 Hello, good afternoon. We're going to start the long chain of introductions that will eventually lead to a panel discussion. I am going to just start it off. My name is Brian Jacob. I'm the director of the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy Close-Up. We're kind of cosponsoring the event with the Ford School. And I want to thank Jeff Mornoff, in particular, a professor in sociology, who has been the mastermind behind this event. I believe it originally stemmed from an interest from a class he's teaching, but we decided it was sufficiently interesting and important for everyone, even beyond the class, to learn about. So we tried to put together this panel, and I'd like to thank Jeff for that. I'm not going to let Jeff introduce the key speakers. But please, everyone, I hope this is an enjoyable event, and I hope we have a lot of good dialogue. Thank you, Brian. I'm going to leave it to our first guest to explain what the format today is going to be, and let me just take a few seconds to welcome everybody and also to say some important thank yous before I introduce Deputy Director Shran's. First of all, a big thank you to Close-Up, in addition to being really generous in sponsoring today's event. And like Brian said, this started actually as an idea for guest speakers from my undergraduate criminology class and a couple people in the Department of Correction, some of whom are here today, started throwing some ideas at me that maybe we should have like a panel discussion with the current director and some of the former directors and around some of the current issues like prison population reduction and prisoner reentry initiative. And I thought, well, if we're going to do something like that, it would really be great to have that open to a broader public than just my criminology class. Looking around the room, I see some people from my criminology class here, and that's good. I know that we had to schedule this at a different time than the regular class meets, so I'm sorry about apologizing to people who aren't even here. So I'm kind of not preaching to the choir, whatever the opposite of that is. Anyhow, I appreciate that. Another thing about Close-Up is that they were really pivotal in helping my colleague David Harding and I start a project that we're continuing with great support from the Department of Corrections, looking at prisoner reentry in Michigan. And I first met our first guest, Dennis Shran, who's Deputy Director of the Department of Corrections about five years ago, I think, introduced by Rosemary Sari at an event. And since then, I became really interested in what was happening in Michigan around the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative. And it's just been a wonderful, collaborative experience since then working with the Department of Corrections. I can't emphasize enough how open they have been to research and to giving opportunities to let research happen. Paulette Hatchett is sitting in the middle of the room there, is someone who works for the Department of Corrections and has been working with us on a daily and weekly basis to try to go through the data that we collect from their databases and make sense out of it. And data collection and research takes a long time, but it's not because of any resistance on the part of the Department of Corrections to release their data to us. It's just because we're dealing with a voluminous amount of data that wasn't collected for the purposes of research. It was collected for the purposes of operating a correction system. So just a big thank you to the Department of Corrections and also to Close Up for helping us get our research going. And for also leading to some nice spin-off activities, like in our class we've had two next week it'll be a third prison tour of different prison facilities around Michigan, again facilitated by the Department of Corrections. And the students, I think, are really appreciative of those opportunities to be able to go on those tours. So then our first guest, as I mentioned, is Dennis Shrance. He's Deputy Director of Planning and Community Development Administration at the Department of Corrections. He has many responsibilities, including strategic planning and collaborative efforts with the Department's executive policy team to develop and implement plans to control prison growth and to manage the Department's prisoner reentry initiative, which I just alluded to a moment ago. His administration is also responsible for implementing, monitoring, and evaluating the Michigan Community Corrections Act, which intends to reduce prison admissions and address issues regarding jail overcrowding. And also he oversees the Office of Research and Planning, which, as I mentioned before, we've been working with and helps researchers like ourselves and also people who need corrections data in the state and elsewhere to make sense out of corrections trends. Dennis has a very lengthy resume that goes back to prior positions that he served in at Wayne County, where he was Director of Adult Services Division in the Department of Community Justice, and also prior to that in North Carolina. He's been in this post as Deputy Director for about six years, something like that, give or take, a little bit. And he's an incredibly dynamic speaker and also came to guest lecture from my class last year and I think left me with lower teaching evaluations than I would have had otherwise because it was on the last day of class and they saw how exciting he was compared to my bland lectures. But anyway, it's my great pleasure to welcome Dennis Schramms. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Thank you, Professor Morinoff and Professor Harding as well. And of course, the Center for Local State and Urban Policy. Studies show that there's actually very little direct correlation between crime and incarceration in that the cost benefit of imprisonment does not support lengthy periods of incarceration as the best way to reduce crime. Return to prison rates for former prisoners who serve one, two, three, four, or five years in prison are nearly the same. The rising cost of the corrections budget in fact is not driven by increases in crime. It is driven by the sheer size of the prison system. Personnel costs benefits healthcare for prisoners and utility costs. The size of the corrections system is driven more by policy decisions than by crime. Today we're delighted to be here to talk with and hear from all of you and our two panelists who are uniquely suited to talk about what's happened in the state of Michigan over the past 30 years because they have been directors of the Department of Corrections during that point in time, that long period of growth that saw an increase in the prison population under Director Brown of 75% increase, 15,000 additional inmates over the six years, six and a half years that he was director. And now, several years later, with Director Caruso, a contraction of the prison system or a reduction not only in the population of folks who are in prison, but obviously closing prisons as well, which has recently been in the news. The format today is going to be pretty straightforward. I'm going to introduce each of the speakers and then I'm going to ask Director Brown to speak first and answer three questions and then reintroduce Director Caruso to answer those three questions as well. Then we'll engage in a question and answer session with the audience. There are some index cards on that wall, that short wall over there. There's a little cup sitting on it. You can see the cup in a couple of places and over here as well. So during the presentations today, please fill out those cards and put your questions on those cards and when you're done filling them out with your question, just raise it in the air and we've got a couple of folks that'll pick it up and I'm going to go working through these cards and pick the ones that are most pertinent, I think, to the discussions that we have and frankly of the policy issues of the day. So that will be the format. First, let me introduce Robert Brown Jr., who was a director of the Department of Corrections for six and a half years, retiring in 1991. During his 30 years with the department, Director Brown served as deputy director in charge of the state prisons, a deputy warden, a parole officer, and a prison counselor. He has also consulted from many criminal justice agencies, serving as a consent agreement monitor for a federal court in Illinois and working with the prison systems of Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Among Mr. Brown's many honors are awards from the American Correctional Association and the Association of State Correctional Administrators. Director Patricia L. Caruso is currently the director of the Department of Corrections where she has worked since 1988 and she too, like Mr. Brown, has served in several capacities which include three years as a business manager, nine years as a warden, two years as regional prison administrator and 10 months as a deputy director of Correctional Facilities Administration, similar to Mr. Brown's prior employment. In July of 2003, she was appointed director of the Department of Corrections by Governor Jennifer Granholm. Director Caruso received her bachelor's in political science and sociology from Lake Superior State University and a master's in comprehensive occupational education from none other than the University of Michigan. Yes, a little applause there. Director Caruso was elected vice president of the American Correctional Association for a two year term beginning in August 2008. She's also served on ACA's commission on accreditation for corrections since July of 2006 and has been involved as a member of the ACA Standards Committee. She's currently also serving as the vice president of the Association of State Correctional Administrators and previously served as their treasurer and she has a long list of accomplishments. You're very graced today to have two extraordinary leaders in corrections in the state of Michigan and have not only provided immense leadership but have responded to both the political and the operational issues that confronted them in their roles as directors of corrections. There's three questions that I'm going to ask each of the directors to answer. The first is during their tenure, what have been some of the primary political issues that have been at play during the time when you provided leadership for the department? The second question is, what are the major operational issues of the day during your tenure? In terms of management of the department during that time frame and also then because we are quite interested in the prisoner reentry initiative, what was going on during your tenure regarding prisoner reentry, et cetera? For Director Brown who will speak first, I think it's important to take a look here at not actually what happened during Director Brown's tenure but what has happened since. This chart shows a very steep increase in the prison population beginning in 1991 but the fact of the matter is is that increase began down here somewhere and over those years that Director Brown was director we saw a 74% increase in the population in the prison system and that escalating size of that prison population did not stall or stop until way into 2003 when Director Caruso was appointed by Governor Granholm. Since the director, Caruso has been in her position, things have changed as you can see from the tail end of that chart where the prison population went down. She'll tell you a couple things I'm sure about why it went up for a while and then it's gone down again. So this sets the stage for this discussion. This next chart is one which was recently presented to the Michigan legislature and shows what the future holds. This is the tail end of the chart that you just saw and then where the colors become green. You see that that is a projected number of prison beds that we will need beginning in fiscal year 2010 and running through 2015. So when you look at these pictures next to each other which is kind of fun to do, you can actually see this dramatic shift from the timeframe before and up to Director Brown's tenure and then now changing and going directly in the opposite direction and that sets the stage for our discussion today. So with that, I'm going to ask Director Brown to answer those three questions in any order and actually he can say anything he wants because I'm not gonna interrupt but he has 15 minutes to talk about those political implications, the operational issues of the day and what was the status of reentry. After that I'll reintroduce Director Cruz. So thank you, Director Brown. Join me in welcoming our panel. Thank you, Dennis. You know, when I agreed to do this event I thought it'd be a piece of cake but as I began to put thoughts together I realized that 18 years of retirement had taken a toll on my memory. Human nature helps us remember the pleasant things and while I enjoyed my tenure as director the growing prison population during that time was not a pleasant aspect of the job. I was deputy director for 14 years before before being appointed director so I knew what I was being handed. I was there, I was part of it. There were no surprises to me. During the late 60s and early 70s there had been a substantial increase in crime. There was a lot of speculation as to why that's returning from Vietnam, increased violence on television, breakdown of family values, baby boomers reaching the crime prone ages and so on. Michigan's 1960s prison system was okay for 8,000 prisoners in 1973 but not nearly adequate for 15,000 in 1983. In 1986 for example, we had almost as many new admissions during that year as it had been in the total system in 1973. How did we control the increase? Well in 1981 the legislature passed the Prison Overcrowding Emergency Powers Act. In my opinion that was a good law but we had to abuse it because we had so many people coming in prison and how it worked if the prison population exceeded capacity for 30 consecutive days in the Michigan Corrections Commission had to certify to the governor that that had happened. The governor and his or her staff had 20 days, I believe it was, to check our figures, make sure that we were accurate in what we were telling them and then the governor declared a prison overcrowding emergency. When the governor did that, the director of the Department of Correction had to reduce the minimum sentence of all prisoners with a minimum sentence by 90 days. Now in those days there were about a thousand prisoners that became eligible for parole consideration every 90 days. You can see when once I declared and started taking those off that the tremendous workload, tremendous workload with our records people, re-figuring times and establishing new minimum sentence expiration dates. And then the pro-board got all this onslaught, 90 days worth of people all were suddenly eligible, all at once. So they were busy. They were a little more than busy, I think. This law was triggered nine times in the roughly three years. I think it was at, yeah, I said it was passed in 1981 and we quit using it. The last time it was triggered was in 1984, nine times. You were a prisoner doing time with minimum sentence during that time. You got your sentence reduced by 90 days nine times. That's 810 days. That's well over two years taking off your sentence. Everyone who was paroled on their minimum sentence at the expiration of their minimum sentence was in fact an early release days. Now, when you're dealing with thousands of excuse the expression thugs, somebody's gonna do something wrong. And that happened. A parolee killed an East Lansing police officer and all the hands went up in the air. The governor called me to his office and said, Bob, we're not gonna use that law anymore. I'm gonna get you some money and we're gonna build a couple of prisons. I said, governor, we need a couple of prisons, but we need to do something else along with building those prisons because those two, we're not gonna stop it too if that's all we do. He said, what's that? I said, well, if we could do something with youth, for every dollar we put into building prisoners, take a look at putting 50 cents into programs and I mean program for toddlers, for three, four, five, six year olds. And then by the time those kids reached a crime prone age, we won't need all these prisons. Governor said, you're right, but right now we're gonna build these prisons. I mean, what else could he say, really? So we started building prisons and it went on, I'm not sure when the prison building ended, but I'm sure it expanded over 20 years of building prisons. You know, the crime rate in the 60s and 70s increased as I indicated and there were a number of reactions to that increase, most of them knee jerk reactions. We got things like an increase in habitual offender sentencing. We got mandatory sentences. The public legislature were demanding longer sentences and the legislature moved to limit judges discretion. Good time was eliminated, prison good time and that was a major blow to it. And giving an example of what happened when we were able to control the prison population with the Emergency Powers Act because we kept releasing people, we kept making people eligible. Every time we get in a bind, we'd be 30 days over capacity and it'd take about another 30 days to get everything to all the administrative stuff done so we could start releasing people. The pro-boys got a adherence and so forth. In 1983, that's when we were using the Early Release Act. There were 7,000 releases from Michigan prisons. In 1984, after we stopped early releases, there were only 3,141 releases. So you can see the drastic reduction in number of people being released and which is just added tremendously to the prison buildup. When we started building these prisons, what did it mean operationally? It meant we had to do a lot of things that we hadn't had to do in a shorter time in the past or previously. As I indicated, the pro-board had additional work, our records people had additional work. We had to find space for these people especially after we put using the Early Release Act. We used prison industry warehouses and that was after we filled up all the gymnasiums, that people, every place I think except in the toilets and the mop closets, we had people sleeping on the floor. We were continually wrestling and trying to explain to the courts where we were at and what we were trying to do and trying to get money to do more. Did I say we had people in tents? We had just whatever. One of my little tricks when I was deputy director and in charge of the prisons, they'd call me from the reception center and say, Mr. Brown, we are out of space. What do you mean you're out of space? We don't have any more beds. Well, look guys, everybody has to be someplace. So we got to find a place to put them. I say load up, if you got some people eligible to go in a camp program. We had 12, 13 camps at the time, minimum cost. You got people eligible to go to the camp program? Yes, we do. Our bus held 40 people. I said, put 40 of them on the bus, head for Camp Waterloo. Camp Waterloo was just East of Jackson, Louis. I said, tell the driver to take his time. They don't have any beds at Waterloo. I said, just get 40 people on the bus and head for Waterloo. Call Waterloo. And I said, get 40 people ready to go to Camp Lehman. Camp Lehman was up by Grayling. They said, well, they don't have any beds at Camp Grayling. And I said, well, you just get some people ready to go because you got a bus coming from the reception center with 40 new people for you. Now you see the picture? I just kept shuffling people from the reception center at Jackson through a system of 12 camps clear to the western side of the upper peninsula. So that gave me 40 more beds. They were seats on the bus, but I couldn't keep 40 people on the bus continuous. I mean, the same 40 people, but I could keep rotating them. And so it was little things like that and ingenuity. And I didn't come up with all of them. Staff helped me figure out ways to shuffle around and get people, get through the hassle. We tried, well, let me say this. Of course, when we were adding a prison, we were adding a new prison about every nine weeks. Either a temporary prison or we're getting prison built after the governor said we were gonna build them. You have to staff those prisons. We were starting a new class at the Academy for Corrections Officers every month. Those classes consisted of from 150 to 225 people. The training effort was just tremendous. We had to train additional trainers. We had to train people in the institutions to be shadowed once we got the people out of the classroom, working into the institutions to get some OJT and the personnel people, of course, had to do all the screening and hiring of these people to get them on board. We did a number of things that staff did not particularly like. I insisted that every class have a supervisor sitting in it from the institutions, a sergeant, lieutenant, a captain, so that the people in the institutions knew what the people in the Academy were being taught. I gotta say that many of them needed to be, many of those people that were observing needed it. And we saw a great success in that program. Because many times, those supervisors would say to us, hey, they're telling them this in the Academy, that's not the way we do it. Well then, of course, we could get somebody in and resolve it and see, okay, how should it be done? What's happening? Why aren't you doing it that way? That's the way I thought it was being done. And those kinds of things. So that worked out pretty good. Prisoner control became a problem because when you don't have the space to separate people, to put people, to secure people, you've got a problem. If you have a disturbance, I don't care how small it is, you need to be able to separate people, get them locked up. When you've got people sleeping on the floor, in the gymnasium, not in cells, or locked rooms, rooms that you can lock, then you've got a real problem. And so much of it depend on building the kind of respect between staff and prisoners that has to be there, should be there anyhow, but it became even more important during those days. Then we started thinking about releasing people and what happens to them when they go out of prison and back into the community. We didn't have enough field agents. When I was a parole officer in Detroit, I supervised 150 people on parole, way, way, way too many. And even if I say so, it might sound a little egotistical, but I'll bet it on most of them too. I tried desperately to get additional appropriations for parole probation officers. I decided to say that I couldn't get it, I didn't get it, I didn't accomplish that goal. I was asked by Appropriations Committee, did I want prison officers, or do you want parole officers? I said, I need both. You're only gonna get one of them, we only got so much money. Well, they didn't realize how much more money they were gonna be spending in years down the road with the way the prison population built up. I think I'll stop there, Dennis. Thank you, Mr. Brown, appreciate it. So we've set the stage for understanding that this growth of the prison system began before Director Brown's tenure and then continued. In fact, the last time that we had any sustained reductions in the prison population was the period between 1962 and 1966 when it dropped 29%. Every year since then it's been rising until about 2002 when this growth started to slow. And finally, in January of 2007, between then and now, 2009, it has dropped for the first time since 1966 in any great way, a reduction of 3,200 prisoners, a 6.3% drop. In the past six years, in fact, the Department of Corrections has reduced its spending by nearly $400 million by cutting the bureaucracy, reconfiguring the prison space, and implementing the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative. At the helm of all this was Director Caruso, who began her rightsizing in the prison system, nearly the first week that she received her appointment. And so far under her leadership, the Department of Corrections has closed nine institutions with three more prison facilities slated for closing this year, in fact, in a couple of months. And then this dramatic drop that is shown here in the prison capacity will begin in the beginning of fiscal year 2010. One of my early images of the director and her leadership was the probably two weeks after she was appointed as director, and she was brand new in that job, although she'd been running the Corrections, the prison system for some time. And we had a horrific murder. And there were just an incredible amount of press about this murder. Man had killed his wife and his children. And the director stood up unblinking to the press and said, this is our responsibility. And she spoke honestly and openly to that throng of media and that transparency and that openness to open the doors of this department for review and for scrutiny has not stopped since then. It's a great pleasure to introduce Director Caruso, my boss, thank you. Thank you, Dennis. And the university is a pleasure and honor to be here. It particularly is to be sitting up front with Bob Brown, who will be back, he just stepped out for a moment, but I'm really honored to do that. Bob is my mentor in many ways. I always tease Bob that if his fault, good or bad, for all this, because Bob took a huge chance on a young woman in our department. When he named me the warden of a large facility, that was in a whole bunch of trouble. And it was a big chance because I'd only worked for the department for three years and all of that time I had worked in the business office. And it was very controversial, as you might imagine, that Bob took a big chance on me. And later, Bob is the he at some point retired, was awarding almost the entire tenure for other directors. But Bob and I have stayed in touch over the years and certainly during the six years that I've been the director, Bob has continued to be a mentor and someone I can balance ideas often. And Bob is someone who is respected throughout our country in corrections for his knowledge and his integrity. And so for me, it's just an honor anytime I do something with Bob. It's interesting listening to his remarks. I came to our department in 1988. And obviously I came during that buildup and I was awarding in our system during that period of time from 1991 through 2000 where on that other side where you see that line go up and some of the politics that we dealt with was we just accepted that that was what would happen. When I became the deputy director of our department, a job I held for a short period of time before I became the director, all of our discussions revolved around the fact that we were going to hit 50,000 prisoners imminently. We were running out of money. We were running out of beds. There were not any discussions at that point in time in terms of whether we could control that at all. If we were in an operational type of a crisis planning mode on how we were going to deal with this. We had a couple of facilities that we had taken offline and closed in order to, in one case, to do some remodeling if it was needed and others that we had just closed. And our internal plans were to go back into them. And I remember becoming the deputy director in September and our plans were in March that we were going to reopen a 1200 dead prison because we were going to run out of beds. And that was just the mindset and it was gonna happen and we had to prepare for it. At that time, we were running the fifth largest prison system in the United States. The only states who had a higher population than we did were California, New York, Florida, and Texas. And we accepted that too. In fact, I lived in fear that one day I wasn't gonna be saying five, but I was gonna be saying four. And those states were a lot bigger than we were. But it was, there was a sense of frightening time. Clearly political environment is a big piece of this. And it was at that point in time, we had an election in Michigan, we had a new governor and Governor Granholm came in with a lot of backgrounds in law enforcement and part of her platform was that we ought not to have to spend so much money on the Department of Corrections and locking people up, but there are other ways of dealing with these issues than what we're doing and there are some things we need to do differently. And so that set a new direction. At the same time, if we roll this back to 2001, 2002, Governor takes office January 2003, by then Michigan is a good year and a half into a really serious economic situation that had not hit most other states at that point. And so our $1.7 billion budget, everyone was looking at that. We were 20, 25% of the general fund and everyone was focusing on how much money was going into the Department of Corrections. So we had new governor, we had a number of new legislators, term limits had come into play by that point in time because we were starting to see a turnover in the legislature that hadn't happened previously. And so all of that environment comes into play. Much of what we deal with in corrections really truly is counterintuitive. And I'll give you an example and it was something I experienced in a hearing in front of the legislature very early on when I had a legislator tell me that I wouldn't have a population problem or a prison problem if we didn't treat them so well. Because if we treated prisoners a little bit worse, no one would want to come back. And I remember saying to the legislator, not in the hearing but in his office later, that I understand that for the average person, maybe the law-abiding person, that makes a lot of sense and that going to prison may sound like the worst thing that could happen to you. But the truth is that every statistic and every piece of research will show that people who are treated inhumane way will become more inhumane. And that people who do time in prison and have less tools to cope successfully when they get out will be less successful. So in fact, the belief that if you didn't treat them so well, they wouldn't come back is actually the opposite of the truth. But that is the environment and certainly in a large extent political environment in which we operate and operate this huge system and deal with a legislator and a public and sometimes the media who base a lot of information on emotion and not that it's not factual but perhaps not in the context. I saw that I was quoted recently as saying that the entire department of corrections should not be judged on one case that's gone bad and every person in our department, whether it's every incarcerated person or every parolee probationer or employee should not be judged on the basis of one case that didn't have a good outcome. But the fact is that frequently we are. Laws have been changed in our state because of one bad case, Bob mentioned an example. 1992, the parole was changed as a result of a bad case and we continue to see that happen. And so those facts drive the situation. When I became the director, as we said we were, we had continued to go up. We surpassed 50,000 prisoners as we predicted we would. One of the changes that had been implemented that was a piece of that, certainly not the only thing. There were a lot of factors that drove that. But one piece of it was the implementation of truth and sentences. Michigan is one of two 100% truth and sentencing states in the United States. In Michigan, that means that a prisoner must serve 100% of the minimum sentence the judge gives them. The judge sentences you to five to 20. 20 is set by law based on the crime. Five, the judge gives you. In Michigan, today, still, you must serve 100% of five years. Mr. Brown talked about a period of time under the Emergency Powers Act when time was taken off. In addition to that, prisoners earn good time. That does not happen in Michigan today with the exception of those prisoners who were sentenced from years ago before those laws went into effect. One of the discussions I will never forget is I've been the director about a month and I was speaking to the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan. There were at least, I would say 50 of 83 prosecutors there, maybe more, but at least 50 of the prosecutors were there. And they said to me, the single most important accomplishment of the Prosecuting Attorneys Association throughout our very long history, the single most important accomplishment was the enactment of truth and sentences. And in fact, I mean, that clearly is a focal point when we deal with the prosecutors. I spoke with them last week and that remains a focal point. Michigan is a 100% truth and sentencing state and is probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future because there was just not support for that to change. So from a political standpoint, we've actually approached this issue from a number of other directions because sometimes it doesn't matter what's right or wrong, it does matter what you can get support for, which is something I'm gonna talk about as I work this along because that's the reality of it. If you can't get support, it doesn't matter because you're not going to accomplish it. Dennis mentioned a tragic incident that occurred right when I became director. Another incident that occurred during my tenure occurred in February of 2006, the 30th of February, three years ago. And when you look at the population over time and you see when we started stabilize and then you see the bump up, the bump up was a, we went up 500 beds in one month after the sell pack markers in February of 2006. And we went up by 1500 baths before that year was over. It was attributable to a very high profile and highly publicized crime. And that is the environment that we work in and live in. And whether you're a judge who's facing someone and has to sentence them or you're a member of the pro board or you're a pro agent determining whether a violation should be addressed by a return to prison or some other sanction. Every, the common denominator in all of that are human beings. And human beings respond to those. And that is a natural thing that happens when you see a horrible tragedy like that. Is that that's one of the things that happened. And part of what we do and the environment we operate in is to talk about that. I tell people all the time that I know we're doing the right thing in taking our population down. And I absolutely know that it's the right thing to do from every possible level. And it's not an economic issue. It's also about investment in human beings. And it's not investment in our state and money being used better. But it's also about the cost of incarcerating so many people and their families who come along with them and everything that goes with that. But the reality is that when something like that happens sometimes people forget the overall balance of that. It's almost impossible too. I have a bag of newspapers that I carry with me. I'm kind of surprised that I bring them today. I almost always do. And what they are is a series of headlines that kind of mark all of these different things that we've dealt with. And one of the headlines says dead man's father demands apology. And I will tell you that nobody, no matter how much you believe the direction you're going is right, nobody can ignore the human factor of the business we work with. It is what it is, the business we're in. And there are no guarantees. And so we know as we proceed with what we're doing and as we have implemented policies that are intended to have our population be smaller that we know that I have people say to me very frequently when I speak in forums like this you guarantee me that none of these people who will get out of prison will hurt someone or do something bad. And very honestly, I certainly I can't guarantee that. I can't guarantee that none of us in this room won't commit a felony in the next 24 hours or in the next year or 10 years. I can't make that guarantee. I can't make it about anybody. I can't make it about the convicted felons who are under our supervision. I can't make it for anyone. But those factors very much draw policy and if someone doesn't think they do walk through our halls once in a while because it does, there's a very big part of it. One of the other political things that happened and really flipped from when Bob was the director to when I was the director was the local political environment because I remember being in county government before I worked for the department of corrections and during the period of time when Bob was the director and the system was expanding and I remember I come from a community where there are prisons and I remember Bob sending the folks up there to convince the community about building another prison and we were, everyone was pretty heavy and to not in my backyard in those days, nobody wanted prisons. And we expanded this huge prison system across the state and many of those prisons were put in the upper peninsula where I live. And the reason is because we ended up going into communities who either didn't have political ability to say no to us or needed the economic development activity of the prison so badly they said yes. Well what's flipped from that is I am now regularly visited by the people from those communities. When I was first director they used to come down and ask what they could do to convince me to build another prison in their community. They've gotten the message now they come down to beg me what they can do to ensure I don't close their prison or any of their prisons. And that is a huge cultural change that's occurred. I have a book in front of me here. It's a book I reference a lot. It's called Going Up the River Travels in a Prisonation. And one of the main themes of this book is that over a period of decades our country converted from a military industrial based economy to a prison industrial based economy. When I first read this book in 2001 I was really offended by that theme. I have come to not just be offended but strongly agree with that because I see the results of it. And I talk to communities, I talk to our staff and I say that we do not incarcerate people to provide jobs. It would be immoral to incarcerate people to provide jobs. Most of us understand that. But if you have to do something I've had to do many times but just go to a community and sit in a public forum and explain to them why it's their prison that's closed and you will walk away not feeling so good about whether or not we incarcerate people. It is a difficult, very, very difficult theory and you have to place that. So what happened that causes change and what were the operational issues? Well, there were a number of them. When I became the director we had about 50,000 prisoners. We went up as high as 51,300 after the cell attack murders. We had more than 18,000 employees. One in three state employees worked for the Department of Correction. Our budget was booming on that big 2.0 with a B after it, something we have surpassed. 75,000 people on probation and full. And I was thinking about this yesterday. I was at a church and our priest was talking and telling me about how painful and difficult changes. And he said change occurs when the pain of change becomes less than the pain of continuing to do the same thing. And I thought of coming here today when Father Paola said that. I won't tell him I stopped thinking about what he was saying and started thinking about that and this, but I did. And because in a large part that is what happened because we did reach that tipping point and part of it was the money and part of it was the political environment and it was just all of those things together and what we weren't getting from that was no prompt. What we weren't getting is nobody was coming back. So we were sending all these people to prison and we were keeping them there so long and so far past, even though we can blame truth and sentencing all we want, when I became the director we had 17,600 people who had served past that minimum sentence of 50,000. So that's not truth and sentencing, that's us. And so all of that combined to a point where we said this has to stop. And it did become an opportunity that grew from crisis. And certainly a large part of it was the economic crisis. And at that time we were having discussions about, what do we do? Do we reopen places that have been mothballed because we didn't feel we could use them? Do we put beds on the floor? I, and Dennis will agree with this. I have adamantly refused to do that no matter what it takes. I was a warden during the period of time when I have mattresses on the floor of the table that prisoners were on and you cannot run a prison like that and I'm not gonna have it run under my leadership. So we're not going back to that. I mean I said we're not gonna do that. Here's the things we're not gonna do, we're gonna run. And so we had to do some other things and at that point in time clearly we were blessed we were part of the new administration looking for some new focus and to start looking on reentry and what I like to refer to as getting people out and keeping them out. Getting out is not nearly as hard as staying out successfully. And not to imply that getting out is easy but staying out is what's tough. And one of the things that we realized was that we had done such a good job responding to the buildup and to running an apartment that was designed to do that. We ran a very good safe and secure prison system. If you look at our prison statistics Bob audits prison systems all over the country and it's something he's commented to me on and others do too. I mean we're known for having a well-run prison system. What we needed to be known for was not just running a safe and secure prison system but for our prison system to be active partners and getting people out and keeping them out. We had never previously thought of that. I tell truthfully stories of when I was important I really worried about everyone goes home safely every day keep the lid on the joint all of that. That's important and we need our words to worry about that. I never thought about when the prisoners left. I never thought about a connection between the time they did and whether they'd be successful when they went home. No one expected me to think about that. I didn't think about it. I knew the parole agent in my community only because his mom lived down the street from me and they went to my church. Otherwise I would never have known the agent. That's not acceptable in a system who has to be integrated to get people out. And so one of the things we said about early on was changing the culture so that the people in our prison so our wardens thought they knew part of their job was to be an active proactive part of getting people out and keeping them out. It was a very different change for people. It's hard, it's a lot harder to be a warden thinking about that than just running the prison which is hard enough on its own, trust me. But when now you gotta worry about what happens when people leave and whether what you're doing in prison is contributing to what happens on the outside. We say all the time that our mission is to protect the public. We do that by running safe and secure prison system and supervising offenders in our community. Now we say that if we aren't part of keeping people from committing more crimes and creating more victims we're not doing our job to protect the public. And so that is what our focus is now. We have a ways to go in doing as in any huge change if you were to ask me where we are in that are we there 100%? No, but we're moving there 100%. I am every day encouraged by a staff person who tells me that I stayed with our department when I could retire because this is the right thing to do. I feel like I'm part of something in the world. When they see an offender fail and they feel they have failed that is a very different message. I was awarded during the period of time when we had zero tolerance for all my mission. It made sense, it's intuitive. If you can't follow the rules then you go back to prison. And I remember the very first time it struck me I was talking to a prisoner in my facility and he was telling me he had come back in a full violation and I asked him what had happened and he said, well I had a job and I was on a curfew so I was only allowed to go to work and I had to be home by a certain time and I stopped at the store to buy pork chops. And I remember when he told me he bought five pork chops, I got home five minutes late and I was violated on that. And I remember thinking to myself, that cannot be true. And I followed up on him because it bothered me and it was true. He was back in prison. He had a job, he was five minutes late getting home he came back. The people who put those rules in place didn't do that to be mean and malicious. They did that because they believed that that was the way to send that message. Now we know that's not true. Now we base what we're doing on what research and evidence tells us works. Sometimes it doesn't make sense. When I first met Dennis, one of the things he said to me that I did not believe, he said that there is no correlation between misconduct in prison. And I'm not talking about like serious assault on staff. I'm talking about normal misconduct prisoners get like they're out of place and disobey direct orders, we write thousands of them. He said there's no correlation between institutional misconduct and success on parole with the exception of women where there's an inverse correlation. The more they get, the more successful they'll be. I remember telling him, you don't know what you're talking about. I do remember this discussion, Dennis. Yes, indeed. You don't know what you're talking about. Seared in my memory. I've been there. Well, I started paying attention to what the research said and I started reading that over and over and over. And you know what? Now I believe it. When it comes to the women, when I think about it and I think about the path that women take to prison, it makes sense to me. The women have learned to stand up for themselves and say no and not be influenced are probably more likely to be successful when they get out. But the average person that does not make sense. For many of my staff today, it does not make sense when you say that there's not a correlation between misconduct and prison. I tell our staff, I'm pretty sure, just knowing myself that if I was in prison, I'd get a lot of misconduct. Most of them would be insolence and disobeying a direct order. If we wrote those in state government, I'd get a few of them in my job. You know what? I get it now. We have to think differently. All of those things, those operating changes are part of what we are working at Incorporated. We are seeing the results. Our population is dropping now pretty dramatically for several months now, starting before Thanksgiving. Every Friday, I get bug count and it's broken down. I've been the director for six years and I've always said we have about 50,000 people in prison. We don't have about 50,000 people anymore. And we're about to drop to 47 something, we're at 48, I think 112 on Friday. We're gonna make the drop to 47. So last time when the 47s, we went through them so fast we didn't even know we were there right away. It's a combination of things that are happening. We want to take a lot of credit for that. A big part of it is what's happening with Green Entry and getting people to think differently. How we supervise in the community, how we approach things. Court commitments are also down in Michigan. Here's a counter-intuitive piece of information for you. One of the most common questions I get is how in this difficult economy could you ever think about doing this? Everyone knows crime goes up. When, as my time is up, crime goes up when the economy is bad. There actually is not a correlation. There is not the direct correlation there either. And I understand that employment is bad. It's hard to find jobs. We also don't keep people in prison as a running foot. It's not the forefront. So I will stop my time so we can start, stop my talking so we can use the time we have left to respond to what's on your mind. I hope I've given you a flavor of the environment. Thank you, Greg. One of the visions that the department has is that every prisoner who is released to the community will have the tools necessary to succeed. That is the vision of the re-entry initiative. I do wanna introduce to you Mary King who is the community coordinator for Washtenaw County and who is a leader who shares this vision. So we're collecting these cards and this is a penmanship test as much as anything and a eyesight test for me, I'm sure. Let me see about these questions here. This is a question for Director Caruso. Are all parolees eligible for the Michigan Prisoner Re-entry Initiative? If not, what other programs are available for those who are not eligible for MPRI? Well, I guess probably the short answer is everyone is eligible. Who goes through that is determined by the school board. And one of the decisions we made early on is that we were not going to go after just the easy candidates, the people who would give us big numbers and good success so we could say we've done this. Because there's a group of people, there's a percentage of people who are going to be successful really no matter what we do and maybe in spite of what we do. There are people for whom just having committed whatever the offense was and having come to prison, they're gonna be successful when they get out and you don't have to do anything with them. And so, well, yes, if the parole board says those people need to go to MPRI, they're eligible, we have not populated it with people who we didn't think needed that. We have tried to populate it with people who are in the moderate to high risk for re-offending categories because that's where our resources are best done. I hope that answers that. Yes, thank you very much. We have just a stack of cards here. So, one for Director Brown. What in your view can civilians do to help their loved ones prepare for release? Well, I think the support of family and support of friends is probably one of the most important things that those folks can look for. Yeah, you can help find a job and you can help, you know, be supportive in other ways, but you've got to let them know that you care. You've got to let them know that whatever they've run in the past is in the past, including behavior. And I think with that kind of support, they're not asking for much more. They're not asking for a hand out. They just want that support. All right, thank you. For Director Caruso, is it true that the governor has just abolished the parole board? What does this mean? The governor, by executive order, abolished the parole board and established the new parole and commutation board and in doing that, expands the board from the current 10 to 15 members. So technically, the old parole board, which was established by Governor Engler in 1992, was abolished, but is becoming an expanded board and under their jurisdiction, now officially the commutation. Let me see, I can remember when the parole board was flagged. Five members. Let's see, wow. There are some real tough questions here. Let me skip over them. Not really, I'm not gonna do that. This one's not easy. Let's give it to my boss. In your opinion, how can we get across the counter-intuitive but evidence-heavy messages that could get the public behind better policy and laws? We try and do that by talking about doing things like this where people who care about what's going on come forward. Some of you may be here because your students and your professors told you to come, but I'm guessing that even the students are here for other reasons. But there are also members of the public who have chosen to come and helped spread the word. We also do it by speaking to the media. This week, I'm gonna be meeting with the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press, something I have done on a number of occasions and this is what we'll be talking about. And we talked to legislators. You can do the same thing. You need to help us by being educated and communicating that. And one of the things, if we go back to what I talked about, there only guarantee there really is that something bad probably will happen. I mean, I can promise you, if we cut our parole rate in half and I build a few more prisons, something bad will still happen by someone who got out of prison. It's going to happen. And so we need to not jump on the emotional roller coaster that's so easy to do. Good policy is not made based on emotion. Thank you. For Mr. Brown, what sort of impact do you believe prison overcrowding has on inmates? What are the consequences of prisoner crowding on rehabilitation? Well, you reinforce the notion that prisoners have that you don't give a damn about them. When you have to start having people sleep on floors, when you can't adequately manage and people get assaulted because you've got so many of them, I can remember a deputy warden saying one time and saying it to a reporter and it looked bad in the press. This yard is so crowded. The recreation yard is so crowded that a prisoner gets stabbed and he doesn't have any place to fall. Well, part of that control and management that I spoke of earlier is trying to control the aggressiveness and keep people safe. People are sent to do time, but they should be able to expect to do it safely. Thank you. There's a lot of these questions I'd like to try to answer, but I don't get to do that. Let me put another tough one to the director. That's why you get the big bucks. Number one, why is truth and sentencing wrong from a policy perspective and why is it right to downsize? Do you have evidence for these views? I'm not sure that I would say that truth and sentencing is wrong and I don't mean to imply that. I mean, it is what the law is in Michigan and I understand how we got there because under our old system, the old good time system was very complicated and the more time you did, the more time you earned off. So if your sentence was 20 or more years, you were earning 15 days for every 30. And what happened was from a victim's standpoint, they would see someone sentenced to 25 to 50 years and 10 or 15 years later, the person was out and it was very difficult to understand. And so I think there's a way to address all ends of that. So I'm not implying that it's that. It is what we have. And the other side of that, what we have attacked in Michigan is length of stay because what is driving our population is how long people stay. And much of that is how long they stay past the sentence the judge gives them, which in Michigan, we're almost twice the national average length of stay. Nationally, the average prisoner serve is about 30 months and in Michigan, it's 51. So that's pretty significant. Other side of that, why is rightsizing the right thing to do? One of the things Mr. Brown talked about was, every dollar we spend incarcerating someone is the dollar we're not spending on something else. And we certainly, I would say, have reached the point of diminishing returns. If having a prison population the size we have is not providing a reduction in crime and it's not having those types of coming to prison isn't resulting in people not coming back. I mean, all of the things that are happening, they're not, that we're hoping to happen aren't happening. And yet we're still spending $2.1 billion on the Department of Corrections, then there's a better way to spend our money. And if, as we know, what the evidence now shows us, staying longer doesn't make it less likely that you're going to offend, we're really not getting our money's worth. At an average of $32,000 a year, per prisoner in Michigan in prison, if you're on probation and parole, it's less than $3,000 to average. The difference between those two every year for thousands and thousands of people is going to make a difference. I think that is the right thing. Mr. Brown, you want to add to that? Well, let me say that you can't afford not to. You, the taxpayer, cannot afford not to have our system downsized. You know, I coined several years ago, I coined the phrase that we're a society addicted to locking folks up. And when you're addicted to something, you have some money to do that, to feed that addiction. But when you run out of that money, you start taking money that's meant for other things. And that's what we've done for the last 10 to 15 years. We've taken money that the educators used to love me because I would say in speeches that we're spending money for prisons that we ought to be spending to educate our children. Now, they forced it around and said, yeah, the director of corrections said that we should take money from corrections and put it, give it to the schools. No, that's not right now. But that's, you get the drift. Thank you for Director Caruso. What are the main disagreements in the state legislature regarding prison reform? What reforms require legislative action? And what reforms can be implemented independently by the governor or the DOC? The most significant reforms that are in play right now, and though we do have a package of bills that the legislature will be hopefully acting on this year, actually for the large part do not require legislative action. There's a reason our population is dropping out and things that we've already put into place. The reason I mentioned to you when I became director wrote 17,600 past the earliest release date and it served that minimum sentence and for whatever reason we're still in prison. We now are at 11,000 something. And that is very significant because for each of those six years, each day of those six years, someone else joined that club. So it's not like we just took 6,000 out of the group or whatever the, whatever, 6,000, yeah, 6,000 out. We took out 6,000 plus however many joined it over that period of time. So that we don't need legislative action to do that. We just need to do that. Right now we are looking at limiting the discretion of the pro board through legislative action, which limits it to, with some exceptions, 120% of the minimum sentence. And that's something we can implement without legislative action. But putting it in statute, we'll keep it going long after those of us are gone. We are looking at putting, one of the bills in front of the legislature is that people do not, in our vernacular, max out. If you have a five to 20 and you serve every day of 20 years, that means you maxed out in our language. And we have taken the position that the public is not well served when people leave prison with absolutely no supervision. And so what we are putting in place is that everyone has at least nine months of supervision in the community. And we'll work with the local law enforcement. We know where someone is. There are services that go into that. None of those things, those are operational issues, not legislative issues, even though we're asking for them to be put into law so that they go forward. Things that would require legislative action would be if we wanna get into the sentencing structure in Michigan. If we want to look at, which has happened in the past, the statutory sentences for various offenses, and there are some in Michigan that even though they have changed, they still remain very long. There are pieces that come with that where we tie consecutive sentencing with certain types of drug offenses. People, we had a case recently that Governor commuted where a woman who had, I think, five separate drug felonies, no one of them had a max more than five years. They were fairly small sentences, but they had to be served consecutively. Finish one and go to the next. The next, she was gonna do 25 years flat before she was eligible for the program. And any one of the sentences were less than five years. So those are the types of things legislatively, the structure of how that sentences are put together that we do need to tackle. Thank you. For Director Brown, have you ever known someone close to you, go to prison? And do you think that this has affected your decision making? I've known folks that I grew up with in school, prison, does it affect my decision making? I don't think so. I don't think so. I come from a family of eight. Six of us were boys. We fought all the time. And I tell them and their children that you get in trouble, don't call on the bomb. And that's just the way I feel. I think you gotta be responsible for your actions. And over the years, I think part of the problem is the fact that we haven't held offenders responsible for their actions. As responsible as we should be. Thank you. We have time for a couple more questions. And I have about 15, 18 cards left up here. The toughest question is here. And I'm gonna ask it to Director Caruso. Who is responsible for the death of Timothy Sauders? Yeah. You probably know that this is a case that your young 21-year-old man died in one of our prisons a few years ago. He was mentally ill and is, I guess I'm gonna talk about it a little bit before I can answer and I'll see where I can work with that. It probably, if it is an excellent example, what's wrong systemically with our system particularly dealing with people who are mentally ill. And it is one of the reasons that there's a very significant change ongoing, at least in the Department of Corrections, but it's a change that needs to be getting in place beyond that. I often have people say to me that, Governor Angler closed all the mental hospitals and that's created all this increase in the prison population. And I don't know that necessarily true. There are pieces of that that are true. But what happened across the country when the mental hospitals closed and certainly in Michigan was the intention was the money would flow into our communities because the thought was it would be better just as much as what we're doing to provide services in communities as compared to in hospitals. But that didn't happen. And so in order to access mental health services locally, people have to be diagnosed as being seriously and persistently mentally ill. But most people don't reach that threshold. And so there are many people in our communities who do really well with mental illness if they have the right resources available to them, but maybe they don't. And what happens is they wear out all of the systems that are there and the local law enforcement and the courts and the judges. And oftentimes then people end up in prison. About 25% of our prison population has some history of mental illness. They're not people who would be currently diagnosed as actively mentally ill, but some history of that. And those people, the majority of them look like and come to us for the kind of reasons I'm explaining. And 10% of our population are on psychotropic medications. So those are people who are seriously mentally ill and are getting assistance in prison. So the problem in prison is it's not a good place for people who are mentally ill because so often the types of behaviors that people who are mentally ill exhibit look exactly like the types of behaviors that people who are unmanageable and disruptive exhibit. In prison, what saves people's lives is knowing that if this happens, we do this. If that happens, we do that. Consistency and a way of dealing with, and percussion officers to know, if you do this, I have to do that. And if you look at 50,000 people and all of the things that we deal with and all the staff and hundreds of thousands decisions that are made every day in all of those interventions, most of those decisions work out obviously well because we don't deal with those tragic cases. This is the tragic case that didn't end up that way where 21 year old man died in prison. Their staff thought they were doing the right thing in responding to what they thought was to deal. We have accepted responsibility. We and other agencies for that death because it shouldn't have happened. And if any good news comes from something that I hate to say good news in the same sentence as a young person dying, I think that there are very significant changes happening in our department in terms of Malio. And in a goal that I have stated publicly that with few exceptions, it is my goal that Malio people will not be in segregation. But it is a difficult place to get. And we are responsible to protect the prisoners and the staff in our facilities all of those lives. And sometimes some of the methods used in dealing with the disruptive behavior exhibited by Mr. Souters in many cases, many cases, have saved people's lives and saved them from themselves. And so it is a very difficult place. That was a tough question. Thank you, Director, very much. I have a question for you, now the audience. Will everyone who's eligible to vote please raise your hands? You are responsible for the state prison system. Thank you very much.