- Good evening.
Thanks to all of you
for being here tonight
for the Frank Guarini government lecture.
This is an event that we really
look forward to every year.
It was established in honor
of our most esteemed
graduate, Frank Guarini,
a former state senator in New Jersey,
seven-time US congressman,
a distinguished leader of this school
and someone we count on
for vision and support
and have done for many years.
And he's a long-time supporter
of this lecture series
which reflects his own
dedication to public service
and his admonition that
this law school continue
to value a public
service and indeed we do.
And so each year we invite a leader
within the public service
world to come and speak
to our students and
alumni and other members
of this community.
And this year we are delighted
to welcome Judge John Gleeson
of the United States District Court
for the Eastern District of New York.
Judge Gleeson, as many of you know,
will be stepping down on March, 9th,
after 21 years on the federal bench.
And he's had a truly illustrious
career in public service.
Before being nominated
by President Clinton
to the bench he made a name
for himself as a federal prosecutor
in the Eastern District of New York.
He was best known for
securing the conviction
of mafia boss, John Gotti.
He was serving as the chief
of the office's criminal
division when he was appointed
to the bench in 1994.
Since 1995, Judge Gleeson has
also been an adjunct professor
of law here at NYU.
And this semester he's
teaching a sentencing seminar
that examines the theories
and purposes of sentencing
and how it has come to be known in the era
of mass incarceration
in the United States.
Judge Gleeson has garnered many headlines.
Judges don't seek them out
but he has made many important decisions
in his time on the bench
and has really earned the deep respect
of his colleagues,
of the lawyers who
practiced in front of him
and of all others who attend to the work
of the federal judiciary.
He's also been a very prominent advocate
for alternatives to incarceration.
He has helped create two programs
in the Brooklyn Federal
Courts aimed at reducing
or eliminating prison time
for non-violent drug offenders
and young defendants.
These were among the first of their kind
in the federal court system
and this really innovative approach
is all the more timely coming now
when the Obama administration
is calling for an overhaul
or at least a rethinking
of federal sentencing laws,
and when the justice department
has supported additional changes
to the federal sentencing guidelines.
In this and in many other ways,
Judge Gleeson is not simply an expert,
he is a pioneer.
We are grateful to have
him with us this evening,
grateful to count him as a
member of this community.
It's bitter sweet to think
of the end of his time
on the federal bench as approaching,
but on the other hand we look forward
with great anticipation
to what he will do next.
And we're glad that he's
with us this evening,
please join me in welcoming Judge Gleeson.
(audience applauding)
- Well, thank you so much,
Dean Morrison for that great
overly kind introduction.
Thank you all for coming on
such a forbidding evening
in New York.
I'm grateful you're here.
It's really an honor
to deliver this lecture
in and of itself but
it's especially an honor
to deliver it in the presence
of Congressman Guarini.
Thank you so much for your
commitment to public service,
for your sponsorship of this lecture
and for your being here.
It really is a privilege to be here.
I wanna talk to you this
evening about a couple
of programs in our court in the
Eastern District of New York
that are our answer to one of
the most important problems
in criminal justice today,
and that is over incarceration.
I could glaze your eyes over with data.
I won't, I'll spare you all
of that except the essentials
which are the federal prison population
has more than tripled since
the current guidelines,
ERA, we call it,
began in the late 1980s.
The one thing that all
three of the institutions
at the heart of our federal
sentencing policy agree on,
and I'm talking about Congress
and the Sentencing Commission
and the Department of Justice,
those are the three main players,
is the need to do something
about our dangerously
overcrowded federal prisons.
That consensus exists, really,
along all ideological lines.
And there are quite a few other answers
to the over incarceration problem.
Some of them address the fact
that the people who do need
to be incarcerated get prison
terms that are way too long.
But our programs are what
I wanna focus on tonight,
are really at the other end.
That is they are efforts to
responsibly identify the people
who we have routinely
been sending off to prison
in the past couple of
decades who don't need
to be imprisoned at all.
One of our programs is a drug court.
We call it the Pretrial
Opportunity Program or pop.
That's how I'll refer to it tonight.
The other is a youthful offender court
which we call the Special
Option Services or SOS
and I'll refer it by that acronym,
by that those initials as well.
And I wanna use my time tonight,
and I told Dean Morrison at the outset,
if I forget to look at the time and stop
when he asked me to stop,
I'm just gonna keep going.
(audience laughing)
So bear that in mind and
feel free when the time,
when witching hour comes
to give me the signal,
because this is important stuff.
I wanna use my time tonight to tell you
how these programs began,
what they are,
how they have fared,
how they have helped to
spawn a national movement.
I'll get to the chart, I hope,
before my time is up,
and what needs to be
done now on this topic
of alternatives to incarceration.
Let turn first to the POP Program,
the drug court.
In August of 2011,
I went to the Ninth
Circuit Judicial Conference
out in Southern California.
I was asked to spend an
entire week out there
but I was specifically invited
to attend a day-long meeting
at the conclusion of the
Conference of the Judges
that Judge Harry Pregerson organized
to which he basically ordered
all of the US attorneys
and federal defenders in
the Ninth Circuit to attend.
I wasn't at all sure why I was invited.
I had spent 10 years as
a federal prosecutor,
hanging around with prosecutors,
and then when I went on
the bench I spent 10 years
on the Defender Services Program,
the Judicial Conference Committee
that runs the Federal Defender Program
and I figured I must've been invited
to do what Judge Pregerson had in mind
for that meeting which
is to help prosecutors
and defenders play well
together in the courts
of the Ninth Circuit.
At the time I had a former law clerk
who was the US attorney in Oregon
who confided in me that the prosecutors
and the defenders at that
meeting were not interested
in being in that meeting at all,
let alone in playing well together
in the courts of the Ninth Circuit.
But they didn't feel
that it was appropriate
to say no to Judge Pregerson.
Anyway, in one of the sessions,
at one of the segments
of this day-long meeting
was a session about reentry,
federal reentry drug courts.
It was a lively session in which a judge,
the Chief Judge in Oregon, Ann Aiken,
spoke about reentry drug courts
and the terminology here is important.
A reentry drug court
helps addicted defendants
after they have served their prison terms.
Chief Judge Aiken spoke very persuasively
about the benefits of judicial involvement
in the supervision process,
how effective it was
in helping people
control their addictions,
how rewarding it was
for the judges involved,
how much money it saved the government
to shave one year off a typical
three-year supervision term.
Now, since I had been invited
to fly across the country
on the Ninth Circuit's dime
and spend an entire week
at this beautiful resort
in Southern California,
I thought it wouldn't
look good if I didn't do
or say anything while I was there.
(audience laughing)
So I figured I better ask a question.
And I asked a question
that actually had occurred
to me frequently over the years.
My district, the Eastern
District of New York
is the cradle of reentry drug
courts in the federal system.
Our late colleague, Tony Sifton,
started what we believe is
the first one back in 2002.
And for quite a few years
we've had two of them presided
over by two of my colleagues.
I have been to both and
admired how they work
and the benefits they produce
for the addicted post
sentence defendants in them.
But for a couple of years I
found myself asking myself
why we were waiting for
prison terms to be over
before putting addicted
defendants in drug courts?
If judicial involvement
in the supervision programs
actually helps people control
their addictions and reduces recidivism,
why not do that the moment a case begins
rather than wait a few years
while the case is processed
and the defendant serves a prison term?
My thinking was as follows,
if the reward of reducing
the three-year term
of post sentence supervision
to only two years was
such a powerful behavior
modification tool, just think
how motivated the defendants
would be if the reward would
be to avoid prison entirely.
In other words,
my question was why don't we
have no entry drug courts?
Now, this wasn't exactly
novel thinking on my part.
I'd been teaching,
as Dean Morrison mention,
I'd been teaching here for 20 years.
I taught in other places for
almost a decade before that
and I'd been teaching my students
about successful drug court
programs in the state courts
for years before I went out to
the Ninth Circuit Conference.
Anyway, I introduced
myself to the meeting.
No one except my former
law clerk knew who I was
and I said why don't
we just take this model
that works so well in
Oregon and move it up
to the presentence phase?
And I shared with the group the thoughts
that I have just expressed to you.
And I have to say,
everybody was pretty quiet after I spoke.
The only response I got
was from Sean Kennedy
who was then the federal
defender in Los Angeles,
who told me that his
office was beginning talks
with Andre Birotte,
then the United States attorney in LA,
with an eye towards creating
just such a program.
And that turned out to be the beginning
of a long relationship
with the Central District
of California on this topic.
I came back to Brooklyn
with two goals in mind,
the more important one was to figure out
how I could get myself invited
to the next Ninth Circuit
Judicial Conference
which was gonna be in Hawaii.
(audience laughing)
And the second was to create
a presentence drug court
in the federal system.
I called Roberto Cordero,
our Chief Pretrial Services Officer
who at the time I barely
knew and asked him
if he would help me create
what would become known
as the POP Program,
the Pretrial Opportunity Program.
We had a nice conversation.
He told me he'd work on it and
I didn't hear from him for,
really, a couple of months which I thought
was his gentle way of
telling me that I was crazy.
But then he showed up one day in my office
with a Pretrial Services
Officer, Laura Fahmy,
and a written proposal
which we worked on together.
And we were basically making
it up as we went along
which made it kind of fun.
By January of 2012,
so four years ago,
I had enlisted my friend and
colleague who's right here,
Chief Magistrate Judge, Stephen Gold,
and we told our brother and
sister judges at a meeting,
at a Board of Judges
meeting in Eastern District
about the newly created POP Program.
We gave them the history of
the program where the idea
of a successful course
of conduct in the States
with respect to drug courts.
We apprised them of what they already knew
which is this over incarceration problem
in the federal prisons and
specifically the bloating
of the federal prisons
with nonviolent drug trafficking offenders
who themselves were substance abusers.
And we apprised them of
what we planned to do,
and truth be told,
at the time we told
them about this program
we were just planning
to do it with the cases
in my docket.
But we finished our presentation
by telling the court
it would be much better
if it were a project of the
Eastern District of New York,
not just of Judges Gleeson and Gold.
To the lasting credit of my colleagues
and my court they agreed
and the POP Program
became a program adopted
by the Eastern District Board of Judges.
Now, a core belief underlying
POP and any drug court
is that many substance
abusers are arrested
for behavior that arises
out of their addictions,
and but for those addictions they wouldn't
have found themselves enmeshed
in the criminal justice system.
And the POP Program provides a framework
for intensive supervision
of these defendants,
combining judicial involvement
as the defining
characteristic of a drug court
as the regular judicial involvement
in the rehabilitative efforts
of the participants in the court.
In addition to their
more frequent meetings
with the pretrial services officer
and the drug treatment providers,
the participants meet
monthly with the judges
around the table in a courtroom.
In our Brooklyn Courthouse
they meet with me,
with Judge Gold,
Pretrial Services Officer, Laura Fahmy,
and one another.
These group meetings address
each participant's progress
in the preceding month,
the problems they faced,
the goals for the upcoming month.
The participants support
and strengthen each other
in these meetings.
And it's hands-on
involvement of the judges
is an important source of
support and motivation.
The social science in the
States makes it crystal clear
that the interaction with a
person in authority, a judge,
in that role where the judge
is playing a supportive role
has everything to do with the
enhancement and drug
treatment retention rates,
reductions in recidivism.
But I think I speak for
Judge Gold as well as myself
when I say that a much
more important feature
is how they interact with one another,
the support the participants
in a drug court provide
to one another in those monthly meetings.
Most of the participants
have already entered pleas
of guilty by the time
they enter the program,
but not all of them,
and a guilty plea is not a
prerequisite to participation.
They do agree to adjourn further
proceedings in their case,
that is the sentencing
if they pled guilty,
if not, the trial,
for at least a year while they
participate in the program.
Our program, unlike the program
that cropped up a couple of
months behind us out in LA,
the CASA Program,
doesn't have the formal
inter-agency agreement
with the US Attorney's
Office but rather Judge Gold
and I went to Loretta Lynch,
who was then our US attorney,
now our attorney general,
at the outset of our program
and we asked for her support
on the sidelines.
We knew we could adjourn the sentence.
We required the defendants to agree to it
and we asked Loretta
Lynch for her support.
And as I'll get to in a few moments,
in a few minutes,
we got support from her that was beyond,
really, beyond our wildest imagination.
And I'll get to that in a few minutes.
To complete the POP Program
successfully participants
have to remain drug free for
a continuous 12-month period.
But there's more than that,
they participate in the monthly meetings,
they have to follow all the rules,
especially the rules of their
inpatient drug treatment.
Programs, most of them
spend a fair amount of time,
sometimes lengthy amounts of time
in inpatient drug treatment.
They're expected to seek
and obtain high school
equivalency degrees.
They're expected to seek and
obtain employment if they can.
We provide them social services,
there's a wide array of
social services available
here in New York to support them.
We make them available to them.
We give them the opportunity,
hence the name of the program.
We give them the opportunity
to make something
of their terrible situation.
They're all arrested
for very serious drug trafficking crimes.
Not all the SOS participants
are drug trafficking defendants
but most of them are.
The participants in our POP Program,
all their cases are reassigned
to me and to Judge Gold.
The social science shows that
the drug courts work best
when the participants meet
monthly with the same judges
who will ultimately decide their cases.
Judged Gold presides over any proceedings
that follow violations.
He imposes sanctions that vary widely,
ranging from a different
modality of drug treatment
to more stringent conditions,
other conditions of pretrial supervision,
setting back the projected
date of their graduation,
up to periods of custody.
Today, this afternoon,
a few hours ago Judge Gold
had to remand to custody one
of the participants in our POP Program.
Now, let me turn to the Special
Option Services Program,
our youthful offender court.
Our district has always had its fair share
of young defendants who are
charged with nonviolent crimes,
usually, as I mentioned,
but not always drug trafficking offenses.
And their involvement in the
criminal justice system appears
to be the result not of
addiction so much as a lack
of any adult supervision in their lives.
These are young men and
women who were raised
in circumstances in which
no one ever taught them
the importance of getting
out of bed in the morning
and going to school or going
to work or looking for work.
More than 15 years ago at the suggestion
of the great Jack
Weinstein, our colleague,
we established a Special
Option Services Program,
the SOS Program,
and the concept was pretty simple.
This was a population
that was too frequently
in pretrial detention
pending the adjudication
of their cases.
Judge Weinstein and pretrial
services believed that
they and the public as
well would be better off
if they were instead subject
to intense supervision
and given access to education
and job training and counseling.
SOS targets juvenile and
young adult offenders,
defendants who are between
the ages of 18 and 25.
Again, there's a wide
variety of community,
educational, vocational
and volunteer resources
made available to us.
We've gone out,
pretrial services and the court
is going out to enlist them.
And the SOS participants are expected
to obtain their high school
equivalency certificates.
Some go to college.
They're given the opportunity
and the requirement
of enrolling in vocational programs,
other training programs,
to obtain mental health treatment
and the counseling they need.
They need the structure
that wasn't available
to them before they got
involved in our system.
For many years SOS operated
solely under the auspices
of pretrial services,
it had no direct judicial involvement.
In recent years Officer Amina Adossa-Ali
has supervised all of the
participants in the SOS Program,
up to 30 at a time.
She's provided periodic status reports
to the assigned district judges
and attended their sentencings.
And what happened was after
we began the POP court
and began an intensive supervision program
that was judge-involved,
we went to Amina and asked her
if she thought it would help
her and the young defendants
under her supervision
to make SOS a judge-involved
program as well,
that is if we restructured it
so that she could bring the young people,
her young charges monthly
to a meeting with judges?
She said yes and the
SOS Program was modified
in 2013 to include the participation
of two judicial officers,
District Judge Joan
Azrack who's here tonight,
thank you for coming Jonie,
and Magistrate Judge Cheryl Pollak.
They hold monthly meetings
with Amina Adossa-Ali,
the pretrial services officer
and the SOS participants
and they're similar in nature.
Their progress and problems in
the past month are addressed.
Their goals for the future
month or months are addressed.
The judicial involvement is designed
to enhance the support system
and to provide the encouragement,
not just to comply with the
conditions of the program
but to effect real changes in their lives.
Now, those are the two
programs in broad strokes.
What does a participant get in return
for a successful completion?
As I mentioned to you
in the reentry setting
from which we learned a great deal,
the quid pro quote is crystal clear,
successful participation
means you get one year
off your typical three-year
term of post prison supervision.
With respect to the POP and SOS programs,
these presentence,
hopefully no entry courts,
it's much less clear in our model.
When a participant's
rehabilitative program
is nearing a successful conclusion
and the sentencing date approaches we,
by operation of federal
rule of criminal procedure,
we judges fall out of it.
We're prohibited from
engaging in plea discussions
under Federal Rule 11.
So what happens is the
counsel for the lawyers
for the successful POP
or SOS participants go
to the prosecutor and
negotiate with the prosecutor
and there's no reason for you
to fully understand the
gamut of possibilities.
One would be to ask the
prosecutor not to object to,
I mean, these are alternative
to incarceration programs,
so the idea at their
inception was to put people
in a position to avoid a prison term.
These prison terms are generally three,
four, five years under the
federal sentencing guidelines.
So one option for the
defense lawyer to talk
to the prosecutor about
is not opposing a sentence
that does not include incarceration,
a probation sentence,
that's the whole idea at the outset.
As you'll learn in a few
minutes there have turned out
to be other options as well.
But I wanna introduce you to
a few of our participants.
I do this with some trepidation because
I'm not a real member of the Academy,
I'm a trench dweller.
I'm over there Brooklyn.
The trenches don't get any deeper than
in the trial court in Brooklyn.
But I've been hanging around
the Academy enough to know
that you don't advocate policy
change based on anecdotes.
And I'm not suggesting to you for moment
that when I introduce you to these folks
that it should bring a tear to your eye
and you should go out
and become like I am,
an advocate for alternatives
to incarceration.
But, so that's disclaimer at the outset.
I will say this,
there's nothing like individual
cases to inspire you.
And there's nothing like
these people's cases
to inspire you.
And after all, you know,
in the end of the day data
collection's important.
Data analysis is important, it's critical.
But in the end of the day this is
what we're talk about, right.
We live in courtrooms and at the other end
of our sentences are people,
they're real people.
This is Emily.
Emily lived in Brooklyn,
has lived in Brooklyn her whole life.
Her parents separated when
she was four years old
because of her father's
addiction to crack.
She began smoking
marijuana at age 11, daily.
When she was 22 she found
her mom dead of cirrhosis
and her addiction
ratcheted up a few notches.
She snorted cocaine every single day,
stealing from her fiance
to support her habit.
In 2007 and again in 2008
Emily underwent drug treatment
but to no avail.
Her fiance prodded her into drug treatment
but both times it was unsuccessful.
In 2011, Emily brought her three children
to Guyana in an effort to reconcile them
with her father who was still
addicted to crack at the time.
While there, her youngest
child fell ill requiring them
to change their return
tickets at significant cost
to Emily and she didn't have the money.
A man who was nearby heard
of her quandary and
offered to pay the price
of changing the return flights in exchange
for Emily bringing a suitcase
into the United States
and for some cash as well.
Emily is no dope.
She knew that there was something
illegal in that suitcase
and she was right,
there were 13 kilos of cocaine in it.
She was arrested at
John F. Kennedy Airport.
She was released that day by Judge Gold
on the condition she
returned two days later
with people who would sign her bond.
And when she returned two
days later she was high
and Chief Magistrate
Judge Gold remanded her.
And to this day,
Emily will tell anybody who will listen
that one of the most significant moments
of her life was when
Steve Gold remanded her.
She stayed in custody for weeks, right,
became one of the charter
members of our POP Program.
She spent a year in
inpatient drug treatment.
She got a GED.
She got a commercial driver's license.
For about a year once she got out
of drug treatment she
did inpatient treatment
and then outpatient treatment.
She commuted by subway two hours each day,
subway and train,
to an hourly bus driving
job out in Nassau County.
Emily started a new job today.
She's now a bus driver for the MTA.
Once she finishes her
probationary period she will
have paid vacation time and
sick leave and job security,
that's what she cares about most.
Most important, Emily,
who as I mentioned was in and out
of unsuccessful drug treatment twice
before she came to our drug
court has now been clean
for 53 months.
This is Rose-Marie right here.
I can tell already I'm not
gonna get through these stories.
Besides, I'm gonna have
you crying if I get
to the end of all of them.
Rose-Marie was 28 at
the time of her arrest.
She'd been in a
relationship for four years
with one of her co-defendants.
She was arrested in an
apartment with hundreds
of prescriptions for oxycodone.
She had no employment history.
She was supported by
that co-defendant of hers
and the money that was made
from their illegal
distribution of oxycodone.
Rose-Marie had years of
prescription drug and heroin abuse,
cocaine abuse, ecstasy abuse.
She had been addicted since age 15
and was taking at least
four oxycodone pills a day.
She tried to commit suicide at 15.
She was detained for about eight weeks
and released directly
into a long-term residential
drug treatment program.
She entered our program in July of 2012.
Her adjustment, this is typical,
was rocky at first.
She kept breaking the rules.
She kept resisting the
discipline that came
with being in a drug treatment program.
She was remanded into
custody in February of 2013.
As is typical for most of the participants
in our POP Program there came a point
where Rose-Marie just had
a complete attitude change.
It didn't happen overnight
but it was palpable
when it did happen.
The treatment professionals described her
as actively engaged in
her treatment program.
She became a peer leader.
Her change in attitude was
conspicuous around the table
in our monthly participant meetings.
She became proud of her accomplishments.
She is now the mother
of two healthy children.
She's in a stable
relationship with their father
who is employed and supports the family.
Most importantly, she's
clean now for 34 months.
When her children get a
little older she's planning
to attend college.
Sinem is right here and Sinem was arrested
when she was 33 years
old and 34 weeks pregnant
with a crack addicted baby in her belly,
and a seven-year-old daughter at the time.
She was using five bags of heroin
and ingesting 10 oxycodone pills daily.
At the time she was
arrested she'd been addicted
for seven years.
She was released after her initial arrest
to a residential drug treatment program
and she broke the rules.
She had the baby she was carrying, a girl,
lost custody of her immediately.
She had already lost the
custody of her seven-year-old.
She used drugs in the
drug treatment program.
And let me tell you
something about our system
and how it normally
treats someone like Sinem.
I don't know if they still teach
Robinson versus California.
I read it when I was a law student.
It's not a crime to be an addict.
And
a common refrain in the
drug treatment world
is relapse is a part of recovery.
But not withstanding those two realities,
if you're an addict and
you provide a dirty urine
and you're already in the
federal criminal justice system,
God help you.
In most places off to prison you go.
And that would've been Sinem's fate
in most places in this country,
but her Pretrial Services
Officer was willing
to try something different.
She arranged for a transfer
to a different residential
drug treatment program.
Sinem's attitude improved.
After a while her newborn was permitted
to spend time with her in that program.
She joined our POP Program.
I can tell already I'm gonna
have to truncate these remarks.
Sinem is now employed,
raising her two children with
her boyfriend and they
live out in Nassau County.
She has completely turned her life around.
She's now clean for 26 months.
This is Sherry.
In our circles
repeating the aphorism,
no one wants a junky for a grandmother.
This is Lorraine,
our SOS participant,
I'll get to her in a minute
and this is Geraldine.
I assure you they have
equally compelling stories.
Here's why I picked these six.
As I mentioned to you, when the
successful participation
in these programs comes
to a conclusion prosecutors are approached
by defense counsel for
people like these six.
And at the outset of this
program what we had in mind
was a program that was an
alternative to incarceration,
right, a no entry,
you don't go to prison.
And our attorney general,
who was then the United States attorney,
essentially raised the ante,
saw us and raised us because
Emily was the first to appear.
Remember, she was convicted of smuggling.
She pled guilty to smuggling
13 kilograms of cocaine
and I put her case on for
sentencing in my courtroom
after she successfully
completed the program.
And on the day for sentencing
the assistant US attorney came
in and she said she has
turned her if around
to such an extent that the US attorney
is gonna dismiss the charges against her.
And the same happened for all
six of these participants.
So our POP Program and our SOS Program,
that's Lorraine, have not
just become alternatives
to incarceration but with
respect to these folks
and with respect to 37%
of our total successful
participants they've
become diversion programs.
Congressman Guarini could
have a lecture next year
and have it usefully devoted
to the collateral
consequences of convictions.
There's no overstating
what it does to someone,
how disabling it is for
someone to go through life
with a federal felony conviction,
even if they haven't gone to prison.
All six of these participants
are not only not going
to prison, they don't have convictions
and that's because of
the leadership provided
by the Department of Justice
and by Loretta Lynch specifically.
Where do we go from here?
Let me tell you about a little anomaly
in our federal criminal justice system.
We have a sentencing regime,
a principal component
of which is the Federal
Sentencing Guidelines Manual,
it's a Sentencing Commission
that creates a manual
that is the starting point
for every federal sentence.
And if all you had to go by was
that guidelines manual you would believe
it was not even lawful not
to sentence these folks to prison.
You look at that manual
and the manual doesn't even
authorize a probation sentence,
doesn't authorize an
alternative to incarceration,
let alone what the executive branch,
what the US Attorney decided to do
which was to dismiss the charges.
So one obvious important fundamental thing
to be done is for the
Sentencing Commission
to let judges know that this is okay.
And let's face it,
if prosecutors are telling
judges to dismiss the charges,
at the very least you
would think it's okay
for judges not to send people to prison.
To do, the number one
thing on our to-do list
is to get the commission
to acknowledge the fact
that judge-involved intensive
supervision programs
like POP and SOS are working.
The social science in the States
has established emphatically
that they reduce recidivism rates,
that they enhance the
efficacy of drug treatment.
So we need the Sentencing Commission
to put its imprimatur on that.
What the commission says is advisory,
thanks to Supreme Court decision
that's now 10 years old,
but doesn't mean it's not important,
and it's important that it
send the proper message.
The other thing,
and I suggested this before I began
to introduce you to our
successful participants,
is is data collection, right.
We know these things feel right.
Actually, we know they are right.
The judges who are involved
in these programs know they
are exactly the right thing
to do for so many reasons.
One, they put a human face
on a sentencing regime
that has been so desperately
in need of a human face
for three decades now.
That's a good thing.
Second, there's more than one
way to protect a community.
One, is to take the people
who need to go to prison
out of the community and imprison them.
Sentence length is another
issue for another day.
But another way to protect the community
is to make sure the people who
have routinely been sentenced
to prison terms but don't
need to be, are not,
and are treated instead.
It costs less than 3,000
a year to provide the kind
of supervision that we
provided for these folks.
It would've cost the federal
government $30,000 per year
per inmate if we had
sentenced them to the,
on average, four-year prison term
that the guidelines appear to require us
to impose upon them.
We know it's right but
knowing it's one thing,
proving it's another.
So we've asked for help.
We asked for help from professionals,
from the types of organizations,
the Vera Institute, for example,
that know what data to collect,
help us gather the data,
help us evaluate it.
Prove in the federal system
as has already been proven
in the States,
the long-term efficacy of these programs.
The the other thing that needs
to be done is already
well underway and that's
what this chart's all about.
I am so proud of this and
it's so much the doing
of our Pretrial Services Department
and Roberto Cordero who mentioned earlier.
Hardly a session goes by,
I may be overstating it but only slightly,
hardly a POP session goes by
or an SOS session it seems,
where we don't have delegations of judges
and Pretrial Services
Officers from other districts
around the country coming
to watch what we do.
There's a real thirst for this out there.
Entertaining the visit requests
and in canvassing them in preparing
reports about this.
By the way,
if you Google alternative to incarceration
in the Eastern District of New
York you'll see a long report
to our Board of Judges
from just this past August
that includes more data
than I've given you
and a more fulsome
description of our programs.
And canvassing the judges
around the country to prepare
that report what we found
was it was interesting.
In some of the places where drug courts
are now cropping up,
presentence, no entry drug courts,
what's happened is state
judges get appointed
to the federal bench.
They come onto the bench,
they have before them
low-level nonviolent folks,
charged with federal felonies
but they're not the most serious
crimes in the courthouse.
They're addicted and
they look around and say,
well, where's the drug court?
We had a drug court in state court.
So you know what they've done,
they've created their own.
And they are from a
grassroots level helping
to import this phenomenon
into the federal system.
And you can see,
I'll tell you how many are here,
there are now up and running
or on the drawing board
programs like ours, drug courts,
youthful offender courts
in 22 federal districts.
And there's some places around the country
that look at that guidelines manual and
the judges there,
God bless them,
they respect the Sentencing
Commission greatly
and if it's not authorized
by the guidelines manual
they're just not gonna do it,
hence the need to amend
that guidelines manual.
But even against that
opposition you can see
this growing movement
in the federal courts towards
alternatives to incarceration
and we owe it to ourselves.
I mean, this stuff has worked emphatically
and indisputably in state systems.
And I don't know how we can all agree
that we have a mass incarceration problem
that needs to be addressed
and not make every effort
to address it in all its facets.
I'm just focusing on one,
that is identifying some
segments of our population
that we can maybe avoid sending to prison
and doing it responsibly.
And with any luck you'll come
back in a couple of years
and someone will show you chart like this
and there'll be all 94
federal districts on it.
There probably aught to be.
How'd I do, Dean Morrison?
Seven o'clock right on the nose.
Thank you for listening.
(audience applauding)
- [Organizer] So we have
time for a few questions
if you'd like.
We have two microphones
so if you would like
to ask a question please come
to one or the other of these
while you're getting ready (mumbles).
- Okay.
- [Organizer] So some other of these,
in (mumbles) a number of districts now
have programs like these.
How much variation is there in them
from one district to the next?
And is there variation that's
helping produce some learning
about attributes of these programs
that seem especially critical to have
or maybe even new variations
that your district might be contemplating
or is there already a
sort of understanding
that what the key components are?
- Sure, there's plenty of variation.
There's a tension,
on the one hand a number
of different laboratories
I think will be a good thing.
On the other,
as I mentioned,
we are kind of concerned
about gathering data
and one problem is the
sample sizes are small.
So it's difficult
to gather meaningful data
district by district.
I should've mentioned this earlier,
thanks for the opportunity.
We have a total of
(papers rustling)
79 participants in POP and SOS
of which 39 have now
successfully completed
their course through the programs, 37.
That's really not enough for
there to be significant data
that would support a
study you could rely upon.
So we wanna scale it up.
On the other hand,
as it's being scaled up
there's a lot of variations
on the theme.
Some folks have different
models in which the intake,
there's a formal role for
the US attorney on the intake
whereas our Pretrial Services Officer
is the sole gatekeeper.
On the fringes there
are some true oddities.
For example, Central District of Illinois
to become a participant
in the drug court you have
to cooperate with the government.
That's not exactly the
model I have in mind.
(audience chuckling)
And so much is
a creature of local
custom, you know.
There are places in the United States
where before these
courts came along people
could avoid going to
prison in only one way,
and that is to cooperate
with the government.
And in several districts
what's happened are judges
who are enthusiastic about
this idea have created a court,
gotten right to the brink of starting it
and then the assistant US attorney,
it's like a light bulb goes off,
they're like, wait a second,
now they're gonna have
a chance to avoid going
to prison by not cooperating with me.
So that's produced a good deal of tension.
So there are growing pains,
there are variations.
I think on balance now since
we're on the early stages,
a laboratory model probably
even serves us best.
And one thing we could do
in terms of getting help
from places like Vera and
Center for Court Innovation,
is just to have a study to determine
what the best practices
are so we could at least,
as people develop different
models around the country,
have a feel for what the
best practices are in terms
of discipline and the like.
If you don't ask questions I'm
gonna call on you, hi Paul.
I got my former students and
interns here, they're plants.
(audience laughing)
- [Audience Member] In
terms of the key players
in this area you talked about
what the Justice Department
has done to support drug courts,
at least what the attorney general did
when she was the US attorney
in the Eastern District.
And you mentioned what the
Sentencing Commission could do.
So my question is,
especially given the at
least nominal support
for criminal justice reform
or bipartisan support,
what could Congress do
to support the mission
of drug courts or do the
district courts already
have the resources they
need to do this themselves?
- No, great question
and I should've mentioned
it earlier, thank you.
Congress can do a lot of things.
One is, tone matters so much
and even if they don't fund it,
if Congress can put its imprimatur on,
even just ask for a
report from the commission
on drug courts, for example,
to focus attention on it.
More importantly,
this arguably falls in
the don't-get-me-started
because if I start talking
about mandatory minimums we're
never gonna get out of here.
But more importantly,
Congress could provide funding,
not so much in New York.
It doesn't really cost us that much.
A popular misconception is
this is a resource drain
to do what we're doing.
Most of these people in New
York are getting the form
of supervision that they
would get even if they weren't
in our POP court.
But there are places in the country
where there's not an inpatient
drug treatment facility
within an hour of the courthouse.
There are places in the country
where it would be a more
significant drain just
by the way they do their supervision.
I'm a Pretrial Services Officer so,
as I mentioned to you,
there's enormous cost savings
to the Bureau of Prisons
through our program, right.
They save $30,000 per inmate per year.
But you know what,
when they save that money
they don't write a check.
(audience laughing)
They don't write a check to the judiciary.
So it doesn't help
probation when they say,
well, this is fine,
we're saving money but it's not our money.
So funds need to be allocated properly
to incentivize courts
to have these programs,
to allow them to have a reduced caseload,
for Pretrial Services Offices
so we can spend $2,000,
2,500 a year instead of the 30,000 a year
that gets spent when the
alternative road is taken.
Max.
- What, I know, sorry.
(audience chuckling)
- And raise your hand
if you're not a student
or a former intern?
I'm just kidding.
- [Max] That actually goes
right into my question
which is basically that,
so in your sentencing class
we talked a lot about BOP,
especially on our field trip,
we talked about BOP and how
sometimes there's friction
with certain criminal justice
and sentencing reform issues,
especially that are coming
out of the judiciary
or coming out of pretrial services.
I mean, it's kind of
more of a radical reform
but do you think that integrating BOP less
in the Department of Justice
and more in the judiciary
would be a more seamless
kind of integration
of the services so that
there was less of a,
they don't cut a check issue,
among other issues?
- Well, that's pretty radical, Max.
(audience chuckling)
It's a great thought and maybe the germ
of it is something we read
in sentencing which is,
you know, the father of
federal sentencing reform
is Marvin Frankel who proposed
a sentencing commission
on which inmates and
former inmates would sit.
That didn't work out.
And one of thing that
Marvin Frankel proposed
was taking the Bureau
of Prisons out of DOJ
and placing it elsewhere.
And that's, you know,
that's a great idea.
I have to confess to you that my focus is
on more incremental reforms
that are more likely
to actually happen.
But that's a great idea.
The one facet of this issue
these days is compassionate
release of old,
elderly inmates, frail inmates.
And that currently can't be
done unless there's a motion
by the Bureau of Prisons.
And obviously, since they're embedded
within the Department of
Justice there are political,
maybe it's not obvious to you,
I'll tell you.
There are political
pressures brought to bear
on the Bureau of Prisons not
to seek compassionate release.
So it doesn't happen nearly
as often as it should.
It's a good idea, Max.
I'll go to work on it.
Yes, Judge Azrack?
- I just have a comment
that I wanna make (mumbles).
Marine is in the SOS
Program and she's gonna be
at my monthly meeting tomorrow
and I just got my monthly report.
And I gotta say although she
has gone through (mumbles)
she's now at (mumbles) Community College
and she got straight A's last year, wow.
(audience applauding)
- Yes, sir?
- Thank you for all you have done.
I was in Congress.
I was invited on to
join the Navy (mumbles).
They're not put in a
position by the fact they
haven't been getting
the help that they need
to be successful (mumbles).
And incarceration (mumbles)
and we're overcrowded
in our prisons with too many people
and when they get out there are (mumbles).
It becomes very evident again (mumbles).
Do you have any idea what's
happening in (mumbles) today?
- I do. I do.
It's actually a very effective program.
There's a 500-hour program.
It's called RDAP.
It's one of those acronyms
that's used so long I
have no idea what it stands for.
Residential Drug Treatment or something.
It's a program that once
you get close enough
to the end of your prison
term and you get in,
everybody who needs it doesn't get in.
They actually have,
I mean, it's a prison so
everything is inpatient
in a matter of speaking,
but they have separate
units within the facility
for participants in the RDAP Program.
It's a 500-hour program.
It entitles you by statute
to up to a year off your sentence.
They tend to get about
six months off the backend
of their sentence and
there's been some pretty,
not sophisticated, but
they've done some tracking
of the folks who have
successfully completed RDAP
and their recidivism rates are good.
I mean, it works well.
One of the arguments that
we made in our effort
to create these front end no entry courts
was the reentry programs
appear to be working well.
The RDAP Program for a too narrow slice
of the addicted inmate population appear
to be working well.
Why are we waiting until
they're either finished
with their prison term or in prison
for those who maybe we should
not send to prison at all
if we only give them
that treatment upfront?
But the Bureau of Prisons is
father along now than they were
when you were a member of Congress.
Yes?
- [Audience Member] (mumbles)
- [Audience Member] So I am
not a student or an intern.
- You're not?
- [Audience Member] No, (mumbles).
But I am curious about the Veteran Program
and I'm wondering if you
can comment on those?
(mumbles) we've got about quarter
of a million veterans living here.
I'm not sure what the
figures are statewide.
What do those programs do and
have you considered standing
(mumbles)?
- He's not a (mumbles).
(audience laughing)
Yes, we have a Veteran's
Court on the drawing board
in the Eastern District of New York.
They're an interesting
variation on the theme.
And the reason,
not every category you could think of
would warrant an intensive judge-involved
supervision program, right.
I mean, we send some
people to prison these days
who shouldn't go to prison at all
and they're nether youthful offenders
nor drug addicts nor veterans.
They're none of those,
it doesn't mean we need
a special court for them.
We just need some sensitivity to the need
to incarcerate them.
When it comes to veterans
there is a unique array
of services available to them
that really dwarfs in significance.
Not dwarfs, but the Veterans Affairs
have their own counselors.
There's much more available to veterans
and they pose a different set of problem.
Obviously PTSD is one common
affliction among the veterans.
But most of those courts, I think,
are arranged around the theme
that there's a unique array
of services available to veterans.
So let's have them be
together so those services can
be of more efficiently provided to them.
They're a little different
in kind from drug treatment
and youthful offender courts in that way.
- [Organizer] This has been
a great talk, Judge Gleeson.
I wanna thank you for
participating.
- Thank you for having me.
- [Organizer] Let's take
this opportunity also
to thank him for his
really wonderful 21 years
of service on the bench, thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Okay, thank you.
