Humane Exposures Blog

As we have shown in our trilogy of books, early home life is at the root of many of our cultural ills. Privation, neglect, and abuse in early life directly contribute to the levels of both crime and recidivism in later years.

In downTown:USA we looked at the homeless problem and found a distressing number of mothers and families living on the streets. We also found a disproportionate number of veterans. Now, a few years later, the crossover between these two groups is growing.

Eric Tucker and Kristen M. Hall, of The Associated Press, covered this story recently and uncovered some extremely disturbing data:

Female veterans make up about 8 percent of all veterans, or about 1.8 million, compared to just 4 percent in 1990. The number of homeless female veterans has more than doubled from 1,380 to 3,328 between fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2010, according to a December U.S. Government Accountability Office report that found many with young children and nearly two-thirds between ages 40 and 59.

Male veterans encounter numerous obstacles when trying to reintegrate into normal life. Female veterans face all of these and many more as well. Tucker and Hall continue

Female service members, who in wars with increasingly blurred front lines return with post-traumatic stress disorder, face unique challenges, advocates say. Many have suffered sexual assault and remain too traumatized to share common space with men. Many are single mothers struggling to find housing for themselves and their children. They’re also more likely to be jobless: Unemployment for female veterans who’ve served since September 2001 was 12.4 percent last year, slightly higher than for their male counterparts.

Part of the problem is that the VA is a system built around male soldiers and their needs, not women. Some examples of this include:

• Current law doesn’t allow the VA to reimburse providers for housing children, creating a financial disincentive to do so. A recent GAO report notes that over 60% of existing grant and per diem programs serving homeless women that it surveyed didn’t house children.
• One hour south of a major military installation lies Nashville, TN. There are only seven transitional beds for homeless single women veterans in Nashville.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development housing voucher program is a great resource that has helped house thousands of veterans and their families. It is limited, however, to those in the most extreme need. Usually this need is one that requires ongoing attention, such as substance abuse or mental health problems.

Many of these women are mothers, attempting to care for their children while living on the street. While it is tragic to see anyone homeless who has defended our country, it is doubly so to see this impact their children as well. I think we can all agree that this is not the way for an innocent child to grow up.

Good news from the state of Colorado. House Bill 1271 passed 45 to 20 in the GOP-controlled House, riding a wave of bipartisan support, despite its controversial nature.

The Colorado State Senate deserves kudos for taking another step toward stripping the state’s district attorneys of their ability to “direct file” the cases of juvenile offenders into the adult prison system.

The measure has two major positive effects. First of all it raises the age at which a juvenile can be charged as an adult from 14 to 16 years old. Second it reduces the number of youth offenders that can be direct-filed into the adult prison system. While the direct-file option is not completely off the table, it would be reserved for truly extreme cases such as murder or violent sex crimes.

Everything that brings this closer to Gov. John Hickenlooper’s desk is a positive step for the state.

Eli Stokolis of Fox 31 reports:

Supporters of H.B.1271 have pointed to a recent study by the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition based on a review of 3,000 cases between 1993 and 2011, showing that direct file has disproportionately affected teenagers of color and that nearly all of the cases — a whopping 95 percent — lead to plea bargains before the case ever goes before a judge.

‘Some of the decisions made in 1993 were overreacting to the circumstances,’ said Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster. ‘Direct File puts children in adult jails which do not have separate areas for juveniles; they do not provide educational services.

‘We need to treat children differently than adults,’ Hudak continued. ‘The victim may be an adult, the crime may be adult-like, but the perpetrator is a person who has not been fully formed yet. They are juveniles!’

It should be noted that the number of direct-file cases has dropped by more than half over the last year, mainly due to 2010 legislation expanding the number of factors that must be considered by the district attorneys.

Even so, the remaining cases still constitute way too many wasted lives.

We applaud the Colorado Senate and look forward to the day that Gov. John  Hickenlooper has the opportunity to sign it into law.

Barry Krisberg is the Director of the of Research and Policy at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. For the past thirty years he has fought for the reform of California’s state juvenile correctional facilities.

Now those facilities are preparing for closure as their responsibilities will be shifted to the county level. The three remaining state facilities in California house between 800 and 900 young people. Krisberg does not think this is wise.

Youth Radio / Youth Media International recently interviewed Krisberg about this issue and its potential repercussions (via The Huffington Post). While he has been critical of the Department of Juvenile Justice in the past he does note two distinct changes that have occurred in recent years. Changes that alter the picture drastically.

First is the fact that the population of youth offenders currently incarcerated is only a small percentage of what it has been in the past. He states that this is because many of the youth he had been advocating for have since been moved out of DJJ and into county programs, a move he cites as successful. According to him, the remaining youth are part of “a very small core of very troubled young people, and so I think that people need to pay attention to the fact that these are not the youth who have been in the system in the past.”

The second change is that over the past eight years significant improvements have been, made whereas with county facilities it would be a matter of starting from square one. This means abandoning the advances made in education and medical care, for one thing. It also means that gains made in reducing the use of force and isolation might as well not have happened.

The entire interview is recommended reading, but I particularly wanted to share Mr. Krisberg’s answer when he was asked about recidivism.

I think the question is the content of the program. Are people being treated decently and humanely? Are they given the kind of resources they need?

I’m a big fan of the Missouri Department of Juvenile Justice Model, to the extent that that we move away from treating young people as inmates and prisoners and start understanding that are going to rejoin our communities pretty quickly and be citizens, that’s the key. In terms of closer to home, the way to deal with that is to create opportunities for reentry.

To me the number one problem is that when you put someone in a high security locked facility you take away all of their decision-making. Then you turn them loose after years of not even having to do any of the basics like set an alarm clock or figure out what you’re going to eat for lunch. It’s really a shock to the psyche to be under such a controlled environment and then be thrown into the chaos of communities. Therefore I think the best programs prepare youth for going home by giving them more responsibility, more freedom, more opportunity to demonstrate that they can succeed. We haven’t done that in California. We haven’t done that around the country.

This is part of the core problem. How does a person readjust to table manners, the job search, possible homelessness, and the general social interactions of day-to-day life, after time spent incarcerated? Is it any wonder that so many of these kids find the appeal of their old gang, and the secure social structure it seems to represent, as a valid choice?

Image by Davynin on Flickr, used under it’s Creative Commons license

Today we continue our series of interviews with people making a difference in juvenile justice. Tania Galloni, the managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Florida office, was kind enough to tell us about their current lawsuit against the Polk County Sheriff.

It is a cautionary tale about the perils of incarcerating children in adult-oriented facilities.

(Last week we wrote about the background of the lawsuit – Southern Poverty Law Center sues Polk County Sheriff for abusive conditions.)

Tania Galloni serves as managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Florida office, where she guides education and juvenile justice reform efforts in the state. Before joining the SPLC, she worked at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, defending and advancing the rights of immigrants. She also worked to secure better working conditions for farmworkers as an attorney with Florida Legal Services. She previously served as a clerk to Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and to Judge Rosemary Barkett in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and Yale Law School.

Many thanks to photographer Carrie Pratt for the use of her photo of Ms. Galloni!

The Center for Employment Opportunities, (C.E.O.) is a New York organization that specializes in helping ex-offenders find and keep jobs. The most interesting and successful program C.E.O. offers is called Transitional Jobs, and it is not your usual fare.

Just take a look at the MDRC evaluation  of the program. The findings are astounding!  Among those who began participating within three months of their release from prison the program reduced recidivism by between 16 and 22 percent when compared to a random control group. (The variance in percentages is based on whether you examine arrests, convictions or incarceration.)

The New York Times reported on the program recently on one of it’s blogs:

The program sends ex-prisoners to five days of training in “soft” work skills — how to behave in a workplace.   Then it places them in jobs, mostly in city agencies doing maintenance or janitorial work.  Participants get a paycheck at the end of each day.   They work four days a week, and on day five meet in C.E.O.’s offices with a job coach to go over their grades for the week and work on their skills.   The idea is to give the men some job history, basic work skills and grades that allow prospective employers to assess their work readiness.

Basic work skills are essential, but I think the focus on how to interact in the workplace is one of the surprising strengths of the program. That sort of education is vital, especially in the cases of those who may have never before been part of the conventional workforce.

The impact was greatest among the people with the highest risk of re-offending:  the youngest, those with the least education or the most past convictions, and those most recently released from prison. (Recidivism is highest the first year out of prison, and then drops; in a few years, a former prisoner’s risk of committing a new crime is no different from that of others of the same age.)

On the national level two-thirds of all released prisoners are arrested again within three years. Programs that can reduce that  percentage are desperately needed.

As always, one can look at the numbers for validation. It costs over $27,000 per year to incarcerate each inmate in New York State. The evaluation of the C.E.O.’s program that I linked at the beginning of this post notes that the program’s benefits ranged from $1.26 to $3.85 per dollar spent. In other words it saved approximately $4,900 per participant over the course of a year.

It must be noted that a sizable portion of those savings came from averted costs of incarceration. That said, even if you look only at the recently released – the target demographic for the Transitional Jobs program – the savings come out to an impressive $8,300 per person.

Since 25,000 people are released back into the general public in New York every year it is easy to see just how massive an impact programs like this can make.

It is, indeed, more expensive to do nothing.