 Welcome back. This is our 14th show in a series of shows entitled Rehabilitation Coming Soon, where we have been discussing the mass incarceration practices of the United States and the effect of those practices on the state of Hawaii. I am Aaron Wills, a William S. Richardson Law School graduate, a research consultant for Abigail, Quantanacoa Research Center, and a paralegal for retired Judge Mike Towns' private mediation practice. Over the past 14 weeks we have heard from a numerous professionals in the community and who are willing to discuss a criminal justice system and see the problem of mass incarceration from different perspectives. So today we'd like to hear from the perspective of a sitting judge who is the founder of the HOPE probation program which stands for Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement. Our guest today will be Judge Steven S. Aum. Welcome and thank you for coming on the show, Judge. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. All right. Well, a little background on Judge Aum. Judge Steven S. Aum has been a circuit court judge in Honolulu since 2001. Prior to that he was a deputy prosecuting attorney at the Honolulu Prosecutor's Office from 1985 to 1994 and was a United States attorney from 1994 to 2001. While U.S. attorney, Judge Aum made federal, state, local, law enforcement partnerships and cooperation his top priority. He initiated the successful weed and seed effort and served as chair of its executive committee. Through the strategy of residents, law enforcement, social services, government, business, and school partnerships, weed and seed helped to reduce crime in Kalihi Paloma, Chinatown between 2007 and 2001 by more than 70 percent. Judge Aum is the principal HOPE probation judge and from 2011 to 2014, the first circuit's adult drug court judge as well. He is the past president of the Hawaii State Trial Judges Association, served in 2005 and again in 2015 as a chair of the Penal Code Review Committee, which is done every 10 years and currently serves as a co-chair of the Interagency Council on Intermediate Sanctions. In 2007, HOPE probation received the American Judicature Society's Special Merit Citation Award and in January 2009, Judge Aum received the McGovern Award presented by the Institute for Behavior and Health for the most promising drug policy idea of the year. In October 2010, Judge Aum was named Hawaii Juris of the Year by Chief Justice Mark Rectonwald and in 2013, HOPE was named as one of the top 25 innovations in government by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and in August 2014, HOPE was selected as recipient of the National Criminal Justice Association Outstanding Criminal Justice Program for the Western Region. Again, welcome, judges. Thank you. Okay, well, I just wanted to start it off by saying that I heard you were retiring and if so, when? Well, I'm going to be retiring September 1st from the bench and I'll stop being a judge. It's been 15 years. It's been great, but it's time to do something else. Time to move on. Okay. Now, I can't really believe you're retiring and not going to work. What else are you going to do after you're done? Okay, well, the plan is HOPE is growing so much. I travel once or twice a month now that my wife and I are going to rent out our house and move to the Washington DC area for a few years to help guide HOPE and work with states, work with the Justice Department, work with Congress on that effort. Okay. And how many people are in HOPE right now that you actually deal with? I started with 34 in 2004 and I personally supervised a little over 2,000. There are about 6,800 people on felony probation on Oahu and I supervised about between a quarter and a third of them. Okay. And so Judge, you're a local boy, right? Yeah. Okay. And before you were a judge, you were a prosecutor? Right. I, yeah, born and raised, worked at Dole Canary for four summers. I was at the city prosecutor's office for nine years. And the last case I did there was the murder of a police officer, David Runk. And then I became the United States Attorney under President Clinton. And I loved being a prosecutor. You know, you're you can start a lot of neat programs, you can hold people accountable, help victims. One of the one of the programs I like the most, or one of the cases I like the most when I was US Attorney was the day I was sworn in as US Attorney, I got a visit from the downtown neighborhood board. And they said there is this bar on Smith Street that just sells drugs all day long. And we talked to the police and the prosecutors, the liquor commission, nothing seems to stop it. So we ended up doing a forfeiture of the bar. You know, long story short, we filed a lawsuit against the owners of the bar because the police had been sending them letters for years saying that all this illegal activity was taking place in and around the bar, and they didn't do anything to stop it. So long story short, we settled with the building owners. They are two buildings side by side on Hotel Street between Smith and Montague. And the building used to house a crack house, now houses the downtown substation for the Honolulu Police Department. So went from a crack house to a police department. It doesn't get better than that. But that really got me interested in working with community, you know, listening to other people doing that kind of stuff. And the other part of the program I really like so much when I was US Attorney was the weed and seed program. You know, you work with the police department, all the different agencies, you talk to residents about what the big crime problems they bring everybody together to weed out the crime, mostly street crime. And then when it's safer in the neighborhood, people will let their kids outside, they'll be outside. And so we brought all the social service agencies together to do things opened after school sports program at Coyolani Elementary School, weed and seed, I mean, a head start program at Kukui Gardens. And the net result was we were part of a whole effort that did drive down part one and part two FBI crimes, which means all crime by seven more than 70% between 1998 and 2001. That's excellent. You know, I don't know if people were aware of this, but I actually worked for Judge Aum as a law clerk myself, right out of law school. And, you know, one of the stories I remember you telling me is that when you get out of law school, it's not easy. You know, you everybody has a hard time finding, you know, your right fit. And I remember the story you told me about how you walked around door to door when you're in Minnesota and you ended up working for Westlaw, I think it was. Yeah, Westpublishing Company that worked for Westlaw is part of that. Yeah, so I mean, it's just great. You know, and I like the fact that you give other guys like myself a chance right out of law school and get get on my feet. So that was great. And I learned a lot while I was at Hope probation. I did not know there was a difference between hope probation and probation as usual. And I found out, you know, first hand. So I just wanted to know, did you think of the idea for hope probation? Or I really did. But it wasn't something that I was just sitting in my office thinking, what can I do to improve the criminal justice system? It's it's that I was faced with a situation in court. And I got it on the bench in 2001, I was assigned to a felony trial calendar in the June of 2004, I took over when Marie Milk's calendar when she retired. Okay. And the first week in court, I would see motions to revoke probation. And I at this point in my career, I started to more look at the systems. When I was a deputy prosecutor, doing those cases, my chief concern was just the particular case. Right. But after being US Attorney and learning about working with other people, bringing them together and try to change systems. That's that was the way I looked at it. So I'd see these motions to revoke probation. And I realized we had carrying POs. They're all social workers from UH, or most of them are half have master's degrees. They're really caring. But it was the system itself that didn't allow for really quick action to be taken. When some people are put on probation, they're scared, they're going to follow the rules. But many people are going to have problems. They're going to be drinking, they're going to be using drugs, chiefly crystal methamphetamine, they're not going to see their POs, they're going to break the rules. And I realized under our current system, if if the probation officers wanted to bring them back to court, and get court action, the only thing they really could do is have them arrested, write up all the violations, come back to court, and ask me to give them the underlying five or 10 years in prison. Right. It was kind of an all or nothing. And no PO or judge wants to send somebody to prison for five years for smoking, you know, crystal meth a couple of times. There's got to be a better way to do it. And so when you were, you know, kind of dissecting the better way to do it. Yeah. How many violations would they pile up before you'd have to revoke or before they would revoke the probation? Well, they would come back into court essentially when the probation officer decided they were a risk to public safety. It would often end with them upsconding. But I saw cases with 10 or 20 or more individual violations that would take hours for the POs to write up, and then bring it back to court. And almost invariably at that point, they would say, to me, judge this person is not amenable to probation, send him or her to prison. And I really thought to myself, you know, okay, this is our current system. And if it doesn't work, what might work better? And I thought of how my wife and I had raised our son, how we were raised, your parents tell you they care about you. But if you do something wrong, your parents do something usually right away. My guess is you were raised that way. That's how you tie together a bad choice or a bad behavior with a consequence and you can learn from it. So it really was this simple parenting one on one firm but fair idea. Could we bring that to the probation system? Okay, so what are some of the differences? If you you've already said some of them, but that makes hope different than probation as usual, as far as like violations go. Okay, well, first, you've got to understand how regular probation is, right, POs have these huge case loads, maybe 120, 30, 40 for felony probationers for each probation officer. And trying to I mean, if you were asked to write down what are your 20 closest friends doing today, you'd have a hard time doing that, you know, and they're supposed to keep track of all those people that's really hard to do. And like I said, the system itself was set up so that if they if they if people start violating missing appointments or testing positive, they would talk to them, they would work with them, they would encourage them, they would refer them to treatment, but often they wouldn't follow through with it. But because their only option would be to send them to prison or ask me to send them to prison, they would often let violations accumulate because it was all or nothing. And so when I saw this and I thought, could we bring the parenting idea, that meant, for example, somebody shows up at the probation office and they test positive for drugs and they admit using, I wanted them arrested on the spot, taken to the jail, and which is OCCC, and then we would have a hearing a couple of business days later. And then I would and then I thought I would cut them loose because they made a mistake by using. But then they didn't come in and lie about it or run away. So they're having problems, but they're still trying to make it work. So it was thinking, like you know, as a lawyer, and thank you for your help when you were a law clerk with me. You know, when you when you have a problem to solve, you sit down with a legal pad and you think through all the aspects of it. So I thought of this idea, but I certainly didn't develop it myself. There was a really gifted probation supervisor named Sherily Noy. And somebody said, if you want to try an innovative program like this, why don't you go talk to Sherily? So I talked to Sherily. And she was operating, supervising this high-risk probation group. So if somebody was charged convicted of a sex offense and they weren't sent to prison for years and they were put on probation, they were in her section. The other half of her section were made up of people that started in regular probation but failed for drug and alcohol reasons, then they were transferred internally with her to her section. So I talked to her and she said, you know, this is great. This will help bring some accountability to the system and maybe it'll help the probationers do better. So that's how it started, sitting down with Sherily. And then we figured out, then I brought in a prosecutor supervisor, Kevin Takata, Jack Tonaki, public defender. And we were sitting around talking. And this is truly a couple of, I think, real important principles. One, a crisis can be an opportunity. If things are going great, nobody wants to do anything different, they want to change. But when things are going rough, people are more open to listening to try and something new. And we all agreed, whether it was Kevin, whether it was Jack, whether it was Cheryl, we all agreed, let's try something new. And the other thing is me starting Hope was kind of a Nixon going to China story. President Nixon was a rabid anti-communist. But he was the perfect president then to normalize relations with the People's Republic of China. It would be better for both countries and he wasn't being soft on communism. So me being a career prosecutor made it possible for me to really think of this to begin with, but help to guide and work with Cheryl and the other partners to make it a reality. Because nobody could say I'm being soft on Crod. Yeah, I agree. And one thing that I liked about the program was when you sit down, someone is like you said, if they come in and they admit on a drug test, they're going to have a penalty. It may be two or three days. But if they lie about it and say they didn't do it and then the drug test is confirmed, it comes back positive. They got to sit a longer time. It's a longer consequence. Absolutely. And that's just how kind of like you said, like your parents would raise you. Yeah, absolutely. And to get this started, you know, it took the prosecutors and public defenders willing to have a bunch of more hearings. It took law enforcement and to begin with the federal fugitive task force through the United States Marshall. The folks from the high intensity drug traffic in Arizona said they'd even pay for overtime with the Marshall service. And so the Marshall agreed to use his fugitive task force to serve the warrants for our state court program. So it was really getting all of the moving parts in place. The Attorney General's office agreed to keep statistics on the program because we're trying these days in government, one, to make our policy based on research. Right. You know, on data, not on what feels good or what I know it's got to be that way because I've always thought it was that way. Right. So you've got to prove that what you're doing to work. So they had a probation said to me let's get the Attorney General's office keeping stats from the beginning. And then we can see whether this works or not. And I said fine. So that's why the Attorney General's office were involved from the beginning in keeping statistics. So we had prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers, law enforcement to serve the warrants. And the jail was saying that's fine. We can take these folks in and we may have more people to take in for these short ones. But that doesn't add to our prison bed days. And that's great. And you need those kind of partnerships to make a program like this work. That's for sure. Absolutely. So we will be right back with Judge Steven S. Ohm. My name is Aaron Wills and this is rehabilitation coming soon. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same game at kauilukas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Josh Green. I serve a senator from the Big Island on the Kona side. And I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on Think Tech is called Health Care in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us again. Thanks for supporting Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel and I'm the host of research in Manoa Mondays from 12 to 1 on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Take a look at us and learn about geophysics, learn about planetology, learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH Manoa. You'll really enjoy it. So come around. We'll see you then. Welcome back. I am Aaron Wills. This is rehabilitation coming soon and we are sitting here with our guest, Judge Steven S. Alm. Okay, Judge, I wanted to talk more. We talked a little bit about probation as usual and the differences. But let's get down to the nitty gritties of hope and just talk about it. So you said there was research on hope and could you just explain a little bit of the research and how hope works? Sure. Well, as I said, regular probation, in spite of all these caring POs and judges and stuff, is kind of an all or nothing proposition. In many ways, it's delayed, it's uncertain, it's inconsistent. You know, nothing happened the first 10 violations. Now, number 11, I'm going to go to prison. What's fair about that? Right. Or you and I are both defendants. We're both, we both smoke masks, we both go into the office. They tell me I'm going to send, get sent to, you know, back to the court, not you. And it's like maybe it's my 10th violation, it's your second right. But to me, we did the same thing and yet we're not being treated the same. So the way hope works is every violation of probation is going to lead to a time behind bars. If people handle a violation responsibly, it's going to be a short time. If people don't handle it responsibly, as you said before, they lie about their drug use, it's going to be longer. So we really have four basic sanctions. The first one Judge Perkins thought of when I was traveling. So if somebody shows up late for a drug test, and they have to call, if they're in hope, they call a drug test hotline every weekday morning after 4 a.m. They're given a color for privacy purposes. If their color comes up, they have to come to the courthouse for a drug test. So they never know from one day to the next when they're going to be drug tested. If they show up and the courthouse drug testing is open from 7.45 to one o'clock. But they even, we have great drug testers, they voluntarily do flex time. They're here at 6.30 in the morning, security guard at the back door, people who are working or in job trainers' school can get an early drug test. But say they come at 1.10. It's still a violation, but if they test clean, they don't get arrested. They're given a court date a couple of days later and we lock them up at the cell block at the courthouse. That's called a cell block sanction. You're late, but you're clean. If you ever test positive admit it, you'll get arrested on the spot, hearing two business days later, and you get released because you screwed up by using, but you didn't make it worse by lying about it or running away. If you ever test positive and deny it, we send the sample out to the lab, you're given a court date the following week, but if the lab confirms it, you're in denial, you're lying, you're wasting people's time, it's 15 days. You don't show up at all, law enforcement looks for you, the police, the sheriffs, and the fugitive task force are all serving warrants. And I take my hat off to law enforcement because they have to serve more warrants in this program. But if people run, they're going to get at least 30 days in jail. And if that happens repeatedly, they go to prison. And so those are the basic sanctions. If people start violating more and more, they're going to get referred to treatment, they're going to get, you know, other kinds of, the PO may see them more often, there may be other interventions. But the sanctions, we try to stay consistent because I think if people know what to expect, they can make better choices. Absolutely, absolutely. Are there other places following your lead and trying to install hope into the program? Well, they are. Before I get to that, let me talk about the how hope has worked. Oh, please, let's do. Okay. And we have about first, our Attorney General's Office kept statistics on the beginning. We started hope with no press, no funding. We just, everybody just agreed to work smarter and harder and faster. And so at the beginning, the Attorney General's Office kept statistics. And by the end of 2005, 15 months into this, it showed like an 80% drop in positive drug tests. Similar drop in missed appointments. So then we went to our legislature, and I think they were very impressed, thank you, Colleen Honabusa, the chair. And they showed us that we could show them that this was working. And so they gave us $1.2 million, which they have funded every year as part of the judiciary budget. We use most of that for drug testing. I mean, I'm sorry, we use most of that for drug treatment. But one of the interesting things we've discovered, and you've got the graphic up now, is we've discovered most people can stop using drugs or drinking alcohol without going to treatment. Now, this strikes some people as heresy. You have a hard time believing it, but when you think about it, we all know people have quit smoking cigarettes. Yeah. And cigarettes are as addictive as anything we see in court. That's right. And people don't go to treatment to stop cigarettes. They just decide at some point they're just sick and tired of it, they're going to quit. The kids may be asking them to stop their wife, their husband, they don't want to smell like an ashtray, whatever it is they stop using. My dad did the same thing. It's and it's really hard. And yet we discovered in our in our research because Dr. Angela Hawken from Pepper 9 did a randomized control trial study. And she discovered that 58 percent of the people in the Hope Study Group didn't have a single positive drug test the first year. And they were identified for this study by being active drug users. Another 28 percent had one person had one positive drug test the first year. Most of those folks were not in treatment. So it was remarkable. It showed people in Hope were able to stop on their own. And I think we have a graphic on the Hope Probation Outcomes. The program outcomes. Here we go. Yeah. This is a randomized control trial study like they use in medicine. Okay. You identify they identified just under 500 people in main branch probation. Okay. Three quarters men. Property crime, violent crime, drug crime, 16 to 17 prior arrests, a similarly situated group. And then two thirds got randomly put into Hope. And the other third were left on probation as usual. A year later they looked at the results. And the people in Hope. I use drugs they test positive for drugs. 13 percent of time compared to 46 percent of the time. That's 72 percent less often. They missed their appointment 61 percent less often. But the bigger big numbers are they were getting arrested for new crimes and having their probation revoked half as often. And that led them to be sent to state prison. They served or were sentenced to 48 percent fewer days in prison. It was amazing to get these, you know, great outcomes. So the first person I called when I saw these outcomes was the chief of police. Because Boise Correa at the end of 2005 I went to see him and I had a conversation with him just like I'm having with you. And he really got it. He said, so the people in Hope, we have thousands of people on probation and they're committing a lot of the crime out there. If we put more reasons up front in serving the warrants because that's what I was there to ask him for help for, then maybe down the road we won't have to investigate as many burglaries are car thefts. I said, that's exactly what we're hoping for. We have these good attorney general's office stats now but that's for positive drug deaths and misappointments. So as soon as I saw those stats I showed them to the chief. And I said, your ideal was right by putting more resources up front, you're preventing crime. People aren't being arrested for new crimes as often so your officers are preventing crime by serving the extra warrants. You're also saving your detectives a lot of time because they don't have to investigate as many burglaries and car thefts and the like. So it really works out and police and sheriffs and marshal, they're making decisions based on data and research too. They're getting away from the gut level feeling. You always got to use instinct as a police officer when you're on the street and doing things. But as far as strategically thinking how to put their resources and planning, they're looking at data and research to make decisions too. Right. You know, one thing that I'd like to bring up is just, you know, there's a every every so often there would be, you know, one of our probationers who would be working and they would do a violation and you know this program isn't so rigid as if you wouldn't work with people. You would always work with people and sometimes when they're working you're going to tell them you're going to serve your sanction but I'll allow you to serve your sanction on a weekend for your one time only. Absolutely. And that allows them to keep their job and allows them not to miss work and they work around their schedule but they're still accountable to probation and I think that's the biggest thing is just remaining accountable no matter what and being able to keep working with probation. And you're absolutely right. This program would not work if the probationers did not think they were being treated fairly. Right. They know they're on felony probation, they know they're going to be rules. And that's the proportionate manner. And to them that's fair. Hope is swift, certain, consistent and proportionate. I went into the Hope folks all the time when I'm at Costco, when I'm at longs and often they're coming up to me telling me, judge, all of them everything's working better for me. You know it's procedural justice in action and like you say we treat people as human beings we try to understand if we can we'll do a sanction on the weekends even if they deny using it they're going to get 15 days as you referenced I'm going to give them a one time deal to do it on five weekends because that's better for them it's better for all of us to keep their jobs a job is huge on the other hand if it continues I'll say you may lose your job but you're a roofer do you want your fellow roofers having you up on the roof under the influence? Yeah. I don't think so. Okay the last couple minutes let's talk about the other places that are trying to use Hope as a model I know they have been all named their program Hope Probation but there is tons of places to lead here. Alaska was the first they call it PACE then Arizona was next with SAFE Indiana has a program ours is called Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement or Hope you can see Indiana is Hoosier Opportunity Probation with Enforcement there are now 31 states doing strategies based on Hope the Just Department funds new ones every year 29 of the states are in probation foreign parole we are doing a pretrial pilot here and there is an interesting effort now 3 states are using Hope in their prison system so when defendants misbehave often they put them in solitary confinement restrictive housing for an open ended period and then they misbehave in there they stay in there now they have a hearing right away and they give them a set period of time like 5 days in restrictive housing then back to general population for them to adapt this strategy in the prison system so I went to visit the prison in Ohio that is doing it and they are really reducing their numbers in restricted housing because if somebody especially if they max out their sentence in solitary 23 hours a day alone in a cell they start having mental health problems they are having relationship they are going to have a hard time dealing with human beings so when they go from there to the street without any parole they are almost guaranteed to get picked up now these 31 sites I wanted to ask you quickly as you are in your position in Washington D.C. is this going to be a place where these 31 different states can kind of call you and you can kind of lead them that is a possibility ideally a non-profit will fund a Hope Institute and then we'll be working on that otherwise I'll be a consultant probably working with the Justice Department working with the drug czar's office to go visit places because I get invited to visit places like once a month to explain Hope talk to judges talk to PO's well it does I know your schedule is super busy so thank you for coming down and sharing your time with us and join us next week for another show of rehabilitation coming soon as we continue our discussion of the mass incarceration practices of the United States and the effect of those practices on the state of Hawaii stay tuned because coming up next is sustainable Hawaii with Kirsten Turner.