Brent: I'd like to tell you a story about
a man, a drowning man. Imagine he is about
50 yards off shore thrashing around the water
in distress. A political liberal walks by,
sees the man drowning and throws him 100 yards
of rope and walks away feeling like his job
is done. A few minutes later, a conservative
strolls up, sees the drowning man and throws
out 25 yards of rope, well short of the drowning
man's needs while exhorting the man to swim
for it. He also walks away happy that he encouraged
self-sufficiency. Later, a libertarian stops
by and patiently explains that while, yes,
he does have a rope that he earned by dint
of his own effort. "For everyone's sake,"
he explains, "it would be best if the drowning
man acquired his own rope. Did he have anything
he could perhaps trade for a rope?"
Throughout these encounters, a neoconservative
has been watching thoughtfully from the beach.
He pulls out his laptop and writes 800 well-chosen
words, indicting progressive waste, conservative
folly, and libertarian heartlessness. Meanwhile,
the man in the lake is still drowning. I love
that anecdote. It's an equal opportunity offender.
It's also a very helpful illustration of the
challenges we face in reducing criminal recidivism.
Much ink has been spilled, and much has been
tried, yet very little has yielded strong
results. Meanwhile, of the close to 600,000
Americans who will return from prison this
year, almost two thirds will be rearrested
for new crimes within three years. On January
17th, AEI released an edited volume that showcases
some of the best and most up to date research
and analysis on the reentry challenge and
potential solutions.
The working group that produced this volume
met over an 18-month period and looked deeply
at the data and evaluations of recent federally-funded
reentry programs. Ten different authors developed
essays on key areas of reentry policy in an
effort to help move the conversation from
a stagnant and despairing "nothing works"
to an inquiry. What might work? Over the next
few months, we will periodically be engaging
on this show with these authors for conversations
about their insights on reentry challenges,
looking at topics ranging from what the evaluations
tell us to how individuals learn to desist
from criminal behavior to a new model for
reentry preparation and support.
In today's episode, my guest is Pam Lattimore,
a Senior Director for research development
at the Research Triangle Institute in the
Division of Applied Justice Research. She
has more than 35 years' experience evaluating
criminal justice interventions and investigating
the causes and correlates of criminal behavior.
Before joining RTI, she worked for 10 years
at the National Institute of Justice, including
a stint as director of criminal justice and
criminal behavior research and evaluation.
Pam Lattimore, thanks for joining us on "Hardly
Working."
Pamela: Well, it's nice to be hardly working.
I like that. No, Brent, it's my pleasure to
be here.
Brent: We just wrapped up a session upstairs,
actually, on prisoner reentry. You were a
principal panelist in that discussion. And
I really wanted to spend a little more time
kind of unpacking your ideas and the paper
that you wrote for us, which is part of a
volume called "Rethinking Reentry." For anybody
who's listening, you can get that by going
on the AEI website. You can read all of Pam's
thinking and our other scholars by ordering
that book or downloading it. When you joined
the working group at our first session, I
was so intrigued when you came in and started
talking through what I detected was some,
a little bit of frustration about the state
of the data and practice around reentry. And
for someone who's given so much of their life
to this topic, I was just really taken with
what you had to say. So, I think a good place
to start off this conversation is just to
talk about this trope in reentry, which is
that nothing works. And maybe walk us through
the history of that idea where it's true,
where it's not so true. And then we'll talk
a little bit about the specific research projects
that you're engaged in.
Pamela: That sounds great. I was fortunate
enough to sort of come into this field almost
by accident at a time when sort of the prevailing
thought in correctional programming was that
nothing works. There had been an influential
publication that was titled "Nothing Works"
by Martinson and some of his colleagues in
the mid, late '70s and the early 1980s when
I went to graduate school. I had the privilege
of working with an economist who was a labor
economist who had done some of the labor theoretic
work in criminal justice and had worked with
the North Carolina Department of Correction
to develop what we would now call a reentry
program. But this, of course, predated the
whole consideration of reentry.
But it was an inside the prison, outside the
prison, sort of service oriented approach,
education, job training. It included Department
of Correction, it included parole officers,
it included the Employment Security Commission,
employment officers. I forgot exactly what
they're called but the employment officers
out in the community to sort of prepare these
young offenders for work and with an idea
that if they had legal work, legitimate work,
that they would be less likely to recidivate.
I had the privilege of working on that evaluation
while I was finishing up my PhD and it turned
out to be the last randomized control trial,
to some extent, the last evaluation that was
done on a correction program for 10 years,
partly as a result of it being overtaken by
the "nothing works."
Brent: Right. And "nothing works" is unfortunately
really pithy. I mean, it has really stuck
in people's heads in a way that, until I read
your piece or until we got a chance to meet,
I didn't even know about. I didn't know that
that was a trope, right? But it's so, it's
worked its way into criminal justice policy
and rhetoric. It's almost like this unexamined
assumption.
Pamela: And it's a serious misrepresentation
of the original scholarship in that the main
conclusion by Martinson and his colleagues
who were doing this for the State of New York
was that very little had been tried and that
what had been tried hadn't been implemented
or hadn't been implemented very well. So,
the primary main takeaway from that work should
have been nothing that has been attempted
so far has worked, but nothing much has been
attempted.
Brent: And not attempted well.
Pamela: And what little has been attempted
wasn't attempted well. Like you say, it was
clearly unfortunate that the takeaway came,
of course, this was in 1980, this was as crime
was starting to escalate. So there are a lot
of things that were going on. The war on crime
started and then the war on drugs started.
And all of that led to sort of a push for
more carceral policies in the United States
in an effort to crack down.
Brent: I mean, is that when prison populations
sort of took off?
Pamela: Right. We basically got a turn towards,
now that nothing worked and now that we're
seeing crime rates skyrocketing, what are
we supposed to do about it? It's time to get
tough on crime. And the way you get tough
on crime is to arrest as many people as you
can, convict as many people as you can, and
put them in prison for as long as you can.
And not to forget also, though, that during
that time, the community supervised populations
also skyrocketed through the '80s. So it wasn't
just, "Oh, we're putting people in prison
now rather than putting them on probation."
It was, "We're putting a whole lot more people
in prison and we're putting a whole lot more
people on probation." So, you know, there
was a three to fivefold increase in the various
correctional populations over the course of,
I don't know, 10, 12 years.
Brent: And so from the public perspective,
this is something that I've seen on the conservative
side of the ledger. From a public perspective,
there was maybe another unfortunate coincidence
that as we incarcerated more people, we did
actually start to see the reductions in crime
but they weren't necessarily all related to
incarceration. I think there's a kind of perception
that the public got a pretty good deal out
of incarceration in terms of reductions in
crime.
Pamela: Yeah. I mean, an interesting way to
think about that is...I've thought about it
from the opposite. And at one point years
ago, I actually did sort of a graph that...and
one of it was a per capita incarceration rate
and the other was a crime rate and at some
point they crossed. And it's like now we're
incarcerating a whole lot more people than
the crime rate. As the crime rate was coming
down, the incarceration rate crossed over.
Obviously, if you were to put an additional
500,000 people in prison, you would hope that
that would have some kind of an impact on
crime. Right? The question is really how much
of a difference there was.
Brent: And just to follow that thread to the
end, I mean, I think that most of the research
suggests that incarceration did have an impact
on crime reduction, but it's about, what,
25% of the total reduction?
Pamela: Yeah, that's what I'm remembering
from. Yeah.
Brent: And the rest of it was driven by demographics
and...
Pamela: And other things that we don't even
know what they are.
Brent: Yeah, we don't know what they are.
And, in fact, I was out at the American criminological
society meeting. I attended a briefing where
they were talking about the relationship between
the inflation rate and criminal activity and
it's like one of the best predictors. Like,
it tracks criminal activity, tracks inflation
almost closer than any other. That's neither
here nor there but it is an extremely complex
dynamic of crime and incarceration that we
don't really understand that well. So that's
kind of the background on "nothing works"
and our responses to "nothing works." And
then we put all these people in prison. Two
million now, right, is about the prison population
nationally?
Pamela: Yeah, 1.2 million and the remainder
are in jails. So, it's about two million in
jails and prisons.
Brent: Yeah, jails and prisons. Okay.
Pamela: Most of the people in jail are pretrial,
65%.
Brent: Right. So, we incarcerated a lot. This
has become an enormous burden in many different
ways. It is clearly a financial burden on
the state, a fiscal burden on state budgets.
It's a drain on productivity, it's a drain
in terms of the downstream social effects
of incarceration on not just the people who
are incarcerated but their families. What's
it been? About 25 years? People started to
wake up to the fact that there are a lot of
costs associated with this strategy. And then
what happened?
Pamela: Well, you know, I mean, I think that
there was a focus on...and combined with that
was the recognition that most of these people
we were putting in prison, the vast, vast,
vast majority of them were going to be released
one day. And so then what? And so that was
sort of the birth of reentry, thinking about
reentry programming. Jeremy Travis, who was
the National Institute of Justice director
at that time, I mean, was sort of one of the
leading thinkers on that, that, you know,
we needed to think about developing the right
kinds of services to hopefully allow people
when they came out of prison to be able to
set themselves on a path that would result
in them not going back to prison. So then
there was a really concerted effort to start
trying to think about, you know, what kinds
of services could be provided and then a policy
focus from the federal government in particular
to start providing resources to state and
local governments to implement programming.
Brent: And that was Clinton administration,
is that right? The story that Christy told
this morning about Janet Reno saying, "What
are we doing?"
Pamela: That was Clinton but some of this
started towards the end, I think, of Bush,
H. W. Bush. Ed Meese was actually very interested
in correctional program reform and in research.
So about that time, you know, there was a
focus on that. I left NIJ and got involved
in the evaluation of the Serious and Violent
Offender Reentry Initiative, which was 2004.
The legislation was probably passed in 2002,
2003, something like that. It was $100 million,
$110 million to fund state and local governments,
mostly state governments to develop reentry
programs for individuals who were incarcerated
in prisons. That initial work was prisons
or juvenile detention.
Brent: And so you were one of the leaders
in evaluating that effort.
Pamela: That's the war effort. That's right.
Yeah, I was the co-PI on that project.
Brent: And that's a really interesting story.
So why don't you tell us what happened in
the evaluation?
Pamela: To my knowledge, it's still the largest
evaluation of its kind that's ever been done.
There were 89 programs funded, 16 of them
were eventually after some evaluation work
by us where 16 programs, 12 adult and 4 juvenile
programs were selected for evaluation. The
adult programs were in states that represented
about a quarter of all prisoners in the United
States. So these weren't randomly selected
but they were certainly representative of,
I think, of the people who were in prison.
It was a very extensive effort to collect
interview data from roughly...
Brent: First, what were the services that
were provided?
Pamela: That's right. That's right. Right.
Yeah, that's a good point. Reentry really
means or it's come to me, programming that
spans the period of incarceration, presumably
returned to the community, generally on community
supervision of some sort, and then post-supervision.
And the idea was based on a needs assessment
that a reentry plan would be developed for
each individual. This plan would address needs
that have been identified. The needs of this
population are huge, by and large. Low education,
little to no job skills, and now it's at least
as true as it was when this study was done
in the early 2000s, serious mental health
issues for, among a lot of people, particularly
the women, and drug abuse problems that were
very serious, again, at least a serious if
not more so for the women who were incarcerated.
So behavioral health issues, low job skills,
life skills or issues, anger management issues.
So, a whole...
Brent: All of which would presumably not have
been helped by being incarcerated.
Pamela: None of that would have been helped
by being incarcerated. I mean, this is a complete
and total side note, but at one point I was
working on a proposal, didn't get funded,
but I was working on a proposal with the Florida
Department of Correction. This was years ago
now. I think it was either two-thirds or three-quarters
of the women who were incarcerated in Florida
were on antidepressant meds, and yeah, I don't
know, the SVORI women that were included in
our study, 60% or so of them indicated at
the time they were released from prison that
they needed mental health treatment, substance
abuse and mental health treatment.
Brent: Which is remarkable because people
don't always know when they need mental health.
Pamela: That's right. That's right. And both
of those percentages were much higher for
the men. I think the women probably do have
more issues with depression. They're separated
from the children, blah, blah, blah. They
have more issues on the mental health side
perhaps than the men do, but I think, my cynical
opinion, the women were just more willing
to admit that they had drug problems than
the men were. So, address these needs, develop
a reentry plan, give people a case manager,
coordinate with services out in the community
at release.
Brent: These projects were implemented by
local community-based organizations of justice.
Pamela: They were implemented by state correctional
agencies. So the grantees were state departments
of correction or state juvenile justice agencies.
So the Second Chance Act which is a newer
iteration of reentry programming that's available
for states includes a big jail component,
but the original SVORI, Serious and Violent
Offender Reentry Initiative focus was strictly
on prisons and the juvenile equivalent of
prisons.
Brent: And it was a three-year initiative?
Pamela: The grants for the programs were three
years. And those of you who are familiar with
how these work, I think some of the sites
got extensions, no-cost extensions, but it
was envisioned as a three-year stand-it-up
and provide services and operate it. Our grant,
we ended up with about a five-year and then
we did a long-term follow-up. So we were in
the field for a lot longer than the grants
themselves were.
Brent: So this is the evaluation grant.
Pamela: The evaluation grant.
Brent: Yeah. Okay. So you were collecting
data on a whole host of measures, outcome
measures, trying to see who got what and how
it affected them. What did you find?
Pamela: That's right. So, we used administrative
criminal justice data, we got arrest data,
re-incarceration data, and then we did interviews
30 days prior to release. So that was our
baseline was basically how were they doing
about the time they got out and then 3, 9,
and 15 months post-release. We had decent
follow-up response rates. We made statistical
corrections that were indicated, which really
weren't that serious. We basically found very
little difference in recidivism outcomes.
We've found some positive findings for unemployment
measures. But the recidivism follow-up in
the initial study was about two years.
Brent: Was that re-arrest or re-incarceration?
Pamela: Re-arrest and re-incarceration and
we actually had self-reported criminal behavior
from the interviews. And we found very few
differences. We had adult men, adult women,
and juvenile boys were included in the...we
had four juvenile sites. So those were boys.
We had to drop, exclude girls because I think
after six months we had, like, seven, which
is a good thing, but we only had about seven.
So, we followed them but based on all of these
indicators, arrest, re-incarceration, self-reported
criminal activity across different kinds of
domain areas, we found very few differences.
Brent: Very few positive findings.
Pamela: Positive findings. I mean, we can
talk about that first study that I did, the
vocational, VDS, the Vocational Delivery System
study. Oftentimes the results were positive
but not statistically. They were small so
they weren't statistically significant. So
it was like things looked like they're moving
in the right direction. But if you go by the
old statistics book, it's like, oh, no, you
have to just say, "This didn't work."
Brent: So what was the reaction to those findings?
Pamela: I think extreme disappointment. I
think that there was a lot of disappointment.
The recidivism findings really ended up coming
out kind of first. As we dug through the data
and looked at employment and housing and substance
use and all these other things, we started
to find that there were actually some significant
positive findings in the data, which really
were more directly tied to the programming
that was being provided. It didn't really
get, I don't think, the traction...that's
probably my fault, but didn't get, really,
the traction that they could have gotten.
Because with all of this, I've done correctional
program evaluation my entire life, adult life,
it seems like, and the bottom line is people
care about the recidivism results. That's
what they care about.
Brent: That's almost all they care about.
Pamela: That's almost all they care about.
And, I mean, up to when the Second Chance
Act came out, there was a requirement that
these programs reduce recidivism by 50%. We
don't have anything that can do that.
Brent: Right. If we did, we wouldn't have
a problem.
Pamela: That's right. That's right.
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. You talked in your essay
and you've also said this publicly, I think
that there are different kinds of services
that seem to have more effect than others.
Could you talk a little bit about that? Was
that part of SVORI? Was that...
Pamela: There's been some research, Doris
MacKenzie's work, that had looked at sort
of what seemed to be working in corrections
and that work had suggested that programs
focused on, like, substance abuse treatment,
cognitive behavior therapy, those kinds of
things, what they called individual change
types of programming, really are the things
that have shown up in the literature. It's
Doris' work but a lot of other people's work,
too. I mean, if you're just looking at a specific
program, these are the things that tend to
be more likely to have positive findings.
Although, again, I mean, results overall are
kind of disappointing. But we found that in
the SVORI evaluation that those programs did,
in fact, turn out to be more likely to be
predictive. People who had had those programs
did turn out to be more likely...
Brent: Cognitive behavioral therapy.
Pamela: Education.
Brent: Case management?
Pamela: Case management. That's right. And
sort of more practical things like help with
housing or participating in a reentry program
oddly enough turned out to be negatively associated.
Christy Visher and my hypothesis on that was
that if people had invested a lot of time
in a reentry program and then got out and
encountered all the obstacles that people
encountered when they get out, you sort of
get psyched up that you're going to be successful.
And you've been given supposedly these tools
that are going to make you, gone through this
program, it's going to make you successful
and then you're not. So, it could be some
disappointment, sort of almost a boomerang-type
effect.
Brent: Sure. Sure. That makes sense. What
I think I've heard you say about this, what
I've read in your essay is mostly weak findings,
weak positive findings. It's not statistically
significant findings for most programs. You
might want to talk a little bit more about
the VDS thing because that's in terms of the
findings, the outcomes that you got on that,
because that actually came out a little bit
better. But then I also want you to talk a
little bit about what you saw when you extended
the review out beyond the timeframe that you
had originally anticipated on SVORI. I think
it was SVORI, wasn't it?
Pamela: Yeah, right. And so the Vocational
Delivery System was the pre-reentry period
project that was done in North Carolina with
NIJ funding that really was a reentry program.
It was in-prison work and then followed by
supposedly services and support post-release.
And we found that was a randomized control
trial. We found, again, positive but not significant
results for individuals who participated in
the program. There were differences in implementation
in terms of... Another thing that's consistent
here with the SVORI findings is the people
who were in the Vocational Delivery System
program were much more likely to get the whole
range of services that were supposed to be
provided, basically, what would now be called
a reentry plan.
They had case managers, they had been more
likely to get job training and so forth than
the people who were in the control group.
But much fewer than 100% of the people who
were in the program got these things. So you
had partial implementation. And the way that
the design of that study was set up, these
were individuals who were in the same institution
but programming was limited. So that's why
we could do a randomized control trial. Some
of the people who were in the control group
also got services. They got some job training,
they got that. So you had a better but still
partially-treated treatment group and a partially-treated
comparison group which statistically undermines
your power you have. It's a smaller effect
size difference. So, that was one lesson to
be taken away from there. That was the very
first study I ever did as I was writing this
chapter.
And actually a little work that I started
thinking about before writing this chapter,
I went back and looked at that, in comparison
now with all the other work that I've done
since then and it was like the concluding
paragraph in this evaluation review article
from 1992, or whatever it was, could apply
to any of these studies that I've completed
in the last 10 years. Because it's like, basically,
because of these power-related issues, maybe
we could live with it being significant at
the 0.11% level. And I thought, "Hmm, that
was 1992 and here, we see some of the same
kind of things." With the SVORI evaluation,
we had only half the people who were in SVORI
programs reported getting any education. And
that's true across a whole range of services.
I forgot now the number but some significant
number of people who were in the SVORI programs
told us 30 days before they got out that they
didn't have a reentry plan.
So, that 50% or 60% or 70% or whatever it
was, much higher than the 30% of the control
group or whatever it was that said, "Oh, well,
I've got a reentry plan." But again, you have
this issue of partial implementation of the
treatment and receipt of services for the
comparison group. And so again, pointing to
sort of a methodological problem with a study.
I hadn't mentioned this and it comes through
in the article that, and I specify it, the
SVORI evaluation was not underpowered from
a sample size, right? We had 1,600 and something
men in the study and 357, I think, women and
337 boys. Those are sort of borderline but,
I mean, we had 1,600 men spread across multiple
sites, but still, that's a reasonable sample
size. And so one of the threats to sort of
the findings for a lot of studies was not
an issue with SVORI.
Brent: Okay. So now talk a little bit about
the long term and what happened over the long
term.
Pamela: So, this was really very interesting.
So, we got additional funding from NIJ. And
this study was done...I'm at RTI International
and the SVORI evaluation was done by us in
partnership with Urban Institute. And Christy
Visher at the Urban Institute was the co-PI
on the study. So, we got additional funding
from NIJ to do a more extensive follow-up,
administrative data follow-up. We basically
had at least five years of post-release criminal
information on individuals from this second
round of data collection. Lo and behold, we
found significant differences in arrests for
both the men and the women when we looked
over a five-year period.
Brent: Compared to control.
Pamela: Compared to the controls. There were
14% fewer arrests, a number of arrests for
the men and 40-something percent fewer arrests
for the women. These numbers were definitely
statistically significant and interesting.
And, I mean, it points to, in my view, another
problem that we run into a lot of times with
correctional program evaluation is it's not
just that we really only care about recidivism,
it's that any failure is it. And I've used
the analogy, it would be...what we're doing,
it would be like an oncologist who's treating
someone for cancer. Six months into the study,
the person has a heart attack. And the oncologist
says, "Well, this chemotherapy doesn't work,"
or an asthma specialist treating someone with
asthma. And before treatment, they're having
an asthma attack every day and post-treatment,
they're having an asthma attack every three
months.
You would never say, "This treatment is not
working."
Brent: No, you'd count that as a huge victory.
Pamela: You count that as a huge victory.
And what we often have done with a sort of
0.01%, any failure, any new arrests in two
years, which has been kind of a standard for
decades, a sort of a standard met or any new
prison term in two years, a standard sort
of...oh, that's sort of the standard for recidivism.
What we've done is we've conflated a whole
lot of issues associated with what criminal
behavior actually is into this one binary
indicator that leaves us well short of really
understanding, I think, what it is we need
to understand which is taking into account
the nature, i.e., type, the seriousness, and
the frequency of offending. A lot of my work
has actually used models that look at timing
and that look at counts and so forth. We haven't
been able to really look at seriousness because
the statistical models really aren't there.
And it's hard to even know sometimes what
seriousness means.
Brent: Did you do any analysis that would
try to unpack what was behind the 14% and
the 40% reductions that you did see?
Pamela: Yeah. Interestingly enough, when we
controlled for a whole variety of individual
characteristics and access to a whole range
of programming prerelease, just being in the
SVORI program was significantly related in
a positive way to these fewer arrests. We've
controlled for who you are.
Brent: Okay. We've controlled for who you
are. You're in the SVORI program. If you're
in the SVORI program, in these long-term outcomes,
you had some significant improvements. And
we know from what you previously said that
what seems to drive significant improvement
are the CBT, the case management, the substance
abuse treatment, these kinds of things. So
is it logical then to say that that's really
the element, those are the elements that we,
if we want those long-term improvements that
we need to be focusing on?
Pamela: I don't think we know. A colleague
when he saw those results said, "So you've
got a lag effect with reentry programming?"
He says, "Oh, that's different." But one interpretation,
and this is just a hypothesis, is that people
were actually provided with things that were
useful. It took a while for them to decide
when they got out of prison, which is usually
a very chaotic time for individuals. And you've
got all kinds of demands and it's just a very
chaotic time that it took them a while to
figure out, "Wait a minute, I don't want to
be involved in this criminal lifestyle anymore.
I really want to go straight. And I learned
some things when I was in prison. I got some
tools when I was in prison that can help me
now."
And so this idea that we need to be able to
think more carefully about the sequencing
of when someone's ready for treatment, and
there's other chapters in the book that talk
much more explicitly about this, but when
people may be ready for treatment, and what
kinds of things might be useful then, the
SVORI, we asked a whole series of questions
when we were doing the follow-up interviews
in the original SVORI study, the 3, 9, and
15-month follow-up. And we had two batteries
of questions. One was the questions for individuals
who were incarcerated when the follow-up interview
was done. And the other was questions for
individuals who weren't incarcerated. And
we took that as a...obviously, it's a rough
but a proxy for re-engaging in criminal behavior
and not. And looking at those results, which
we've never published, but we've looked at
a lot. But looking at those results, it was
really interesting because people who were
re-incarcerated, pretty much, the reason they
were back there was somebody else's fault.
And the people who were...
Brent: Was it actually somebody else's fault
or what they were saying?
Pamela: That's what they said. That's what
they were saying, "It's somebody else's fault,"
"It was my girlfriend," "It was a parole officer,
"It was this guy," "It was that guy." The
people who were out on the streets were clearly
at least claiming to have taken much more
responsibility for their own lives. "I decided
I wasn't going to go back to prison." "I'm
doing this for my children." "I'm doing this
for my family. I told my family I would never
do this again." What was interesting, there
was, like, I don't know, 15, 20 different
things I could pick. Included on those lists
were the typical kind of reentry services
that are provided. Neither group highlighted
any of those things. Which is not to say necessarily
that those things didn't end up helping what
we were just talking about...
Brent: So fascinating.
Pamela: ...but that you've got this initial
step that's got to take place before these
kinds of things can help. I've equated it
to, you know, I mean, it's one thing to know
how to get a job, how to apply to a job. But
if you're going to actually get a job, you
have to go want to do that. And so it really
is this, you have to want to change, you have
to want to quit smoking, you have to want
to really be able to make your life different.
Brent: And it's more than just sort of a rhetorical
commitment to "I want something."
Pamela: That's right.
Brent: We all want things, what are we willing
to do to get them? There's an underlying commitment
to change that it really goes beyond just
wanting because everybody in prison will say
they don't want to go back.
Pamela: You know, Christy earlier today in
the briefing talked about the fact that nobody
says they want to go back. And I think in
the SVORI, because we asked all the SVORI
people and it was, like, 95% who said, "I'm
never coming back." And we know that that
is not true. I mean, 90-something percent
of these folks over that long term that we
looked at were re-arrested at least once.
Brent: And there's lots of reasons for that,
right? I mean, there's the stickiness of the
criminal justice system, it's hard to get
out of it. You're just constantly at risk
of violating terms of probation or parole
and getting drawn back into the system. There's
all sorts of ways the system can actually
trip people up. And this is why I'm so intrigued
with the cognitive behavioral therapy is that
I think that there are all of these triggers
that are built into people. They're not even,
like, fully in control of what's happening
to them because they've only got one way of
reacting to whatever the negative stimulus
is. Right? So they go back to taking drugs
or they engage in a violent act or whatever,
and anger management problems, all of that.
And it just strikes me that those are the
kinds of things that we have to work on if
we want people to develop the desire to stop
and then have the tools to stop. You know,
different ways of engaging the world.
Pamela: I mean, you need to almost think about
criminal behavior and recidivism in terms
of early relapsing behavior. And if someone
goes from drinking too much every night to
drinking too much one night a week, that's
an improvement. And if someone goes from being
involved in all kinds of criminal activity
on a regular basis to slipping up and doing
something bad. Now, the problem with our system,
of course, is with so much of this, I mean,
we don't really have three strikes and you're
out anymore. But people with priors can really
get hammered. And so you might go 5 years
before that next offense, but now you've already
been incarcerated twice and now you're gonna
get 25 years, even though it was 5 years.
And so how we use, what you were alluding
to, the $60 billion worth of correctional
investment that this country makes every year,
if you want to call it an investment, how
that money is spent, it really is something
we need to look at as a society and say, "Is
this really how we want to spend this money?"
Brent: Okay, so to sort of move us toward
wrapping this up, what are your conclusions
based on this research? What are the things
that we really need to pay attention to if
we're going to improve reentry outcomes for
incarcerated persons who are coming home?
Pamela: I think I'll start at the bottom of
my list because I think it encompasses everything.
I mean, I think we need more patience. We
were talking about three-year grants before.
That's not long enough, not long enough certainly
to implement something and do any kind of
rigorous evaluation of it. We need to think
about the methodological limitations of the
designs that we're using.
Brent: Yeah, causation's hard to prove. It's
really hard.
Pamela: The causation is really hard to prove.
And I think that as social scientists that
we have not been properly attuned to how our
language can be interpreted by policymakers,
in particular, but practitioners as well.
So you get a lot of baby-tossing with the
bathwater. That probably is not...it's certainly
never been my intent but that leads people
to think, "Well, okay, that didn't work."
Another comparison point here is that in medicine,
the new treatment only has to be as good as
existing practice to say, "Yeah, we can implement
this." And in some ways, we've applied a much
more, not in some, in a way, I mean, we have
applied a much more rigorous standard to these
social interventions, these behavioral interventions
that we're trying to implement.
Brent: Yeah. I mean, you started out by talking
about patients. So, patients, you were talking
about, at the beginning, about patients and
stability in policy to allow enough time.
And then there's patients with the actual
people we're talking about. Like, these are
complex...
Pamela: You have people come and people come
to succeed.
Brent: Yeah, they've got complicated problems.
And if we do exercise a little more patience
and forbearance and have alternatives to throwing
them back into incarceration, that that might
be of value, too. But this idea of just be
patient in the policy and in the programs
and with the people.
Pam, thank you so much for your time. This
has been a fascinating conversation. I always
enjoy sitting down and talking with you. As
I said, the ideas that Pam has been discussing
are fleshed out in considerable detail in
our volume "Rethinking Reentry." I encourage
you to go online and order a copy or download
it and rethink a little bit for yourselves.
So, thanks again, Pam, for being with us.
Pamela: Thank you so much. This was my pleasure.
Brent: Thank you for joining us on this episode
of "Hardly Working." I'm your host, Brent
Orrell, and I hope you tune in next time to
learn more about the state of workforce development
in America. Be sure to like and subscribe
to our podcast. Let us know at vocation@aei.org
if there are any topics you'd like us to cover.
As always, we hope you find the job that fits
so well, it feels like you're hardly working.
