Credible Messengers Help Turn Former Convicts Into Leaders

For Julius Walker, success is defined by small moments. Like the time one of Walker’s students called his cohort his “family.”
The significance of such a moment might escape the notice of some people working in the criminal justice system. But not Walker. He knew right then that his student was going to be all right. “When [students] know they have a support system to latch on to, it gives them a lot more confidence to face the world,” Walker says. “Our goal is to get the young people to know that we are in this with them.”
Walker is the program coordinator for Arches Transformative Mentoring, a New York City-based program that works with youth on probation to change, in sustainable ways, the behaviors and attitudes that can lead to criminal activity.
The key to this program is an initiative called the credible messenger approach to restorative justice. It pairs at-risk and justice-involved youth, who are individuals who’ve been involved with the criminal system, with people who have had comparable life experiences, such as ex-convicts or ex-gang members. “When you think of a credible messenger, you think of those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” says Jason Clark, the program manager at King County Credible Messengers Initiative in Washington.
These credible messengers, who are paid and trained for their work, support and guide 16-to-24 year-olds in every aspect of life. Whether it’s explaining how probation works or answering a text message at 2 a.m., credible messengers provide tools, strategies and personal experience to keep the youth out of the criminal system.
A credible messenger approach not only prevents young adults from reentering the penal system, it also has the potential to save money. In 2011, 43 percent of people released from incarceration were rearrested, according to Pew Center on the States. According to Vera Institute of Justice, in 2015 the average cost of an inmate was $33,274 a year. In places like New York, it can cost around $247,000 a year to house a single inmate, according to A More Just New York City.

A King County Credible Messenger cohort.

Credible messengers sit at the intersection of education, government and community, and the approach is designed to work holistically. Program officers work directly with government employees, like law enforcement and teachers. For example, the Arches Transformative Mentoring program relies on probation officers referring young adults to the program, whereas many mentorship programs do not have those same connections.
Programs in Jackson, Mississippi and Staten Island, New York, have benefited from credible messenger initiatives. And they’ve been proven to work.
These communities are seeing reductions in rearrests, violations and antisocial behavior. Beyond that, youths are more engaged in their community, and often become credible messenger alumni themselves.
Recidivism rates have fallen drastically among youth participating in the Arches Transformative Mentoring program. Those youths had a 69 percent lower recidivism rate within a year as compared to youths who did not participate in the program. And after two years, it was 57 percent lower than their peers, according to an evaluation by the Urban Institute.
In New York, where more than 2,500 justice-involved people have been paired with credible messengers, that translates to large numbers of youth staying out of prison.
These results are inspiring other communities to adopt a credible messenger approach.
Across the country, at the King County Credible Messengers Initiative, Clark is implementing a credible messenger program for all young adults living in his county.
“Not only are we able to provide opportunities that can help previously incarcerated leaders grow in their professional leadership,” Clark says. “But we keep our young people out of the system, and we keep our communities safe.”
Clark believes credible messengers have the potential to work in every county, every city and every jurisdiction. “There are huge opportunities for this to be taken on nationwide,” he says.
More: This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline

A Prison Sits Empty. A Nonprofit Moves In

As a social worker accustomed to prodding the minds of adjudicated youth in the juvenile justice system, Noran Sanford has long been an inquisitive kind of guy. So when he discovered that six prisons had closed within a 50-mile radius of his home in rural Laurinburg, N.C., including one in the nearby town of Wagram, he began asking questions. Lots of them. “It was in that moment that I began putting together the idea that somebody should do something with these large sites,” Sanford says.
Enter the concept behind GrowingChange. The organization launched in 2011 to help reform and empower young ex-offenders, some barely into their teens, as they work to turn the abandoned prison in Wagram into a community farm and education center. The first group of 12 participants recruited by Sanford had all been arrested, expelled from school and kicked out of their homes — a combination of risk factors that Sanford calls the “unholy trinity,” especially when living in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties.
The Wagram site, which partially opened to the public for tours in October, has worked with 18 formerly incarcerated youth since its inception, with seven active participants today. The group was able to secure the property from the state’s Department of Public Safety, who agreed to donate the land after Sanford and two of his youth leaders pitched the idea. Sanford hopes they will eventually be able to sell the soil amendments and organic produce they’ve cultivated. So far, participants have grown food for needy local families, and are working to repurpose jail cells into aquaponics tanks and guard towers into climbing walls, among other initiatives. GrowingChange also provides intensive group therapy for its youth leaders.

This former prison has become a community farm and education center.

Analyzed over a three-year period, the prison-to-farm program was 92 percent effective in preventing recidivism among participants, Sanford says.
As the program has matured, so has its group of original participants, some of whom have stayed on to act as mentors to new recruits. Other young ex-offenders have been working to expand GrowingChange’s reach with a graphic-novel series, called Prison Flip Comics, that chronicles their troubled past; the goal is to use the comics as a learning tool distributed throughout North Carolina’s system of juvenile justice offices.
There are also teens who have embraced a more public-facing role, speaking at outside events and otherwise “sharing their stories about a personal experience of change,” says Simon Stumpf of Ashoka, which awarded Sanford a fellowship last year for his social entrepreneurship. Ashoka also provided funds to help scale GrowingChange. Sanford’s long-term goals include flipping 25 former prisons by 2025; currently, he estimates around 300 prisons sit empty across the U.S.
Despite GrowingChange’s small number of participants, other organizations have taken notice, reaching out from places as far away as the Netherlands, where Sanford traveled to present his model. And students from schools including the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have helped in areas like designing site plans and mapping the area with 3-D technology to share with the public what the site — which will eventually include housing for veterans and a counseling center — will look like once fully completed.
Sanford hopes to inspire prison authorities, government leaders, nonprofits, universities, foundations and others to think differently about unused prisons, taking an open-sourced approach by sharing what has, and hasn’t, worked at the Wagram facility. And that has him dreaming big.
“Our hope is to create a federated system of independent sites,” he says.

The Long, Strange Journey of U.S. Drug Courts

The United States isn’t exactly an international role model when it comes to incarceration; out of all developed countries, we imprison the most people, and not very cheaply.
Close to half of those incarcerated in federal and state prisons are there because of drugs, but that hasn’t solved the nation’s ongoing drug crisis. And even though America is safer now than ever before, putting a glut of people behind bars isn’t the reason why.
The failures in the American justice system to tackle the drug epidemic — now in the form of prescription opioids and heroin — has forced the hand of lawmakers to reach across the aisle to find bipartisan solutions. Whereas prison reform used to be relegated to Democrats and libertarians, many Republicans have started to recognize the need for a change in a judicial system whose costs have far outpaced state and local spending on education.
One of these bipartisan solutions has been the implementation of drug treatment courts, an alternative to the traditional court system in which low-level offenders are kept out of prison. Under close supervision of a judge, addicts agree to undergo up to 18 months of mandatory sobriety meetings, group therapy sessions and random drug testing.

A COURT MADE FOR TREATMENT

In 1986, President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to build prisons and funnel money into treatment, but the most impactful (and most covert) aspect of the bill was imposing mandatory minimum sentences on drug users.
In 1982, before anti-drug measures were signed into law, there were just under 41,000 people serving time for drug offenses. That number skyrocketed throughout the 1980s and ’90s. By 2015, close to 470,000 people were incarcerated for drugs, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that analyzes U.S. Bureau of Justice data.
But incarcerating drug users didn’t help reduce crime.
In response, the first drug courts popped up in Miami in 1989, a time when the scourge of drugs and crime had made the nation’s most powerful CEOs rank the city as one of the worst places to establish a business, much less a place they wanted to live.
The drug courts started small at first, with only 42 programs in place by 1994, according to a report produced by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Less than two decades later, by 2010, the number of programs had reached 2,500. But despite that growth, as of 2008, only 3.8 percent of all arrestees considered at risk for drug dependence were actually diverted to a drug court for treatment.

SUCCESS, WITH A SIDE OF SKEPTICISM

Initially, the jury was out on the impact of drug courts, though a 1997 GAO report found an incredibly wide margin of success. For example, out of the 65,000 people examined in 1997 who had gone through drug courts, between 8 and 95 percent had completed the program, and retention within the program ranged from 31 to 100 percent.
But as the drug court system matured and grew, so did its effectiveness. When it was analyzed again in 2011 by the same office, the rearrest rates of those who had completed their drug court mandates were significantly lower — up to 58 percent less — than those who hadn’t. The report concluded that “drug courts produce statistically significant reductions in drug use [and] in self-reported crime.”

A graduate of the Cheshire County Drug Court in Keene, N.H.

However, the success (and failure) of drug courts relies heavily on the kind of treatment it administers. In other words, because of ideological differences in how to best treat addicts — which pits medical intervention against a cold-turkey approach — and the varying state laws, not all drug court programs have been created equally.
When courts recommend medically assisted treatment, or MAT, addicts are provided methadone or buprenorphine to help wean them off opiates. The practice is recommended and well-regarded among numerous world and national coalitions, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations. The research backs it up: In Baltimore, for instance, access to methadone and MAT reduced overdose deaths by 50 percent, according to a 14-year study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
But methadone, which has been used for treating opioid dependency for over 50 years, has its detractors. There is evidence that some people stay on methadone for years, leading critics to argue that these addicts are simply swapping one drug for the other.
A 2010 survey of U.S. drug court programs found that just more than half, or 56 percent, provided MAT. And though that figure is higher than in 1999, when only 39 percent offered the treatment, that’s still a wide gap considering methadone treatment has been shown time and again to reduce overdose deaths.
In giving reasons for their opposition to MAT, one survey respondent said that “Our drug court team feels that allowing our participants to take medication in order to ‘detox’ from one substance could result in new addiction to another substance.” Another court surveyed claimed that “When these drugs are used people are substituting one high for another.”
The aversion to methadone and buprenorphine has led some judges to enforce immediate sobriety. But that approach is highly ineffective, says the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, and only heightens the risk of future drug overdoses and deaths.

A BIPARTISAN SOLUTION

The promise of drug courts has led to some unlikely alliances. Liberal commentator Van Jones and Newt Gingrich, the conservative former speaker of the House, have teamed up to speak out on the opioid epidemic — and the political establishment is carefully watching their efforts to see how bipartisanship could help solve the crisis.
In a recent op-ed for TIME, both men made an argument for drug courts, writing, “What started as an experiment has now become a successful method for helping people with serious substance use disorders get on a path to long-term recovery.”
In New Hampshire last year, then-Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat and current U.S. senator, signed a law that directed $2 million in matching state grants to drug courts — a move that was widely praised, even by the conservative think tank American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
“Saving taxpayer dollars is a central pillar of a public official’s duty, and given the overall criminal justice cost of opioid dependence is estimated to be $5.2 billion annually, measures that seek to reduce that cost are necessary, especially if such measures simultaneously reduce crime rates,” wrote Ronald. J. Lampard, director of the Criminal Justice Reform Task Force at ALEC.
And there are more across-the-aisle measures being introduced. Earlier this month, a bipartisan bill was introduced that would reduce sentences for low-level drug crimes and give inmates with drug problems more access to treatment. If it passes, it could be another important footnote in the fight for prison reform — and for recognizing that treatment, not prolonged incarceration, is the best way to address addiction in a more meaningful, and effective, manner.
Continue reading “The Long, Strange Journey of U.S. Drug Courts”

The Impressive Top-to-Bottom Makeover of the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice System

Teenagers make mistakes. They sneak out past curfew to drink at a house party, shoplift clothes, graffiti their names in bathroom stalls, talk back to authorities and throw punches in heated moments. Our juvenile justice system views some of these violations as youthful folly; others are deemed criminal offenses. Unjustly, skin color or socioeconomic status might determine how the behavior is categorized. Suburban white youth are tsk-tsked, while urban black children are handcuffed and jailed.
Massachusetts created the nation’s first juvenile correctional system around 1846, and it also led the first reforms by shutting down Dickensian “training schools.” But during the high-crime spike of the 1990s, the punitive model common to most states made a resurgence. However, while laws passed making it easier to try kids as adults, a group of fed-up employees teamed up to reform youth courts, juvenile detention facilities and probation offices from within. While much of the country continues to arrest more than 1.02 million children every year, Massachusetts reduced the number in custody down to a daily average of about 190 youth, or 2,240 admissions annually. These state workers also dramatically slashed the number of children under age 14 placed in secure facilities from roughly 500 to just a handful.
What changed? The state wised up to normal teenage behavior and its institutions’ role in either furthering or freezing maturity. Reformers implemented what they call “positive youth development” as the main priority. Under this philosophy, which draws much of its insight from developmental psychology, the Massachusetts juvenile justice system stopped focusing on the bad things kids shouldn’t do and started promoting positive outcomes. When a child makes a mistake, the state steps in as the de facto parent, teacher, mentor and neighbor. Recognizing that youth need to grasp a sense of their own future in order to avoid a life of crime, college graduation and job placement replace recidivism as measures of success.
“For example, the kid who comes into court for fighting at school will ordinarily be put on probation, where he’s told, ‘Don’t fight, follow all the rules, keep a curfew.’ But if this is an 8th grade boy who’s old enough to be in high school and reading at a 2nd grade level, he’ll never succeed on probation. It’s never enough to order children to behave better. We need to look at their life circumstances and ask, ‘What resources, opportunities, services or supports are they going to need in order to be able to behave better?’ asks Joshua Dohan, head of the state public defenders’ juvenile unit. “As adults, we need to do something kids are not good at, which is taking the long view. What do we need to invest in over the long run so that we can nurture a healthy adult, as opposed to punishing a kid because he missed school one day?”
A little over a decade ago, Dohan, a public defender representing youth in Boston reached out to one of the men in charge of the state’s juvenile detention facilities. Dohan wanted to know if the official (who regularly locked up plenty of teenagers) wanted to join him at an upcoming conference on juvenile defense. “Ignorant” of the role good defense attorneys played in a child’s case, Edward Dolan, then deputy commissioner of Massachusetts’s Department of Youth Services, accepted. In an unexpected turning point, Massachusetts’s entire juvenile justice system started to flip. As the top leadership started collaborating, a punitive model slowly lost out to a restorative one.
For too long, each separate agency in the criminal justice system — from the lawyers in court, to guards in detention facilities, to officers in probation — had been caught up in its own institutional inertia, carrying out policies because that’s how they had always been done. There’d been some dissenting voices, most prominently Ned Loughran, a former priest who had agitated against harsh retribution for juveniles as head of DYS from 1985–1993. But on the whole, the agencies remained trapped within their respective silos. At the conference, focused on the entire juvenile justice system, Dohan and Dolan had their first chance to look outside their own roles, question the underlying rules and realign the system in kids’ best interests.
“Even though I’m in the business, it was the first time I was seeing the world through [the public defenders’] eyes. I put myself in their position, looking from a kid’s perspective and a…mother’s perspective at some of the things we did as an agency. We were like a machine,” Dolan says. “[Juvenile detention] was a pretty troubled agency at the time, overwhelmed and overcrowded. Even for the big leadership in the organization, we didn’t feel good about the way we were doing things. We were looking for a better pathway forward.”
Starting with that one conference where defense attorneys and a juvenile jailor found common ground, the agencies initiated a conversation about their overlapping roles in helping youth. Side by side, they could no longer blame other parts of the system for the dysfunction. From there, a group of bureaucrats started to rewrite the system together, unified under the banner of an approach that made more sense for children.
“Positive youth development” generally defines the field of academics applying insights from neuroscience and knowledge of human development to criminal justice. As practitioners, attorneys and officers usually don’t have time to get an advanced degree in social work, says Dohan. “The people who apply it have taken it on as their task to sort through and operationalize [the research] for youth workers, teachers, lawyers and probation officers to give us guidance about what works and what doesn’t and why.”
At the height of the War on Drugs, policymakers generally split along partisan lines about how to respond to criminal acts by youth. The right wing saw unchangeable “super-predators” who needed to be incarcerated to restore law and order, while leftists saw victims of poverty who needed counseling and therapy, says Dr. Jeffrey Butts, director of John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Research & Evaluation Center.
Both of these viewpoints are “incredibly biased in terms of class and race,” adds Butts, best known as one of the field’s founders, because they assume teens from high-crime communities are inherently more criminal than their peers elsewhere. The developmental approach, in contrast, doesn’t take a child’s actions as indicative of their character. Butts’s theory holds that the best way to stop crime is to encourage youth to acquire skills. Unlike the other two models, “the fact that a 17-year-old stole a bike doesn’t mean he’s destined to be an adult criminal,” Butts says.
Positive youth development maintains that five assets enable teens to mature into law-abiding citizens: strong bonds with adults and prosocial peers, a safe home, a healthy lifestyle, opportunities for civic engagement and an effective education and success in the labor market. Possessing these resources will make youth naturally begin to see that belonging to conventional society is more valuable, says Butts, than the short-term advantage one might accrue from committing a crime. If a young person feels connected to his community, “there’s more to lose by being caught stealing someone’s phone than by saving the few hundred dollars to buy a new one,” he adds.
“We have to be at least as good as criminal street gangs. They know exactly how to bring a 10-year-old into a group, how to increase their sense of purpose until they become very loyal,” Butts adds. “We need to be at least that good in attaching young people to our community.”
Positive development takes place at every step of the Massachusetts juvenile justice system — from when a public defender meets a client in lockup to the last appointment with a probation officer. For them, it’s not about creating a “feel-good” system, so much as designing systems that will reduce recidivism and lead to positive outcomes. Unlike most other states, Massachusetts offers a network of highly specialized public defenders for juveniles — a benchmark few under-resourced legal aid societies across the country have met. “What makes juvenile defense such a critical area of specialized practice is that in order to be effective, you need to have all the skills of an effective criminal defense lawyer and all the knowledge of adolescent development,” says Mary Ann Scali, head of the National Juvenile Defender Center. “In places like Massachusetts…, we know that we can provide constitutionally mandated access to counsel and effective counsel all the time.”
In Massachusetts, Dohan built the Committee for Public Counsel Services’s Youth Advocacy Department into a premier league of 36 staff attorneys and over 500 private attorneys who receive regular trainings on juvenile-specific topics. That’s a big feat considering these lawyers sign up for an unforgiving job. “The pay is terrible. Juvenile is the hardest place to make a living because there’s no private clients,” Dohan explains. (Still, you won’t hear him brag about what he’s developed; when NationSwell reached out to profile him for this story, the humble attorney sent back a list of 18 other sources to interview.)
Even when these experienced defense lawyers can’t argue their client’s innocence, the child is still in good hands in the Department of Youth Services, which leverages every connection it has to ensure kids receive the services they need. DYS tries to offer “all those things that you’d want for your own 17-year-old teenager,” says Peter Forbes, DYS commissioner. Indeed, kids seem to grasp the value, because half continue to go back to DYS for services (like tutoring, job training, coaching and counseling) for up to three years after they’re released. Most return for about six months on average, Forbes reports — something that would be unheard of at a jail like New York’s Rikers Island or a prison like San Quentin in California.
And finally, once a child is put on probation, her public defender will argue for a reasonable plan that’s created to advance her best interests. It’s a stark contrast with the old model — “trail ‘em and nail ‘em,” as Dohan calls it. The new system’s main goal is to ensure conditions are achievable. Much of this advocacy centers on education. As Dohan’s seen from experience, an 8th grader reading at a 2nd grade level feels like they’re being “tortured.” Bored, frustrated or humiliated, these students are prone to acting out. To help a child catch up, the lawyers are trained to involve the school system. “It’s not enough not to be expelled. We also get them into a program in which they can succeed,” Dohan describes. Kids won’t march themselves into a principal’s office to request this fix, but their lawyers in Massachusetts will. “Our job is not just to make the kid look good in the courtroom,” he adds. “Our job is to litigate but then put them in a much better position to succeed when the case is over.”
In implementing this program, the Massachusetts reformers, at first, fought an uphill battle to win funding from legislators. “In fairness to legislators, you are asking them to make an investment of the public’s money. They should expect a return on that investment,” Dolan says. They quickly saw a payback, in the form of reduced recidivism, and legislators soon allowed money saved from reduced caseloads to be reinvested into other initiatives. (Where that funding didn’t suffice, agencies turned to nonprofits outside the state system to supplement their work, assistance they still rely on today.) As evidence accrues, it’s getting easier to sell the developmental approach.
Even as this model gains traction, it still presents problems to be solved. Up next? The reformers are trying to confront racial and ethnic discrimination that’s endemic to the system by rigorously studying the data to locate what Dolan calls “unintentional but undeniable” disparities in treatment, offering classes on implicit bias and working with partners outside corrections to generate awareness. If they get it right, there’s much that can be used in correctional systems — both juvenile and adult — nationwide. Dohan, Dolan and Forbes started out with the intention of helping kids see their future; in the process, they’ve defined what’s next for a justice system in sore need of a new direction.
MORE: When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process

Open Doors in a Maximum-Security Prison: Why This Counterintuitive Approach Works

Within his first two weeks on the job as the new warden of Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in South Carolina, Michael McCall faced a hostage situation. Prisoners captured a guard and held him in a closet until other corrections officers rushed the dorm. Three months later, a group incited another riot. Inmates and guards alike were afraid to walk across the yard. Three or four times a week, McCall dealt with a stabbing, he recalls.

In the wake of the dangerous violence, McCall pondered how to excise the brutal culture that dominated the Palmetto State’s largest Level 3 facility. Instead of imposing further punishment, McCall responded by allowing convicts to improve themselves. Solitary confinement wouldn’t change behaviors, but some taste of freedom could.

He created the Better Living Incentive Community (BLIC), a special dorm for prisoners with a clean record where security feels laxer and they’re allowed to take classes. Offenders must apply for acceptance to the dorm — 256 live in the dorm at Lee; another 300 are on a waiting list — and they have to remain on good behavior to stay. Since its founding in 2012, there hasn’t been a single incident requiring discipline: no thefts, no drugs, no contraband phones, no emergency responses. Nothing. Why? The simple fact that no one wants to go back to the pen.

“I was raised an old country boy: ’Lock ‘em up and throw away the key.’ Being born here in the South, you hear a lot of people say that,” McCall tells NationSwell. “That does not work. These guys are going to be our neighbors some day. Our job is to make them a better person, and [through BLIC] we’re giving them an opportunity to do that. I learned that very quickly in my career.”

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McCall, who took a job in corrections because he couldn’t find other work, has since been promoted to deputy director of operations for the entire state’s corrections department. He’s on a mission to bring his more humane methods to other max-security facilities and eventually convert whole institutions — not just individual dorms — to the BLIC model. If his version of criminal justice can work at the state’s toughest prison, he reasons, it can work anywhere.

McCall first developed the BLIC model in 2009 while he overseeing Perry Correctional, another Level 3 facility. His superiors asked him to come up with a faith-based program, but the idea didn’t sit well with him. “I wanted to see a community — a character institution — where everyone was involved,” McCall says. “Muslim, Christian, atheist: I didn’t care what you were. You were coming together as one.” BLIC’s precursor at Perry focused on self-improvement and community-building. Inmates held one another accountable. They talked out problems, rather than resorting to violence.

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The same concepts took hold quickly at Lee. If you walk into the BLIC dorm there, the first thing you’d notice is the serene quiet. Some inmates might be dipping brushes in acrylic paints; others are practicing chords for bass guitar (the advanced group) or keyboard (the beginners). You almost forget you’re in a maximum-security prison.

Elsewhere in the dorm, there’s beekeeping, barbering and Biblical Greek. Instructors are talking about improving character, resolving conflict and reconnecting with emotions. Unlike classes at South Carolina’s other prisons, which are taught by volunteers, all classes at Lee are taught by the inmates themselves. Even with this restriction, there’s four dozen classes at Lee alone.

The opportunity to enrich themselves proves transformative for many prisoners. They begin to realize they may have made a mistake, but that error doesn’t necessarily determine what they do next. “I put myself here [in prison]. I’m responsible for the actions that I took that got me here. I’m guilty. I’m paying man’s price for what I did,” an inmate named Randy, who’s serving a life sentence for murder, tells a local TV station. “But I’m at peace with myself,” he adds about his life in the BLIC dorm. “For the first time since 1977, I can relax.”

Offenders like Randy are the people McCall hopes to reach. They’re the ones who are making the most of their time behind bars, the ones who see incarceration not as a sentence, but as an opportunity.

”Having lived in this department for decades, this new BLIC unit has given me the opportunity to learn what it is to be a man in my six-decade life,” Randy says. “I’ve been a slave my whole life to alcohol and drugs and I couldn’t be freer in this prison.”

Alternative Courts Can Transform Offenders, Not Just Punish Them

After being pulled over for running a stop sign, Heather Bateman was rummaging around looking for her driver’s license when something else popped out of her purse — her crystal meth pipe.
The policeman at her car window spotted the drug paraphernalia, and Bateman soon found herself in handcuffs.
In a strange twist of events, getting arrested was actually the answer to her prayers.
For months, Bateman had been asking God for some kind of help, as her life spiraled out of control. She was using meth every day. She’d lost her nursing license. She and her 7-year-old daughter were homeless. “It was the lowest part of my life,” she says.
Later, at the courthouse, Bateman was asked if she’d like to take part in an alternative court program — a drug court. “I said, ‘Absolutely. I want to get help.’”
Instead of receiving probation or a prison sentence, Bateman underwent three years of supervised treatment in the St. Paul, Minn., drug court. Her urine was tested randomly to see if she was still using, and she was required to attend treatment and counseling groups. Batemen regularly attended court, where the judge didn’t just issue orders, but asked her what was going on in her life, in the same way a social worker might do.
It wasn’t a straight road, but Bateman found her way to sobriety, regained her nursing license, got married, bought a house and rebuilt her life. But none of this would’ve happened, she says, if she’d simply been sent to jail for drug possession.
Since the first drug court was created 25 years ago in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, the concept has proliferated. Today, there are more than 2,800 specialized courts nationwide that work with juveniles, veterans, the mentally ill, drunk drivers and prostitutes to change their lives after being arrested for minor offenses.
These so-called “problem-solving” courts are born from a recognition that traditional methods of criminal punishment are ineffective. Judges who are frustrated with the existing system and tired of seeing the same defendants appear before them again and again often lead alternative courts, which are designed to address the root causes of the arrest-imprisonment-and-re-arrest cycle.
Alternative courts are growing because they work. Studies have shown that drug courts can reduce recidivism rates by an average of 8 to 13 percent. Additionally, drug court graduates have fewer relapses than offenders who are simply given probation or prison time, according to a 2012 national study financed by the National Institute of Justice.
Most important, the turn toward problem-solving courts may be part of a larger change in the American criminal justice system: leaning toward treatment rather than retribution.
FINDING A BETTER WAY
“The traditional response of sending people to prison or placing them on probation was clearly proving ineffective, if the goal is causing people to change their behavior,” says Associate Circuit Judge Alan Blankenship, reflecting on the beginnings of the drug court he presides over in Stone County, Mo. Blankenship helped start the court 10 years ago, during a methamphetamine epidemic there.
“We realized that imprisoning people is extraordinarily expensive and the environment is not conducive to recovery,” he explains. Prison sentences for drug-addicted defendants “caused more harm and worsened public safety,” he says. “People got worse instead of better.”
Drug courts often employ a multiphase approach to treatment. Initially, defendants are closely monitored, required to undergo frequent drug testing and may have to attend an intensive treatment program, counseling or group therapy. Offenders are assigned a team that might include a probation officer, a social worker and a drug counselor. The group addresses not only treatment needs, but also issues like housing, employment and family reunification.
“The team is going to work with you every step of the way so that you’re not just clean, but stable,” says Chris Deutsch, director of communications for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.
As defendants accumulate sober time and meet their obligations, drug tests become less frequent and court monitoring loosens. When offenders have shown themselves to be stable and clean, they graduate from the program.
Throughout the process, offenders are required to come to court regularly for conversations with the judge — interactions that look very different from traditional courtroom exchanges. Alternative court judges ask offenders personal questions about family, work and stresses in their life. And they offer praise and encouragement, even applause.
Judge Blankenship says he often says things you might not often hear in a courtroom: “You’re doing great. I appreciate what you’re doing. I’m proud of you.”
“They have this dialogue back and forth and it’s an amazing departure from the way criminal justice interactions normally go,” says Deutsch.
Just a slight shift in approach can have a dramatic impact. Blankenship recalls one defendant who told him, “ ‘I’ve been in many courts in many parts of the country and you are the first judge to look me in the eye and call me by my name. You don’t know how powerful that is.’ ”
However, if offenders are not meeting their obligations, if they are missing meetings or testing positive for drug use, they can be subject to sanctions like community service, extra group counseling sessions or even a few days in jail.
EFFECTIVE & EFFICIENT
When people complete the program, which can take anywhere from a year to several years, they don’t often end up back in court, Blankenship says. The latest data from Stone County indicates that, five years after finishing the program, 13 percent of drug court offenders were re-arrested and only 6 percent were convicted and sent to prison. That’s a significant decrease, when compared with statewide data showing that 60 percent of people with addiction who were sent to prison return there in five years. “No other criminal justice response we’re aware of even comes close to achieving these kind of results with this really high-risk population of offenders,” Blankenship says.
As drug courts have taken root, other alternative court models have appeared.
Savannah, Ga., for example, now has a felony drug court, a mental health court, a veterans’ court, a DUI court and two juvenile courts. Each offers a different twist on the basic drug court model — intensive supervision and treatment tailored to the needs of different populations.
Jean Cottier, coordinator of the Savannah-Chatham County Drug Court, offers impressive statistics about the city’s mental health court. Forty of its graduates, who together had racked up 564 arrests and 1,074 criminal charges prior to participating in the alternative court, only had four arrests and five criminal charges in the two years after completing the program.
Alternative courts also save money, Cottier says. Participants in the felony drug court cost taxpayers only about $19 per day, but “it costs $58 a day to house a prisoner in our local jail,” she explains.
Alternative courts also reduce city spending because they target those who use courts and other public systems the most. People who end up in mental health court, in particular, “are high consumers of services in the community,” Cottier says. A successful mental-illness court can cut ER visits drastically, for instance, saving taxpayer money.
A SEA CHANGE
It’s easy to caricature drug courts, which often offer cakes and hug-filled graduation ceremonies for offenders who complete programs, as part of a soft-on-crime strategy that coddles criminals. Deutsch’s response to that criticism: Drug courts work. Traditional retributive justice doesn’t.
“The people in our community, even some of the most conservative, realize that it’s better to treat people and enable them to transform their lives and become contributing members of our community,” says Judge Blankenship.
While drug courts are becoming more common, they’re still not necessarily reducing the overall prison population. “In many drug courts, criteria for admission can be pretty restrictive,” says Marc Mauer, head of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “Many of the people going to prison never had an opportunity to go to drug court.”
One of the best critiques of drug courts, then, might be that there just aren’t enough of them, and they aren’t helping enough people. But their rise may be a signal that the American criminal justice system is beginning to move away from an exclusive focus on punishment.
Drug courts “are a response, a reaction to more than a generation of policy making in this country where we’ve essentially tiled the axis of the justice system in the direction of punitive policy making,” says Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
Twenty-five years ago, Berman says, the criminal justice conversation was about “how to make punishment swift and certain.” Now, within policy circles, “people say, yes, we can change the behavior of offenders.”
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These Jailed Journalists Provide a Glimpse of Life Behind Bars

What if you had a chance to hear an inmate’s perspective on some of the country’s most controversial debates in the criminal justice system? Would you want to know how they feel about overcrowding in prisons or transgender relations behind bars?
In an effort to provide those incarcerated with a positive outlet, as well as giving the world well-reported journalism (held to the same standards as other established publications), the San Quentin News is fielding reporters from an unlikely place: California’s San Quentin Prison.
The staff of 15 — which is comprised of male felons serving time for crimes ranging from burglary and home invasion to murder and a Ponzi scheme — publishes a monthly newspaper with a circulation of 11,500 readers. The paper was founded in 1940, but six years ago, it was revived as a serious journalistic publication, according to the New York Times.
In a trailer next to the prison yard, reporters and editors pour over stories on topical issues including the availability of bras for transgender inmates and a federal court order regarding mental health care for death row prisoners.
Managing editor Juan Haines, 56, mandates his reporters use “boots on the ground” journalism in tackling tough issues.

“It’s about being heard in a place that’s literally shut off from the world,” said Haines, who is serving a sentence of 55 years to life for a bank robbery. “We can go right into the yard and get a quote about how inmates are affected by policy decisions.”

“The Pulse of San Quentin,” as the paper calls itself, is distributed to 17 prisons as well as the 3,855 people at San Quentin. Other topics covered include sports stories on the San Quentin Giants and the A’s as well as entertainment, baby announcements, man-on-the-street interviews and holiday greetings. For members of the public, an annual subscription costs $40.

MORE: Cooking Up Change at an Illinois Prison

The subscriptions, along with donations and grants, fund the printing and distribution. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations does not contribute any funding, but prison authorities approve all content. Earlier this year, the news operation was suspended for 45 days for swapping a photo without approval.

But the paper is not alone in its enterprise. Volunteers and students from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkley offer editorial and research support. Richard Lindsey, a former staff member who received parole last year, also maintains his connection to the paper by pouring over studies from the Vera Institute of Justice, the Pew Research Center and other scholarly sources to assist reporters. Students from the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership at UC Berkley have advised the staff on developing a 12-year business plan that includes increasing the number of paid subscribers to subsidize the paper for free copies for inmates.

“When they [prisoners] get involved and see they’re accomplishing something, that could be the one positive tick mark in the ‘good’ column for them,” said former San Quentin warden Robert L. Ayers, Jr.

With writing, he said, “they start expressing themselves in ways other than physical or violent means.”

Ayers revived the publication from the “inmate rant rag” it was into journalistic enterprise that it now is. Though he received pushback, he believes it’s an important outlet for San Quentin’s inmates.

“I’m just trying to give back, to deal with the rips and tears I’ve made in the universe,” said one of the staff members and inmate Glenn Padgett. The 50-year-old, known as Luke, stabbed a man to death and set fire to his home to conceal the crime at the age of 33.

But the work is more than a means of redemption. In fact, more recently the Northern California chapter of Society of Professional Journalists recognized the San Quentin News with one of its James Madison Freedom of Information Awards.

Perhaps it’s just an exercise of the mind for some reporters, but this newspaper is setting out to prove that sometimes the best form of journalism comes from giving a voice to the unheard.