 Just enough work to save it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. See where Sidney is taking it. Pretty, so pretty. Ha ha ha ha. You got an addition to that. Watch the record. Do you do that again? I don't know. I don't know. It's a fact that I was good at that. I was good at that. Last night, the front desk was doing this best. It was the kind of attitude to be with triggers. And it's not good when you're collaborating with my wife and wife, so... I have a nice house, and Texas has good staff, and I get some... Well, I started... All of this is good. And it sounds like... This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We already talked to you. Yeah. Yeah. Uh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah dude! Yeah yeah... Why don't I do it? Hello? I was going to say this is the only one where anyone grows up. No. Um, but, um... Good morning, of course. You know, we have such a thing for everyone. We're here even like... Um, if you want to explain, you know, where your presentation is, and I understand you're there to stand, Let's go to see what it's like. All right, let me just let R.B.B. talk to you. I'll give you this, just forward and back. Yeah, that's enough. You're going to call me now. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Good morning, sir. Hi, George. Hi, George. Good to see you. Good to meet you. Hi. Hi. Hi. David Young. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to the United States Institute of Peace, and welcome to today's JustTrack Symposium on Exploring Alternatives to Incarceration Abroad. I'm David Young. I serve as USIP's Vice President for Applied Conflict Transformation. I know it's a wonky title, maybe one of the wonkiest in Washington, the capital of wonk, but I wear this wonkiness as a badge of honor because this concept of applied conflict transformation lies at the heart of USIP's work. Let me take a minute to explain what I mean. Let me start with the compound noun, conflict transformation. Our vision at USIP is a world without violent conflict. Accordingly, our mission is to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflicts around the world. We try to do so by doing two things. First, we engage directly in conflict zones in partnership with local peace builders to link analysis, training, and field programming. Second, we partner with these local peace builders not simply to stop violent conflict, but to transform it, to transform it through the building of new social contracts between state and society. That's why we call our work Conflict Transformation. Next, I'll explain the adjective applied. In 1984, as many of you know, Congress and President Reagan teamed up to establish the US Institute of Peace. They did so because they believed that while the United States had great military academies, it also deserved a great peace academy. The lead authors of the legislation were two senators, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Senator Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii. Both had served with great valor in World War II. Senator Hatfield in the Pacific Theater and Senator Matsunaga in North Africa and Italy. So in the 1984 United States Institute of Peace Law, the senators wrote that the institute would, quote, strengthen and symbolize the fruitful relation between the world of learning and the world of public affairs. USIP was thus established to bridge theory and practice, to bridge the world of the researcher and the world of the practitioner in the field of peace building. My colleagues and I, in partnership with all of you, seek to build such bridges. We seek to create knowledge with you and to apply that knowledge to policies and programs. So you take one adjective and one compound noun and that equals applied conflict transformation. That's what we proudly do at USIP and applied conflict transformation is what brings us together today. We assemble this morning in partnership with the University of South Carolina's Rule of Law Collaborative and the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. For several years now, the INL Bureau and the Rule of Law Collaborative have worked on this important JustTrack project. JustTrack stands for Justice Sector Training, Research and Coordination and they do a great job in all three of those nouns. USIP has been proud to co-convene several symposia with our JustTrack colleagues. So I want to thank now the leadership of the Rule of Law Collaborative, Professor Hamid Khan, Professor Joel Samuels. I want to thank also the leadership of the INL Bureau and I want to thank Senator Lindsey Graham who for many years on the Hill first he initiated the idea of the Rule of Law Collaborative in his home state of South Carolina and then for many years has provided support for peace building human rights democratic governance and the Rule of Law in his capacity as a senator. I'm also grateful for the contributions of USIP's governance justice and security team which is led by my colleague Philippe LaRue-Martin. I want to thank Philippe and his team member Chelsea Dreher for supporting JustTrack in today's activities. Given the importance of governance, justice and security to the transformation of conflicts we're very happy at USIP to be part of today's symposium. We meet today to exchange ideas on exploring alternatives to incarceration even in the toughest environments. Over 11 million people around the world are held in penal institutions. In many countries the rate of incarceration is rising. Overburdened facilities can accommodate neither the needs of the general prison population nor those of vulnerable populations such as women, children and the disabled. Mass incarceration also impacts heavily the families and communities of prisoners. Under these conditions, prisons often foster recidivism and wider networks of criminality especially for such for nonviolent offenders alternatives to incarceration offer a solution to this complex of problems. We also meet today because mass incarceration in many countries may contribute to the radicalization of certain groups and when perpetrators of violent extremism are themselves incarcerated penal institutions must devise ways to prevent the radicalization of fellow inmates. For those who have subsequently renounced terrorism have served their prison sentences justice and security actors across the board must work with community leaders and families to help rehabilitate and reintegrate those individuals. So the more lessons we learn in this regard and the more lessons we can apply the safer and more reconciled these communities may become. In sum the problem stemming from mass incarceration and the possible solutions offered by alternatives to incarceration are key topics in our current discourse on applied conflict transformation. Within this inspiring monument to the American people's commitment to global peace I wish you today a fruitful discussion. I encourage you to build new bridges new links between theory and practice in the worlds of learning and public affairs. I now like to introduce Hamid Khan. Hamid is the deputy director of the rule of law collaborative. He's also a non resident senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research in Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Hamid is best known all around the world as a leading expert on Islamic law and he has also served at USIP. He's also a national security fellow at the Truman National Security Project and he's very involved with the World Justice World Justice Project's rule of law consortium on Islamic law and he's also very involved in one of our networks that USIP leads the international network to promote the rule of law. So with much gratitude I now introduce Hamid Khan. Thank you David for that very embarrassing introduction. Good morning everyone. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. Welcome to one of our offerings under the JustTrack program which today promises to delve into important questions that deal with incarceration and the alternatives that we intend on exploring today. As already mentioned the JustTrack program is a cooperative agreement between the University of South Carolina particularly the rule of law collaborative and our partners at the State Department and as already mentioned this is one of our constant deliverables which composes of experts from around the world to tackle and discuss issues of great political and legal concern to the rule of law community. In addition to our symposia which are typically two symposia that are offered publicly in a closed door invitation only symposium in which we travel to various parts of the world with various issues of concern. We also offer various trainings. We extend our gratitude not only to USIP for their willingness to host our event today but only two weeks ago they were willing to also roll up their sleeves and co-host an event that dealt with civil law legal systems around the world. In a few short weeks we also intend to offer a training that will be led by myself that will look at Islamic legal systems and that will also be an opportune time for individuals both in this room as well as individuals in the broader policy community to delve into some particularly interesting subject matter. In addition to our symposia and our trainings which we offer on a quarterly basis JustTrack also provides research opportunities and we will continue this work with the benefit of INL in the coming years with the aim of trying to benefit practitioners in the rule of law and those who work in the justice sector with additional offerings of both training and symposia in which hopefully all of you will be willing participants. To today's event, as you will undoubtedly notice this is a rather novel topic especially in the realm of justice sector issues abroad. However it is not a novel issue for those of us in this room and those of us who are aware of the issues pertinent to the United States. So today we will bring together a collage of different experts, those both here domestically empowered as well as those abroad to talk about some of the most important and salient issues that one can cover in one day. So it is with that both extending the gratitude to USIP, to the staff of the rule of law collaborative who have been assisting. Let me just note a couple of minor logistical details before we begin today. First and foremost, restrooms are at the end of the corridor. You are welcome to bring in your coffee at various times during the day. Lunch, the keynote address which will be offered by the State Department will actually be down in the lower part of the atrium and then it will return up here for the concluding sessions during this afternoon. In addition, because we are of course always trying to better and improve our deliverables you will notice that in the packets that you were given there is a very colorful evaluation form. So I am duty bound and honor bound to remind you that if you have any complaints, concerns, but high praise to please include them. So with that, let me introduce both an innovator in her own right, someone who has worked in the policy community on these salient issues to introduce the topic of alternatives to incarceration and to lay the foundation both for the challenging issues as well as the work that they have done. Ms. Pan-Rum for you guys. Thank you. And advanced slides, I'll be fumbling forever. So good morning everybody. Thank you. I want to thank Hamid and Dr. Yang and the Institute of Peace, INL and JustTrack for convening this and for honoring the work that we have done by asking us to open up the day for you all today. As Hamid said, my name is Pam Rodriguez. I am the president and CEO of TASC, Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities. We're based in Illinois. We are an independent NGO. We are providing case management statewide to justice-involved populations, and we work at all points in the continuum related to people with substance use and mental health disorders. So in Illinois, that means we work in both very urban places, such as Chicago, but also very rural communities, and the services we provide are available to everybody in the justice system, whether you're in prison or in the courts and on probation. As I said, our core service is case management. We are focused on reducing incarceration, on reducing recidivism and increasing health and wellness and recovery for people who come in contact with the justice system. We have, in addition to being a service provider, though, we view our responsibility and our role to really change systems and to advocate for change in systems nationally and internationally. So in addition to the direct service work, a piece of our work has always been about policy, advocacy, and systems change throughout the world, really. And that's, I think, what that experience is also what brings us here today. We have been in business doing this work and doing advocacy since the 70s pre-war on drugs and have been doing international work for about 10 or 15 years. And so my comments today will be based on a combination of those experiences. Okay, so why are we talking about diversion and alternatives to incarceration today? Why does that matter? We have, I want to just start by accepting the fact that, yes, incarceration punishes people. So what you want to do is punish people. That works. And that's a given, and that's usually what people throw out is the reason for doing this. But what I want to say to you is what it does, as well, is it makes people worse. We think that we're increasing public safety by incarcerating folks, and in fact, there's a ton of evidence that suggests that we are making an increase in their criminality. 95%, 98% of people who go to prison come home, and when they do, they bring risks back to communities. And we see that, we see that here today in the U.S., and we see it around the world. It increases the risk of recidivism, disconnects people from the supports that they have locally. It disconnects them from families. It makes them unemployable. It makes them hard to house. It makes them hard to reintegrate in families, and so the cycle of criminality and recidivism continues. So instead, we would argue that if we want to increase safety and increase safety in communities, we should really be focusing on alternatives to incarceration, that there are things that we know about how to serve and treat people in community that increase safety, increase health, and reduce recidivism, and that is not in question. There is a ton of research that supports that. So what we're really talking about is implementing what we know in the face of pressure to do the opposite, right, in the face of pressure to continue to incarcerate folks. The thing that often gets overlooked is that this also increases victim satisfaction when we do this the right way, and victim safety. And a lot of times people leave the victim voice out of these conversations when we talk about alternatives to incarceration, but in fact, victims have a voice in what happens to the people who have offended them. They frequently want restitution, they frequently want an apology, and they are happier with the outcome than when people are just simply sent away and they don't know what happens and they're not involved in the process or the decision-making. So it's also palatable in the victim community when done right. And by the way, we haven't always done that right, so I'm not suggesting that's an easy thing to do, but it's an important voice to remember. So the thing that we advocate for here and across the world is that every decision point in the justice system presents an opportunity to divert people. In the past, we have looked at diversion as something that is a diversion from prison, and that really is sort of the last opportunity we have to make that decision. In fact, we make many decisions about what's going to happen to people and with cases and charges at many points along the system. So at the point of arrest, police make a decision on whether to arrest or not and exert tons of discretion at that point in the process touching the most people of anybody in the justice system. So law enforcement represents a huge opportunity to make a different decision about what's going to happen to this person and with this case. And so in this diagram, you see that's sort of the widest swath of people and the first opportunity we have to really make a different decision about diversion and alternatives. At the point of deciding whether or not to hold somebody in jail, pretrial is another point at which we can make a different decision about what to do with folks. And a subsequent slide we'll talk to you will show evidence about even the smallest amount of time spent in jail increases a person's risk of recidivism. At the point of charging and making prosecutorial decisions about what to charge, how much to charge, we can make a different decision at that point. There's discretion all the way through the system that enables people to make different decisions about alternatives and not wait until the very end of a case and the very end of processing and the very final decision about prison or no prison. And you will hear system actors saying that they are limited in that discretion. But they are by law to some extent but not as much as they pretend to be. I was trying to come up with a different word but I'm just going to say pretend. Because it's convenient to hide behind that as opposed to actually admitting that they have tons of discretion on what they're going to do. And so the point of this diagram is really to visually depict how small in fact our system would be if we diverted folks at every point along the continuum. And what you will be hearing about today are things to do at these various points that make this a safe and viable strategy, reducing incarceration, reducing recidivism, and increasing health and recovery in community. Okay. So what have we learned about who we incarcerate and who's incarcerated around the world? Right? The people that we incarcerate by and large have substance abuse and mental health disorders. They're not all violent. They're not all murderers and rapists. They are people with substance use disorders who cycle through the system over and over until we get tired of them and then we throw them in prison. And that's what we would argue again is that that's true in so many places. We can do something different with those folks before we give up on them, before we get tired of them and throw them away and lock them in prison. So if you look at these numbers and they're kind of hard to see, but you have PowerPoints in your packet as well, that in the United States the first bar, the first light gray bar shows the general population rate of mental health disorders and substance use. Let me just say one thing quickly about mental health. SMI stands for Serious Mental Illness and that is bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, things that tend to involve hallucinations, delusions and things like that. And then mental health writ large includes other things as well like depression. You compare that to the jail population where 50% of the population instead of 18% have diagnosable conditions or 64%, I'm sorry, and 50% of prison populations. If you look at the substance use disorder one, it's even more stark in the sense the rate of diagnosable substance use disorders in the community is around maybe 7% of the general population has a substance use disorder. When you look in prisons and jails, they are overwhelmed by people with those same conditions. And jails and prisons, are they treatment centers? Are they designed to provide treatment? Are they designed to provide rehabilitation and services that prevent this disorder from reoccurring when people leave prisons? Generally not. There may be some AA, there may be some there, but those are self-help groups. Those are not treatment. They don't get medications for the disorders that they have. And when they are released from prisons and jails, they are also incredibly likely to return to use even after forced detox. So what are some of the lasting problems associated with it? So we've removed people from our communities. We think we're safer. We think we're happy to not see them anymore. And this is true internationally. People are mad at you. People are afraid of you and they want you away from them. But, you know, you come home. And when you come home, what happens to you? We used to have this notion here in the United States anyway, that if you did the crime and you did your time, you were done. And you could come home, reintegrate, get a job. Whoa, I see this is why I needed two hands free. Get a master's degree, go on and get a PhD, teach, do all kinds of wonderful things. And in fact, that does happen for a few people. But the reality is that a criminal conviction today lasts a lifetime. The internet has really helped with that. So even as you go and expunge your record, and as you seal your records and all that kind of stuff, there's still tons of information out there that enables an employer, a housing provider, a family member to find out that you have in fact a criminal conviction. So you can't get housing. You can't get employment. Your family isn't able to take you back in because you make their housing unstable because now you're at your risk to them. And so whole communities end up being destabilized. And this is true everywhere, right? The people who are impacted by substance use and mental health, the people who are impacted by justice involvement come from concentrated communities of poverty, concentrated communities of deprivation, communities where resources have been either pulled never there or pulled out of those communities and those communities have been decimated. And so that's what people are, that's who's incarcerated. The poor people of color in other countries, it's people of darker color or people of different religions, etc. that are targeted for incarceration. They're parents. One of the things that frustrates me immensely is that while 80% of the people involved in the justice system tend to be male, we don't talk about men as parents. We don't talk about them as dads. We talk about the moms and the women who are incarcerated. But the reality is 60 plus percent of the men all have children as well. So we're taking parents and incarcerating parents. People who have lots of health conditions these are people who are coming from communities without a lot of good health care. So they've got chronic health conditions. They've got COPD. They've got diabetes. They've got high blood pressure in addition to substance use and mental health disorders. So our prison system not designed to treat substance abuse from mental health is also not really designed to be a primary health care provider. And so for example if you need kidney dialysis and you're in prison you will have a security guard drive you back and forth for your dialysis every day. And that takes up two or three people and they're gone for the entire day for one person in dialysis. So the people in prisons get Alzheimer's and have dementia and prisons end up managing that. Prisons often trigger mental health episodes and psychotic breaks. Additionally people do get drugs and alcohol in prisons here and around the world. And so if you have an active substance use disorder going in, odds are pretty good that you'll be able to sustain that while you're in some prisons at least. So it's not even as if those are drug free days, weeks, months, years that you've spent in prison. We have learned that even three days in prison increases the risk of not prisons, jail excuse me big difference in the U.S. The difference in the U.S. is that jails are state and count or they're local, they're county run and prisons are state run. Prisons you tend to serve a longer sentence at least be sentenced there for more than a year jails tend to do shorter sentences but in reality jails are mostly pre-trial settings where people cycle through and wait for court even three days while you get arrested and wait for your bond hearing or whatever it is you're waiting for to make bond increases the risk of recidivism. So again doing what we think is a public safety strategy in fact escalates the risk of continued criminal behavior. What happens when you get incarcerated in jail for three days or more you miss work if you're there 10 days you might miss your rent payment your employer might find out where you are and you lose your job all kinds of consequences just associated with those few days in jail and it costs a lot of money it costs a lot of money and doing the right thing costs less so it's not just that it costs a lot of money but providing adequate care in community costs less so if you're not motivated by the human condition and the risk to community associated with incarceration maybe you're a person who's going to be motivated by the financial trade-offs right so if a person is less risky when maintained in community and if the community is safer and healthier and it costs less there's got to be an argument in there that pleases just about anybody else it is why I said though in the beginning if you want to punish them prison does it so that argument we can't defeat with cost and and outcome kinds of information okay so when we think about then designing systems that understand this address these issues we have we think we start with thinking about each system each country each state wherever you're at with some kind of an assessment why because one size does not fit all one size does not fit all one size does not fit all and so you end we want to encourage you to think about the local context right whether it's a local context in where so we've done stuff in South Africa we've done stuff in Jamaica and Guyana and a bunch of countries right that local context is going to be different so you start with a system assessment you want to start where the country is at not where you're at and not with what we think we know what the end is okay so I want to be clear that we have a vision for what the end outcome should be but we got to start where the country and the system is at and we want to know what kind of political will they have and that will vary and where does it come from we want to know what kind of capacity and that capacity comes in the context of the capacity of the justice system the capacity of law enforcement the capacity of service communities the capacity of community generally to think about responding to these issues and integrating people and doing something different than what is currently being done which is incarcerating folks who with low level nonviolent probably substance related issues and when I say you build to a system strategy or a system response that's the vision that we all kind of have in mind and that's the vision that I laid out earlier where we make decisions at every point in the continuum to divert people right that's sort of the end goal that's the vision that we're working toward but you don't start with that you can't just build that right so I mentioned the vision diverting people at every point in the continuum you have to have a systemic strategy or a system strategy building the justice systems capacity to respond and building the service delivery community's capacity to respond and that usually starts with a program or two right you don't want to stop at a program a lot of people are very familiar with drug courts we do a lot on recovery communities and case management but you have start somewhere with something that the country and the communities that can tolerate and can handle and can support building to the broad range of systemic responses to people who come in contact with the justice system it's it's my experience of that trying it having some success breeds more success right have some success it breeds motivation to try additional stuff if you start with a specialty court you figure out oh you want to do something you start with reentry you realize you want to do something to stop the flow of people coming into the system but the players and actors in the system kind of have to come to those realizations themselves you help them you build motivation and you build their understanding and the solutions the strategies are all pretty clear and are all pretty well researched and laid out it's just a question of building the systems capacity and by that I mean ability politically as well as programmatically to respond to the opportunities that are there to do something different so you start somewhere start anywhere start where they're willing to start right and then build on that so one of the things not up here but that I did want to that I think is important when you think about substance use and substance use disorders it tends to be a good and easy way to get into systems and talk about alternatives and diversion people are willing to talk about that people with substance use disorders and mental health conditions are usually the primary targets that people are willing to work on I want to confront or clarify a couple of myths or misconceptions one is the myth that you if you have a substance use disorder you need to hit rock bottom before treatment works that is not true that would be like saying we're going to wait until you have stage 4 cancer right or we're going to wait until the bridge falls down before we repair the bridge whatever metaphor matters to you whether you're an infrastructure guy or a treatment guy or a doc you have to wait until somebody hits that rock bottom to intervene in a substance use disorder the other myth or the other conflict that exists in this field that I think is relevant here is that coercion doesn't work that people have to want to go to treatment they have to want to become drug free they have to want what you're offering them that's not true either there's a lot of research that says using the leverage of the justice system to get people into treatment and keep them there is very effective now the effectiveness part is that the justice system keeps you there long enough for treatment to work treatment still has to do its thing it still has to motivate you it still has to teach you new behaviors and attitudes and help you develop new friends and social supports but coercion works to keep you there long enough for treatment to work most folks without justice supervision walk out the door of treatment within days of starting it and we need them to stay long enough for treatment to work so coercion on the part of keeping people in treatment long enough for treatment to work is very effective and you don't need to hit rock bottom and beg for it and be at the end of your rope for treatment to work so some key principles I already talked about treatment needing to be long enough to produce behavior change the the other thing I would say is that treatment should be individualized now that's a hard thing to do in programs so what we mean when we say that in reality is that an assessment should drive the treatment goals so just because I show up with a needle in my arm does not mean you know enough about me to work with me to figure out what my treatment goals need to be so you start with assessment in order to develop appropriate goals one size does not fit all cookie cutter programs are not the best idea now you have to have programs so I'm not saying they're not structured and organized but Pam something different than David is and then Hamid is we're all going to be working on different issues one of the things specific for justice and these principles come from the national institute on drug abuse and I want to highlight a couple of things, number four treatment should target factors associated with criminal behavior that tends to be peers and antisocial attitudes as well obviously as substance use disorders but that tends, in addition to substance use treatment generally for the health condition for justice involved we really need to deal with peers attitudes criminal lifestyles the other thing that is very important when providing treatment to a justice involved person is that the treatment team, the treatment staff somebody is coordinating that effort with the justice system the justice system has a vested interest in what happens with this person they're under supervision they need to know what's going on that often presents problems for treatment because they don't feel like they want to cooperate with the justice system and so at least in our case we have a solution for that and that is the independent case management that task provides and I'll talk a little bit about that later whether you have that infrastructure or not the treatment system does need to cooperate, collaborate and organize itself with the justice system in order to be effective one of the easiest I guess two easy obvious examples would be when the person leaves treatment against advice the justice system needs to know that if they disappear, if they walk away they're AWOL you need to tell the justice system the other thing that happens is that the justice system often layers tons of obligations and requirements on people and deadlines and those are almost always impossible to meet you've got the conditions of a justice system involvement can be pages pages and pages of requirements that you and I would have an incredibly hard time doing let alone also going to treatment so in that case treatment needs to be an advocate for more realistic timelines expectations and staging of all of those obligations and requirements but again the partnership is really important another thing that's super important three minutes I've got three minutes okay here's a picture of what recovery over time needs to look like or looks like in reality not needs to look like so having realistic expectations regarding what recovery looks like and what can happen when is really important people are not magically changed overnight and oftentimes our frustration and disappointment is related to that expectation the other thing that's really important in if you remember who I said gets incarcerated here and abroad it is the poor it is people with chronic health conditions so it's really important if we're going to be effective in dealing with the population and helping them stay out of prisons and jails and out of the justice system is that we deal with other social determinants of health it's really hard to maintain a crime free lifestyle if you're homeless period it just is so we have to deal with all of those other challenges that the population presents this is not just a medical model that enables us to see the person four times a week and we're done with it so if we have all of these obligations and all of these responsibilities and expectations how do we help this all stay together and make sense and flow what ties the justice system, the treatment system, the housing system, the education system, the employment system the family and the community together what we advocate for is case management is the function for that and more and more people are understanding the real value of case management and care coordination for complex populations and problems so if you look at this picture is designed to just sort of convey all of the pressures, all of the obligations all of the responsibilities that people who are touching the justice system need to deal with and it is that chaotic and overwhelming and hard to navigate this still shows all of the complicated and extensive obligations and requirements but then also starts to make it look a little more organized and a little more manageable and a little more doable and so this reflects a case management model and organization to the whole system and the whole process independent of the courts independent of treatment independent of housing aligned with the person involved in the process aligned with the client or the patient or the person in the justice system and there are the challenges and the benefits of that case management are listed here but if you just think about for yourself the challenges in navigating complex systems let's say the healthcare system is a complex health problem you know how complicated it can be to get through that system that system has case managers that help you through it we're advocating for the same kind of strategy to help justice involved folks this model streamlines it a little more makes it look a little clearer about the steps in the process from assessment to service planning to linkage just here's a here are four housing providers go find one here's a list of six docs go find one no case manager helps you get to and through each step in that process it's also really useful in environments that are low resourced because a lot of times a case manager sort of compensates for lack of resources in certain areas and in certain communities and it almost doubles the retention in treatment and time in treatment is what's necessary for people to succeed and while I do believe that some of that is related to the relationship that is built between the case manager and the participant I really think it's because of the case manager also holds a system accountable for delivering what it has promised to deliver and helps the person navigate those very complex systems I'm wrapping up okay to I guess in a pre-conversation this morning one of the things that one of your future speakers and I agreed on was the fact that we know what to do these are not mysteries that need to be solved we have evidence about what works in treatment evidence about works in the justice system even more importantly we know what doesn't work and yet we continue to do it and what you're going to hear about today is examples of and people who have stopped doing what doesn't work and have started doing what does work and that's what we're here to advocate for did I make it we'll go ahead and ask the members of our first panel to come up and begin the remarks and then we'll have a brief coffee break at 11 o'clock so we'll try to stay on schedule good morning well thank you so much Hamid thank you for the organizers for this wonderful event I'm very pleased to have this wonderful and knowledge people in the panel this morning and I'm very pleased Pam that you were the one introducing the topic very pleased about that and there are many many things that you mentioned that I'm sure we'll be covering and we I work at the OAS the Organization of American States and we are particularly interested in hearing the whole range of alternatives to incarceration that we're going to be hearing to and experiences but this particular panel that is about obstacles is something that we are confronting every day and I'm sure you are in your daily work as well right now in this hemisphere in the Americas there are 15 member states 15 countries that are either exploring or implementing monitoring different alternatives to incarceration most of them are on the pre-trial stage most of them they will love to do some more diversion programs etc but most of them they're focused on the models that we know however from restorative justice approaches to therapeutic justice in general terms or drug courts reentry models community courts etc etc so I know you have a lot of experience on these topics and some of the so what I would like just to keep this a little bit more active and dynamic we all agree that we will have kind of an interaction let's see how it goes so we will do some kind of internal questions it's not that we are not seeing you all but we're going to be asking each other things and then we will let the floor follow the questions from you but if you I mean you have the bios of everyone I'm not going to introduce them but if we're going to do a short presentation about what we do in our everyday life in relation to this panel and then we'll go into those questions so George, Jeremy if you want to start from that end please how many of you started work in criminal justice before May of 1966 can I see your hands how many of you weren't born in May of 1966 alright in 1966 I'm a student at Iowa State University and we were the big 12 champions not NCAA champions I had a psych professor who said I understand you're interested in corrections would you like to go for an interview I'm taking my son down we're going to interview with men's reformatory in the men's prison for people to be counselor trainees during the summer I had such an admiration for this guy if he had said do you want to go clean hog houses on Saturday I'd have shown up and so I started work in corrections in 1966 I arrived at the penitentiary short of money everything in my car said I am here to be a counselor trainee and the women in the personal office smiled just as you are right now and said we don't pay counselor trainees but because you're 21 years of age you can become a correctional officer you can work the 2 to 10 shift and in the mornings you can come in and volunteer to work with the counselors where do I get a uniform I share this with you in that community corrections having worked in five correctional institutions starting as a correctional officer in a maximum security prison working a cell house I've worked from minimum security to maximum security I've worked in men's institutions women's institutions I worked in a mental health JCAH accredited at hospital run by I have seen corrections I have seen corrections from the institutional side before helping to design a community side as was suggested by Pam institutions are artificial communities the warden is the mayor they operate the best institutions in the country will still be artificial communities they are not the real community and so as you look at can we manage populations within the community and how do we do that toward deliberate ends that's the key issue from my point of view we are where we are today not by accident not by deliberate design but we're not here by accident if you look at institution populations from World War II to the early 1960s the population grew gradually from the 60s until the mid 70s institution populations actually went down when I went to work at the men's reformatory in 1971 after I came back out of the service we had a cell block that was shut down there was discussion of a decade later they were putting another floor in across the middle of that institution and double decking because the population was growing if you look at the climb of the institution population and if you look at some of the policy initiatives that we've taken you will find that it's not an accident that the growth curve from the mid 1970s to the end of the decade is a rapid climb and that we couldn't build institutions fast enough to satisfy the population that people in Texas who were sentenced to prison never got to prison because they fulfilled their sentence in the county jail before they could get transferred to a state prison that the federal government in the 1990s subsidized the building of prisons not the operating which is the true cost but subsidized the building of prison so that there would be more physical space and that people could serve longer sentences not because it produced a particular outcome that you wanted but because it satisfied a sense of these people have done a crime they ought to do a time so my argument would be look at this need to be very clear about what the outcomes are that we want for people who come through the criminal justice system and whether that's the system that makes the most sense whether those outcomes are achievable or not see we have accidentally as Pam suggests we have backed into the idea that if you're indigent, homeless and mentally ill the service delivery system for you will be county jail or state prison that's not a deliberate decision but it is a real decision it is a real de facto policy so I would conclude Antonio by saying I am opposed to using the term alternatives to incarceration is it working? thank you and I forgot that we are recording so this is the whole thing being recorded so just for the record and this isn't the paper but it's live? well hello to all even better for those who don't have the papers with them in front of them George Casey is the chief executive officer Casey and associates and the former chief of community corrections National Institute of Corrections thank you so much for that introduction we will go into that later on about the term of alternative incarceration and it is a discussion as well next it will be Fred Patrick director of the Center for Sentencing and Corrections the Vera Institute of Justice thank you so good morning all, it's a pleasure to be here honored to be here so I'm Fred Patrick I work at the Vera Institute of Justice which is a national non-profit and research and technical assistance and policy organization and our three core priorities include for purposes of today importantly one closing the front door to mass incarceration often when people think about mass incarceration we sort of immediately shift to prisons and don't think about the overuse and misuse of jails in the first instance and I'll talk a little bit more about why that matters later a second core priority for us is the notion of ensuring that we have sort of safe and fair and inclusive justice system in this diverse America and that's dealing with everything from how we police diverse communities and how we the role of prosecutors in the justice system and then our third key priority which also very much connects to our discussion here today is transforming conditions of confinement and that is for those who are in the system for those who are in jails and prisons how do we treat them what do we expect to accomplish when we lock someone up and that's very important because as as others noted today 95% of all folks are coming home and so if you think of jail and prison operations and programs as also part and parcel to alternatives and incarceration because if you provide the right opportunities and do the right thing there those folks maybe come home and never reoffend so they don't come back through the system so our overall mission at Vera is to drive change and to urgently build and improve our systems of justice that are based on fairness and primal safety and that also strengthen communities and again I think as we think about alternatives to incarceration or whatever you may want to call them it's important that you think about things such as human dignity and how do we situate safety and strengthening of communities and we think about individuals as our fellow members of the society as loved ones as neighbors as fellow members of that community and if you sort of think about it that way instead of otherizing people and seeing them as something different or someone different I think we could get to a much more humanistic approach to how we see justice across the nation at Vera we work in partnership with government we believe that if you work closely with like-minded government officials at the state, local and national levels you can drive change from within and you can sort of use your presence as a national organization the way Vera is in partnership with communities and diverse perspectives to really drive change and importantly make that change sustainable. So our work I should add began in 1961 Vera's very first project was called the Manhattan Bail project again very important for us here today and that is the two founders of the Vera Institute of Justice realized that they realized the injustice of the New York City cash bail system in which people were being detained in jail simply because they were poor and the injustice of that and so they actually piloted a program which proved that if you allowed individuals who did not have the monetary resources but had strong community ties if you release those individuals they were going to show up at future court appearances and so it's interesting because as a certainly here in America as we deal with the whole notion of cash bail which is now this sort of new reform movement think about it in 1961 my organization the founders had identified that then as an injustice and proved through empirical evidence that again people with strong community ties who could not afford bail could be released and they would return so it's interesting because that story kind of suggests that a lot of the sort of movement towards justice reform and alternatives it's not a new thing it goes to show how much you got to really sort of lean in and stick with it because that was 1961 and here we are in 2019 and that's there's a whole new wave of reform around the overuse of cash bail and rather not it has a place in a society that believes in justice thank you so much it's funny that we are thinking that we are reinventing the wheel again in many ways the next person in the panel is a person that I've been very pleased to work with lately a lot in some countries is Michel and I never pronounce your last name very well even though we know each other is a chief council of three minutes for safe communities task in Chicago please the floor thanks Antonio I have the fortunate opportunity to follow Pam who described quite a bit about what task does so what I will say is task is a social justice organization and as chief council I have an opportunity to work within our operations and case management delivery also with the policy and legislative work we do statewide and also nationally and then our consulting which is now or has been a global effort a little bit about my path to task I see George and I have something in common which is psychology my bachelor's degree is in psychology and learned a lot about behavior modification and actually one of the jobs I applied for after I had my bachelor's degree and I was deciding what I wanted to do when I grew up was to work in a half way house and I did not get that job they said I was too nice so I figured out my path in life and much to the chagrin of my psychology professors I went to law school I wanted to know the roles of society and how we can work within these systems I went to law school practice law I was on the bench for seven years and I think I started to regain faith of my psychology professors because I worked in a municipal court which is high volume so a lot of the nonviolent offenders and just a lot of people that are struggling and now they're in the court system we started a poverty initiative I've heard a lot of talk about poverty we're not directly talking about that today but we felt that if we address some of the poverty issues in the community that that would alleviate some of the people coming into a legal system and that's where they belonged in the first place we formed a drug court we formed a mental health court and also a veterans court and it's amazing to see the transformation of lives within those models so being the person that I was I realized when you were forming these programs at the ground level there's a lot of work that needs to be done upstream at the policy level to support them realizing that there was way too much lifting for one small community to make things happen that needed to have some statewide effort so I moved on to the supreme court I was policy council there and it gave me a chance to really look at departments and the coordination that needed to happen to have a multi-system approach it was at that point that I meant task because one of the things that we pondered was opioid use disorder and the drug crisis does not respect boundaries or jurisdictions it does not limit itself neatly to your city or your county or your state and quite frankly or our country and that's one of the things that is I've been able to do some traveling with Antonio and some of my colleagues in the audience we're seeing how we are all tied together in this issue and so I'm really thrilled to be a part of today's discussion because I think we're taking some of what we're learning here at home and we don't have it all figured out either and we're sharing it abroad and we're seeing some of the unique adaptations that we need to do out of curiosity how many of you are lawyers? oh my goodness well then most of you will know this and I may see some head nods for those of you that aren't lawyers I want to give you a little insight as to maybe why our system ended up where it is I told you when I went to last school I promptly unlearned everything I knew about behavior modification and that's true I hear tuckles from my panelists really when you look at our criminal code and the court system it's pretty simple when you do something wrong the idea is if you're punished enough you will get the idea that you weren't supposed to have that behavior and you will be deterred from any future conduct like that because you don't want the punishment again and we see how well that's not working right you look at our jails you look at our prisons we talk about a lot to courts is that really the purpose of courts is not to incarcerate it's to rehabilitate it's to make communities safe it's to reduce recidivism and crime and my colleagues and my staff at task will also point out when I have the 10 purposes of the courts one is to avoid the arbitrary use of government power and so I don't tell that to the courts so I will deny it don't tweet that comment but it's something really important to think about and it has relevance here and relevance abroad and I'm really looking forward to the conversation well that was a great intro thank you the three of you let's go back in terms of implementing these alternatives and go back to the name the issue of the name I'm sure those that have kids know that whenever you name the kid there's one of the big problems I don't know if you experienced that but I did with one name or the other in the international arena this is something that we've seen is amazing but we didn't expect that to happen but every single time we go to a country we dedicate a huge amount of time in how the kid is going to be named and it's just and sometimes that name really blocks the whole project which is something that we didn't expect and I'm glad that Jamie Lee from UNODC is here because in Europe at least on that side they're talking about alternatives to punishment and not to incarceration which is something that we at the OAS would like to take but it's kind of difficult to change the wording now once you already accepted it so changing the name is difficult anyway why George did you emphasize on the name thing and it's a great place well again I had the good fortune of the state wanted to pay some of us to go to graduate school obviously times have changed that would not happen today and so as I went to graduate school I was introduced to some really great mentors who were involved in a movement in the early 1970s to mid 1970s called the development of community corrections and so one of the guys a guy by the name of Bernie Vogelgesang started the first LEA recognized criminal justice community corrections program in the United States and again the focus was very much keep in mind the time we were post Richard Nixon we were post Vietnam there was a great deal of mistrust of the federal government was mistrust of state government the closer you could get the decision making to the local area the better there were riots in the cities and so during this turbulent time there was a movement that started to shift and to say we can manage this population in the community but quite frankly we did not have the bodies of knowledge we didn't have the research we really operated very much by faith and so I spent a lot of time marketing community corrections as an alternative to prisons and jails particularly alternatives to prison and I would try it out the fact that I worked in five or four by then four institutions and so I knew what the prison side was like and was offering what the community side could be like by the time I got to the National Institute of Corrections and spent 28 years promoting community corrections there a couple of things had become a reality to me and that was what Michelle has just shared with you it's not about just improving a particular agency or developing a particular program but it's really when you can get the system the actors who make decisions that impact each other the prosecutors as Fred said the law enforcement people as Pam said the judges the other system actors to come together and to agree on what the outcome is supposed to be policy, public policy not agency policy, public policy ought to tell you what and why what do you want as an outcome why do you want it if you do that and now based on the strategies and the tools that we have available to us we can disaggregate this big large population that we say goes through criminal justice and we can begin to ask the questions do we want law enforcement when they pick somebody up who's obviously demonstrating behavior through delusional behavior that is not a criminal justice issue but a mental health issue do we want them to be able to deliver that individual to an agency that can meet that need as opposed to booking them in the county jail that's a public policy issue that's a systems decision it impacts the economy it means that county commissioners who are making decisions about how to spend tax dollars ought to be looking at that and deciding which option makes the most business sense and so I would argue that instead of alternatives to incarceration we're really talking about dispositional decisions whether it's sentencing decisions release decisions we're talking about decisions and decision makers needing to be looking for what's the outcome and what's the body of bodies of knowledge that best informs getting that outcome whether it's at pre-arrest pre-conviction or post-conviction the last thing I would say to you about using the word alternatives as you're driving down the highway and you see this road sign that says alternative to route 462 have you ever taken that alternative route 462 it's full of trucks and buses the road needs repair it typically is not the primary highway I would say to you for some individuals going through the criminal justice system prison should be the primary highway we do not know how to manage their behavior in a way that keeps them safe and keeps the community safe that is a very small portion of the population the vast majority of people we can manage in the community but the outcome in that same line of thought taking the alternative route would you Fred think that alternative incarceration is disrupt the status quo in that sense or is it something that helps the result well it depends I think too often what we call alternatives I believe are simply repackaging of the carceral state still heavily focus on surveillance and control still bedded in the belief that people of color and low income people and people with disabilities are incapable of living free lives and are incapable of thriving and so often what we do is we fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing other dispositional options when in reality we are taking the thrust of the carceral state against surveillance control and simply moving it to other places sometimes that's the home with electronic monitoring unfortunately sometimes that's drug treatment facilities how we are very quick for instance to default to inpatient treatment as opposed to outpatient treatment which can be effective for the right individuals with the right level of care so I think we have to as you think about expanding or developing alternatives it's important that you take a step back and say are we really doing something that's different or are we sort of repackaging the same harm and the same dysfunction and I would argue that more often than not we are repackaging a lot of the carceral state from location as opposed to radically transforming how we approach justice we talk a lot about outcomes and I would argue that a part of what we don't do enough of is think about who and what are the right inputs to what degree do we involve the community in thinking about what true justice looks like it was mentioned earlier that when you actually look at data the polling of crime victims and crime survivors many disagree with the system that we have they think it's too harmful it's too retributed and not focused enough on rehabilitation and by the way the victim's voice is often missing from it I mean think about it we have a system in this country at least where the state the prosecutor takes over and so it's the state versus Fred Patrick you the victim don't really get a voice by the prosecutor's office and so I think what we need to think about is as we think about alternatives and other things of that nature trying to find a better way to frame it what are we doing that's radically different how are we being transformative or are we simply moving it to a prettier box if you will thanks so much it's interesting the end of Montenegro is here from Chile and knows that some countries are taking restorative justice as the way to go forward and Costa Rica for example in Chile they do take the victim into account in the whole conversation on offensive incarceration interesting you mentioned that you've been talking about that end the prison and the post-education in a way there is a however and you mentioned that in your introductory words the whole thing of a drug court that you had in touch that you supported in the beginning and you being part of a package that you have or a county has in most of the countries in this hemisphere we've seen that the most demanded model that it is is the drug court with any names and there's a lot of discussion about that yesterday we presented a monitoring evaluation manual for impact evaluation the interesting thing is that those models are taken because the legal landscape is there most of the countries have an easy way to go through that all the ways is they need to change a lot of things if they need to go to diversion and if you go into treatment in prison system that's even another story who wants to deal with treatment in prison whenever you see how prisons are in some places your experience on that particular model and I know you work in many others but what are the main challenges that you see that that you see in the United States or even abroad in your experience sure for those of you that I'm assuming a lot of you are familiar with the drug court model a couple things I want to point out about it and we've heard from Pam one size does not fit all and so I think that's a really good phrase when you're talking about drug courts when you need a drug court when you're at high risk for recidivism when you have a high need for treatment this is kind of your last chance and it's all hands on deck it's a wonderful model and it's transformative there are drug court and problem solving court graduations where you look at the picture at the point where they were arrested and you look at graduation and it's unrecognizable and I will tell you that the judicial decision makers implement that model and do it well it's been transformative for them and a little bit to the does ATI I'm not even going to say the words does ATI disrupt or maintain the status quo I think when done well it does disrupt because it gives a voice to the person associated with the charges we're not marching you through a legal system just based upon charges so when drug courts are needed they're wonderful but it's not the only approach to take the drug court system and PM showed the full range of opportunities all the way from pre-arrest deflection through the prosecutor through post-conviction but even with that court process there are individuals that come into the court that are low risk for recidivism they have low need for treatment but they need something and I've heard people time and time again comment do we need to catch a felony to go into drug court do we have to wait until things are that bad before the court will move us into treatment rather than kind of the traditional disposition of a court case so a low risk, low need case is one commonly seen in prosecutorial diversion where there's a need for education it's more prevention based there are some light touches there and that's all the person needs if you want to help that individual and you make them do drug court for 18 months to 2 years with all the weekly court appearances treatment appearances all the things that are mandated it's really disruptive to the social determinants that are actually helping them to be successful there are also models within the court system where you don't have high risk and high need but you have one or the other so if someone's high need for treatment I think Pam mentioned the role of the court system is to make sure that the person is engaged in treatment long enough to complete successfully if you have someone that's not as high of a need for treatment, maybe a low need it's going to be more of a corrections based where you're going to look at the factors that place someone at risk for recidivism that are dynamic or changeable and that's what you want to address so drug courts are fabulous as well as all of the other problem solving courts when they're needed I would also say that when you look at developing countries it's a heavy lift my goodness even if you look at rural areas in the United States it's a heavy lift and so if you don't have everything that gives you fidelity to the model and if you don't treat person with the intervention that they need you can actually make them worse so what I would advocate for is to understand that and Pam made a great point wherever your entry is into ATI it helps communities and systems a treatment system the judicial system or justice system as well as community systems start working together so you start where you are what you can do and what you can do well you address the target population that can be effectively helped through that system collaboration and then you start building upon that to fill the gaps in that sense that we've seen that which is very interesting what you just mentioned but the thing of the everyone understands the high risk high need is the profile but it took like over 20 years in the United States to realize that so there's a lot of time in between when you go to a country where there is no prior communication between health and justice there's nothing at all this is the first time that you go into these kind of programs it is kind of a challenging to tell a judge to really or even the system itself to take a high risk high need to start with because they are not going to take that risk institutional risk of having that kind of a profile it takes so often we go to countries and say that and they say well we cannot go and implement the best model as you have seen in the U.S. after 20 years or 30 years of research sorry about that we need some time and it's kind of a yeah but that profile we've seen that a lot as well Fred there is why do you think alternative incarceration are important during the pre-trial and pre-adjudication phase so if we walk out here today at the end of the day and we see someone in handcuffs right out front you're not likely to be asking what did the police do why is that person in handcuffs you're more likely to ask what did that person do there's an assumption there that policing or a bad arrest but that that person must have done something wrong think about the notion of individuals adjudicating their case while being detained in jail so they're going to court in handcuffs often in uniforms and so when you see individuals showing up that way to adjudicate their case where presumably they are still innocent until proven guilty you have that that perception that's pretty powerful and by the way the research not only do you have that perceptual issue but the research is very clear that a short stay in pre-trial detention as opposed to being adjudicating your case from the community is more likely to result in a conviction your sentence once convicted will be longer than had you been fighting the case pre-trial from home to serve your time assuming you get an impartial sentence you're more likely to recidivate so in every way being in pre-trial detention is a bad thing and produces bad outcomes and so it's important that as we think about ATIs I didn't say alternatives this time about that I'm learning here from my fellow panelists so it's important as we think about it that we don't just automatically skip the whole jail apparatus and go straight to prisons and think about alternative dispositions for prison sentence but even as relates to jail why disrupt a person's ability to still support his or her family while they adjudicate a case disrupt their supporting the community disrupt their employment again if in most cases we're saying an individual still has a standing of being presumed innocent and so it's very important that as you think about developing and improving and expanding these alternatives that you don't just think about that prison setting so I think they matter a whole lot in the jail setting again the research is clear in terms of all the bad outcomes likely to be found guilty likely to get a longer sentence and more likely to recidivate that alone I think is power for evidence as to why alternatives in the jail place matters just as much as on the post-conviction side in that same line George if we can establish a clear concise public policy targeted at reducing reliance on confinement pre and post adjudication what do you think are some of the most common impediments to accomplishing in terms of that policy I can't believe Antonio I did it that you said a clear and concise policy statement see I think that's one of the starting points is can we articulate a clear and concise policy statement part of what leads me to say that is a British colleague Steven Pitts and I had the good fortune of working in Armenia in the U.S. Wall and unfortunately there wasn't enough money in the budget to go on site and get a feel for the jurisdiction and understand the culture understand strengths weaknesses within the process and instead they said we'll we'll send you everything you need to know well yeah so we received first we received the law and the law clearly was obviously written by committee it was written by advocates for restorative justice it was written by advocates for punishment it was written by advocates for the use of what now has become evidence based practice because they required an assessment tool of the current generation risk and needs so you had a policy statement that was not clear and concise it didn't speak specifically to what was this new state probation department supposed to be producing as an outcome so we could measure whether or not we're just repackaging or whether or not we're actually producing the desired outcome so even if you can get the concise statement there are three things that I would share with you this morning that I think are important to keep in mind for implementation first is the vision of the creator of the public policy statement frequently is not the person or persons that have to implement the policy and the vision of the creator is frequently not the vision of the implementer and so in Armenia there were some very smart people who came together to write this law and so very smart people who frankly came out of the ministry of justice and out of the prison system of Armenia who now had to take a reduced salary lose part of their retirement lose their uniform, use their recognition lose their status in life to implement something that they had no background for and had no vision for and so keep in mind if you are creating a better universe and you know that what you're doing is the right thing to do keep in mind who's going to make it happen the second would be the issue of new staff versus old staff about every decade in the United States from 1970 up to the end of that century about every 10 years we had to shift in public policy or values within the community side of things we went from quote rehabilitation in the 70s to probation departments that wanted to look like law enforcement in the 1980s right down to getting uniforms that look like law enforcement getting cars with bar lights on the top one state even went so far probation system classified as a Class A law enforcement agency you hire people at a point in time if they stay with your agency they were brought in on a set of values now 20 years lady you're saying Fred the values of the organization have changed we have a new mission and you who have been doing something for 20 years you'll have to do it differently and then Fred goes back to his staff and he says you should have heard the goofy stuff I heard this morning so keep in mind even if you write a new policy in a new direction if you bring new tools and tactics new strategies you've got to bring staff along behavior change for the people going through the system comes second behavior change of the people who are working the system and frequently that's easier done with new people than people who you're trying to retrain in that process finally expectations of implementation frequently outsiders who are trying to change the system have expectations that things need to change immediately we ought to see at least within the first year dramatic shifts in the number of people who are going to prison we ought to see dramatic shifts in the number of people re-arrested going back through the courts what have you as Michelle shared with you behavior change is a long process it takes time it is hard work it is a heavy lift it has to be very disciplined if you take the model for which there's a great deal of research and don't implement it correctly there's no reason to expect good results and so there needs to be attention so that we continue to make progress and we get pushed and we're held accountable but by the same token expectations need to have reality built into them so that we can celebrate together those accomplishments last piece I would share with you and it ties to what Fred is saying is and also Pam shared with us before it's not just about keeping people out of prison or out of jail and keeping them in the community we have people who would prefer to avoid some of the alternatives we've created in the past because it takes them longer to satisfy their legal requirements that if I just did time in the 1980s there were a lot of people who said just give me my sentence I'll do my time I don't want probation because I'll have all of the rules that Pam talked about and I'll get trapped in those rules and a year later you'll still make me do all of the sentence that I would have done before so I'll just do it up front those conditions need to be tailored to what puts the person at risk needs to take into consideration what strengths the person brings to the system that takes advantage of the healthy things in the person's life but also honestly recognizes the unhealthy things we used to think we just need to keep everybody close to their family well no we don't there are some families that are pretty darn unhealthy and keeping that person connected to them is probably a risk factor and so we need to be very smart about how we do that case management and how we apply that those kinds of knowledges what we don't want to do as Fred says is just restructure all of that confinement to the community we want to get people to be able to focus on the behavior change that allows them to live their life in the community independent of the system and not coming back to the system last anecdote I got to share with you because we do things with the best of intentions we work a systems project working on reducing the incarceration of women offenders in Cook County, Illinois with a great systems group prosecutors and judges and probation and all kinds of good folks at the table and I was going in for a visit and I had been told that one of the judges had created a parenting class and was requiring women who had children to go to this parenting class as a condition of probation and and the probation department was having real problems with this so as I'm visiting with a judge and I said I understand you have a new parenting class and she said yes we do do you have time to go take a look at it and I said well I don't this trip but maybe in the future and I said by the way do you make that a condition of probation and she says yes I do and I said so if a woman doesn't show up for parenting classes is that a violation of her probation agreement well yes it is would you expect the probation department to file a revocation report yes would you consider returning her to jail well yes I would now there's child abuse in the original charge there's no indication that this is a bad parent and like me we could all use improved parenting skills but so I said just a hypothetical so what if she had a codependent and the codependent happened to be a man okay and the man happened to be the father of those children she said okay I said do you she said stop I see where you're going with this or you go any further I'll hold you in contempt of court and she said so creating these conditions could mean that we would be incarcerating more women rather than seeing fewer women that ceased to be a probation requirement that day so we need to be even when we think we're doing what are those unintended consequences well that was even the anecdote itself was very clear and concise thank you not concise well the last thing you mentioned with the anecdote it has to do with with training as well and resources and how you train those resources and I'm very glad that you highlighted those two elements in the beginning about rotation or people changing and that is I mean any of you and you mentioned case management I want to ask you a question about case management now Michelle but there is one of the things that we've been seeing country after country is and even ourselves I mean our own institutions is the rotation of people people you train people they really know what they're doing and then three months later one year later then these people move to another place and you have new people you didn't train these people and they do the best they could at one point one time I talked to a gypsy justice and said well why don't you keep the same person for three years in this particular pilot and he said well if I do that you know I will be punishing this judge because then that judge will not be able to go up in the so it's kind of any any comments on that that you've had and on that kind of institutional the capacity obstacle in terms of rotation or the turnover so I worked for many years in city government in New York City Deputy Commissioner of Department of Correction Director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice and other things and one of the things I think you have to think about is you build structures and how do you incentivize what you want and so how do you avoid the notion of someone being punished for doing a good job by moving them on to something else or keeping them there because they're doing a good job you have to think it through as an example when I worked in NYPD New York City Police Department the police commissioner there was very focused on building community affairs and building police community relations and I sort of said have you ever given someone a gold shield a detective shield for doing great work around community relations because I know that everyone who gets a detective shield a gold shield which is every cop's desire you know if you had a lot of arrest particularly felony arrest in New York City there was a clear route to that gold shield again the thing that suggested you are doing a great job but if you want to go into community affairs and you want to build it there was no route to a gold shield so think about what you've incentivized you've incentivized the notion of go out and make felony arrest all the time but if you want to spend your time as a youth officer working on community affairs in terms of working with the community to build that relationship and that trust there was no route to a gold shield so there unintentionally maybe but look at the incentive structure you've built and so I would urge you all to think about how do you in every aspect of your system how do you reward promotions how do you reward merit and pay increases how do you incentivize good training all throughout those things you know we kind of take them as secondary we're so focused on you know these other outcomes we don't think about the basic implementation things which is the training the incentives around promotions what do you get rewarded for what do you get demerit for those are the kind of things that you have to really spend a lot of intentional effort focused on it doesn't come easily and naturally and then you're trying to retrofit it after the fact but that's a good example by the way I was able to convince that commissioner police commissioner to begin rewarding gold detective shields to police officers who were focused on community affairs and youth services but it was very important that he had this wonderful institution NYPD with lots of smart people just hadn't thought it through so that's an example I think how you have to push institutions and constantly ask yourselves and your systems and your institutions are we incentivizing and prioritizing all the things we really want do we take our mission and ensure that it's infiltrated through all aspects of operations thanks so much I'm going to ask the last question and then we go to any questions that are on the floor these you mentioned yours about the case management and Pam dedicated some time in her presentation about case management we've done in CECARO we've just did seven six country evaluations on process evaluation how they're implementing some of these alternatives with the cooperation of IC Arnold from Center for Co-innovation in New York one of the things that you can highlight across countries when they implement a model is the lack or weak link of how do you follow the whole process as a case when you talk to a judge case management is one thing then that name again back to the names case management means many other things from the other end of social integration etc Michelle what do you think the role of case management is in the whole concept of ATI and the next panel gets to decide what ATI now stands for we are not using alternatives to incarceration well when we consider dispositions of legal cases you need a lot of information so we keep talking about you need to know who's in front of you right to Arraignment Day I can tell you there were lots and lots of complaints and you call it the name and you advise or charges against you and maximum fines and penalties and review rights but at that point in time when I made my first judicial decision I didn't really know what I needed to know about that individual does this individual do justice as usual or does this individual need something different so case management plays a lot of roles Pam did a great job of talking about it there are materials in your folders so I'm just going to pull out some examples of case management without trying to answer everything but if you have case management in your court it allows you to get some clinical information some screening do we need to spend time with this individual and learn more about them what do we need to know a full blown assessment what is there a substance use disorder what are the primary substances what are the implications of that how severe is a substance use disorder what is the ASAM level of care that is huge and I think we heard a conversation about are we putting people in residential treatment and that's kind of another form of keeping them away from society I'll tell you as a mom a substance use disorder I would want to gently hand my child over to a treatment provider have them encircled in bubble wrap I would want them to promise that nothing bad will happen until they're all better and I can go ahead and parent them at home when you're on the bench the community is asking you please keep this person safe and keep us safe from any of the activity that we don't want to have happen so we can't use that as our default reaction there's not enough treatment we don't pay for it very well if you're uninsured or have medicaid there's no financial way of sustaining that and for many of the individuals coming into the justice system it's just not the right level of care so the case management can help share that information with the justice system make sure the person has proper treatment monitor their progress but it's not all about treatment it's about the social determinants that promote and sustain recovery we talked about maybe initially being with your family is not such a good idea and it's challenging to find good housing we have lack of treatment we have lack of housing we have transportation challenges a number of individuals don't have full education they may have limited employment opportunities and if we have a post-conviction model now they are settled with all the collateral consequences that go along with that so case managers understand how to navigate the legal system they understand the information the legal system needs sometimes we have a little bit of treatment that we provide and the treatment providers love to give a really long narrative of what you would expect to hand off to another treatment provider so they fully understand the case you give all of those details to a judge as smart as judges are as well meaning as judges are they don't know what to do with that information but the judge does know that the law requires me to make these five findings of fact and depending on which way those facts go I have perhaps some expansive but perhaps some really limited options of what I'm even allowed to do even if I feel that I want to do the right thing so case management helps translate information between treatment into the justice system between the community and the justice system and not only do they translate the information but they can serve as a resource to make sure that information is used appropriately in a way that advocates for the client so if there is a relatively minor program violation the knee jerk reaction should not be jail and so they are the ones that are equipped with the information and the resources to have a clinically and therapeutically appropriate response to whatever the deviation is there are all kinds of theories about that but I wanted to just give you some examples that are touching upon the themes that were developed case management is much more than that and when you hear the term case management in a court it's probably what probation is doing are the fines and costs and fees all paid are you showing up for your probation appointments are you doing clean drops okay that's what probation departments initially look at some of them are getting more into this other model but not always and we can't make that assumption if you look at case management from a treatment perspective many of them will say we do case management they're primarily looking at within their organization what is the appropriate level of care how is my client progressing through this treatment level of care and do we need to adjust it upward downward or do we need to have other services on board if the patient, if the client does not show up for treatment today they're probably not going to find a ride next Tuesday right and so this is where case management makes sure that none of this falls to the cracks they keep the systems engaged with one another and sometimes if you have a problem solving court the court can help do that it's a pretty robust model for these other models you may not have the point in person that's making sure that everyone is on tap and I think PMU is a word accountable and that's exactly what happens you have someone tying all this together but also note that research has shown it makes a difference PM gave some data from TASC it is a best practice standard the TASC model specifically is cited for adult drug courts and SAMHSA has shown that this kind of specialized case management that we're describing here is a promising practice for both mental health and substance use disorder thank you so much we will need days and days to talk about all these topics I know we have five more minutes before closing of two minutes I was going to open the floor to either if we can get like one question and then do we have a second just to say one word of closing just one word each of the panels or very one word message a strong message there you go and there's caffeine that we are standing between everyone and their caffeine and we won't even touch that addiction there's a question over there what we've really focused on what we're capable of here but in exploring the approaches to alternatives abroad it seems to me that the wise exercise of discretion police prosecutor judge at an early stage in the proceeding is so critical to at least get more people out of this pre-trial detention let alone going on to serving the sentence that's imposed but in societies where all those actors in the system are suspected of and perhaps even appropriately suspected of being corrupt where even good people are afraid to exercise discretion otherwise discretion will be assumed to be a corrupt release or diversion of a person out of the system what do we do about that most fundamental barrier to being able to move in this direction at all take that Frank so I mean I think a part of it is how do you sort of get beyond the punishment lens of justice systems in most places I was overseeing a project at Vera called reimagining prison and we realized it was very difficult for a bunch of adults to get around we had all these round table discussions and we wanted to kind of do blue sky thinking around how you reimagine it was interesting but most of us were so baked into this system as we know it we really weren't reimagining we were sort of tinkering at the edge and it took some doing and someone I'll never forget from one of the focus groups said you know we should probably just get a bunch of 8 to 10 year olds in a room and have them think about what you should do for individuals who you feel sort of broke with the norms of community and they without all of the trappings of this punitive system would probably do a better job of building from scratch what a radically different approach would be and so I say that not in just in reality I think one way you kind of get beyond all of the troubles and impediments of the current system including corruption is to go outside that as you think about what an alternative approach might look like and it may be that it's the youth that can kind of do a better job of building from scratch this different approach any comment on closing as well yeah um brief brief brief I want to shift that comment a little bit and give an observation I will use law enforcement as a way to show just the lack of system capacity in country so you can imagine treatment and levels of treatment lack of capacity but I want to use a law enforcement example because I think there are some good takeaways in terms of just starting where systems and countries and people are right so we're traveling and we're talking about alternative incarceration the opportunity for pre-arrest and certainly corruption was one of the challenges but then we looked at even why is use of resources we've talked a lot about how individuals benefit from alternatives to incarceration the systems benefit too so we were in a country and we were divided invited to a meeting and there were a lot of cases that were filed in the courts and being dismissed and that was a challenge for public safety and justice and law enforcement and so they were having a meeting to kind of walk through this we learned that the law enforcement officers are not paid there's high turnover by the time you have a case involving law enforcement they're not working there anymore they don't have a way to be paid and they're expected to put on their uniform and carry a gun and get on the bus with the people that they are in the community with to get to court and so it's not surprising that they don't often show up there were also cases being dismissed because the evidence wasn't fully developed by law and they decided that you would no longer need a warrant to gather evidence and now that the crisis has subsided the warrants are now required but for the past 14 years and we talked about high turnover for the past 14 years you didn't have to go get a warrant and dot the i's and cross the t's for evidence and so the burden for law enforcement to prepare the court files in a way that would be appropriate for the justice system was huge when you look at alternatives to incarceration especially as early in the system as possible if you have someone with a nonviolent crime they're not a danger to the community and they need treatment we can have a better use of resources by letting law enforcement and courts focus on beheadings and some of the really violent crimes that they have again meeting the country where they are and realizing that we alternatives to incarceration can actually promote better and more effective use of the limited resources again meeting the countries right where they are briefly briefly content without context equals chaos content plus context can equal creativity because no one size fits all what you've got to look at in each of those individual countries is is there any credibility any place within society and how do you then reinvent or restructure or invite people to the process that by their presence they give some hope of credibility to what you then begin to build just that question is the question in many ways and we are sick when we go to countries and deal with you know, attention to incarceration that is a big issue and I don't want to be simplistic but in the opening remarks of Joel Samuels he said we are about public transformation and I think this is a cultural transformation and the very simple start point that we have is just half you know, cultures and sectors that do not normally talk together, talked for the first time and just talk the same language and have justice talking health and health talking justice that is something that we started it takes a long time, it takes forever as you all know but that is even simplistically but that is the answer that I would give to that and I think we have no more time I just wanted to ask for a big round of applause for these wonderful three panelists thank you so much thanks for the opportunity we will have a brief coffee break and reassemble here in about 15 minutes so please be mindful of time thank you very much you want to check the seat? sure hi everybody okay now the mic is on I am the government affairs director at the Vera Institute of Justice and welcome back and we are ready to go with our second panel we are going to be talking about looking at alternatives to incarceration at each stage of the criminal justice process I know the last panel talked about a different word we are going to stick with that word for purposes of this panel so I am going to turn it over to our panelists to start their presentations and we are going to start first with Janine Buck-Willison who is a senior research fellow at the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute great thank you so much and I am going to kick off the panel by providing a high level overview of the array of alternatives to incarceration that are used across the US and across key criminal justice programs so taking a very broad approach to this, looking at decision point spanning arrests through to post disposition and I will do that by briefly highlighting the various decision points and opportunities at which to appropriately use an alternative to incarceration highlighting some examples of common ATIs as well as sharing some examples of innovative alternatives to investigations implemented by selected communities in the United States under the auspices of the MacArthur Foundation's Innovation Fund which is an initiative that seeds criminal justice innovation and reform specifically measures designed to reduce the over reliance on jail through small implementation grants and Urban is actually administering the Innovation Fund which is part of the reason that I am highlighting some of the work in these and make sure we define what we mean by alternatives to incarceration. I'm defining this very broadly today. I think that's consistent with the panel in the symposium to really mean or discuss any option or alternative to custodial time so the use of jail, prison and again taking this very broad approach looking at where there are options to avoid the use of incarceration at arrest all the way through to post disposition and I think we'll be considering for whom we're using appropriately alternatives to incarceration so I'll highlight a few different mechanisms I think it's also here just important to highlight a couple things in terms of understanding what alternatives to incarceration are designed to advance they're designed to advance a number of different objectives from increasing system efficiency to reducing system costs as well as I think promoting equity in the system we know that in this country we tend to hold people pre-trial based on their economic status or ability to pay alternatives to incarceration can be one way to try and reduce the reliance on fees and fines as well as enhance outcomes for individuals by providing greater flexibility for some criminal justice actors in terms of being able to respond accordingly to the particulars of the incident and the individual that's involved in it here is just meant to really convey in a very simple way reflect the complexity the many stages and many variations of alternatives to incarceration across the justice system and so thinking about the first point of decision making we have arrest and pre-booking and really this is thinking about highlighting alternatives to incarceration really alternatives to custodial arrest so the opportunity to divert somebody at arrest the criminal justice system entirely or from pre-trial confinement we have common mechanisms you may be aware of these that range from police being able to issue a warning so they may have contact with somebody and it doesn't go any farther than a warning to issuing a citation or a summons in which they're actually issuing a written citation with a court date for someone to appear and really here the key actor in the justice system authority is really often law enforcement here and depending on the nature of what's going on with the individual there's also the opportunity for police to for example if a person is in crisis for police to divert from jail or an emergency room to a crisis stabilization unit where an individual could be assessed and receive medical assistance as well as behavioral assistance and assistance you may be familiar there are a number of other mechanisms and approaches at this particular stage one that's received a lot of attention is the Seattle's law enforcement assisted diversion program which I believe Angela is going to be talking a little bit about a little bit later and that really was the first pre-booking intervention in the United States it targeted individuals with low level drug abuse and also prostitution charges and so there instead of being booked and a custodial arrest time in jail an officer could actually see if they qualified for diversion if they did divert that individual to a case manager who would do an assessment and link that individual to services and depending on the position of the prosecutor they could also could truly be a diversion from further entrance into the justice system diversion from further entrance into the justice system diversion. I also wanted to draw attention to Summit County, Ohio as a situation or a site with some innovation so lead targets of individuals that have particular needs including drug offenders. Summit County actually was used or developed its felony summons program to reduce the jail population and the jail was increasingly overcrowded one strategy that they had already taken prior to becoming an innovation fund site was to not presume that misdemeanor offenses would be taken into custody that left them with a jail population that was 70% of their pre-trial jail population were facing felony charges so with an overcrowding situation in hand and budget cuts they could have a felony summons program in which low level individuals facing low level felony charges could be diverted not taken into custody and into jail and remain in the community. They had participation from 43% of the arresting agencies in the county there during it's actually was a 16 month period of time that we were looking at not for. They issued 749 felony summons that was upwards of 70% of those individuals stayed in the community without an incident came back to court for the processing of their case which means that about 509 individuals who would have spent a considerable amount of time in the local jail actually were able to remain in the community, maintain jobs, maintain housing and other critical structures that we know are important to their success in the community. In terms of pre-trial post-charging decision making here we have the opportunity to avoid jail during the adjudication process and possibly defer prosecution as well through common mechanisms like electronic monitoring which provides an element of accountability for someone who's facing a charge as well as pre-trial supervision which is an even provides a little bit more accountability in terms of linking people to some supervision and possibly notification, holistic defense models and then specialty courts which have been studied quite a bit, things like drug courts, mental health courts, veterans courts. Here I just wanted to highlight two innovative approaches in terms of Tulsa County and Deschutes County, Oregon and what they're doing around this. Tulsa County is interesting and relatively somewhat unique in terms of using a two-way text message system up trust in order to reduce the rates there. They knew that again they had a number of people who were being held pre-trial as a result of a failure to appear using resources, these people could probably be productively in the community so they implemented through the leadership of the public defender there a two-way text messaging app as well as part of their holistic defense model which features a social worker. What it does is it sends out notifications to people who have upcoming court dates but it also allows for individuals to interact with the public defender's office and the social worker there to indicate if they have their need of assistance so it's really designed to remove barriers to somebody interacting with the system in a productive way. So far launched in late February there were reaching about 3700 senior clients on their caseload. The initial appearance rate is quite high which suggests that when people are provided with the additional assistance that they need in order to get to court that they will get to court and be there and so again there individuals who may have spent a fair amount of time pre-trial in their jail are actually able to stay in the community and some of the common requests so far including for assistance include rides, child care and just clarification when they have multiple court dates because they have multiple cases and just making sure they understand which one they're showing up for so that they don't miss one. And another innovative approach is a program that Deschutes County, Oregon collaboratively designed it's the clean slate program for again individuals who are facing low level drug charges, possession of a control and they found there that looking at data, it was a data driven process but there they found that the target packetation was defined after analysis indicated that approximately 400 people a year were being arrested annually on possession of controlled substance charges and nearly 50% were recidivating or coming back into the system so they felt like they needed to do something a little different. And this particular program was designed from jail time as well as a true diversion from processing in the system as a three tiered strategy that was led by the prosecutor again the prosecutor brought together county law enforcement as well as the county behavioral health and primary care providers to design this program. It provides again people who are whose primary issue is really drug use opportunities to link with drug use. And this is the first level allows people who are facing low level possession charges to avoid formal charges by attending an orientation, admitting to their law breaking behavior and then they can be diverted from any formal processing going forward. Level two is for people who have a really significant drug use issue and treatment need and they can have their charges compliant with treatment over a year. And then level three is for folks who may have been at level one or level two had a little bit of an issue there provides yet another opportunity for them to divert considerable time in jail by interacting with or engaging with the family drug court and successful participation there can avoid jail time altogether. And so it's hard to see but at the very bottom of this discussion, we're looking at it was only active for about five months prior to our work ending there, but they served 121 people. And for those who were diverted on level one and level two, they had upwards of 80% who were reporting. So it was actually quite suggest it was quite successful. And again, people who otherwise may be spending time in a custodial setting that don't need to be. So there's a number of opportunities here and probably those that you may be much more familiar with to employ dispositional alternatives and sentencing options to confinement things like using. So there's the opportunity to be engaged in services through something like specialty courts as well as intensive treatment programs. Another program I would highlight that is a true alternative to incarceration is the Tulsa's women in recovery program who are convicted of low level felony charges and would be facing significant time in state prison. But that is diverted for a period of time, depending on their successful interaction with and completion of services through an intensive community based case management program. And then you have other options like reentry programs and aftercare as well as graduate sanctions that you may be able to apply to prison. And then there's the electronic monitoring and again those can be used toward the back end for people who may have served a period of time in confinement or out in the community but may have misbehaved and it's a way to give them a continuum of options before sending them perhaps back to prison. So a way to avoid incarceration there. And then there's the process of incarceration across key decision making points. I would say though that, you know, the discussion around alternatives to incarceration are also part of a larger conversation that we're having these days really regarding the negative consequences of any justice involvement but also thinking about what it means for people who are justice involved to make sure we have I think very specific mechanisms for alternatives to incarceration that there is a movement in many communities to think about changes to penalties that require significant or any kind of incarceration time and also thinking about who to charge or rather to charge somebody so we know that the many communities are rethinking that and while I haven't touched on that I want to make sure that I acknowledge that as well. And research that we're having. So I would say that what I would say and what that importantly suggests that alternatives to incarceration like LEED and specialty courts and drug courts have extensive research that they are more effective than incarceration. But yet we must be mindful that there are also potentially unintended consequences in terms of net widening sometimes when we develop a new ushering people unintentionally deeper into the system. And again, I thank you for the opportunity to highlight a couple innovative and promising strategies that communities are testing, the ones that I mentioned. I think that part of what those underscore very quickly is just the need for collaboration across and a multidisciplinary approach. Each of the innovations that I highlighted were really the result of a multi-agency approach in people coming together to troubleshoot in their community to think about alternatives to incarceration. Great. Thanks so much, Janine. And that was an information-packed presentation. We're going to get more into some of the substance during the Q&A portion. So also, to the audience, get your questions ready. Next up is Angela Hawken. She's the director of the Litmus program and a professor of public policy at the Morone Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Angela? Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to be here today. So at New York University, I also direct Beta Hub, which is an action research center. And I'll be talking about some of the work that we're doing here today. As part of that, I also direct New York University's opioid collaborative, which is really focused on working with primarily police and prosecutors on diversion strategies for people who are opioid-involved. Just a plug for federal funding on that line. It's amazing when federal funding is available, how creative people are willing to be. This is funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and we have sites across the country who are clamoring to test alternatives to incarceration through that solicitation. So that's a plug for more resources, inspire more action. The work I want to do is primarily under our Beta Gov initiative, which is really kind of rapidly learning what's working and what isn't working with jurisdictions across the country. And I want to just acknowledge the practitioners who have been amazing to let us into their jurisdictions and learn with them and also fail with them. We just finished a beautiful fail-forward study with Seattle Police Department. And for those of you who don't follow us, our newsletter pushes out these studies very quickly to share both what's working and, most importantly, also what is not working. I'll briefly mention some of the work in our domestic portfolio, but then pivot to some of the work we're doing in international settings. Our team is really interested in those points within the criminal justice system that provide opportunities for doing something differently. We're very interested in the heavy utilizers, the people who are cycling in and out of prisons and jails and our emergency departments, looking for opportunities for what we call in-reach, often the people who are most vulnerable never see a service provider. They just don't make it to that door. So bringing the service providers into the correction settings, into the community supervision settings to reach out to them and help to drag them to feel more comfortable about entering their institutions to begin with. Often there's a fear of the unknown, and we can take that fear away. One of our more intense programs we're running right now is in Illinois called Graduated Reintegration Illinois. And I'm a recovering economist. What I noticed is that the resource allocation system is really messed up when it comes to corrections. We spend a lot of money on you today if you're in custody, but as soon as you walk free in the community, we spend next to nothing on you. And then expect you to succeed. And when you don't, just get really mad at you rather than mad at our system. So prison release for a lot of people and most people in the United States is $20 in a bus ticket. And for people who have been locked down for a really long time, $20 in a bus ticket just doesn't cut it. So what we managed to get the state of Illinois to do, which is quite remarkable, was to allow us to try something radically different in terms of resource allocation. So rather than release somebody with $20 in a bus ticket on release day, they allowed us to start off with a men's facility, receive these incarcerated individuals six months prior to their release date. So they were still in status of prisoner. But we got to receive them in the community, but the money followed them. So what can you do when you actually have resources to help people reacclimate into the community? Powerful things can happen. So stay tuned on that project. We've been really interested in the role of new technology and we do lots of rapid cycle testing around the role of new technology. This is often focused on staff, so we do this with law enforcement or corrections officers. How do you interact when you're encountering somebody who's in substance use crisis or mental health crisis? What are the appropriate interactions to have? And then also for our participants, how do you ready people, for example, transitioning to a treatment provider in the community? If they've been down for a long time, they can experience that virtually. They can go visit their treatment provider and that really lays the concerns of the unknown and helps get people into the front door. This is our juvenile life of population. Can you imagine someone who went into corrections as a juvenile, right? These are 16, 17-year-olds coming out as 50-year-olds while being able to experience the world virtually prior to actually doing it, made for a lot of reassurance along the way. You can do job training programs. People can learn how to go to the bank or shop at a supermarket. Buying cereal is really complicated if you've been down for a long time. You just aren't used to exercising your choice muscle. Rapid cycle testing, we heard before this idea of sending messages, getting people to show up, not just for court appearances or probation appearances, but also for service situations. And we've been doing a lot of this with people who are unhoused, as well as encouraging people to take their medication. You can really ratchet up medication adherence with antipsychotics even, with those small nudges. We have a body of work in Ohio on looking at alternatives to incarceration. And I wanna give a shout out to Fred's comment earlier on, are these meaningful alternatives, or are these just a different way of getting people trapped up in the system? What's been interesting about this work, not only are we keeping data on outcomes, we're keeping data on the perspectives of the participants. And it's fascinating under the umbrella of fairness to really hear from them about how they feel about these alternatives to incarceration. And I don't wanna blow our research study, but you'd be surprised to find out which one of these lists was considered the most awful. It's not what you think it is. I wanna pivot to our international portfolio. This used to be one of my favorite projects until we had a murder on our team. We were doing crime prevention through environmental design in Mexico. And the issue with the community we were working with, I love this project, because of how collaborative it was. It involves the federal government, the mayor of the city in Iroboata, Mexico, as well as the private sector that was helping with data analytics. And they really approached us in a very problem-driven way. The best way to avoid incarceration is for there not to be a criminal offense in the beginning. So they noticed that the challenge in that community was an increase in business robberies. These were, think, 7-Eleven. It's 7-Eleven, right? I'm so foreign right now. And a lot of these crimes were involving weapons. So these were quite serious. And it was a big issue for economic development for the town. It was a priority for the mayor. And we stepped in and started just understanding the nature of these criminal offenses in a more detailed way. And started to notice the stores that were victimized often had many characteristics in common. They were kind of visual obstruction. So all the beer commercials and the cigarette commercials were really obscuring visibility. There was lots of litter, lots of graffiti, and alleyways were a huge predictor. So the crime prevention through environmental design was really just engaging with the business owners, getting police to think of their roles differently, engaging with the community, being in and out of those stores, helping those stores understand how they themselves could avoid victimization. So look at this tiny intervention. It's called line of sight. Around all they had to do was take away those cigarette ads that were in the way of the cashier, direct line of sight. We stole this from what we were learning in another site of ours in Canada. And if you can just create more visibility, you create fewer victims. Well, fewer victims, fewer crimes happening, and less incarceration. That project, unfortunately, has had a bit of a substantial setback. The person who was running our data intelligence was murdered. And our primary person had to be reallocated for safety reasons for a temporary. We're about to restart and reengage with that project. So we are not going to be kept down for long. In Lagos, Nigeria, we were working in maximum security prison in Lagos. And if you've been to maximum security prison in the United States, you can know how horrible they can be. It's really, even in the US, it's often like walking into a Dickens novel. No human, they talk about themes of humanity. You cannot believe what goes on behind bars. It's much worse in some very resource-strained countries. And in Lagos, what we were really interested in was just this idea of, can we get programming in custody settings to help prevent recidivism on the return? Also to really reinforce the nature of themes of humanity in custody settings. But also in Lagos, and this is true in the United States too, people go missing. People go into custody and get lost. And I was actually in a big well-functioning state in the US recently where someone had just gotten lost in a jail for a very long time. Well, this happens more so in international settings. So the goal was, in some developing countries, the goal was, could we just start to breed an appreciation for data? A very great pushback to corruption is the transparency that comes with data being collected around a situation. So if anybody's on an anti-corruption campaign, cannot impress upon you more. It's not fun-sounding. It's not sexy. But data can be your best friend. So we worked with a nonprofit called the Joy Bringers Program. And we just really started programming in custody and really learned very quickly how difficult it was to do more traditional research in that sort of setting. And we'd worked in international settings, so it wasn't surprising to us. But there was really no data infrastructure. We had to put data infrastructure into place. And there was constant churn, which made it really difficult to keep participation going in the programming that we were offering. We really had to get staff to rethink what they were doing. But it also really gave us a strong sense of the opportunities here. The staff were really willing to let us come in. They were actually really enthusiastic for it. There was like the thirst to do the right thing and to demonstrate that they were doing the right thing. And that enthusiasm, I think, has become quite infectious. We did, in the meantime, find nice improvements and at least self-reported outcomes from our program participants. But of course, we'd love to get that into harder data on the reentry experiences. Another program I'd like to plug very quickly, and I'm going to be mindful of time, so I only have a few more minutes, is, and this is something I'm really desperately trying to bring into the United States. But it's a little complicated in some of the settings we work. Some of you might be familiar with this. They're called Situation Tables in Canada. And we're about to launch. We're working with several Situation Tables in Canada. But we're about to launch the first randomized control trial test of Situation Tables in Barry, Canada. And really what a Situation Table is, it's a strategic alliance of all of the kinds of organizations you'd think they would have to work together to really improve the outcomes of someone who is in crisis. So these are really short-term but immediate responses for people who are at acute critical need right now. So the target population for a Situation Table is these kind of frequent users of the system. They're in and out of multiple government systems all the time. They meet the definition of an acutely elevated risk, imminent harm to self or others. And the level of need is so high that the people at the Situation Table deem it appropriate to share information on that individual. And that's the key that makes this complicated, is the sharing of this person's personal information. So how it works really is they have weekly meetings and up to 32 agencies can come together without identifying the person just as a case. No one even knows if it's a male or a female necessarily. They discuss the specific need of this individual. And together as a team they decide whether this elevates to dire need that justifies the sharing of that information. If that determination is made only the need to know agency personnel are involved in that case, they open the veil and know who it is. And within 24 hours they're swooping in with really an emergency response that's collaborative. In our sites where we're working 95% of the cases coming to the Situation Table are referred by police. And 90% of the cases are responded to by public health. So this really is a way for them to redirect traffic in terms of individuals experiencing crisis in the community. We really have seen a taste for trying to rethink how we do both corrections and community supervision. This is a group of what we call them, Precademics. We have 400 people across the US right now working with us to try something differently. And we're learning so much along the way and we'll push out that information to all of you that are interested. And very importantly, we've been learning again how to fail forward because so much of what we're doing just isn't working. Whether it's a big idea or a small idea, we're taking it on and trying to move the dial. Thank you. Thanks so much, Angela. And a little bit later during our discussion, I want to talk more with both you and the other panelists about you mentioned what your center does is look at what works and what doesn't. So I want to talk more about both best practices and also evidence about what is working most effectively and perhaps decision points that are least effective. But we're going to turn now to our third panelist, Jamie Jia Li. She is the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer in the Justice Section Division for Operations at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Thanks, Hain. As she mentioned, my name is Jamie Li. I work at the UN of DC in Vienna, Austria, where we focus on criminal justice reform. And we help member states of the United Nations with a focus on developing countries and post-conflict countries on achieving criminal justice reform. And today, I want to share with you some of the good practices and also some promising practices that can have a good impact on these countries, if done right, with appropriate safeguards. So my office, Justice Section, we work on three distinct levels. One is normative development, where we develop standards, the standard minimum rules that should be followed when a country is undergoing criminal justice reform. And in the area of alternative still imprisonment, that applicable rule is the Tokyo rules, the United Nations standard minimum rules and non-custodial measures. And this is the international community's agreement on what should be the bare minimum when you're trying to do alternative still imprisonment. This was adopted unanimously in 1990. And our office has been widely implementing and all around the world. And that rule had been supplemented in 2006 through the Bangkok rules, which is the standard minimum rules for non-custodial measures for women offenders and suspects. And we also have the basic principles on the restorative justice matters in criminal matters, which governs the use of restorative justice in the criminal justice system. That's the normative level. And this is supplemented by our section's development of technical guidance materials, where we develop publications and training curriculums that helps criminal justice professionals around the world in implementing those rules, because where we unpack the minimum rules that are contained in the normative development and try to make it more understandable and accessible by countries. And the third level is technical assistance, where we use both normative guidance materials and technical assistance materials to actually provide concrete and tangible help to the countries by conducting legislative review or capacity building exercises, training workshops, et cetera. That's our office. And today I would like to share with me first go through the different stages of the criminal justice process to share the different good practices. First in the pretrial stage, so in England and Wales, at the pretrial stage, it's really important that the imprisonment is used as a last resort, because suspects should be presumed innocent under international law. And pretrial, any precondition measure that imposes an obligation on the offense or the accused, the consent is required. So that's the most important thing to remember when you're using non-custodial measures at the pretrial stage. And one good practice that I would like to mention is the practice of the police bail or pre-charge bail that's used extensively in England and Wales. In England and Wales, at the time of arrest, the law enforcement officers have the power to release them without being charged or with detaining them and also impose a certain condition, such as remating at a certain address or not contacting certain people, forfeiting their passports or other identity documents and reporting regularly to the police station. And if these conditions are not met, they can, of course, be arrested again. But practice shows that it is a good practice because it reduces unnecessary pretrial detention by a lot. In one year, the available statistics show that in one year, there was a reduction of 86% in RSDs being held in pretrial detention through this measure of police bail. But it's very important that police bail not be used in an indefinite period of time because there is the risk of the accused being held in legal limbo for months or even years. And to combat this unintended consequence, two years ago in April 2017, England and Wales, they imposed a 28-day limit on the pre-charge bail so that they're not just waiting forever and not really moving on with their lives. So this really goes to show that any alternative to imprisonment, it's really not a one-size-fits-all. It must be applied taking care, taking the nature and gravity of the offense in question. And it also can't be used for every offense, every accused. For instance, if the offender of the accused is accused of a severe domestic violence, obviously returning them to their domestic home is not a good idea. Second good practice is the use of non-monetary bail, also called personal cognizance in many countries. In many countries and through numerous studies, it's been shown just as effective as monetary bail. For example, in Costa Rica, legislation had always included the possibility of being released on personal cognizance during the pretrial states for many decades. But if you were to undergo a personal cognizance, in exchange of being released, the accused has to appear in court on a certain day, on a regular basis, stay in a specific area, report to fulfill certain other conditions that have been imposed on an individual basis. And also, the court obtains contact details of not only the offender but a close family member to act as a trustee to make sure that they show up to the police station or the court on designated dates. And one thing to note about this personal cognizance scheme in Costa Rica is that failure to show up in court doesn't automatically lead to imprisonment. The second chance is usually given, because there may be some situations where you just couldn't make it to the court that there were other emergencies. So if you were to automatically send them to imprisonment for breaking a small, minor condition that leads to the problem of net widening, which the previous panelists had mentioned about the child care of the parenting class. But this was in the box. However, it was not being used very much across the country. And a team of researchers looked into why that was the case. And apparently, 80% of the judges had responded to a survey that they were afraid that the suspect would just abscond and not show up. But this wasn't based on research or evaluation of what actually happened. It was just in their minds. They just didn't think that it would work. But according to a study done over a six-year period, there was no difference between those who were released a monetary bail to non-monetary bail in the courts of first and second instances. The things were a little different in the third instances, because third instance courts are usually not distributed all over the country. It's usually in one, like the main part of that province or state or area. So it was a little harder to implement. But in the courts of first and second instances, it is proven just as effective as monetary bail. So the key lesson here is that courts do need a comprehensive access to information about the offender to know what happened that led to the commission of the crime or what would help this offender be more prone to follow the conditions imposed and meet the objectives of non-custodial measures at pretrial stage. Another good practice at pretrial stage is the use of house arrest for women with caretaking responsibilities. The repercussions of imprisonment for women are much harsher than it is for men. This has been well documented. And although women make up a very small minority in the overall prison population all over the world, it's increasing at a faster rate than that of men. But the problem is women who come into conflict with the law are often coming from a history of victimization and substance abuse problems and mental health issues. The previous panelist has documented that well. And they often also have caretaking responsibilities of their children, of their elderly parents, or other family members who are disabled, et cetera. And they're often behind bars for very minor and nonviolent offenses. And oftentimes, prison is not a good place for them to achieve the objectives of rehabilitating or re-regaining to the society. And also, in addition to all these hardships, prison facilities are often designed with men in mind. And the services that are needed by women, such as for safety, for health care, for child care, that's often not met within the criminal justice system. And women in conflict with the law, once even after they go through imprisonment and release, they're often stigmatized and criticized for having been in contact with the criminal justice system. They have a much harder time getting jobs afterwards or being accepted by their family members, which makes rehabilitation even more difficult. So with all these extra hardships working against them and in recognition of this, in Brazil, in February 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that pregnant women and mothers of children under 13 and mothers of children and adults with disabilities who are in pre-trial detention for nonviolent offenses should await trial under house arrest, except for very exceptional circumstances. But although the measure was that could have applied to over 11,000 women, judges had ordered house arrest to only 400 women as of May 1st last year. So in over a year, they only used it for 400 women because judges made very widespread use of very exceptional cases. And this really speaks volume about the importance of raising awareness about the benefits of alternative imprisonment, because even if there is a legislative or judicial measure in place, the criminal justice system is not going to be very effective if the decision makers in the criminal justice system are not using them. So it's very important to raise awareness in both the public and within the criminal justice system to clarify the myths about using non-custodial measures and about the long and short-term benefits of using them. So similar laws are in place in Argentina and also in some countries, it can also serve as a mitigating circumstance if the woman is living in poverty or have other child caretaking responsibilities or have elder people or disabled family members. Or in Armenia, if you're pregnant at the time of sentencing, it can serve as a mitigating circumstance as well. Another good practice at the pretrial stage is a restorative justice measure called the Victim Offender Mediation. First, a little note about restorative justice. It's both a process within the conventional criminal justice system as well as a paradigm shift in criminal justice. As a process within the conventional system, it describes any process that brings victim and the offender and other effective members of the community and society together to talk about what happened and to reach a resolution on what to do about what happened. And the conventional criminal justice system usually only deals with crime by applying the law and identifying who's to blame and then administering punishments. It focuses on punishment. Denunciation, retribution, and deterrence. On the other hand, restorative justice views crime as essentially having inflected harm on the individual and the community and the society rather than just violating the law that's in place. So its focus is to repair the harm that was caused. It's a fundamentally different approach to looking at crime. And it also tends to addressing the needs of the people that are involved, not just the offenders in the society. And it's also the only measure that brings victims into play in the criminal justice system. In conventional criminal justice, victims are basically incidental to what happened, even though they're the ones that are most affected by the crime. Their role is usually limited to providing evidence or in certain jurisdictions, they can give victim impact statements, but it doesn't have a determining power in disposition of the case. Whereas in restorative justice, victims need and their role is at the center of it all. And it's the only measure in the current conventional criminal justice system around the world that really gives the voice and a stake to the victims. And for this reason, and for many other benefits of restorative justice, if used well and if used in the right context with the appropriate safeguards, can serve as a really promising practice to achieve the goals of criminal justice without really excluding anyone. And victim offender mediation, sometimes called the victim offender dialogue, reconciliation, or conferencing is another good example of this. It emerged in the 70s in North America and in Europe mostly in Scandinavian countries. And it's currently the most common form of restorative justice that exists within the criminal justice system today. It's important to note, though, that it's called mediation, but it's very fundamentally different from mediation in other areas, such as civil or commercial mediation. In victim offender mediation, the process usually starts with separate meetings with the victim and the offender to assess the suitability of the case to mediation and to ensure that the offender is willing to take on the blame, which is different from admitting guilt. And these preliminary meetings are followed by joint meetings where each party has the opportunity to describe what happened, their feelings, and how it impacted them in their lives. And then there are stories and talk about what could possibly address the harm for them or what they want to do from here on out. And after one or a series of these meetings, the parties reach an agreement, which can include material compensation, an apology, a restitution, or other services for the victim. And they reach this agreement. And if the restorative justice measure is used as a diversion from prosecution, it often goes back to the prosecutor or the judge who ordered it to inform them about what happened. And this is what they agreed to do. And instead, the offender doesn't have to go through the regular criminal justice process. And the mediation can be used at any stage of the criminal justice process, but it's most often used at the pretrial stage as a diversion from prosecution. But I also want to mention that restorative not every case is well-fit for restorative justice, especially in cases involving gender-based violence, for example, domestic violence or sexual violence. Restorative justice, use of victim offender mediation and other restorative justice measures should be applied very carefully with the appropriate safeguards really in place and at the crime of it all, at the center of it all. For domestic violence in particular, there's almost always a power imbalance between the offender and the victim. And the risk of revictimization and secondary victimization is exceptionally high. It's not something that can be observed right at the first meeting, but that has been going on for a long time. And usually, it's hard to detect at first glance. And in cases such as these, the importance of appropriate screening and risk assessment is extremely important. And this risk assessment should be done on a continual basis and not only in the beginning. Facilitators, the mediators need to be very well trained in the dynamics of power and control of the domestic violence, the history of domestic violence and intimate partner violence. And a good practice in this area is Austria. There are probation and mediation agency called Neustadt, which means a new start. In Austria, probation office handles victim offender mediation in addition to probation. And in cases involving gender-based violence, there's always a very long and careful risk assessment process to see if the case is well suited for mediation. And if it goes forward, there's always two mediators, one for the offender and one for the victim of the same gender. And the facilitators are always very well trained on intimate partner violence and sexual violence. And initial training spans over two years with practical training and ongoing mentorship as well. And as far as use of rest or justice and gender-based violence goes, this is one of the practices that we can highlight. So at the trial and sentencing stage, I want to talk about the use of suspended sentences and fines, which is very well done in Germany. The suspended sentence is a prison sentence that is not immediately put into effect, but maybe later, but delayed. So in the 70s, Germany, then West Germany, they changed their penal code and reduced the use of imprisonment by maximizing the use of fines and suspended sentences. First, prison sentences of less than one month were abolished altogether and replaced with fines. And second, a lot of petty offenses were decriminalized and made into administrative sanctions. And third, laws were changed to discourage prison sentences of less than six months by requiring courts to provide a specific reason why they're putting them into jail instead of giving suspended sentences. And a combination of these measures brought about a massive reduction in prison sentences between 1968 and 1996. There was a 70% reduction. And nowadays, prison sentences are rarely used in Germany. It only constitutes 5% of cases that are imposed by the court that comes into contact with the criminal justice system. And suspended sentences are almost always, they're always given with a precondition that you don't commit any new or the same crime. And generally accompanied by more conditions such as compensation to the victim or the charitable organization of their choice, regularly reporting to the police, avoiding contact with certain people, usually victims, and undergoing treatment and rehabilitation. Of course, if there is a new offense or if any of these conditions are seriously violated, they can always serve the original sentence that were given. And this requirement to provide an explanation for imprisonment is particularly effective not because it doesn't cost anything. It's a very simple measure that makes judges actually think about why is it that we have to give imprisonment when that actually has cost in the society and on the individual and on the family members when in fact it can be suspended and see if the person will behave afterwards. And this has been the efficiency of this measure has been demonstrated in the Kazakh stand as well. They implemented the same measure in 2001 and it has led to prison sentences from 50% of all sentences to only 42% in 2002. So it can be effective in low income countries as well. And one thing to mention here is also Germany made very good use of fines by introducing day fines, which is basically it's a proportionate amount of fine instead of an absolute amount. So what you pay as a fine is proportional to what you make. And this was used very widely in Germany and applied to more than 80% of all criminal cases. And it has showed and a lot of the studies that were done in Germany since then showed that it's there were more effective than probation and imprisonment in terms of reconviction rates. And it showed that day fines increased the rate of payment as well. Since the introduction of fine only 4% defaulted on the payment of fines because they were able to pay them they were much less than what you would have paid if it weren't for day fines. But there were also should mention that there were some studies that were done that the day fines don't work as well if you don't have a good formula in place that allows the judges to reach the same amount of fines no matter who, if it's the same nature and gravity of the offense. So that's an important thing to keep in mind if you're gonna use that measure effectively. In the interest of time I'm gonna move on to the post sentencing stage. At the post sentencing stage the objectives are a little different, right? The person has already been convicted they already are serving part of the sentence. The main objective here is for rehabilitation and reintegration in the society. And Japan has a long history of doing community based probation. Which the main part of that is the use of volunteer probation officers, VPO's who are private citizens that have regular job and they're normal people that assist the professional probation officers by being a sort of a mentor to the offender. They have official status of a part-time government employee they're not paid at all they're reimbursed for certain expenses but they often, they have the status of a part-time government official and it works like this if the probationer or parolee is first referred to the volunteer probation officer by the professional probation officer and then they meet regularly the share information, advise up and then the volunteer probation officer gives advice and makes observations on how well they're reintegrating into the system until probation is over. And it's generally, the overall objective of this program is so that the newly released offender has a way to, has someone they can rely on to reintegrate mental society because oftentimes and in many countries around the world when they are released from prison it's like a giant sign that they can't get jobs, they can't find housing, they can't, there are a lot of things they can't do or are a very, very difficult position to do that compared to a normal person and the volunteer probation officer is designated as a person who can help with that and since they're volunteers they really want that they're, they want to do this they're passionate about it, they actually have the time and the resources to help them so it's been proven very effective Japan of course is one of the safest countries in the world, I mean the chicken or the egg problem but it's been very effective in Japan. There are almost 15,000 volunteer probation officers in Japan, they help about 1100 professional probation officers and you can imagine how a cost effective it must be for Japan to have volunteers do, to do something that full time probation officers would be doing in other countries but more effectively and more efficiently. I think I'll, I have one more but let's move on and I can talk about it later also. Great, well thank you all for the overview and I think we've covered a lot of ground here and the three of you have given a wealth of examples from different jurisdictions not just within the US but around the world which is fascinating because in many respects what happens to you depends in large part on where you are arrested and where you are prosecuted both in the world and in the United States and just for context we have over 3000 counties in the United States alone and as I said in large part what happens to you will depend on whether you're arrested in say New York City versus Tulsa, Oklahoma. What the various student has found is that over the last 10 to 15 years jurisdictions in large cities in particular have been implementing justice reforms that have drastically reduced their rate of jail incarceration but at the same time in rural counties which as many people probably have heard in the United States are struggling in terms of resources, in terms of the opioid crisis but even prior to the opioid crisis they began locking up their citizens at higher and higher rates and they have huge increases in jail incarceration. So given that so much depends on the jurisdiction I wanna sort of turn to the macro level and for the three of you in both your research and in practice, have you found that there are decision points in the criminal justice system that are more effective for these interventions and also are there decision points that are less effective for intervention? I guess I'm an optimist. I don't think there is a bad intervention point. I think we have to think of them all as an opportunity. You know, in our work if I think about I call it in the 20 minute studies where within 20 minutes we can have the most impact and that's usually bringing a data scientist just to look at an issue has been with prosecution. Just showing them their own data has a very powerful effect whether it's addressing race ethnic disparities whether it's addressing issues of over incarceration just letting them understand their case loads. So that's for me that's a very powerful opportunity to intervene. I think we've been very lucky in recent history in the US that we do have prosecutors increasingly open to considering alternatives and this is in blue states, red states, purple states and all the states in between that we already are at this moment of potential change in the country when it comes to prosecution. So I think there's a lot of promise right there. I don't think it's, I don't think there's a certain stage in the criminal justice system where alternatives are the most effective because as I mentioned the objectives of using alternatives at different stages are a little bit different. And I think what's much more important than the timing of it is to impose an alternative that is well-suited for the offender or the accused. You have to make sure that it fits the nature and gravity of the offence and the personality and the background of the offender. Say for instance if it's the use of victim offender mediation it has to be someone who is willing to go through the process of meeting someone and talking about what happened. You can't just impose a mediation if they're not willing to do that. So it's important to tailor what kind of offence that you're going to do. And on the flip side of that is that it's important to have a wide range of alternatives available, right? Like you can't impose the right one if there aren't a lot of options to choose from and that this is what we see a lot of in developing countries where they have something that started like a new program that started and they started using it a lot for all different types of offenses but that's not very effective. It has to be well-tailored for the offender and also on the type of crime. And just adding to that, I think, building on both points it's important for also the stakeholders in the community to be aligned in terms of what the objective is and understanding that I think a lot has to do with implementation around that and having good buy-in around the objectives. Again, of what that looks like. So I think a lot of times you look at implementation and that's where there can be a level of when something isn't working. It's because it hasn't been fully implemented or perhaps implemented with fidelity. Everybody's not quite sure at the table around what this means or how it's supposed to work or why we're doing this. I think that's foundational. And jumping off that point in the implementation and Jamie mentioned the sort of desire to have a one size fits all approach which as you mentioned doesn't work. I think the challenge that probably you all have heard that we often hear is we lack resources to implement anything. And then when jurisdictions do want to implement something it does end up being some sort of shortcut for reform which doesn't work so well. I know obviously a lot of countries are struggling with lack of resources. Can you all speak to the resource question when jurisdictions say, hey, we'd love to implement some kind of alternatives. We just don't have the ability to invest in either the research or the resources to do that. What is your response to that? Does anyone have a response? Well, my knee is needed. No, I think in general, starting with a conversation and every place is different and even if something is done with high fidelity, importance of place can't be underestimated. We've seen the exactly the same program implemented in a jurisdiction why they come completely different outcomes and just feels different because of local players. Just being different, the culture is different, the atmosphere is different within those agencies. Often the agencies actually have more than they think they do. So often it really is an exercise in reallocating existing resources or reprioritizing from an initial budget. And that's where I think it is helpful to have one, if not an economist, but someone who thinks in terms of resource allocations and where can you find the dollars that you need to do what you really need to do? And they almost always can come up with something that's reasonable. And what they're doing is successful. They can grow it from there, right? Because there will be the savings on site. If this is working and we don't have that recidivism flow back in, eventually those savings will create their own futures. So I think that we don't have resources. We don't actually really let that be an excuse. I think someone used the language of excuse earlier, I think it was Pam, but it really is an excuse to not get started. And I think if you put them on the spot for that and recognizing that every jurisdiction can do something to make the next right step happen, they almost always come on board. And I think there's a similarity to there with thinking about data too and starting small that often communities have more data sometimes than they may realize. What they may not have is the analytic capacity to look at that and think about what is telling you. So I know we often try to work with communities to say let's start small with what you have and let's see what you have and what kinds of questions that raise about what else we need to know and how can we help you build that capacity so that you can use your data to inform what you're doing or monitor what you're doing to see if you're on the right path in achieving the outcomes and if not, why not? Availability of resources is extremely important for alternatives to imprisonment because one of the rationales for one of them, if we're using alternatives to imprisonment, it is more cost effective than imprisonment. Prison is extremely expensive and alternatives can achieve the same objectives with spending a lot less money. So it's actually a very, very attractive thing that governments should be doing. However, I think that the PR of alternatives is not very good and that's the weak link, I think, in this area of a very negative perception of letting prisoners off the hook kind of image. So raising awareness in both the public and within the criminal justice system, I think, is one of the most important things to improve the resource situation that we're seeing in pretty much all of the countries around the world. And although there are things that there are non-custodial measures that you can implement with very minimal investments, a lot of them, and to be effective and to be used appropriately, they do need certain amount of front heavy investments that the governments need to do and for that to work well, I think governments need to have the political will to set aside more funding for use of alternatives to so raising awareness about the benefits and the rationales of alternatives to imprisonment should be at the forefront of this any kind of policy surrounding alternatives. And I'm gonna agree with you there in the United States what we've seen is often it's the law enforcement agencies that are some of the biggest opponents to changing anything in terms of the way sensing schemes work, in terms of changing who's charged and who's not. And that goes, I think, to the political problem because no politician wants to sort of stand in opposition to law enforcement agencies. Before I turn it over to the audience for their questions, I wanna ask you all one last question for me, which is what is the one sort of critical piece of information or research that you feel like is lacking in this area that you would like to see? I think we've really understudied fairness more generally. I think we tend to create programs for ourselves. We think about ourselves and if I was wanting to encourage myself to behave differently, what would I do to myself? And while I'm not facing a felony conviction any time soon, most likely. And so creating programs for ourselves, even though it seems right to us, it seems appropriate, often when we, I think, leaning in and really listening to the populations we're serving well and really thinking through fairness carefully and how to have a criminal justice system that does not itself create harm. And that opens up a very big conversation and a complicated conversation. And I think the issue of fairness is given short shrift. Either of you wanna answer that question? I agree. I mean, I think that's right. And I guess also thinking about procedural as part of fairness, I guess, procedural justice too and thinking about how people, the experience of people who are walking through the system and thinking how that strikes them and thinking about making sure that even these alternatives are employed fairly but consistently and that people understand that. I think there is a lot that we take for granted. Sometimes you hear people who are going through the system even with something like a court notification, the perception can be sometimes from stakeholders that it's just someone's recalcitrant and really there's just isn't good information about how this process works or what's expected of them and when you make that clear or make those resources available. And I think we just under sometimes, I mean, I fully appreciate that as much and we're taking that into our research as well. Okay, so we're gonna I think end at 12.40 in order to get time for folks to walk down for lunch but I wanna open it now to the audience for any questions. Yes, in the back. Henry Hacker, retired government. I wondered what your feelings were on ISIS women and families that have recently come to light in Syria. We had one individual woman who will not be able to reenter the United States. Her citizenship has been revoked. There's many, there's a number of ISIS families right here in our own country and people at least had some connection to ISIS. What is their status? So do you think people are to be put on probation, be able to return here or find a country that will take them where they might be accepted and can be reformed? What are the plans and what do you ladies think about it? Well, let's have an easy question before lunch, shall we? That's honestly, that's a very, that's a hugely challenging question. And if I had a well-informed opinion on it, I'd love to share it with you. I just don't. And I think I'd be a really not, we're not a credible voice to address that now. Would love to think about it some more, take a card and get back to you. But I just honestly don't have a well-informed it's such a complicated issue. I think it would be a disservice for me to respond. Anyone else want to take that very easy question? Any other questions from the audience? Yes. Are any of you currently in joint ventures using both foundation funds as well as public funds to promote and stimulate change within local communities? So I can answer that question from Vera. So we receive a fair amount of foundation funding to work with local jurisdictions directly. Oftentimes it's with the stakeholders. So we're working, for example, in the MacArthur Safety and Justice Challenge with several counties to reduce the size of their jail populations. We have other work going on that's looking at the rural incarceration growth that I mentioned. And that is looking at sort of the problem more holistically, looking at the community. What are the community stakeholders and then also who are sort of the official government stakeholders? And figuring out from the folks in the ground what do they see as the challenges and how can we get people to start working together folks inside and outside of government? I think that's sort of a key next step for our work. Was there a question back there? There was some discussion at the very end related to public relations. I work in Malawi. Part of our program does community sensitization. But it's very limited in scope. I mean, with a view, at least for me, to a developing country context, what work is done related to community sensitization about the purpose of punishment and the purpose of the incarceration versus other methods of responding to what we as a society deem as improper actions or activity. OK, great question. Who wants to take that first? So I think that's an interesting question. I feel I hear part of it is, I guess, I would refrain that as kind of community education in part. And again, I think sometimes we take for granted that people may understand the purpose of the criminal justice system or how it works. And I think we find often in our research that there are a lot of misconceptions from the community at large, as well as sometimes stakeholders within the system who just know their part. So a lot of that is around education. I think we also sometimes do large public opinion polls to realize that the larger public is much more ready to embrace things that are fair, equitable, and make sense, that aren't so punitive. But I think you're right, it's kind of an education campaign more broadly and thinking about how you get that out there and how you're working with stakeholders more broadly, I think, to embrace that or understand that. That's great. I would add to that. There really is. I mean, we have a problem with numeracy in general. This is not just in the United States, but in general. When it comes to criminal justice, there's serious innumeracy issues. The public just doesn't really understand the basics of where we are at in terms of criminal activity. Most people think crime is up when it is not. There's a strong lag between what's actually happening and how people perceive it to be happening. So really, I think just valuing that the public is able to learn and getting information out and then creating, I love this language of these deliberative forums, these kind of deliberative democracy forums where issues are really brought to people. Sometimes you really have to know quite a bit about an issue to even get to the point of making an informed opinion and recognizing people are able to be sponges if presented with the right sorts of information and grow an understanding of an issue in that way. And there's some great work out of Stanford on this deliberative conversation. I think we have time for one last question, yes, right there in the back. And I'm the regional director for Africa. And first of all, I want to thank the panelists, both panels for presentations. And most importantly, the important work you guys are doing because I think not only the United States but particularly abroad this issue is paramount. In Africa, the stats that we have is 40 to 80% of the people incarcerated presently are pre-trial that is waiting adjudication. To my, what I've been arguing for a number of years is this is the preeminent human rights concern in Africa. It doesn't get as much attention as any of the explosive things that happened in Africa, tortures, incarcerating press and so forth and so on. But it is the most widespread, I think, human rights abuse. And it's ignored largely because the system continues to grind on. So the types of things you guys are discussing here, I think are very important. I want to make just one observation that perhaps in answer to your question, you had a couple questions about where in the system is the most efficacious, when in the system is it most efficacious to intercede? And you also have the question about resources. My argument to INL and to the CT Bureau, the State Department, the government and my argument I think to you colleagues here who are working in this area and particularly overseas is most efficacious place to intercede is at the front end. It's been an awful lot of effort at the back end and that becomes much more problematic for all the reasons you all have discussed this morning. It's much more expensive because you have that many more people incarcerated. And most importantly, of course, the front end, you're incarcerating people who don't need to be there in the first place. And the stats with regard to the 40 to 80% of the people incarcerated pre-trial, what we know is that the majority of them should not be there in the first place, not meaning that they shouldn't be diverted, but they shouldn't be there because the evidence is not there. And so I think that the USG and its activities and so I was to make this observation of people working in this field because I continue to make this observation my colleagues at State Department in terms of the programs that we should put much more emphasis on the front end including the criminal procedure, included evidence-based decision-making by and some of this has been alluded to, of course, already, evidence-based decisions by the police, by the prosecutors giving them the discretion to make decisions at the front end and then all the way up to plea agreements which again have been alluded to. We get a lot of grief for advocating plea agreement regimes overseas. The US seems to, you know, we get a lot of grief from the international partners that this is problematic. If you work in Africa, you recognize the plea agreements are a very beneficial part of any kind of regime to reduce that pre-trial detention. So I think in answer to the questions you asked the panel and to follow up on that, just from my own observations, we really need to emphasize in the work we do and advocating to our USG partners who's giving us the money. Rather, as I say to people in the systems, particularly in Africa, I know less about Latin America and other places, you can throw a dart in the criminal justice system and you're gonna hit something that needs work, particularly on the prison context. And if you've been in any of the prisons in Africa or any other developing countries, you know how horrific they are. So your immediate reaction is, we need to put more effort here. And that's true, we shouldn't ignore that, but we need to continue to emphasize the front end. And the last point I'll make on that is, and the point I make to my colleagues is, with regard to resources. One, the USG knows how to do this. And number two, it is an area which can be zero cost or low cost interventions. The types you've all alluded to here this morning and gone into detail about whereas many of the other things you've talked about, including the back end with case management, those things are impossible or at least improbable in places like Africa. As a consequence, we should be implementing and demonstrating to them the very low cost solutions at the front end so we don't have so many problems at the back end. That's my observation for comment. Really helpful observation. Does anyone want to offer any feedback or comment before I close this out? Great. I just want to end here and say Vera put out a report recently that found that every day in the United States, a person is arrested every three seconds. The United States is a very large country, but someone is arrested every three seconds. That's a whole lot of people that are being arrested and the vast majority of those people are arrested for nonviolent, non-serious offenses that most people would agree are nonviolent and non-serious. And so we've got a problem, as the last person mentioned, about dealing with things at the front end. And at Vera, what we talk about is how we treat people in the criminal justice system is often a reflection of our values, both at the local level, the state level, and the national level. And so in order to implement some of the changes that our panelists talked about, a jurisdiction has to be willing to sort of shift how they see people in the system and sort of shift that value structure, which I think goes to sort of the larger question that we talked about here is looking at sort of the political well and changing public hearts and minds. So that's sort of the larger project that all of us are a part of. But thank you so much for your participation and thanks so much to the organizers for organizing this panel. So for those in the room, we will proceed immediately to lunch, which you will take, you'll just proceed to the end of this corridor down the stairs and lunch will be served down there and please gather at the various tables. Secondly, for those of you that will not continue for the afternoon session, as Carol Young in the back is holding up that neon blue evaluation form, we would strongly encourage you to give us your feedback, completing your evaluation if you won't be joining us in the afternoon. But please proceed directly to lunch and enjoy it from there and we will have our keynote address. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Sorry to interrupt your lunches, but I wanted to first introduce myself. My name is Joel Samuels. I'm the director of the rule of law collaborative. It's a pleasure to see everyone here. I want to thank all of our speakers. I want to particularly thank Pam Rodriguez for providing our opening remarks this morning. And I want to welcome you all again as my colleague Hamid Khan did to our symposium on alternatives to incarceration. I want to thank you all for being with us through the morning. We look forward to engaged conversation throughout the afternoon as well. It's my pleasure to introduce our lunchtime keynote speaker, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of INL at the Department of State, Jim Walsh. Pete S. Walsh will be talking about the role of INL at the front line of the opioid crisis, connecting I think he will be talking about the relationship between the work that INL is doing abroad and domestic issues. And we've seen already throughout our conversation this morning the lessons that can be learned from the United States and our experiences with ATI, but also the unique perspectives and unique context of the international settings in which many of us are working. And INL's work both abroad and as it relates to the domestic space, I think bridges a lot of the conversations that we've been having. And so there was no one better to have here and we're pleased to have him joining us. So Pete S. Walsh, thank you for being here today. Thank you. And it works okay, great. Well, I'm truly honored to be here and actually humbled. I'll start by saying I am not a corrections expert, as you can imagine, working in the State Department. I'm a full-time diplomat, but I do have some experiences working in corrections and alternatives to incarcerations. And it goes all the way back from my first visit to a prison which was overseas, believe it or not. And I got to see the worst of the worst. My first visit to a prison was in Georgia, to Blee, not the state, but the country, to Bleezy, Georgia. And this is before they had a lot of their corrections reform. So this is, I'm going back, I'm trying to remember it was 2005 or 2006. And they took us to one of their pretrial jails. And as you can imagine, this is an old, old Russian Soviet style building. Didn't have any heat or air. Had just one big, giant community of room, about 300 square feet. And they had 200 people in it. And every one of those 200 people you talked to them were stuck in pretrial detention, waiting for a trial date. And this is before Georgia had any concept of what the process of pretrial, any alternatives to pretrial alternatives. And they were just stuck there. And some of these people were stuck there for over a year and a half. Imagine living in a 300 square foot room with 200 people. So that was actually the, I wasn't done there. Then they took me to their high intensity, wait, there's more. They took me, okay, well, that's our pretrial. Now let's go to our corrections, our real prison where we have the really bad guys. And they were really proud of what they had to show me because of how much controls they had over these very dangerous guys. And these were dangerous people. I mean, I'm talking the top of the top of the thieves and the laws. And if you're familiar with what's going on with the, anything in Eastern Europe, the thieves and the laws are some of the worst of the worst when it comes to some of these gangs and criminal organizations. And so before I go in there, all the corrections officers suit up by putting mask, armor, machine guns. And then I'm walking in there, it's like, well, where's my machine gun? This is bad. But sure enough, they walk in there and they show me how tight it is to control these guys. And so that's just one example of what I, some of the experiences I had early on. I also had another example experience actually in Juba. That was a lot of fun. Don't recommend that as a vacation spot, but they're working on it. Anyway, so that was another example where there was just nothing in these poor countries where it was just literally walls. There was a few huts where people could sleep, but everybody else just worked in the community. And one of the saddest things as you can imagine is that you have, and unfortunately in a lot of these countries women go to jail because of quote unquote sexual crimes, which isn't their fault at all. And then let alone, there's their child because they have nowhere to place to put the child sitting there in prison, living with their mother. So that was 2007, 2008. And I'm pleased to announce we've really come a long way. So internationally we have come a long way. And I'm really proud of what INL, our bureau has done. I would argue in this international space, I don't think there's another country doing more on corrections prison reform than United States and INL in particular. And so we're so proud of that. And we're so proud, I'm so proud of the fact that my organization recognized 15, 20 years ago that if you wanna have good, true criminal justice reform, you gotta think about all the pillars of the criminal justice system and prisons is one of those right up there. But we've got a long way to go, ladies and gentlemen. And I'm really excited because we're basically on this next step of where we're going when it comes to corrections, development overseas, and especially alternatives to incarceration. And a lot of that is the lessons learned we learned here in the United States. I argue that our role really is to export some of the best practice, one of our roles is to export some of those best practices we have in the United States and to make it better for our partners overseas so we can support our national security interest. And you can imagine the prison population would have 20, 20 some million, right? The overall world population. And we have two million of those. We have a lot of opportunities for practice when it comes to prison and alternatives to incarceration. So you guys are very familiar with the reforms that we've taken that have taken place in the United States. Certainly at a policy level, we had some major, major reforms that took place with the first step act. One of the biggest, I think, are criminal justice reform efforts from Congress in Washington, D.C. and arguably in the last 15, 20 years. And that's a huge step forward. But that's just a piece of that. And as you guys know, we got there because of all the grassroots and practices that the Congress people were learning about taking place in our communities around our country. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of those and then that's gonna tie into how we're gonna export some of these things overseas and how this is really important to what we're doing and how it relates to our national security. And then I'll kind of tie up with some questions because I really wanna hear some of your questions. So let me talk about some of these really amazing best practices. You probably heard from somebody this morning already. Where's Pam? Hi, Pam, nice to see you again. I visited Pam in task in Chicago last year some time. When was that? Last year some time, everything's a blur. And it was a prime example, and you guys heard that this morning, a prime example of how communities have to come together to deal with one of the major problems with our prison populations and dealing with the reform. And that's the drug addiction issues and substance abuse disorders that we're dealing with in this country. And so part of our policy, and unfortunately it took this opioid crisis that we have going on in the United States to really give us a big wake-up call to recognize that this has gotta be a whole, not only a whole government, but a whole nation effort to kind of fix the grass root problems and going after that. And alternatives to incarcerations, I will tell you, is one of those key components. And so what I learned in Chicago, and I also had some other visits, Pam, not just to Chicago, but I also learned in Ohio and Kentucky, some other examples of all these great, great best practices that are happening around our country and what's the impact overall of how it's impacting our communities, how it's impacting the individual. And then my role is how do I take that overseas and then support our national security interest? So you guys may have heard some of this, you're gonna hear a little bit more about this, but some of these alternatives to incarcerations especially with the drug abuse issue is that we've had a lot of years of experience with drug courts. So I mean, you guys, everybody's heard about the drug courts that have been out for a while. They've been pretty successful. There's been poxed success at the prosecutor level, poxed sex at the sheriff level and the pretrial. But I think what we're doing now is we're bringing it all together. And I think that's one of the things that lessons learned that we're going to apply is that if you don't have, if you just have your law enforcement over here, you have your community services over here, your health professionals over here, your judges over here, your prosecutors over here, and you don't bring them together. And I think that's the one of the great things I learned from TASC is how they're bringing everyone together and regularly meeting with these professionals and sorting through, okay, where are the points of entries that we need to think about when it comes to identifying if this individual, how do we treat the individual? How do we deal with this issue? So that is one of those critical questions that we're asking through a whole of nation kind of aspect. Treating the individual, imagine that. And which is a radical change, I think, than what our policies has been in the past, which is, again, a challenge that I think we have to deal with, and I'll talk about this in a second, is dealing with this perception that these alternatives of incarceration has actually created a risk for our communities. And that was the one thing I was really asking, and I'm digging more into the data, and the data is starting to show this, but these options actually make our community safer. So just think about this. So we all have heard about the recidivist issues, and then the vicious cycle of someone that gets addicted to drugs, and they have to find the money to support their addiction, and it's just the vicious criminal cycle just continues and continues. But it's not just that individual. Think about the family. The studies from NIJ that show the evidence of the children of these prisoners that get thrown in there, that they are likely to become susceptible to a criminal activity and other issues, less productive citizens, because their family members are in prison. And so how do we think about those issues? So there's so many layers we need to be thinking of from not just the individual, but also from our community's safety perspective. And so this is where I'm gonna emphasize data and statistics, and I encourage all of you, as you guys start thinking about bringing these ideas back there, encouraging the data and research to follow through. We're gonna need that to convince the policymakers, continue to convince the policymakers. I think we have most of the policymakers here in the United States agreeing to this, but they're not all there yet. And I'm here to tell you internationally, they're definitely not there yet. Because let's face it, there's a lot of risk with this. And I know there's a lot of risk every day for a prosecutor, a judge, a sheriff, to make that hard choice of, okay, do I send this person to get treatment? Or is this guy, a young lady or individual, a person that's a true trafficker that is wreaking havoc in our communities? And those professionals have to make tough choices. So figuring those things out, getting those best practices out are something that we wanna do. Lastly, let me talk a little bit about how we're gonna deploy this overseas. And Joel mentioned this about some of our programs that we have in INL. We have this phenomenal demand, a drug demand reduction program in INL that we've been exporting and promoting overseas. It's to the point where we have this tremendous network that are sharing these best practices. But we also have the research we had this research on how we've established universal prevention curriculum, universal treatment curriculum. And this is science-driven. So we're using this to apply to the health professionals. Now our new strategy is what we just talked about. We're gonna integrate that with some of our corrections programs. And now that this is the cool thing about the National Security Imperative. Georgia and South Sudan and those examples, I started the conversation with, are just the tip of the iceberg are some of the other challenges that many of these countries are facing. And so we have a tremendous vicious cycle, especially in Central America and other places, where it's just a huge recruiting ground for these criminals to join our gangs on transnational criminal organizations that then turn out to be the traffickers that are sending these drugs to here in the United States are disrupting security and stability around the world. And so we, this is a critical population we wanna focus on. And so what we're learning here, what we've learned in the past, we're gonna apply that to some of our corrections reforms, some of our drug demand reduction programs, integrate those, and actually look at some of those things, not only help the individuals help those countries, but help our national security interests as well. So that's where we're going. I'm very excited about it and we couldn't have done that without hearing and learning from all you guys. So I'm very excited to be here. I'm very excited to take some of your questions. I hope you do have some questions. I wanted to kind of keep my conversation topics a little shorter though. I haven't been talking about 15 minutes, so I'm running on time. So with that, take it away. Who's got any questions for me? I'd love to answer them. It's always that first person afraid to ask the question every time I do one of these things. All right, thank you, sir. Sorry. I can't hear you. A good deal of the efforts of the veterans. I'm sorry, sir. You're gonna have to start right in here, anything? Well, I wanted to just ask a question regarding the narcotics business with the Maduro regime. Yeah. According to news reports, they've indicated that a great deal of their activity has been in this area to undermine the United States. They keep talking about the United States being a problem when it appears their country appears to be more of a problem than we can be. All this is somehow secretly being put into containers and then placed in ships and finally arrives here in ports, but a lot of it's been found under the most difficult conditions, breaking up pieces of concrete and finding a center filled with cocaine. Yeah. Do you have much to say about this? I don't know whether their government is an narcotics industry, but it surely appears to be part of it. They said that a good deal of drug dealers or cartel leaders are now in charge of the reserves, the reserve armed forces in Venezuela. It looks like a terrible issue. I wondered what your feelings were on this. Is there anything to be done about it? Or will anything be done about it? Besides sanctions, which appear to be quite effective. Yeah. Good question. I do have a lot to say about that. In fact, Assistant Secretary Madison and I did say things about that in our recent international meeting in Vienna on the commissions of narcotic drugs publicly stating our concerns with Venezuela and the fact they're not only not doing their fair share of rural responsibilities when it comes to the treaties, which is ensuring and protecting not only their sentences, but international community from drugs, but they're participating in it. And so we agree that what we're seeing is that more and more of the Maduro regime is engaged in the narco trafficking. What do we do about that? What my bureau can do about it, we have to wait till day plus one. Meaning that there's a lot of other things going on with the sanctions and other things that the President Trump is trying to do to help the people of Venezuela get that opportunity to get democracy back. And we would play a role, just like the lessons learned we have in Colombia and other places, of supporting a new government from Venezuela. Well, actually have a new government, we would argue with President Guaidó, but supporting him once they come into power and reforming that. Thank you very much. My question is are there possibilities in your experience for implementing alternatives to incarceration for terrorism and violent extremism related cases? Thank you. Yeah, as a matter of fact, we actually are already partnering up with our Bureau for Counterterrorism in the State Department. And in some countries, I won't highlight which ones, but some of the vulnerable countries. And what we discovered is kind of like, I hate to go back to my example in Georgia as an example, but separation of the most violent of violent is a component of good corrections policy, and ensuring and identifying those. And then we have all this great technology where we can now not only identify them, but get their records, all those other things to track them. And so we are working in some of those places right now. Yes, sir. Thank you for your remarks and congratulations, your support of JustTrack's important work. We heard this morning about the many benefits of successful alternatives to incarceration programs, a reduction in recidivism, reduced pretrial detention, reduction in costs, and just better results for the community. We've also heard about institutional and cultural resistance to imposing alternative to incarceration programs or implementing them. Are there some success stories abroad where INL has worked or the US government has worked where you can describe some of the results in a sort of tangible way? Yeah, I'll give you two examples. Let me start at the international multilateral area. In 2016, we had this thing called Ungas, which is a UN where we discussed drug policy going forward. And in that session, we laid out a protocol, not a protocol, but a resolution that talked about alternatives to incarceration. That took the 130 plus countries that are signed up to the senior degree to that. So there has been some momentum to look at that and promoting that as matter of policy. Specifically, I think we made a lot of progress bilaterally in Mexico. Not only their corrections reform, but working with them to kind of get them up to standards. And correct me if I'm wrong, what were the standards at, yeah, ATX standards that we used, we looked at them and we went from keep prisons to prisons to work on that. But also we then linked those up with the drug courts. And so my trips to Mexico, working with them and working with civil society, they recognize that there's a lot more momentum going there as well. So there's a couple of examples. I think we got a little bit of work to do in some other countries. But what we're getting there? All right, three questions, Joel. I think that's it. Oh, yes, ma'am. So this is kind of a bit more domestic policy issue, but we've heard a lot about individualizing these alternatives to incarceration and making sure that people are met at an individual level. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on how we can implement or write legislation that allows for this individualization, but also a systemic change. That seems to be something that if we're kind of putting this very broad sweeping overhaul to the system, how can we also allow for very individualized change throughout the states and throughout the systems? Yeah, there are some legislative requirements needed. I'm gonna go back to my conversations in Chicago where they needed the state of Illinois to kind of work on some legislation for their diversionary programs. Just because you think about, as I mentioned, these officials are, they have to have some sort of criminal justice, criminal procedure code to allow them to do these kinds of things. And so my recommendation is that look at the other states that are doing that. I'm not the expert on what specifically, but there's other states that are out there doing these kind of things and use them as the best examples to apply to, I don't know what state or what country you're talking about. Texas, yeah, so use this form right now to find out who's done this and talk to these guys at JustTrack and they can point you in the right direction on some of the criminal procedure code that needs to be reformed and adjusted in order to do some of these programs. But it's a good question there. I know there are some requirements, legislative requirements to implement them. You're welcome. Yes, sir. I'll give you a shout out for... I'll take a shout out. Therefore, INL putting an experienced community corrections administrator embedding him in Armenia for two months. Taking somebody who has a working knowledge of evidence-based policy and practice who's done it within jurisdictions in a couple of different states in the United States who's a very down-to-earth, salty individual sending him in to roll up his sleeves and work alongside these people to acknowledge the context in which they're taking on a totally new and different experience from what they've known and to be able to do that over a period of time, to coach them, encourage them, to acknowledge what they can and can't do with the lack of resources that they have is a far more practical effort than events being dropped on. So I appreciate INL's making that kind of an investment if you're gonna have a strategic long-term impact. Yeah, thank you for those comments. And I agree that there's only so much policy work that you need to do, and it needs to be done, but that's something I can do. I certainly can't go into that corrections in Armenia, which I have been, and by the way, I was just as impressed. You need those salty experts to go in there and apply those best practices and lessons learned. Yeah, in Armenia, I was really impressed what was going on in Armenia, especially for a small amount of resources, especially what they're doing with the prison population and we're not talking about alternatives to incarceration, but within the prison itself, there's so much reform that needs to be done, just the coaching, the mentoring, the counseling that needs to take place. You know, we saw something, you guys watched 60 Minutes the other day, there was a really great episode, and that was, what state was that? Connecticut? It was Connecticut. That was, they were doing those kind of, I never thought, what a great idea, I just have prisoners being mentors to the young prisoners, and it's working, imagine that. But thanks. Yeah, yeah, so it was pretty interesting. I work at SeaCat, Organization for American States. It's with Matt, yeah, nice to see you. Vienna recently, I just wanted to say that, in fact, I mean, when you say that you're doing a lot abroad, that we are one of the brokers of the channels through which you do a lot of activities, and SeaCat under the leadership of Ambassador Arnaum, we are really very pleased to be implementing, I mean, just helping, exporting some of the models, task model and others abroad. It is something that countries are demanding and we are really thankful. Not a question, just a comment. It is really, yeah. Yeah, and my comment is, I apologize because my staff wrote into my remarks to give you a shout out, and it's on my three by five card. But Joel, I told you, I was, we said, oh, nobody would know what I'd missed, but somebody knew what I'd missed, my three by five card. Yeah, you guys, we do some great work and we're looking forward to the presidency here coming up in the next few months here and doing some things with that. Yes ma'am. So in some countries in Latin America, there are USAID projects that are working to strengthen the judicial sector. How is your office analyzing the unintended consequences of cutting off USAID to the Northern Triangle countries like Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala? Yeah, well, we're still in the review process, so right now the department, and I don't know, are you with USAID right now? No, with the USAID implementer. Okay, the United, the State Department of USAID are currently in a review process based on the president's guidance. And so we're just taking a look at what, providing recommendations to the secretary and to the president and highlighting some of those impacts. So we're going through the hard work of identifying, okay, what does this mean? But I'll go back to some of the comments the secretary Pompeo made over the weekend. We've given these countries a lot of assistance over the years and the fact that using diplomacy, and this is a diplomacy tool that the president and secretary are using to highlight, that they should be doing more. So we're going to follow this review process, see where it goes, but I would also argue that we also have a tremendous amount of institutional memory in these countries. So even if there may be a pause coming up here, maybe a short-term, long-term, I don't know. I think that that institutional memory will continue and that there'll be ways that we can kind of keep the momentum going. All right, save the tough one for the last one. Thank you, enjoy the rest of your session. It's actually better, isn't it? Because... Just because people are probably going to be filtering in for the next few minutes. So just to introduce myself, my name is Kerry Neal. I'm the senior child protection specialist on Justice for Children at UNICEF Headquarters in New York. And I just want to thank the Justice Sector Training, Research and Coordination Program and the Institute for Peace for allowing UNICEF the chance to participate in the meeting and to give me the opportunity to introduce a moderator panel of experts who bring a wealth of experience and practical examples for our consideration. Before I hand the floor to the panelists, I'm actually going to break. The previous moderators were very modest and said nothing about the work that their organizations are doing. My organization would not allow me to live if I didn't at least wave the flag for children and talk about the work of UNICEF just for a couple of minutes. But I think it is relevant. We do have a long history of working globally both to reduce the number of children who are deprived of liberty and to improve the conditions of those who are detained and serving some form of sanction or measure, and including in identifying ways of expediting their release. And our mandate derives from the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every country in the world except one, and I'm sure everyone here knows what the exception to that is, so I don't actually have to say it. An article 37 of the CRC, it doesn't just encourage countries not to deprive children of their liberty, it actually imposes a very strict limitations on when they can and how they can do this. So in terms of the group of children that I work for, we actually have a strong international legal imperative against the use of detention as a sentence for them. And the guidance actually says, essentially as a measure of last resort, meaning that the prosecution, the judicial authorities, whoever, have to have considered every other possible option for responding to a child who's in conflict with the law before they resort to using detention. And then it should only be for the shortest possible appropriate period of time. I mean, that's in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and then there are another group of soft-law instruments, the Riyadh guidelines, the Beijing guidelines, et cetera, et cetera, which reinforce this imperative and this direction towards non-detention. And just to pick up on something that somebody mentioned earlier, we understand that as applying to all categories of children who come into conflict with the law. Doesn't matter what the nature of the offense was. So to speak about the children of foreign fighters, children associated with violent extremism, our understanding is the international legal imperative does not differentiate according to the nature of the crime that led the child into the conflict with the justice system. And so certainly for those groups of children, we continue to work for and advocate for community-based resolutions. And just about two months ago, I came back from Nigeria, where we've managed to negotiate the transfer of about 300 to 400 boys, mainly boys, small number of girls, who were associated in some way with Boko Haram and who are now being responded to in the community and are not subject to detention. So it can be done, and as far as we understand and our partners within the UN system, it's something that applies to that group of children as much as any other who are in conflict with the law. And last year, actually, 94 UNICEF country offices were involved in juvenile justice reform of some kind. And I think roughly about half of those countries were working to provide either diversion schemes or community-based responses. I'm avoiding the ATD or ATI language, so community-based responses is how we speak about them. And it was interesting for me that a lunchtime keynote speaker spoke about Georgia, because that's one of the success stories for us. In a relatively short period of time, about 10 years of overall justice reform, we've gone from a prison caseload of about 240 juveniles to now about 40 to 50 juveniles who are held in detention, and the rest are in some form of community-based response, whether that's probation, whether it's victim-offender mediation, or some other form of supervision within the community setting. But other cases recently, we're looking at in Jordan, where we've been working predominantly with police in terms of the first possible sort of means of diverting children from the justice system. Now, about 79% of cases that are dealt with in Amman by the police of children offending, they get diverted. They are not going any further within the justice system, so we've been able to massively reduce the number of children who do finally end up in a custodial sentence. And if I look at Sierra Leone, Zambia, Moldova, we've also been able to support caseload reduction of between 50 and 75% that's ending up in the prison system by the provision of credible alternatives that prosecutors and judges feel that they can rely on and feel that children will be supported and supervised in. So certainly from our side, we know that diversion schemes and community-based sanctions do work, and we know there are effective measures for managing these children. I think where we need to do better is in perhaps producing some of the robust data to actually show that these measures in developing countries can be cheaper than detention. I think we have a lot of evidence showing in the high-income countries that it's cheaper, less so in developing countries, and also in building that political consensus that people were talking about earlier because we still face a lot of governments who are having to respond to their constituents who have concerns about out-of-control use, even if the reality of crime statistic shows there's no such thing, that's the public perception. And just as one final note, I would add, thanks, that this year the UN is actually going to be releasing a global study on the situation of children deprived of liberty. It'll be coming out at the General Assembly in October. I mean, it looks at deprivation of liberty across a range of issues, so it's not just looking at the situation of criminal justice, deprivation of liberty, so it's looking at immigration detention, children in institutions, treatment centers, and this, I think, responds to a point that was made earlier about some of those other forms of detention, which we don't necessarily call prison, but can effectively be prison. And it also looks at promising practices from a range of different countries of different development and income levels. One thing I do have to say is it's also going to be providing a revised estimate of the number of children who are being held globally in detention, but this will be a really rough estimate because one of the most alarming things in the process of this study for me has been that about 60 to 70 of the countries that were given the questionnaire to respond to when all member states received the questionnaire, it wasn't that they weren't willing to tell us how many children they had in detention, they just couldn't, they didn't know how many children they had, and let alone whether this was pre-trial, post-disposition, whatsoever, and I mean, Angela earlier mentioned people getting lost in the justice system, and for me, that's very clear that that's a real possibility for a very large number of children, so to pick up on something else that was said earlier, the importance of improving data collection and being able to say at any one point, we have this many people in our detention system for this reason, I think is extremely important. So with that brief snapshot, I'll now turn to our panelists to hear about specific samples of providing alternatives or community-based responses for particular groups that are deemed to be suitable for this. And so first, I'm actually gonna go from the end of the panel this way. So first, I'd like to juice Aaron Arnold, the Director of Technical Assistance at the Center for Court Innovation in New York. Thanks, Kerry. Hi, everybody. I'm gonna focus my remarks on the proper role of the justice system in dealing with substance use disorders or drug addiction, as it used to be called. I'm currently the Director of Technical Assistance at the Center for Court Innovation, which is a New York-based nonprofit that does justice system reform both in the United States and internationally. Before that, I was the Center's Director of Treatment Court Program, so substance abuse and best practices in the justice system for dealing with substance use disorders is kind of my thing. But in raising this question about what is the proper role of the justice system in dealing with substance use disorders, I'm mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people who would say the proper role is to have no role or to have very, very little role. And I'd be really interested, I promise I won't call on anybody, but I'd love to see a show of hands to see if there's anybody in the room or how many people in the room think that the ideal way forward for the United States and other countries is to follow Portugal's example and just legalize all drugs and deal with them in a more regulatory public health fashion. Is anyone in this room of that mindset? It's just helpful for me to know. I'm surprised, not a single hand here, they're a very shy group or a more conservative group than I thought. I am also of the opinion for what it's worth, not that my personal opinion matters that much in this conversation, but I'm also of the opinion that that's not necessarily the best way to go. I do think that there is a legitimate and proper role for the justice system in dealing with substance use disorders. But it's a tricky question. The role of the justice system in dealing with this problem really should be very circumscribed, well understood, and well-defined. And so that's what I'm gonna try to talk about today is how in the United States and in other countries we can make sure that we use the justice system when it can do good. We use the justice system in ways that are evidence-based and promote our ultimate goal of dealing with the public health crisis of substance use, but not to let the justice system exceed that proper role. So it appears that I'm talking to converts, but in case anyone is kind of toying with the idea of why the justice system should be involved, I wanted to point out something that I saw yesterday on TV. U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who's running for president is of course now doing interviews everywhere, was doing an interview on television I think yesterday. And she was talking specifically about addiction and she was talking about her dad. And I didn't know this about her until yesterday. But apparently her dad struggled with alcoholism for most of his life, perhaps other substance use disorders. But she was talking about his experience and growing up with him. And she described how when she was young he got a DUI and then they tried to get him to stop drinking and then he got another DUI and they tried to get him into treatment and then he got another DUI. And then she said eventually her state, Minnesota, right, changed the laws. And so that his next DUI, which he inevitably got was a felony. And she just in this thing, I mean she's not a justice, she's not in this room, she's not a justice expert in the way that most of you in the room are. But she said in a very nonchalant way, well now that he's facing a felony and he's got real consequences staring at him, that's the push he needed to really deal with it. And he did. And according to her anyway, he, you know, that was his enlightening moment and he achieved some sustained recovery and is now in a much healthier place. And so that experience about having the weight of the justice system staring you down and saying this has gone on too long and there are gonna be real consequences that the fact of the matter is that for a lot of people, not for everybody, we're gonna talk about what kind of people, but for some people that kind of threat of sanctions, whatever that may be is a motivator. I mean it's common to say in the treatment field that someone really needs to hit rock bottom or someone needs to want to recover or someone needs to want help in order to succeed. And thankfully I've never experienced this myself but all of the research that's been done in the last couple of decades says that that's not actually true. Court mandated treatment for the correct population is actually more effective than voluntary community-based treatment at keeping people in treatment longer and keeping them abstinent longer. And we also know that that is the key to sustained sobriety and recovery is the length of time you're engaged in treatment. So if by leveraging the power of the justice system, if that leverage can help keep someone in treatment longer, someone who otherwise would not have been inclined to do treatment like Amy Klobuchar's dad, if the justice systems leverage can get that person to engage in treatment, stay in it for a sustained period of time, it can be the difference maker that allows that person to kind of emerge on the other side from their addiction. So that's kind of just an anecdotal piece that kind of helped me crystallize in my mind how for some people, the justice system does have a legitimate role and can do good. Now, with that being said, obviously it can do a tremendous amount of harm too. So let's talk about what the justice system's role should look like. So my expertise more than anything is in drug courts. So I'll start there and then work backwards. So people love to talk about drug courts. I talk about it for a living. So I could talk about it for a while. The thing about drug courts is on the one hand they're the most effective criminal justice innovation in at least a generation. They're the most studied and they're the most consistently successful at reducing both crime and keeping people in treatment and promoting sobriety. So by any account, like there's a lot to celebrate with drug courts and they are a very important tool. But as you all know, most of you probably know the research is very clear that they are an innovation that works for a very specific subset of the population. They work for people who have very serious and entrenched substance use disorders. Many people who oftentimes have gone through many rounds of voluntary treatment and come back and kind of fallen back into their addiction. And in addition to that, they have to be people who are at a very high risk for committing additional crimes. If you fall into that band, then great, a drug court has been shown to be a very successful intervention for you or for people who fit that profile. But that's actually a fairly narrow group. There's lots and lots of people who are justice involved who have substance use disorders who don't fit that profile. They're either not likely to commit more crimes because they have a job and a family and they have a lot of other strengths and assets and they may continue to use and they may be continued to be slaves to their substance but they're not really likely to commit more crimes. For those people, you don't want them in a drug court. And then by the flip side, if you've got someone who is very likely to commit more crimes, not to be too stereotypical, but maybe they're a gang involved or they live a criminal lifestyle, they have criminal associates, they're very likely to commit more crimes but they don't actually have a diagnosable substance use disorder, right? They may have gotten picked up on a marijuana charge or something and they dabble and they use recreationally but they don't have an addiction. Those people also don't belong in a drug court. Why? Because the drug court is a very heavy hammer that, number one, won't work so you're wasting resources. Drug courts only hit about 4 to 5% of the eligible justice involved population as it is. There are tons and tons of people in the justice system who could benefit from drug court so you don't want to waste those slots. Those are very valuable slots on people who are not going to get the benefit. So you want to keep them out for that reason. And also because there's research that says if you put the wrong people into drug court, particularly people who have lower needs and in the sense that they need less treatment, you're actually going to, you're likely to make them worse by surrounding them with people who are going to teach them to get even more involved in drugs or different drugs. So drug courts are great but they're these days anyway in the United States, they're generally a post plea, late in the process intervention for people who are very high risk and high need. So let's talk about everybody else. This is what we're recommending and I should say I had the pleasure of being at the Organization of American States Office yesterday to celebrate the publication of six research evaluations on drug courts in six Latin American and Caribbean countries, the kind of countries that had just started down the road of drug courts. And the evaluations that we published were on the one hand very exciting because these are countries that are starting to rethink their approach to substance use disorders but they also have cautionary notes in them as well. So a lot of these countries, and Antonio referred to this this morning when he was speaking, a lot of these countries are new to drug courts and their systemic players, their policy makers, their judges, their prosecutors are very scared about the idea of putting high risk, high need offenders into these courts. That's what Antonio said and we saw it in our evaluations. So when you look at these brand new drug courts in these Latin American and Caribbean countries, they tend to be focusing on people who are very low risk or even low need. People who are marijuana users and around their first or second arrest. So, you know, there's again a lot of excitement that people are thinking differently but there's a little bit to be scared of too. Like we wanna make sure that as countries and Latin America and elsewhere move toward adopting the drug court model which we think they should, at least I think they should, they should do it for the right kinds of cases. So as we advise people in the United States and elsewhere about how to go about this for these people who are not drug court people, people who are justice involved, have substance use disorders but are not drug court people. Here are some things that we know works and we recommend. So first thing is universal screening. What do I mean by universal screening? Everyone, you hear about it a lot but few places are actually doing it. One place that I know of is doing it very well is Buffalo, New York. Long time ago, there was a visionary guy named Hank Parowski in Buffalo, New York. He was the court administrator and he came up with this idea kind of on his own. Like I don't know what's in the water in Buffalo but like he said he came up with this idea that they were gonna create in the courthouse and basically it feels, I don't know how big it is. It feels like an entire floor but it's probably not but it's a very large office that's carved up into cubicles and in the cubicles are a whole range of community-based service providers. So there's treatment providers, there's employment services providers, there's all kinds of people and all of these agencies around the community voluntarily send people to sit in this room all day. And essentially every single person who's arrested in the city of Buffalo, the first thing they do before they go have their case disposed of is they go to this program. It's called the courts program, it's an acronym, court outreach unit, COU referral to treatment services. It's a very unwieldy acronym but it's called the courts program and it's designed so that every single person who's arrested goes there, they get screened by one of these agencies and there's also court employed staff in there as well. So it's a mixture of court employed staff and community-based providers. They go there, they get screened and the screening reveals kind of what their constellation of social service needs are and what kind of risk they are to re-offend. That information gets shared by an agreement that exists between the prosecutors and the defense bar. It gets shared with the court and the attorneys and the defendant and they use that information in order to make educated decisions about how to handle the case. I think there was a judge up here on the first panel of the day who was explaining that by and large, when judges are hearing arraignments or hearing early hearings, there's very limited information oftentimes at their disposal so this is an attempt to get information in the hands of the judges very, very quickly. Now with that information, so that's what universal screening is. So you hear lots of people talk about when we do early screening, whatever, but oftentimes it's for a narrow slice of the population. This is across the board. Get everybody screened so you can identify who has a substance use disorder right away. The second thing is immediate engagement. That's another thing or rapid engagement you hear about a lot, which is kind of an overused term because all drug courts are supposed to be rapid engagement, but some drug courts are taking six months to get people into treatment, you know what I mean? So that's not rapid by any reasonable definition. Rapid engagement, again, I didn't even realize I was gonna do this, but I'm gonna say it again, Buffalo just created a new opioid intervention court that gets people from arrest into a treatment provider and started on medication assisted treatment within 48 hours of arrest. Like that's immediate. So that's a goal that's very, very difficult for a lot of places to achieve and a lot of people throw up their hands and they say I could never do that, but maybe you can't do 24 hours or 48 hours, but you can surely do better than six months. So getting people into treatment as rapidly as possible, both because of fairness, but also because the research says that rapid engagement in treatment is one of the predictors of long-term success. Third, individualized response or proportionality. You don't want people who have misdemeanor crimes or non-criminal violations. You can't expect them to be in a 12 month, 18 month, two year drug court program. It's not proportional to the crime. It's not fair. It's not how our system works. So we need to be able to offer those people interventions that are tailored for the level of crime that they have. And so what does that look like? Well, the truth of the matter is this is one area where the justice system needs to invest some resources. There is a major lack of evidence-based interventions for people at the kind of misdemeanor level. We need short interventions that the justice system can offer people that are proven to get them to engage in treatment and then stay in it. There's one that I know of is called the SBIRT model, which some of you may know, screening and brief intervention, screening brief intervention and referral to treatment, which has been shown as an evidence-based practice, particularly with youth, but that's just one we need to dramatically expand the range of services that are available for low level crimes and not try to overtreat people and make the situation worse. And then finally, the last thing I'm gonna turn it over is providing a range of recovery support services, including, and this is some of the more emerging research, peer recovery advocates, even in many, many drug courts, they don't use peer recovery advocates. And the evidence shows that if you can have, like in New York State, they have the State Behavioral Health Agency has a certification program for peer recovery advocates. You have to go get trained through, I don't know what it is, 24 hours of training and you get certified and you kind of know how to work. But this is peers working with other people in recovery. Makes a huge difference. And then family support services as well, involving the entire family so that when people are going home after their court sessions or their treatment sessions, they're not returning to an environment that kind of promotes the same old behavior. So that time went a lot faster than I thought it would. If you have questions at the end, I'd love to hear them, but thank you for your time and attention. Thank you for that. I'll hand straight over now to Jamina who is from the Institute for Peace itself. So please take the floor. Well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about USAP's work in Pakistan. So USAP has been engaging in Pakistan since 2013 actively, but our involvement and research analysis goes back over two decades. So USAP in Pakistan right now takes a two prong approach. We look at the broader peace building world and we look at go beyond looking at just CVE or looking at criminal justice issues to looking at broader intolerance of diversity of opinion, which can lead to extremism and then violent extremism as well, which is our bottom approach working with civil society organizations. But we also work on bridging the state society to divide a lot of that work is focused on police reforms, criminal justice and some of our programs take both approaches. They look at the top down and bottom up, which is what the program that I'll be talking about that we've supported and are still supporting in a number of aspects is called Social Well for Academics and Training. It's an organization, their acronym is SWAT. They've been based in Pakistan for a number of years. So this organization manages a radicalization program in Pakistan called the Sub-Own Center. It was established in 2009 post the Baksan Army operations in the SWAT Valley and then transferred to civilian management. The interesting part about that this is that when they had their operations, the military cleared out the area. The army found a number of young boys who were part of the violent extremist groups that were in center and when they rounded up all of these militants and to their credit, they realized that these children do not belong in jail with these over 18, over 20 year old violent extremists. They reached out to a local psychologist, Dr. Faria Pracha and her paper is which USIP supported is out there on the table and goes into much more detail about the program, realized that they don't belong here. They really need psychosocial support. They need to be de-radicalized. So the organization to date has worked with 200 young men, young boys, somewhere as old as 13, 14 when they entered the program and over 190 of them have been successfully reintegrated back into society. They have not seen any recidivism. And I think a key component of this is what Erin mentioned is the community-based approach that working with families to make sure that they don't slip back into these behaviors or slip back into being recruited again by another extremist organization. And so you'll, and the research and the work that the several incentives has done and what is that when you join a violent extremist organization they strip them of their identity. I give them your persona, give them an alias. They push them and give them duties towards a collective goal. They learn not to question. And I think that is the hardest thing, especially in many of these developing countries and Pakistan is one example that education systems aren't set up for young people to push back and question what they're being told. And so this leads them into susceptibility to joining these extremist groups. So as I said, psychosocial support is one of the key components. There are intense one-on-one sessions that the staff at Sabal and Das they do group therapy sessions as well. But they also impart them skills. So when they go back into society they are given livelihoods training skills but also skills to help them better adjust into society. They're looking, these kids join these groups because they're looking for a higher purpose. So the program tries to point them towards another direction. Sometimes it is rooted in religion. Sometimes it's rooted in their culture to get them to understand that where they have, when they were recruited, what they were told this is not the case, this is not reality. Providing them other narratives and emphasis on social and moral responsibility. The livelihood skills is also a very key component because when they reintegrate back into society a lot of communities don't want these youth. They are, they and their families are, they're a shame on the society. So the idea is when they're giving these skills they're also trying to tell them don't just become, you know, somewhat a mechanic and fix cars and motorcycles but be an active member of your community. Sometimes they are reintegrated into their original community. Sometimes the original communities won't take them. So they're placed in other places around their region. And the part that USIP has supported we did not support their theoreticalization center. We support the follow-up monitoring again which is as equally as important if not more I think than the actual theoreticalization because being in that area still, they are susceptible. Being shunned by their community, they still are susceptible. So working with them post-integration is very important. So our work looked at this for a year and the paper that's out there on the table kind of gives highlights of what lessons were learned and as you use as a model for theoreticalization programs not just in Pakistan or South Asia but I think someone asked me the question earlier over lunch is this something that could be used in the US? And my personal opinion is that, well, it depends on where you're doing this work. If you're doing this in urban centers, there's no sense of real community in urban centers in the United States. But in smaller communities, this actually could be a viable model because you are seeing it or communities where there is more homogene within a population of, you know, where these young men and sometimes women are coming from. So I think, you know, people are saying, oh, the American model, the American model. Yes, there's a lot that can be transferred from the United States and exported out. But then I think learning from these programs not just in Pakistan but in other places as well, I think there's some successful programs in Southeast Asia on how to curb children and youth from joining radical groups could be used as viable models and should be looked at. And another component that really isn't highlighted is how law enforcement is involved, post-integration. So these young people are already afraid of law enforcement or the military. They're seen as the ones who captured us, who put us in this program. And once they're out and back in their communities, developing that trust not just between that individual in the community but that individual and law enforcement and the community. So it's a three-pronged approach because if there is some disharmony or some issues within the community with that individual who's been reintegrated, having law enforcement understand where this young person is coming from, understand where the community is coming from is very helpful in nipping any possible tensions before the exacerbate. And I think peer groups as well, and I think the one very interesting part of Sabo is that community therapy sessions, the group therapy, the group conversations, these young people exchanging ideas of what happened to them and information, and sharing their stories, I think is very important. So I think one, and I think the key thing and I don't think the report really goes into and hopefully the subsequent reports that Sabo and Will provide us will talk about this critical thinking issue, which I highlighted a little bit earlier, is why aren't these children so susceptible? So USIP is helping support a pilot program with Sabo and to actually pilot a critical thinking program that was developed by a number of scholars at the University of Cambridge, but contextualized for the Bacchuson setting to really understand what are the barriers to teaching critical thinking? What are the barriers for the students to receive it and even teachers as well? Why is rote learning? We're seeing these in a lot of post-colonial countries. Rote learning is how education systems are set up. The education systems are siloed in so many countries where you're seeing a lot of these young people and extremists coming from where they don't have interactions with other people. If you're in a religious school, you're gonna be in a religious school until you turn 18. If you are in a government school, you're gonna be in a government school until you're 18. If you're going to a lead private school, you're gonna be in that and there's no interactions with any of these other communities. So they don't have an understanding of the other, which again makes them more susceptible to being recruited. So I think on that note, I would just say that there are many cases and I know many countries that, if you're rounded up in a law enforcement rate or a military rate and it doesn't matter how old you are. And there are places in Bacchuson and other countries around the world where they are and Kerry's comments about how people not knowing how many young people are incarcerated around the world, I'm sure a number of these. And as we see returning foreign fighters coming back from Syria and elsewhere, I think this is gonna be a larger problem that not only the countries need to look at but the international community needs to think about is how we're setting up these alternatives instead of putting them in prison is really providing them with support and psychosocial services, the livelihoods trading, the community-based approaches that will help them reintegrate back into society because just putting them in jail I think is just gonna make the situation worse and as jails are overcrowded, we're seeing it all over the world. Young people who were minor offenders in a violent extremist group, but they've been in jail languishing with more hardened extremists, who knows what kind of impact that's going to have on their thinking. So getting them earlier into these types of deradicalization programs I think is imperative as we're seeing the spread of these other extremist groups beyond Al-Qaeda and now ISIS and ISIS offshoots. So thinking about that I think is very important and I look forward to hearing questions. I mean, you're getting questions, but also hearing your thoughts on in other countries that you're working in, what kind of deradicalization reintegration programs are you seeing that have worked and have not worked? Because even the US model where they've tried to look at how you work in certain communities to prevent radicalization, it has not been effective in the US, I think. And there are models that we should look at, how we should turn around the perception of these young boys, very young boys who in some cases just didn't know any better. They had no other appreciation of what's out there, whether they're alternative narratives are out there and they just couldn't get sucked in and you can't fault them if the system has made it so that they can't find another path out of the situation they're in. Thank you. I'll go straight to our final speaker. That's Fiona Mungham from the University of South Carolina. Thank you and thanks to the JustTrack team for both having me here today and also for tolerating me as a fellow for the last year, it's been really wonderful. I was also here within USIP for five years until recently and so much of the work that I'll talk about today is actually work that I was doing with USIP and continue to do with USIP engaged as a consultant now. And like many people in this room and many people who are thinking through this issue in Washington, the way that I'm often brought in is looking at detention systems in crisis. Detention systems in conflict environments, active conflict environments and the detention crisis that can emerge in a post-conflict environment where you still have an incredibly unstable and insecure setting within which you're thinking about and trying to cope with and then trying to encourage people into thinking about alternatives or community-based options from the court and from the criminal justice system. And so some of these environments and the one that I'm gonna talk about today is Libya but think also Somalia, think Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, South Sudan. So these are the kind of environments in which I've been going in often at as our first speaker spoke about that assessment phase, that thinking through what is the detention crisis that we're facing at the moment and what are the potential avenues out? And one of the things that I'm repeatedly greeted with is we need infrastructure. And sure, who can argue with a prison director who's saying I have a prison that I'm dealing with that has a hole in the wall and I've got 2,000 guys that I'm supposed to keep in. How can you argue with guys who are saying the sewage is coming up through the toilets? That's my mass, that's my immediate need. I need to deal with that. I've got structural situation, a legislation that has come from an autocratic regime and we're supposed to be doing something new. So the focus is let's get some new prison law through. I've got a personnel crisis where now 50 to 75% of my staff are militias that we just integrated that have zero training. That's my crisis situation. Get me some trainers. I'm dealing with some guys who might be about to open the doors any day and let my prison population out. I don't know, this is a very fluid situation. I'm trying, often the mentality then that you're going into these meetings, that you're greeting this assessment phase, that you're greeting conversations with authorities is hunkered down crisis mode. And unfortunately, during that kind of a period, I think the mentality that creeps in is lock them up, shut it down. We've got an insecure environment that we're dealing with. We don't know if these people, pretrial or whatever, are gonna contribute to an insecure environment, lock them up, put them behind these doors. And of course, as we know, this does not produce good outcomes. What I see frequently is obviously huge blockages within the criminal justice system where massive percentage, up to 95% I've seen in some countries of the individuals that you're seeing as you walk around facilities are pretrial. The other piece is that you're seeing an overcrowding situation to the point of creating incredibly chaotic incarceration environments which both produce abuse scenarios within the facilities where you're going to have an effect on those individuals as they're released because they will most likely be at some point that are going to have repercussions within that society and a ripple effect but also often a breaking point overcrowding situation where you see frequent prison breaks and violence both for staff to deal with. So in this context, when I bring up, hey, let's think about some community-based alternatives. How's your probation system working? Is that still operational? Hey, how's your connection with the Ministry of Social Affairs? Are we still chatting to them on a regular basis? They're like, what a luxury. That's for alternatives to incarceration or community-based alternatives? That's for five years down the line. We're dealing with our crisis now when we're gonna lock the doors and hunker down. And so these are the contexts in which I'm often trying to just open the door on a conversation about dealing with some of these issues within the community instead of contributing to overcrowding instead of contributing to huge blockages within the criminal justice process. But it can be difficult. And this is where both vulnerable populations are particularly suited to because they have very, very complex needs within the incarceration model but also, of course, most direly need being out because they're so poorly affected by incarceration environments. So sometimes it's one of those small areas where you can actually start to get prison officials to think about it. In part, and this is the way I often sell it because there are pain in the ass detainees for them to deal with on a regular basis, juveniles, this is incredibly stressful. I don't wanna have to handle this. One thing for me to deal with an adult male population, dealing with juveniles within the prison population, most prison directors find it a huge stressor. Dealing with women within the incarceration environment depends on the environment in which you're in. It can be a particularly challenging one because of rather unsympathetic social conditioning realities for women, but they are also a detainee population that have additional medical needs, have additional psychosocial support needs, have additional community links needs that often you can start to think, start to get a prison director and a detention authority to start exploring with you. I think the substance abuse piece within relatively conservative societies and often conflict environments, this is a really, really difficult one. We're really only starting to see a crack in the door and in fact, in one of the environments that we're gonna talk about, we're seeing a negative dynamic that's emerging on that. And another one that isn't listed here, but of course comes up in this context, is dealing with conflict-related detainees and their particular set of needs and their particular vulnerabilities within the detention context, but also their vulnerabilities if you're going to explore a community-based alternative because of potential backlash within communities. So I'm just gonna take you through, I'm afraid they're not very positive examples, they're more negative examples and they show you where some of the blockages are emerging in a particular context that I'm working in a lot at the moment. And that is Libya. So I've been working in and out of Libya since 2012, very fortunate to be brought in to this incredibly complicated environment in 2012 with USIP and just down the hall from here in 2012, we were hosting the Deputy Minister for Justice from Libya, a guy who was 32, a former prosecutor from Benghazi who'd fought in the front lines, who had never worked in a prison setting, didn't really understand it. And at a certain point in our meetings with him, he broke down and he said something it was familiar with. I don't know how many prisons we have. I don't know who's running them. I don't know whether our prison guards are really back to work or they're just telling me they're back to work. I don't know what dynamics they're dealing with in dealing with the new guys that run these prisons because the reality was all prisons had fallen to different militia controls in all different geographic areas of the country. I don't know how many people are in them and I don't know what we're gonna do. I don't know how many staff I have. And I don't have anyone within our ministry that even feels neutral enough at this point to go around and tell me what that looks like because I can't really trust what they might tell me because things have become so highly localized and because things have become so polarized. And so that was our first entry point. Being invited in to figure out how many people were there and all sorts of other things. I've been, for better or worse, going back ever since. Within that context, one thing that is interesting that has been a positive that I've been pushing the authorities in Libya to keep at the front of their mind and see as a positive is that in fact, pre-revolution, at least on paper, certainly not always in practice, they had some really good community-based alternatives. They had open prisons where you went for a certain number of hours per day to get psychosocial support, maybe work in a prison workshop and you went home to your family at night. They had social worker involvement. You don't see this in every conflict environment. All of this had collapsed by the time we got there but the structure is there. And from a legislation perspective, if you can hitch on to some of those positives and gradually try to wake them back up through a process of engagement, at least the structure is there. At least you're not building from zero. With regard to juveniles, and this is an area I've done a lot of work in, particularly focused this year, pre-revolution, all juveniles, there was only jurisdiction to hold juveniles under the Ministry of Social Affairs. No prison guard should ever have been interacting with a juvenile in the Libyan context. It wasn't necessarily always the case, but certainly on paper. And juveniles were detained within Ministry of Social Affairs run facilities. There were four in the country in different places. Unfortunately, every single one of them was taken over by revolutionary militias during the revolution and they never got them back. But a big part of that is that the Ministry of Social Affairs simply hasn't woken up and hasn't been re-responsibilized. And so in this crisis context, the Ministry of Justice and the Judicial Police who are the prison guards in Libya have been holding juveniles. And as you note, they, the prison directors themselves, are very aware that they're holding juveniles as young as 13 with adult male populations who in a very vulnerable setting where they're at risk for further criminalization and radicalization. Many of the prison directors themselves are so panicked about this that they themselves, slightly outside of sometimes what their superiors are giving orders for, have actually been doing some brokering with the communities to try to reduce at least the number of these individuals. But it's a rare setting. And often, as you say, it's within some of the smaller community-based environments where the prison director will have that relationship and can informally engage. But they're at a crisis point. We have been, this year, that the prison directors don't have the power to convene and to have meetings with the Ministry of Social Affairs to demand them to wake up and reopen these centers. So the United States Institute of Peace has been convening meetings where they bring together Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of Justice, the Judicial Police, social workers who used to work in the prisons to have a discussion and to create a roadmap for the way forward. A few weeks ago, we got some news that in a positive development that the center in Benghazi has been reopened, which was one of the key recommendations put together at this meeting because the largest number of juveniles within the system appeared to be actually within the Eastern geographic zone. So we said, let's prioritize that as a first and then see if we can move things forward. With women, I think, particularly in Libya, but in many of the countries in which we work, it's a particular challenge. The particular challenge, I think, in Libya is that the stigma of any association with the criminal justice system is such that family abandonment is almost immediate. So even before the Revolution, when a woman had served a sentence, the likelihood that her family were coming back to receive her back was so low. As one prison guard said to me in the women's prison in Tripoli recently, she said they don't get any visitors for the men, people come and go, for the women, they're alone now. And the reality is that unfortunately, often that looks like even if they have served a sentence aside from looking at a community-based alternative, which would be a good option, particularly if you can look at potentially geographically moving them within the country to break that negative stigma within their own community and look at alternatives, even if you can pursue that, often what they're handed over into a halfway house where they were essentially continuing an incarceration environment even when they're technically not being incarcerated. This has been a particularly difficult conversation to begin with the Libyan authorities. It has started, but not a lot of progress, unfortunately, is being made. Regarding substance abuse, interestingly, again, pre-revolution, there was some enlightenment or at least some facilities to deal with this. There were, I understand, two facilities within incarceration environments, sort of adjoining prisons, which were drug treatment centres, and individuals who were in for drug-related crimes were often diverted into those. Again, complete collapse, post-revolution. And unfortunately, in the absence of those facilities, we've seen different militias associated with the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defence step in and volunteer their services. Families with out-of-control youth are often, quote-unquote, voluntarily handing over their out-of-control youth to be incarcerated by authorities who have no jurisdiction to carry out, and as far as we're aware, no technical abilities in this regard. A very concerning situation, often also a number of the groups that have involved in this have Salafist links, and there is some concerning. We're doing a study at the moment, particularly looking at this drugs dimension, and some concerns about recruitment into militias and recruitment that may be even happening within those drug treatment incarceration settings being run by militias. The prisons themselves have absolutely no capacity to deal with substance-addicted detainees, and as one very innocent director told me in Tobruk last year, we're really seeing a rise in drug-addicted prisoners, and we don't know what to do, so we put them in the isolation cells and we treat them with milk and antibiotics. Asked him a couple of follow-up questions to clarify why milk and antibiotics and why they thought the isolation cells were the best place for this, and he just, we don't have a clinic. We don't even have a medical clinic, so even if somebody has a sore arm, we don't have them anywhere to send them, so we thought this was at least somewhere isolated from the general population, and he said to me, he was like, we know this is not the right thing to do. We wish we had somewhere else to send them, but I'm dealing with a guy who's going through withdrawal and I have the rest of my prison population to protect from and I'm trying to protect this and we have no qualification, and so that's just an example of what a crisis phase they're in. The final piece, vulnerable population that I wanted to touch on today was conflict-related detainees, and this is a particularly sensitive one because even when the court system was exploring how to release some of these individuals in parts of the country have even pursued amnesties, there have been repercussions for some of these individuals, in fact, a number of people who even got to the stage of being acquitted of crimes and were found murdered. There are questions over whether they were ever released from their detention facility, but we've just written a piece through USIP, it's due to publication soon, looking at the management of secure release of sensitive detainees. It doesn't unfortunately go into looking at it as an alternative to incarceration or alternative to going through the corrections model, but I think that the same concerns apply which is that there's very little regulation even within international law about how to manage that moment of release and that vulnerability that certain sensitive detainees will have. One interesting example that we looked at is not too far from my home, which is looking at the example of post-Good Friday release of conflict-related detainees in Northern Ireland, 500 of whom were released in the immediate years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and a very, very interesting model which similar things have been brought up by many people today of the multi-agency and the multiple authorities that you need to bring to the table in order to manage that. So in Northern Ireland, they had the prison service plus the police and thinking about how to continue to monitor these individuals who, of course, are extremist detainees. Let's not use that categorization only in one regard as we tend to these days. That need to be monitored within the community, but also looking at how the community is going to accept them back, bringing the housing authority to the table and able to ensure that they have safe housing, bringing NGOs to the table, bringing together organizations which had been set up for prisoner groups so that they have social networks to link in with, but also the concerns about them linking with those particular social networks. And so there's some very, very interesting thinking, I think, that was done in Northern Ireland and that now in Northern Ireland is being used for other sensitive, release of other sensitive detainees individuals who have served time for pedophilia, things like that, which are also difficult. So just as a final piece, the next piece of work that I have coming up is in another incredibly complicated environment and touches on some of the complicated detention and alternative as a detention or community-based thinking that we need to do, which is in the next couple of months I'll be going to Iraq with UNODC to look at the complicated detention environment that they're dealing with there where ISIS-related detainees are being held by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, some militias associated with the Prime Minister's office, some militias associated with, not sure, and within that setting, an enormous amount also of women and children and making the distinction between women and children who are gradually being sifted out into release and return within the community because they were individuals associated with ISIS but not fighters, and then also the reality that you're dealing with a large number of women and children who were fighters. So in the Iraqi context, they're in, again, in crisis mode, sifting through how they're gonna deal with this extremist, quote unquote, extremist detainee population and that they have absolutely no capacity to deal with that with adult males but beyond no capacity to deal with it when you're thinking about women and children and so we'll definitely be in UNICEF. I know they're already in touch with UNICEF in thinking through some of these issues but the main takeaway, I think, and the main thing that again, I'm gonna be trying to bring up in this crisis situation is it is never too early to think about community-based alternatives and although many of the authorities that you're having a conversation with think of this as a luxury, think of this as a nutty thing that we might get down the line, think we're awfully liberal people coming from the West talking about this is that it should be seen as a tool to deal with detention crises, not as this crazy thing or this ultra-liberal thing that we'll get to when the country is experiencing some semblance of security. It should be used as a tool to relieve pressure and that can come at a number of different phases, whether it's through alternative models to explore an individual's sentence but also, and this is something that is very, very difficult, is critical thinking in prosecutorial discretion and how to advise security authorities as well in terms of what kind of cases are we going for at the moment? If our country is going through a crisis and we have a huge detention backlog, should we be arresting people at all for low-level offenses? Is there a completely other model that we can be pursuing? But anyway, I'll stop there. Okay, thank you. I think that was three incredibly rich presentations. I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions. Before I hand over to the audience for questions, I mean, I guess one thing that struck me was I'm coming at the idea of a vulnerable group or a particular group based on characteristic. You're sort of coming in terms of the route by which they came into the system and then I'm thinking of children I met in the Sahel who kind of fall into all four. And I wonder how well we're doing it, responding and fully contextualizing that individual situation as a vulnerable substance abuser who's been involved in conflict, extremism, is a child, et cetera, et cetera, or whether we're just saying, okay, it's a child, so we'll slap approach A, B, or C on them. And so that's something for us to think about. And then I guess the other point, and now I would ask you is, I mean, a couple of you sort of mentioned low rates or non-existent rates of recidivism as in a way as an indicator of success. And I actually never used this language. I never, I refuse to. I mean, for me, the principle is you don't put a kid in jail, buster. So whether or not what we are doing is going to reduce the rate of recidivism is irrelevant for I have the luxury of that position. I'm the UN, so we don't have to be overly practical. But I'm aware that when we're discussing with governmental partners, that is often the indicator in which they're interested. So I don't know how any of you have responded to that demand to show reduced recidivism and little else. So after I made my comments, I realized when I used the number 200 people thought, well, people are fighting, that's a very low number. This is very discreet to Swat Valley. And also some of the, and in a correlating that, there's still kids that are coming into the system. But for me, that was the key thing on the recidivism issue for the communities, for the government, for the Sabahun program, is that they don't want these children to be put back into these violent extremist groups. Or if they're even coming in association, I don't know how accurate this is, but my own personal thing is that, if someone says, oh, this child was in a group, and then instead of being arrested and going to jail with everyone else, like a good member of this group, this child went through another program, are they ratting us out? What information did they provide? You never know what's going through the minds of people, the adults in these groups. And so that also makes that child a target of being a reprisal from these groups. So yeah, I think the recidivism issue you were right, I think for the UN, for other internationalizations, that's not, it's just, they should not be in this situation. But I think when it comes to the case of other countries that are going through this, this is the metric by which they can at least show to their people or justify why they're investing in these particular models. Well, I'm happy to hear that it's not just the United States that has an obsession with recidivism. And I get really, so I, most of the funding that sustains my job and the people that I supervise comes from the US federal government and various divisions of it. And I can tell you that every single day the question that we get asked is how does this impact recidivism, what is it? And it's, so you're right to call us out on it because sometimes I slip into it more than I should. But one of the things that we're constantly trying to do is craft the conversation a little bit differently, both with our funders, with journalists, for that matter, with the folks we deal with so that recidivism isn't the only number. I mean, I do concede that at least in the criminal, in the criminal justice field it is a relevant number. I wouldn't say it's not relevant. It's a relevant measure. But there are so many others that get overlooked, including things like how long a person has abstained from substance use, in my case, or how if you work in the domestic violence field, like some of my colleagues, how long a victim of domestic violence has been able to avoid a recurrence of that or whether or not they've been able to find stable safe housing. You know, there's a billion measures that are beyond just recidivating that are important to the conversation and it's oftentimes, it's the funders and the policy makers and the people who have the ultimate decision-making authority who are the ones who have this seeming obsession with recidivism. So all of us, I guess, use every opportunity to remind people that that's only a part of the conversation. I think definitely with some of the host countries where I've worked in, it comes up a lot. But the other piece that comes up, and particularly with juveniles, is revenge and protection from revenge. And so in, not just in Libya, but I'm thinking in the east of Libya, one of the reasons that we were seeing such a high number of juveniles within that setting was because it is more traditionally tribal. And so they would say, actually, we are exploring alternatives and community-based alternatives for these kids. We're just gonna hold them here because their tribes are making a negotiation and if they were outside of this, there would be a tax going on. So we're holding them almost in protective detention, which is, we point out arbitrary detention. But it's often in this context within the case of what's known there as accidental killing or manslaughter, which again, feeds back to the, there's a lot of drugs, alcohol, and ready access to weapons and conflict-related, it all. That's it. Okay, thank you. I guess now we'll open up to the floor if anyone has any questions. I wanna thank you all. That was really so interesting. I have a million questions, but this one is specifically about the program in Pakistan. You talked about the youth going back to communities and building trust with law enforcement. What are you doing with law enforcement to, or what's happening with law enforcement, to help them change their perception of the youth who are coming back, who've been through programs and de-radicalized and things like that? Because that will be really relevant for us in community to hear. Absolutely, and that's something that, I don't think our partner has really given too much detail, I'll have to think back to. And I can't, I'm happy to get back to you, but generally there's been work being done on police reforms in Pakistan, so understanding on various levels of how to better relate with the community. In Pakistan, there's a huge trust deficit generally between police and community for a number of reasons. It's not just the police is seen as the enemy, but also there's just not enough investment in countries like Pakistan where they try and then training and skills on how to be more effectively, deal more effectively with communities, especially in these sensitive situations. It's something that we've been exploring trying to develop models here at USIP, learning from the other programs, especially the rule of law program here at USIP. But you're right, so I think my understanding from when, and talking to our partners is that it's just literally just the conversations, the outreach to community, to police law enforcement officials within the communities where these young boys are being reintegrated to. So it's like ongoing conversations, ongoing sensitization, but I don't think it's anything systematic and that's actually, it makes me think now that when we go back to our partner to kind of help develop other types of models, like this critical thinking program to get their insights on how you develop, who sensitize law enforcement to deal with, not only these are young boys, but these are young boys who have gone through radicalization, who have a lot of trauma, abuse, lack of education, lack of social skills and how do you work with them, especially if conflicts not just within the community, but between that young boy and their family. And in this case, all the young boys that had gone through the Sabahun program, the parents were aware. The parents did give approval for these children so it wasn't that the military rounded them up and put them in the center. The parents were, they gave their permission for these children to go through just these three radicalization program, which I think is not a lot of, when you talk about the other situations you've been talking about, that is just arbitrary rounding these kids up and putting them in. The families aren't involved, but these families do want their children to be reintegrated into communities. They want their kids back at the end of the day. Kerry, I think there was a question in the back. Yeah. I wondered the situation we heard currently is sort of the recent situation in Libya. I wondered how things were under the prior regime, under the colonel for many years. They claim they had a fight ISIS. Now we're present there trying to fight ISIS and we've just packed up and called it a day due to the threat of a civil war that's unveiling. And I wondered how did they handle things with respect to probation, children issues, et cetera, et cetera. Was it a sort of a ruthless regime or was it more advanced than you would think? And I also wondered that the other situation would be the maltreatment of migrants and some have been reduced to more or less slavery. I can't believe how important all this is to human rights, but I wondered how things were under the old regime and now what are we faced with as far as what the future would be as well? I was very lucky actually when I was carrying out the very first full-scale assessment that we tried to do of detention in Libya to be going around with a colleague of mine who's former UNODC who had in fact done quite a few of the prison visits under the former regime. So we had that experience and indeed talked to a number of other people who'd been in. I think as I said on paper and certainly post-2005 where they underwent, led by Girafi Sanseh Fallislam, some level of opening up to the West, some level of reform, particularly from a criminal justice and a security and justice perspective. They crafted a new law, law number five, which at least in some regards, it's not perfect, but has some positives and certainly has a model for open prisons in it, has a probation system, has the involvement of social workers. What I would give as an example is that even old-order prison directors that we interviewed immediately post-revolution, we said, oh, can you tell me a little bit about law number five? There's some interesting provisions in it. And they said, I pointed up at dusty shelves and said, law number five was a law for the shelf. We were never expected to implement it. Law number five was the thing that we used to posture to the international community to make it look like we were moving forward. And there are a number, to give them credit, there are a number of senior judicial police officers who are the prison guards in Libya who were the beneficiaries of training from the British, from a number of others, in human rights-based approaches to detention, many of whom are very enlightened, some of whom talk a good talk, but in reality, if you're put in a situation where we're not so positive. So there were some things that were functioning better, but a big but here in terms of what you talk about, the crisis of extremism, growth of some extremist groups and the vulnerability for the growth of ISIS within the Libyan context, I would say that the other parallel system of detention where the really nasty stuff happened under the regime, which was much more closely held certain prisons which were not under the authority of the judicial police, which were under internal security, where then terrorist suspects, individuals who had gone and fought in Afghanistan, in other places, came back and were detained by the regime are also the detention of many Muslim brotherhood people in those facilities, Abu Sleem being the most obvious, allowed a breeding ground of networking within those different groups and the increased radicalization of those individuals as they networked. And so I think, and there's some very good writing on this, Mary Fitzgerald and a number of others have written, the networking that happened between what's known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG and the Muslim Brotherhood during that period of time and the type of groups that we see operating in Libya, many of those relationships happened because of Gaddafi's detention policies and particularly his tendency to lock up, quote unquote, extremists. Unfortunately, in the east of the country now under Hefter and of course, as we know actively right now, Hefter is now potentially taking Tripoli, Hefter has very much pursued a similar thing which terrifies me for when we get to the down the line, when we get to see the repercussions, five, 10, 20 years down the line of the individuals that he has locked up. Within Northern Ireland, which I've also done some work in and my family is from, the provisional IRA was formed essentially behind bars due to a decision to detain extremist elements, many of whom were not involved until they were held behind bars. So yeah, I'm in on the one hand, there's a desire to see it as a better time, but I'm not so sure. I mean, just, I can certainly say on the juvenile front, I mean, the irony for us is 10 years ago, our Middle East regional office did a studies. We try not to do comparative who is the better who isn't, but at least looking at different aspects, law and practice. Number one was Libya, that we would recommend other actors in the region to look to. Number two was Syria. So for us, it's been an incredibly tragic 10 year period in the two of the systems that we really thought were making very promising advances and taking on a lot of promising practices. That work has essentially been lost and as you know, we're back to a very early stage of getting those systems going again. I'll talk about migrants with you after because it's a whole other bag of tricks. I don't know if anyone else has any other questions. If not, I guess we've granted ourselves a 15 minute breathing space before the next session. So thank you again to all of our panelists. Thank you. Okay, sorry to interrupt. There was a bag left downstairs in the corridor for lunch and somehow that bag, the bag made its way to the next door room, the holding room and now it has since disappeared. So would you, if you get a chance, let one of us know if that bag was yours, if you reclaimed it because we don't want anybody to feel like they're deprived of their property. So thank you. Excuse me. We're the institutes. That's Mrs. Marguerite here. I'm all about you. So I might have, it's actually funny because I didn't mean to lie to myself in the scary part, you see the great day about all the patients. Yeah, I mean, I didn't even get into it, but the saddest part is that most people was women in prison. Yeah, I lost a lot of experience. I was firing for a few minutes. I just wanted to say nice to meet you. Great to hear about your award. Hope to run into you again. Yeah. Oh, God. Yes, sir. Oh, God. Yes, you're doing good. We have several grants together, right? Yeah. Oh, thank you. I told him to give me the invite. Now, be great. Be great. Thank you. I appreciate that. That's nice to be here. Thank you. All right. Thank you. How are you doing? Good. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. How are you? How are you? How are you? Oh, really? Yeah. How are you? How are you? Hi. Where are you? Oh, no. I was just going to get a call. Okay. How are you? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm okay. How are you? I'm okay, my pleasure. Thank you. Are you? I'm okay. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Me too. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, and I could see it right there. Yes, and you can see theoretically. Okay, theoretically. Yeah, well, you know, I know. I can read that it comes down right here. Oh, okay, come on. That was so good to see you. You have close. Yeah, I'm past your cross. That's the way I wanted to stop you. Yeah. It's always helpful. Thank you. Did you come back tonight? Yeah, I'm leaving right now, actually. Thank you. Just, I don't, I don't. We need like a podium. Oh, you need that. Hello. I'm good. We're good to go. We have a full house. Yeah. Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Greg Gizvold. I'm a senior fellow with the rule of law collaborative. And I have the dubious distinction of standing between you and leaving. So you're my hostages for the next 90 minutes or so. And we have a, we save the best for last. We have an illustrious panel here that's going to help us unpack one of the, or an aspect of the, of the problems we've been talking about extensively today. As we run through these sort of challenges to the criminal justice system, it can seem like just a wall of issues. Capacity issues, societal issues, population issues. And we don't know really where to grab and what thread to pull on. And Fiona was beginning to grasp at some of this with conflict affected states. And the gentleman from CCI was talking about how we approach these issues in various U.S. jurisdictions. But the challenge for us as folks who program in this area is how do we start dividing all of this up? How do we arrange it into buckets? And a leading international rule of law scholar has begun to push forward a notion of systems, services and society as a way to begin to parse it all out. But even then we are faced with the challenge, the tension between the political reality that the criminal justice system is very often used to remove a population or a set of population to address a social problem to provide a semblance of strength. And that exists in tension with the reality that the criminal justice system is going to surface and magnify and clarify the problems underneath all of this. The poverty, the ethnic tension, the exclusion, and that list goes on. So the challenge we have in part is recognizing that for justice to be effective it has to be people-centered. And yet it is focused at a level of abstraction much higher and much more diffuse. It's focused on populations or on priorities, but it deals with individuals. It deals with people. And we are constantly trying to figure out how we deal with an individual who has multiple identities at the same time. They are an offender usually. They are a victim. They may be addiction-afflicted, conflict-afflicted, afflicted by a wide variety of things, domestic violence, sexual abuse, gang abuse. All of these things exist at the same time. They are victim, they are witness, they are perpetrator, and we don't have a language yet to unpack that, but we're working on it. And so our panelists today are going to talk about the intersection between the criminal justice system and the societal problems and how we deal with them, the approaches, the frameworks, the tools, and give a few examples that have been tried in their various locations. We have chosen a domestic example, an international example, and an international practitioner to comprise your last panel. So I'm hoping you will have reserved all the questions you were either unaware of you wanted to ask or were afraid to ask from earlier and save them up because this is the group that can answer them. The structure of this is going to be fairly straightforward. We're going to take about 10 minutes each and run through a quick presentation on frameworks and issues and how we approach them. And I'm then going to circle back and ask if we have time, just to give you three or four things that as you go out and approach this type of challenge from your perspective, implementer, DOJ prosecutor, programmer, INL field rep, whatever, you can take away with and say, all right, that's news I can use as it were. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over and we're going to start with Aaron Park from Washington, D.C. Welcome and thank you for staying. So before I get into my actual presentation, I wanted to provide some context to the District of Columbia's system in general because when other panelists were speaking about the systems and challenges and barriers, I was able to identify with most of those even though my agency is a federal agency with a local mission that supervises adult offenders who have been convicted of D.C. code violations. So wrap your head around that. So we're supervising D.C. code offenders, but we're a federal agency. So that's where it starts. The second part about the system that I work in is that the District of Columbia does not have a prison. So all of our offenders who receive long-term prison sentences serve their time in a federal institution. So they become custody of U.S. Federal Bureau of Prison. So that's a unique feature. We have a D.C. jail that's run by the local government. So our free trial detainees in some instances are placed in D.C. jail, which is run by local government. Lastly, our offenders who are returning to the District from BOP, if they have six months left in their sentence, they are transferred to either Halfway House or D.C. jail. So run by local government to finish out their last six months of the sentence in D.C. under BOP's custody. So do we get that? So it gets really complicated and convoluted. So my agency, we help with those re-entrance coming back to the city from BOP, prepare them to re-enter the community and help transition them during those six months. But our work begins way before that. We have different programs to help connect our offenders, who might be in Nebraska, Wisconsin, West Virginia, all over the country to really try to get them back into the community. So we actually have programs that deal with that. And that because we don't have a prison system, and D.C. had a prison a while ago, about 20, 25 years ago, and it was not even located in the District. It was located in Northern Virginia. So there was never a prison in the District of Columbia. So that's the background on why we have the system we have. So the ATI was not a want. It was a necessity for the District of Columbia. We couldn't afford to send all of our prisoners to all of the country to serve their sentence. And we didn't have a big enough facility, jail facility to really put our pretrial defendants into institution to put them under some form of custody. So fortunately for the District of Columbia, we have pretrial system that's incredibly strong and does fantastic work as part of preadjudication process. We do not have bail bond system. Most of, majority of our defendants are released under pretrial supervision and in the community awaiting their adjudication. So that agency is actually our sister agency, CISOSA's sister agency, and we're funded through the same budget process through Congress. So we have pretrial ATI process that's very robust and the portion I work for is the post-adjudication system and we don't call ourselves probation officers. We don't call ourselves parole officers. Our officers are called community supervision officers because we are in the community. We're working with our community partners to provide supervision services to the offenders, post-adjudicated offenders. So that's the broader framework for our system. So for us, the challenge has always been mitigating risk versus containing risk. As a community supervision agency, we're really focused on maintaining our offenders in the community. What are the things we need to do to mitigate their risk so we could really effectuate behavior changes so they could maintain their tenure in the community and not go back into or go to prison for these crimes they have committed? So it's been a really challenging for us to really balance that because the options are very limited and we have developed a really comprehensive system of responses to their risk and also the behaviors. So one of the things that we really truly believe in is that all of our offenders are individuals with individual difficulties, different profiles of risk and needs, and that our job is to figure those things out and get the help we need from our offenders to figure all the details out. So we don't just see our offenders as somebody we do something to, but we see them as partners in their journey towards change process. So we're really talking about how do we apply supervision, monitoring, and intervention strategies to really get at what they need and promote behavior changes. So going forward, I want to make sure I touch on all the key points. So most of you are probably familiar with the ACOR correctional practices and that's the foundational piece for all evidence-based practices in community corrections. So our service provision is really based on these eight principles and we work really hard to adhere to and implement practices and programs that are consistent and aligned with those eight principles. So when we look at that, we do have a tool that we use to assess actuarial risk and that's where we start to differentiate the offenders who are sitting in front of us. That's the first step in the process. What kind of risk do they pose to the community, to themselves, others, and etc. And then from there, we really look at what motivates people to change their behaviors and the motivation differs by individuals. What's motivating me to do something is totally different than anyone else in this room. So we need to be able to identify those factors that help people to really want to change. And based on really truly understanding the risk they pose and the different types of needs they come to us with, we have to target interventions to really fit the needs and the risk of that individual. And all the evidence-based practices and literature tells us that we allocate the most resources to the highest-risk persons with the needs. And we really try to align our resources to address that. In addition to aligning the resources, we also want to target those charismatic needs factors that have the most impact on the behavior change. And so that means we have to have interventions that are targeting their criminogenic cognitions, behaviors, attitudes, and associations. So the programming that we developed and we are continuing to develop and because it's a work in progress is to really focus on those, because that's our specialty. We are not in the business of necessarily really taking over the mental health concerns or substance abuse problems of our offenders. We could provide some resources towards that, but our core mission is to really target those driving factors behind their criminal behaviors as a supervision agency. So one of the things that really helps us to get at the individual needs is responsibility. Not all people are going to respond the same way towards whatever interventions we provide. We talked about educational needs. Some of our offenders have really low achievements. So they can read, they can write, and there's a lot of deficits that requires different type of interaction. So looking at all the, you know, risk is what we tend to focus on. Needs is the second thing we talk about, but we don't necessarily talk about the responsibility of the system to work with these different individuals who are in front of us and challenges they have internally. So we want to make sure that we get at all those things which we're really truly talking about evidence-based practices. And I think other panelists talked about this. Having really skilled staff and the system that is capable of working with this complex and challenging issues that our offenders bring with them. So having a system, a training and technical assistance process that really help our staff to be successful. One of the things that we have instituted as a system is the communities of practice. So we're going to do evidence-based practices. We have to provide our employees with the forums to really practice their skills, continue to reinforce good skills, and then really motivate them to continue to learn new skills, continue to go out there and research what's out there doing some different things and think through what they're doing every day in a different way and applying those skills and having a structure process to get feedback. So I don't want to go into extensive detail with everything, but also talking about punishment versus incentives and what we really try to ingrain with our staff is reward and incentivize any behavior that's incremental move towards pro-social behaviors. So not looking at everything from black and white binary decisions, but seeing things through continuum. Behavior change takes a long time and any movement forward is a good movement and incentivizing those incremental changes is an incredibly powerful tool to have as we move through the system. So those are individual staff level and offender level kind of evidence-based practices that need to be ingrained in your system, but also as a system is incredibly important for us to be part of a community. DC is incredibly fractured, complex system that if we are not engaging with our partners, stakeholders, and the community and really develop a system, have a system that supports our offenders every integration into the community. No matter how good a job we do, our offenders are not going to be successful and we encounter that every single day. So one of the biggest challenges that our agency is facing right now has nothing to do with anything other than securing buildings. We have no place to go. As a community supervision agency, we have decided as an organization that we are going to go into the communities where our offenders reside, go into their natural community to provide the services they need. The problem is those communities really don't want community supervision agency in their neighborhood. They don't want a concentration of what the community calls criminals coming in to receive services. So it's been an incredible challenge for us because our lease started running out and if you are not familiar with the district, the district is being gentrified in a manner that we've never seen before. So many of the communities we can't afford to go in because the rents are really high and other places we can't go in because there's too much pushback, not just from the community but also the building owners. So that may not be a unique challenge for many of us with a lot of these communities gentrifying and being revitalized. I mean, it's the social cost of economic boom that we are facing right now. So engagement with the community is incredibly important and they need to see a value in what you do and how you do things. And then the other thing is what we've been talking about, two things, measuring what you do, how you do fidelity adherence to the models and etc. And giving, as a system, developing a process to measure what you do and how you do things and be able to demonstrate the value that you bring to the table and what kind of impact you have as an organization and the impact you make with helping to change people's lives and the behaviors and etc. So as I said before, we really want to focus on the big four, attitude, behavior, peer association, etc. However, we cannot forget the last four. So in terms of those areas, we really have built a continuum of service treatment for substance abuse programs. So we have, fortunately, our agency has a significant amount of funding to provide substance abuse treatment for our offenders, especially the high-risk offenders. So we have a whole continuum from residential all the way to outpatient and if we're looking at every level of substance abuse services, we have early intervention also. So we've front-end all the way to the back-end. And for those offenders who are low-risk and moderate needs with substance abuse, we partner with our local government agencies to provide two secure services for them. Mental health is a completely different animal, though. We have, just like Pam talked about this morning, a very high percentage of offenders who are coming into the system with a persistent mental illness and that a lot of them do have active symptoms and their mental health conditions are the drivers for their criminal behaviors. There isn't a robust system of care that we could really use to create a continuum from the most chronically severely mental ill to people who may need maintenance kind of services. So that's a challenge for us and we've been working very closely with the city government and have secured some funding to provide some level of services for our offenders, but that's been a barrier for us for a long time. We are implementing some restorative justice initiatives that have allocated some positions to build that up because one of the things that we are seeing and it has to do with what's going on in the city and if you watch the news, you're going to see a lot of stories around gun violence. Illegal weapons coming into the district, these young adults who are aged between 18 to 24 randomly shooting at each other with these semi-automatic weapons and the number of shootings that are happening has increased tremendously. Homicide rates have been going up significantly for the city. So our programming is shifting to respond to that need so we are looking at some empathy building with our offenders, aggression and violence reduction programs and etc. We have had mentors in the community to work with our offenders to really connect them to the community. So our programming is ever-evolving programming to really reflect the needs of our offenders and the risk they pose to the community. So that's what we've been working on. So when I talked to Greg about how we decide on what we do with our offenders given all this evidence and research, we have made a conscious decision as an organization to really look at stabilization needs of our offenders. Housing, the basic thing is not just housing but clothing and food. If you're hungry and you have nothing to wear and no place to go, you coming in to see one of our officers is like zero. It's not going to happen. So when we see that those needs exist with our offenders, we try to get those needs met. We have a system to secure identification for them because a lot of our offenders don't have identifications. So they can't go and get services. They can't get services without an ID. So we have those kind of things that we think is really small but that has a really large impact. We have set up a system to really be able to secure those things for them. So for us, it's a stabilization student need. We address those and then target those primary drivers of the criminal behaviors. And then we really work on engaging offenders into the community programs to support their sustained recovery and educational needs given the profile of our offenders with their educational and vocational needs and achieve shortcomings. So let me see. That's where I am with that and that I'm completely forgot about my slides. So I know that the resources NIJ, resources was mentioned. And I love NIC because they have a library. So if you click on one of those links and then there's like covers of all, and everything you ever wanted to know about evidence-based practices and how to implement them all on the same page. So, and I see our library is one of the resources and there are a couple of other ones. So, and there's actually inventory of all the evidence-based programs. So I have that on there for you. Thanks, Erin. Next, we're going to turn to Dr. Mariano Montenegro who's going to talk to us about Chile. Okay. Thank you very much, Grego. I don't know if... You should be able to just go. Yeah, there you are. Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for invitation. I appreciate very much to be here in this fantastic meeting. I'm learning a lot. So I want to show... My presentation is about two words, maybe context first and second is content. No, like you said. Because it's extremely important to take both words. So we have in Latin America, I want to show you the context first. And we have a report in 2013-2014 in regional human development report, you know, is the citizen security with human dimension, diagnosis and proposal for Latin America. And we have an extremely interesting paradox. This is our paradox in Latin America. Behind crime and violence, understanding Latin American paradox, why in spite of advance of regional growth and development indicators over last decade has objective and perceived insecurity increased. This is our big paradox. So, the reason this report offer four big reasons. Full set of variable allow us to explain the vulnerability of Latin America to crime and violence. Number one, the economic structure has conditioned economic growth without quality and focused in consumption with insufficient social mobility even generating aspirational crime. Second, changes in the social institutions such as increased and single parent family, high school dropout rates and accelerated urban growth. Third, our subject facilitators, weapon, alcohol and drugs. Four, a lack of institutional capacity of Latin American states, especially in the justice sector. So, sorry. So, the situation Latin America and the Caribbean means we have Latin America and the Caribbean have a high crime rates. This is one reality and high rates of drug use, another reality, compared to other regions. Citizens consider public safety and drugs as priority issues in every single country in all Latin America and the Caribbean. Third, governments must respond to these concerns and be effective. These two phenomena cause great suffering and among other things also destabilized democracy. In the region, there are few alternative to incarceration. This is our reality. Few alternative to incarceration, prison is usually the destination of those convicted. This is the rule. So, when we want to talk about that, we need to know this context. Because we want to change the context. My country, now I want to talk about one country. First, Latin America, in general. Now, one country, a long spaghetti in the south of South America is very long. It's 5,000 kilometers. So, some relevant data in Chile because I want to show an example with hope. With hope, I want to convince you it's possible in this kind of country also. We have a population with 17.5 million. 7.5 million live in the capital, Santiago. So, it's very centralized. This is a big problem. 16 regions, not the state, it's not federal. 16 regions and 350 municipalities, counties. And we have 23,000 per capita middle income country. This is our reality. In this context, we... Sorry, we are using the model. We decided to use these models. No risk, needs, and responsibility model, R&R. This is being applied in Chile among problematic drug users in conflict with the criminal justice system. In Chile, drug consumption is not criminalized first. Okay, the use is not criminalized. The model applied to criminal offenders with problematic drug use and other crimes, but not the use of drug is not a crime. It is applied at different moments of the criminal process. We have 90,000 people sentenced. 45 in prison, non-jail prison, and 45 in alternative to incarceration. Half and half. Okay, probation, parole, et cetera. We know how many prisoners we have. We know how many staff we have. Please, yeah, we know. Chile has a system of alternative to incarceration, and now these alternatives are being given content, especially if there is a problematic consumption. Now we are putting the content. Alternative to incarceration without programs that guarantee rehabilitation and reduce the risk of recidivism are not acceptable in the public opinion. In that case, jail is preferred. So we have to compete with this. We need to guarantee. This is very important for the policymakers and it's very important for the general population. So we have a public policy. In our public policy, we have treatment and rehabilitation programs for population with problematic use drug in conflict with the criminal justice system. We decided to have public policy. We don't have universal covering, but we started. We decided, and why we decided principally because it's much more effective for reducing recidivism. This was the first reason that the policymakers accepted this development. Not economical, because you have to know in our regions the prison are very cheap, extremely cheap. So the treatment and rehabilitation is much more expensive than the prison. So it's not a good reason for us. So it's important to know because in different contexts you have to have different speech, different reason for convince the policymakers. So we have drug treatment court, of course, almost in all the country, in 30 courts, in 11 regions of 16, so 14 age and adult offenders. Ordinary crimes are combined by drug consumption in Chile is not a crime to consume drug. Okay? Second program is drug treatment and rehabilitation in probation. Third drug treatment and rehabilitation in parole. Now we have a law approved, but not yet implemented. This year we are going to start with this, with parole. Four treatment and rehabilitation of drug for teenagers of offenders, in prison and in alternative to incarceration. We have a law for teenagers. Okay? And five, we have program, drug treatment and rehabilitation in prison. Okay? In all the country, but not with universal covering, but in a very big, a lot of regions. Okay? So the model is RERNR. I'm not going to stop here, but we have this model. The model is comprehensive diagnosis and intervention plan and the comprehensive diagnosis. All these access, we evaluate in each person with a use of drug and in conflict with the criminal justice system. Okay? Everything. And the intervention plan is repair responsibility, development of competence and social integration all the time for access. So we have recovery, we have exclusion and we have social integration. For us it's extremely important to talk about that because I think this is the principal subject for this panel. So recovery, we have this definition, it's very clear the definition in SAMHSA, we share the same definition, but the important thing is to talk about exclusion. Because exclusion is a subject that we need to be very clear. A person is socially excluded if he or she is prevented from participating fully in economic, social and civic life and or if his or her income and other resources, personal, family and cultural are so small that they prevent him or her from enjoying a standard of living considered acceptable by the society in which he or she lives. Combination forms by the lack of economic resource, social isolation and limited access to social and citizen rights. Exclusion is abroad is covered economic, political, legal and social relation dimensions. It's an impediment to full participation that which is considered acceptable by society in which they live. So we have two perspectives for if we want to see this phenomenon. One perspective is deficient people. Another perspective is people with capacity. And this is very important because the first perspective is everything is your responsibility. It's a personal responsibility. And the second is a illness but it's my responsibility so my recovery is important if I am in charge. The second, the people with capacity is sharing responsibility. So I have responsibility by the society also. So if we define the society has a role we can build another solution. So when we are talking about social integration we are talking about reintegration, insertion, inclusion. So the definition of that for us is a process of mutual changes both by the person and the society. The contribution of those affected and of a community to achieve an equalization of opportunity which allows equality and full participation of people with problematic substance use in life and social development. All the program, all the policies, the public policy that I showed is considered the case management on the time in treatment and in social integration if not it's not possible to have good result. So the challenge is multi-sectoral like you said, it's multi-sectoral multi-agency. It requires a case management method that facilitate integration with different sectors. Case management professional must have knowledge and skill in social vulnerability, problematic drug use, criminology, mental health and disorder, management with different sectors, good social skill, knowledges of gender and sexual diversity, management of permanent motivational techniques. It's very demanding for being a professional who is in charge in case management, but if not it's not only a person who is close it's a person with skill and knowledges. Sorry. So in summary, finally talking about social integration because it's important to talk about that, we are talking about a bilateral process affected person, society of mutual accommodation. Two, participation of all social space and three, equalization of opportunity, rights and responsibility. So, I wanted to tell you is I have a hope with this population. We convince the policymakers because I worked in this subject 20 years ago I started in 2000 you know, in prison we started with a model in 2000 with teenager, no, with drug court we started in 2004 in teenagers, offenders, we started in 2007 in probation in 2015 and now we are going to start in parole. So, we convince them with good reason, principally concentrated in victims. We want to have less victims. We want to have less crime. That's why we have to be effective. This is the speech in Latin America because if we have another speech about criminal rights is completely acceptable for me, for the academic but in the social society is unacceptable politically. So, we need to convince so we convince them with this way. Thank you. Excellent. So now we are going to journey back from the Spaghetti Nation of Chile to the North Star of Integrated Programming that is the State Department. Richard? What's so funny out there, George? It's getting late in the day. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'm going to bounce back and forth from corrections to alternative to incarceration but I'm a corrections advisor for INL and I get involved with international correctional partners who are involved in initiating prison reform and capacity building efforts. The majority, like many of the speakers have discussed, the majority of organizations I'm involved in are severely under resourced and are trying to implement some basic systems of control to improve their system. So, when we work with these organizations we try to implement low cost sustainable best practices that fit their country context that best could improve their operational capacities. So, some of the areas that we focus on obviously one of the top areas we focus on is training because my personal belief is that training is the key to the professionalization of any criminal justice organization. So, we really try to focus on training and developing training programs for the organizations, line staff, because many of the countries don't provide training to their corrections or probation staff. And if they do it is generally more police training or military training. So, we really promote discipline specific training and corrections or probation for their staff. Also, first line leadership training for staff. Supervisors, we take for granted but first line leadership is critically important as those are the staff on the ground that are supervising the line staff and are going to implement internal controls to make sure things are going right in the correctional organization and the probation organization. And also executive leadership to train executive leaders in corrections and probation on certain executive leadership components, especially as it relates to implementing cultural change within the organization because as George had indicated a lot of these reform efforts are going to require a huge cultural shift for their line staff. So, how do you implement that cultural change in an organization? And again, even at the higher levels of some of these organizations they come in, they're not corrections folks like myself who's been raised in corrections for 25 years. They're the police commander that they appoint to be the corrections leader. So, we really try to focus on all levels of training. We also focus on classification which is key to the institution and key to probation organization. And again in some of these countries classification is not always as we see it in the United States. Sometimes you feel success if you're able to separate adult from juveniles females from males. You can consider that a success in some countries. And prison systems in some of these countries unlike the United States where we have medium security facilities, minimum security facilities and prisoners are designated to those security levels in a lot of the countries all security levels are placed in one facility and you have to work with them to best separate that population so you are best managing the individuals and not contaminating when I say contaminating mixing minimum security prisoners with high risk prisoners. Prison programming, we focus on prison programming as much as we can not only on the traditional drug treatment, mental health, education, vocational training, prison industries but also basic recreation programming any activities that reduces inmate idleness because you know that's very bad and prevalent in some of these institutions is inmate idleness. Also if you can implement program you generally one of the benefits of that is that you increase staff and prisoner communication and relationships and that's always a positive thing and in some of these countries there's a great deal of mistrust between prisoners and their government and again by implementing programming, increasing staff relations and the main treatment of prisoners you can decrease some of that level of mistrust and then some of the other areas that we focus on from corrections is emergency response prison intelligence and facility maintenance a lot of these facilities are very poorly maintained and we like to train their staff on how to best maintain the facility to increase the conditions of confinement of four prisoners but we do a lot of this training I just wanted to mention that we have a very special partnership with Colorado in which we have a full-time residential corrections training academy there where we train about 1500 international corrections officials of countries on an annual basis and they are very good partner and we use that quite a bit and I know the first speaker had mentioned that corrections is not designed to be a treatment facility and that is true but I do want you to know there are a lot of good state organizations correctional organizations out there that are doing a lot in the way of innovative reentry programs and things to better prisoners both in the opioid and drug treatment and reintegration and trying to move inmates from long-term restrictive housing down to the security levels and Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania are all very good partners that we utilize in our efforts I just want to switch on a couple points of alternatives to incarceration I know that P-Dash Walsh and his keynote speaker had brought up Armenia as a country that we're engaged with an alternative to incarceration that was a successful engagement we were able to work with them and they established their first ever risk needs assessment tool in that country they developed a probation specific training curriculum to train their staff and they also developed a directory of social and community resources for the different provinces in Armenia that their probation officers could use to refer their clients to so it was a very successful engagement and I think it was successful based upon three things that I think are important in any engagement one you need to work closely with line staff to make sure that what you operationally want to implement is feasible and meets the country's context two you need to interface very closely and get buy-in from the executive activity throughout the organization and three you need to have good touch point with higher level decision makers who are going to a lot resources and support to that particular entity and we were able to do all three in Armenia which led to some very good and continuing success in Afghanistan which I had worked for four years as a correctional advisor for in Afghanistan we my colleagues from the Afghanistan office have been working closely with the government there to implement alternatives to incarceration for adults and last last month we had our first individual sentenced to community service on the adult side in Afghanistan I know there's a few other individuals in the pipeline for alternatives to incarceration sentencing and that was a big thing for us and one thing I learned in that engagement we need to have judicial trust in alternatives to incarceration and when we first worked with them the judiciary did not have faith in the processes did not have faith in the organization to carry out their key mission and would not use it and in some of these countries decision makers who make decisions judiciary to place people on alternatives to incarceration or wardens who refer prisoners for early release if those offenders and individuals go out in the community and commit some heinous acts sometimes the judges and the prison warden could be held responsible for that in some of these countries so you have to have a good deal of trust between the judiciary and the entity and how you do that is making sure you utilize your first line supervisors and your executives in those organizations to have good internal quality controls to make sure that the basic vital functions are being performed just a couple more things that I have learned and I just wanted to share two or three more points organizational structure going into any country it's important that you know the organizational structure of the entities and the country is it centralized organization is it decentralized organization if the entity is centralized what is the authority and control throughout the country here let's say the federal bureau of prisons if they want to implement a policy may first you know on may first that that policy is going to be implemented as written from federal prisons from Pennsylvania to California not so in some of these countries where the reach of the organization is not that strong in addition what goes on in the capital say of Kabul Afghanistan is not what goes on in the provinces or what's operationally feasible in the provinces in Pakistan the probation office may conduct one on one checks with probationers once a month at their home or their place of work in the outer provinces good supervision may be a phone call to the tribal leader to the religious leader to the family member to check on the well-being of the offender so be cognizant of that and just two more points close coordination I learned in Afghanistan at the height of our engagement where we had 15 to 20 organizations trying to assist the Afghan civilian prison system working at cross paths of each other it wasn't until we really got together developed a formalized work groups and action plans that we were able to synergize our efforts and produce better it's really good to know who the partners are out there and coordinate closely with them because generally if you're in a particular area there's other partners that are working in that space and donor fatigue I just wanted to mention that that if you're in a long-term project with one particular agency for an extended period of time people sometimes get fatigue and get frustrated because things do move slowly and they move slowly because a lot of things we try to initiate require legislative changes there are lots of changes at government levels on a frequent basis and you're going to get new people in power positions that have different priorities different attitudes different personalities and sometimes that could lead to frustration and recently somebody had likened these type of engagements as not a point A straight line to point B engagement but it's like a as they said riding a sailboat on the San Francisco Bay where you're making progress going this way sometimes you go right sometimes you go left sometimes you go back just keep your eye on your ultimate goal and what you're trying to accomplish there so I'll end my comments there and open it up for questions Excellent so we've gone from DC through Chile to Afghanistan and San Francisco Bay to get three diverse perspectives on what people centered justice looks like in alternatives to incarceration so now we turn the microphone on those of you we have about 15 minutes left those of you still here for questions I'm not above calling on people alright I'm going to start then so question for Aaron first when you talked about the offender agency partnering with your offenders your released offenders to solve the problem in part that sounded like the problem is them as a complex individual in a situation with challenges whether competency challenges or locality challenges if you could drill us down a little bit and sort of help us understand where much of that energy gets concentrated um when I said that we see them as our partners it wasn't because they are the holder of the problems it's because they are the holders of solutions so I think a lot of us have been trained to see people as problems and that it's like a shifting of your paradigm so we want them to really engage in self-analysis and really look at themselves as a person and as a person with aspirations person with strength person with experiences that may have impacted them in a negative way to really come as using us as a consultant to come up with solutions to make changes and kind of help chart out how they want to go about doing it so so it's a little different orientation so it goes back to strength-based approach to working with our offenders and people in general so anyone yeah and I just want to piggyback on that if I may and just say that I think both in the probation alternatives to incarceration world and corrections world we call that motivational interviewing that we're trying to train our staffs not to be the supervisor but more the coach to coach the offender along for them to make good decisions to lead them into good decision-making processes so yeah I agree with that we've got a question in the back yeah I think it's three for each one of each of you for the DC question I was asking since you guys are kind of mobile what technological what are you using technology wise to stay that way because if you don't necessarily have a home base but you have to work within the community what are you doing to do that so hang on then the next question related to the definition of exclusion as you presented it was that state imposed or was that something that's just base because when I was trying to listen to the definition I didn't know if that was something that was something that's just because you're a part of the system that you're naturally excluded or was something that you actually this is what you follow as a a tenant that you are excluded because of the act that you committed does it make sense what I'm saying I just wanted I just wanted some clarification on that and then for Rich I was going to ask because you talked about the sale boat thing that's going into this in this in this field has there been has there been in a governmental agency that you actually work with where it was more straightforward where you were getting hitting those points without the changes in all the different governmental you know elections and all this other stuff that may affect the work you're doing this has there ever been experience like that and what was it if there was one why don't we start with Dr. Montenegro and then Aaron and then Rich maybe I I think I want to talk about this both both subject I think we have to put on the table discrimination and stigma because it's maybe it's a ghost but it's real this population has extraordinary high stigma and discrimination and we study their needs for for exclusion we needed to know what does it mean about exclusion and stigma and discrimination was very important we study every single patient and what do they need for social integration and finally with our definition is according to this study but we need to talk about that because for example the agency when if another agency we are not in charge of this population they have enormous amount of stigma and discrimination they don't want to help us because they are criminal they are drug addict they don't deserve anything so this is not easy but it's important to put on the table all the time if not we are not going to be able to do it alone only the agency who are in charge because we need to integrate in different sectors in education, employment and houses housing and citizen and everything everything so we need to talk about that very important political decision because the political decision is very important also about stigma and discrimination we want to integrate them or not this is very important so Aaron how do your staff communicate Snapchat around BC so we have satellite offices within these communities we have requirements for our CSOs to be out in the community so because we require them we equip them with cell phones and then because we are shrinking our footprint like most of the federal agencies they are all we are transitioning into laptops with all the applications on laptops so they could be they could go to a field location in northeast DC they could go into the system and have everything available for them to do whatever they need to do we are also one of the panelists talked about moving into more of an app based like notification system we are developing offender app where we send out notices for their appointments with CSO all the intervention services their group schedules and etc so remind their kind of things so we have CSO dashboard where there's all these activities they need to complete and then have them have an app that tells them when things are due for their assigned cases etc so we are becoming much more mobile with all of our technology so truly be in the community and be engaging with the community and our partners in a much more technologically savvy manner Richard have you been part of the unicorn project where it hit all its milestones and proceeded in a straight line from need to reform to achieved reforms not necessarily in a straight line but there's certainly many projects that move along a lot smoother than others in terms of implementation and I know we've had a couple positive projects in Eastern Europe with not only Armenia but with Moldova and Kosovo on some of the activities that they're taking on relative to reform efforts other questions yes I have a question what does the panel think about the actual legalization we'll make this one real quick as a service provider and community supervision provider it's been a nightmare for us because the criminalization of marijuana in DC has created some differential system for the probation nurses versus supervised releases and pluralities so it's just been a very difficult process to manage so from our perspective it neither needs to be federal or like local it just becomes like a chaos for the system and also for our offenders because we have people with split sentences and all kinds of things that has different requirements it just becomes very complicated process in Chile it's not criminalized the use of drug so but about legalization is another subject is offering every single shop with publicity and a lot of access it's not good in my opinion because we are going to have more user and with vulnerability it's terribly dangerous because this is a problem with vulnerability social vulnerability principally but psychological and biological so we have to talk about vulnerability also when we are talking about this kind of subject because if you have an offer very easy the use is going to increase in general so decriminalize of course because you have to treat use of drug like a patient or like a citizen not like a criminal in my country it's not criminalized the use but we don't promote the use so we put different how can you say barrier for getting drug but if somebody is using drug is treat like a it's not criminal Richard anything to add? nothing to add from a correction standpoint alcohol and drugs still create an issue with security and safety in the institution and that wouldn't change my perception of that and could be any other questions? we've got time for maybe one or two more okay, Hamid closing remarks yes now to sum up to sum up well first and foremost I want to extend first please to everyone on the panel a round of applause it is never easy to be the last panel secondly I want to extend our profound gratitude to the staff and to the facilities here at the U.S. Institute of Peace who have always proven to be gracious hosts and special thanks to Chelsea Dreher in the back she has been vital to both publicizing and ensuring all the minor details from start to finish so with that thank you Chelsea and of course to our rule of law collaborative staff Soneco, Claire and somewhere in here or somewhere out there is our vital leader Carol Young all of whom who helped to facilitate the travel of our speakers the facilities and to make sure that the day goes smoothly so thank you to them finally thank you for especially to those of you to our speakers to our participants for making this day possible for accomplishing the task that we set out to do which is to explore a new topic and then to also remind you first and foremost on a logistical issue to complete your evaluations if you've not already done so and to keep a prize the next training that will be offered here in Washington will be June 3rd and 4th and that will be a imperative look on Islamic legal systems Islamic law, political Islam extremism all those fun things so hopefully today was a jitting up of the topics and we hope to see you at another event safe travels and good day thank you thank you very much