Joshua B. Hoe interviews Vincent Schiraldi about his recent report on parole in New York City
Full Episode
My Guest – Vincent Schiraldi
Vincent Schiraldi founded the policy think tank, the Justice Policy Institute, then moved to government as director of the juvenile corrections in Washington DC, and then as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. Most recently he served as Senior Advisor to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. He is currently a Senior research scientist and the co-director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He was recently announced as the new Director of Corrections in New York City (after our interview).
His current report is: The Enormous Cost of Parole Violations in New York City.
Notes From Episode 105 – Vincent Schiraldi
You can read Less is More here.
You can read what is referred to as the Martinson Report here.
Alice Goffman “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City”
Bruce Western “Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison.”
David Harding and Jeffrey Morenoff “On the Outside: Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration.”
Full Transcript
Joshua B. Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 105 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Vincent Schiraldi about the Columbia Justice Lab’s report: The Enormous Costs of Parole Violations in New York. I should mention that a few weeks after we completed this interview, which has become a bit of a theme this season, Vincent was named the new Commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections. Vincent Schiraldi founded the policy think tank, the Justice Policy Institute, then moved to government as Director of Juvenile Corrections in Washington DC, and then as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. Most recently, he served as senior advisor to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. He’s currently [now formerly] a Senior Research Scientist and the Co-director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. Today, we are here to discuss the recently released paper: The Enormous Costs of Parole Violations in New York. Welcome back to the Decarceration Nation podcast Vincent Schiraldi.
Vincent Schiraldi
Thank you so much, Josh. Good to be back.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, thanks for joining me again. I always ask the same first question – but you’ve already heard it before – it’s kind of the origin story question. But since you’ve already told us how you came to the work, feel free to let folks know anything more about your journey working to reform the way we look at supervision in this country.
Vincent Schiraldi
I guess maybe an interesting part of the story would be when I became Commissioner of Probation in New York City, I had never worked in probation before. I kind of knew a bit more about it from my nonprofit work. But I hadn’t been, I hadn’t worked there. And so I think that’s an interesting way to approach it because I hadn’t been a 20-year man or a 30-year man or woman. And so I was able to look at it with a fresh set of eyes, and really look at what is the elemental purpose of this thing? And are we deploying resources – you know, the 80 plus million dollars a year that the city puts into it – to do that thing? And so we’ll talk more about that. No, I think the answer was no. And I think the answer is no, for lots of probation and parole agencies. But it’s hard to get to know unless you are able to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. And that was an advantage for me, I thought.
Josh Hoe
it makes sense that if you come at it from a different direction, you might come up with different analyses and solutions. So I’ve done several episodes about supervision. How would you best summarize the problem we face as a country as a result of how we approach supervision?
Vincent Schiraldi
These two things that were created as helpful alternatives to incarceration – probation and parole – were largely individualistic, voluntary, at first voluntary, in terms of who were the parole and probation officers, that has now morphed into a very managerial process which gives you as much of a chance of locking you up, adding to incarceration, as it does to reducing incarceration, and is not providing any substantial measure of help.
Josh Hoe
Is there a history or a story of how we got from where we started to where we are now?
Vincent Schiraldi
It started in the 1800s. John Augustus is regularly thought of as the “father of probation” – a temperance movement – a bootmaker in Boston, who just started to bail people out of jail and tell the judge, let me work with this guy for a little while. And I’ll come back and see if we can’t help steer them in a different direction instead of putting them into stocks or in the house of correction. And similarly Zebulon Brockway, in the US context, who was the warden of the newly-minted Elmira Penitentiary in 1876, began releasing young people below the age of 30 who were locked up there; once they programmed and behaved well in prison, he released them early and had a bunch of volunteers working with them in the community. That’s the way it all started. And then it started to become ensconced in law, both probation and parole. They became, [they were] proliferating around the country. Every state didn’t have them, even by World War II. But shortly after that, everybody had probation. Everybody had parole; it became a government function. Still very focused on rehabilitation and individualization so much so that the leading cases, the Gagnon case and the Morrissey case, Morrissey v. Brewer is the case that defines the due process protections people on parole, enjoy or rather don’t enjoy, and Gagnon v. Scarpelli for probation. And when the courts gave people under supervision diminished due process rights, severely diminished due process rights, in the 1970s, – 72 and 73 those two decisions are, – here’s what they wrote: “while the parole or probation officer recognizes his double duty to the welfare of his clients and to the safety of the general community. By and large concern for the client dominates his professional attitude. The parole agent ordinarily defines his role as representing his clients’ best interest, as long as these do not constitute a threat to public safety”. And they go on to say, presumably, it would be inappropriate for a field agent never to revoke. The whole thrust of the probation/ parole movement is to keep men in the community. This is what they were writing. This is what today’s Morrissey and Gagnon hearings, and that’s what they call them, if you’re getting revoked, are premised on this notion that this was a friendly process. Now, in 1972, when they ruled, there were only 196,000 people in US prisons. And in 2017, the most recent year we have revocation data for, 266,000 people were revoked. So there are more people going to prison, just due to violations of probation and parole today, considerably more, than the entire prison population, when they ruled on Gagnon and Morrissey; it’s a major change.
Josh Hoe
And so you would point to that being the tipping point from how we got from the original idea to where we are now? Or are there other inflection points? Or would you say that’s the major one?
Vincent Schiraldi
No, I don’t think that’s a major one at all. I think I just wanted to juxtapose that premise, the premise upon which today’s law is based, to current-day reality. What happens is right after this, so right around the same time, a couple of things happen. One is Nixon and the Republican Party engaging in a strategy to peel away southern voters and northern suburban voters from the Democratic Party – who were pretty reliably democratic at the time – by racializing crime and poverty, and in doing so, launched the War on Drugs and what Nixon declares, and right around that same time, an obscure researcher at the City University of New York, a guy named Robert Martinson, writes what would become one of the most influential papers in the history of criminology, what’s become known as the Martinson Report, alleging that nothing works when it comes to rehabilitating. So those two things happen within a few years of one another. And that’s the major inflection point. Rehabilitation is declared dead. Parole boards start to vanish around the country; probation and parole administrators like myself start to toughen ourselves and emulate our big cousin the prison. We start to wear flak jackets, carry guns, we mete out intermediate sanctions; we rename our field Community Corrections, essentially prison in the community. And we just start adding conditions to people’s lives and imprisoning them when they don’t abide by those conditions. From 1972 to 2009, the prison population would rise every single year, a fivefold increase. Probation and parole, which were invented as an alternative to prisons, rose right alongside them. So if they were really an alternative, what you’d be expecting to see is that probation and parole were increasing about fourfold; [and] prison and jail populations should have been declining. But since both were going up at the same time, I think most researchers and advocates now view probation and parole as an add-on to the carceral state rather than an alternative to it.
Josh Hoe
I think in the same vein, I think most folks who aren’t deeply steeped in reform assume that the lack of supervision means there has to be more risk to the community and more crime, especially after seeing the backlash that happened in New York after bail reform. If you were speaking to the skeptics and afforded a large microphone, where would you start?
Vincent Schiraldi
When I speak to conservatives about this, I say, when did you guys become such big believers in government intervention? And it’s not just the prisons now; at least if somebody is in prison, as the saying goes, they can’t mug my sister, so at least you’re getting incapacitation for that period of time. I think the research shows overall very disappointing public safety outcomes from our massive expenditures on prison. But at least they got that argument on their side; it is pretty damn punitive. So even if you don’t care about the outcomes, you’re getting a punishment out of it. Probation and parole are kind of ‘meh’ in that regard. There’s not a lot of evidence that they improve public safety. Amy Solomon, when she was at the Urban Institute, did a paper showing that people who released on parole, and people who are not released on parole do about the same, so it’s not really affecting public safety. New York City used to have 82,000 people on probation. And now we have 13,000 people on probation. And during that time period – that decline was about the mid-90s to today – both Rikers population, the jails, and arrests and crime in New York City have plummeted. So the vanishing of 75% of probation supervision in New York City doesn’t seem to have impacted either incarceration or public safety. So I think that this is one of those systems that really needs to be elementally examined from its original purpose. If we’re trying to keep safer, and we’re trying to divert people from incarceration, are our expenditures on probation and parole the best bang for the buck? Or should we be doing this much less frequently? Or even experimenting with abolition?
Josh Hoe
Also in the report, and in other places, there are suggestions that the problems with supervision, and the stress of supervision, can be counterproductive to public safety. Is that also correct?
Vincent Schiraldi
I mean, you’ve got people being sent back to prison for missing appointments and testing dirty for drugs. And sometimes they’re being sent back and then returned to the community six weeks later. I met a guy – a year ago, I was speaking to the board of a nonprofit organization that does some really terrific work in New York with helping people coming out of prison find employment – and this guy was on a panel with me, and he was telling a story about himself. And his story was, he got out of prison. This nonprofit helped him find a job. But the job was at night. So his case manager at the nonprofit called his PO and asked her permission for the guy to be able to work a night job, because the PO had sent him to the nonprofit. So that PO said, sure, it was actually a good job. It wasn’t just some burger-flipping job. It was a career path job that was paying well above minimum wage. So it was a good score. So he is working that job. He goes from one PO to another PO to another PO – this happens very frequently. And I think the fourth or fifth PO just goes to his apartment and knocks on the door after the 7 pm curfew; he’s not home, because he’s working. And she violates him. Now he goes to Rikers Island, which is where you go initially on a technical parole violation in New York, while you await your hearing. And it took six weeks to figure out that he really shouldn’t have been violated. And so then he gets released. But he said when I went to jail, I had a girlfriend, a job, a car and an apartment. And six weeks later, I had none of those things and had to start all over. The guy was incredibly calm about it. I was pretty enraged as was the board of this nonprofit. And he had started over, he had an apartment, and a job by that point. No girlfriend but no car. But he was working on it. And so you know, it’s just the trivialization of people’s liberty interests in this massive managerial system with 4.4 million people in it, that was designed as an individualistic approach. And it’s never been redesigned.
Josh Hoe
And there’s also a disparate impact on people of color, right?
Vincent Schiraldi
Yes, the research shows – and by the way, there’s not a lot of great research in this space. In the mid-80s, when it became apparent what was happening with mass incarceration, a lot of the best researchers started moving their talents over. The effects of prison and jail on society, and probation and parole research really ebbed at that point. So there’s not a tremendous amount of research. And it’s an area where really, people need to look into it more deeply. And I think that’s true of advocates in philanthropy as well; this needs paying attention to. One out of every four people going to prison in America are entering for a technical violation of probation or parole. So it’s a very non-trivial number, and certainly non-trivial to each and every one of them. But anyway, the research shows that people of color are supervised at higher rates, and revoked at higher rates. If you think about – even when you control for other significant factors, like prior arrest and current offense – when you look deeper into it, Michelle Phelps has done some tremendous research on this and Ebony Ruhland. And when they looked deeper into it, what their research shows is that it seems as though probation, particularly, serves as a true alternative, mostly for white people, who are middle and upper-class people who tend to be facing actual jail or prison when they get probation, as opposed to it being just sort of a net-widener for people of color, and who are better able to navigate it, because they have resources. If I have to go see a PO as a university professor, I can go see a PO. If I have to spend three hours waiting to see my PO, I’m not going to get fired from my job. And if he makes me or she makes me do that, every week, I can do that. I can drive my car there. I don’t have to worry about the trains breaking down and me missing an appointment and getting revoked. And so there are a lot of things that middle-class people take for granted that enable us to navigate probation and parole that aren’t true for people of color, who tend to not have as many resources as white folks. So yeah, it’s another way that the system’s disparate.
Josh Hoe
You brought this up a little bit already. But your report focuses on the problem in New York, in particular around technical violations of parole and probation. While I suspect the vast majority of people listening know what a technical violation is – just on the off chance, we don’t want to lose anyone – can you briefly explain what you mean by a technical violation?
Vincent Schiraldi
Yeah, good point. I’m going to explain probation and parole too for a second. Probation is a sentence you get up front, and it was designed in lieu of incarceration; parole is at the back end, you’re getting released, sometimes early, sometimes not. And then supervised post-release by a parole officer. And in both cases, you’re only conditionally free, you’re not quite free. Because you have to obey a bunch of rules. You often have a curfew, you’re not able to associate with somebody else with a felony record. You can’t use drugs or alcohol. You can’t use drugs or alcohol, by the way, even if they’re legal. Sometimes, the rules aren’t universal, but I know of no place that, for example, does not make it a violation of probation to smoke marijuana in states where marijuana is legal. I could be wrong about that. Because I don’t know everything. And now it’s 16 states. But if anybody knows different, let me know. But right now, in all the states I’ve contacted, it’s still a violation of probation to smoke marijuana, even if it’s legal in your state. So things like that. You’re not allowed to get a credit card without asking permission; you’re not allowed to get a driver’s license without asking; you’re not allowed to travel out of state without getting permission. So this has, and I think each and every one of these conditions was developed, in many respects, with benign intent, at worst, maybe even good intent. Too paternalistic, but I don’t think they were designed specifically to lock people up. Others might argue with that. I don’t think they were, and they’re defensible, right? I don’t want my kid hanging out with other bad kids. So I’m going to create an association condition that you can’t associate with somebody with a felony record; not outrageous on its face. [But] when you think about the fact that one out of three black men in America has a felony record, that means pretty much any probation officer can violate any black guy on probation anytime they want. Don’t travel out of state. I ran into a person when I was Probation Commissioner, who again was stunningly calm, who told me that he had asked for permission to travel out of state to Jersey to go to college because he got a scholarship to college, he was still gonna stay living in New York, but he wanted to go to school and his PO said yes. His supervisor said yes, nobody was saying no, they all thought this was terrific. The guy got a scholarship. But it took so long for my office to respond to him that he missed the chance to get that scholarship. He had to forego his scholarship. We weren’t even mad at this guy. We didn’t even want to screw it up. But it’s just become such a mass number of POs with 100-200 people on their caseload that it’s just too big to succeed.
Josh Hoe
You mentioned that a lot of the technical rules are set up, and you can kind of see some reason for them. But one of the assumptions that seems to me is that the things that become technical violations are markers for new crimes. Does the evidence back that up?
Vincent Schiraldi
No. I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, I shouldn’t say no that definitively. There’s researched evidence that spending time with bad influences, influences, right, especially for young people, young people are developmentally prone to follow peers. And we always take all that, that peer pressure, and negative, it’s not always negative. That’s why we put our kids in chess clubs and on football teams and on dance teams, right? Because sometimes peers follow good peers, right? But you know, there is some evidence that says, for example, that it’s not great for people to hang around with bad influence. But now we have the standard conditions of 21 different things.
And unlike its origins, we don’t individualize them. So Josh, if me and you knocked off a bunch of liquor stores, it would be appropriate for my PO to say, I’m going to make it a rule that you and Josh can’t hang around with one another. I think it would be a really stupid rule for him to say, you can’t hang around with anybody named Josh. That’s what we kind of do – nobody with a felony conviction. So again, over the last couple years, I’ve been doing a lot of speaking on this, I met a guy in New York State Prison on a technical parole violation because he married a woman with a felony record. I met another guy at a Fortune Society counseling session where I was in attendance, who was living in a homeless shelter, even though his mother had a room for him at her house because she had a felony conviction, an ancient felony. So this guy, even though it was a bedroom for him, was living in a homeless shelter. I gotta tell you homeless shelters are places where people go to fail, not to succeed, as that most recent case of Brandon Elliot shows us – the guy who was accused in that assault on an Asian woman in Manhattan – that got a lot of national publicity, he was living in a homeless shelter. More than half of the people we parole from New York state prisons into New York City go to a homeless shelter. And that’s not a place where people are going to succeed. And at the same time, they have a rule you can’t associate with other people with criminal convictions; what do you think, in homeless shelters, they are actually going to not be able to associate with somebody with a felony conviction?
Josh Hoe
Yeah, there are a lot of interesting contradictions that get built into the system. And as you said, I think the end result is that you can probably violate just about anybody. Your report suggests that as of 2019, as many as 40% of the people sent to New York prisons were incarcerated on a technical violation. So the scope of this problem is pretty large.
Vincent Schiraldi
Oh, yeah. I mean, New York, is an oddly terrible example. So New York has one of the lower incarceration rates; we had the lowest incarceration rate of any of the large 10 states with the lowest, and yet we have the second-highest – we revoke and imprison for technical parole violations – the second-highest number of people in the country behind only Illinois. And depending on how one counts, we’re arguably the highest. The research we did showed that that cost over $680 million at the state and county level. At the county and city level, the county and city incur costs, because before you go to prison, on a technical violation, you sit in the county jail or the city jails, waiting for your hearing on your parole violation, and then you go to state prison if you violate. And so basically, what that means from a New York standpoint is that we’re spending, New York City spends over 200 million just holding people waiting for the technical violation hearings. So we’re spending $200 million at the New York City level, 200 plus, 200 plus million dollars at the state level, imprisoning people for violations, but we’re sending them, when they come released from prison, into homeless shelters, we got no money to house them. But we have $680 million to incarcerate. And I don’t want to pin this exclusively on parole officers. And I know the parole officers kind of hate when I say this stuff because they feel like I’m blaming them for it. And to be sure, there are going to be some mean nasty parole officers. And they’re also going to be some heroes. And I’ve heard this from people that their parole officers have treated them great. And there’s going to be a whole bunch of people in the middle, that want to get to the end of their 20 years, pay their mortgage, send their kids to college, and they don’t want to do anything along the way that might cost them their job. And I think that’s where a lot of problems come in. Because people are engaged in these incredibly risk-averse bureaucracies and are trying to make these decisions about individuals. They have hundreds of folks on their caseload, they have no money for housing, no money for helping them find a job, no money for helping people with their mental health, or substance abuse problems, or to help them get an education. But with the stroke of a pen, they can spend $76,000 a year re-incarcerating them. It’s actually a surprise we don’t do it more often.
Josh Hoe
The financial costs to society and just obvious misuse of resources seems pretty strong. Has the research on supervision given you any additional insight – I often say, when I do speaking and stuff like that, that it doesn’t make any sense if you’re trying to increase public safety, to make people radically insecure. Has your research given you any additional insight into the importance of housing and employment and mental health and re-entry and increasing community safety?
Vincent Schiraldi
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of good research that people are doing about the stress levels that you just talked about, about the amount of stress this puts on people on parole, their families, and their neighborhoods, Megan Comfort did some really interesting work on family stress that accompanies parole, because, you know, it’s not just that the parole officer can walk into my space if I’m on parole, but they’re walking into my wife’s space, my family space; they’re encouraging my wife to snitch on me, and if I use drugs. It really kind of warps a lot of relationships. Alice Goffman wrote a book called On the Run. And I really encourage people to take a look at it. She lived in a neighborhood in Philadelphia for several years, and focused specifically on the impact it has on a community, at a community level, of having this many people out on bail, under pretrial release supervision, on probation, on parole, all these young black men sort of on the run with the law enforcement and parole and probation, apparatchik having a role in their lives. And it was really sort of startling, to include things like, you know, one guy misses some appointments. Now he’s got a warrant out on him, his girlfriend’s having a baby, she goes into labor, he’s in the labor room with her, and the police look at the visitation lists in the hospital and come up to the room and in the middle of birth, snatch him, and put him in jail. And then another guy, later on, promises his girlfriend he’s going to go to the hospital, but he’s got a warrant out on him for missing appointments or whatever it was, it wasn’t for robbing a bank, it was just for some technical violation. And, you know, she’s standing there with this guy as his phone’s ringing and ringing and ringing because his girlfriend’s calling him from the hospital. And he’s explaining to her, I’m not going because I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to end up like the other guy. And then just little ways that this just kind of warps people’s lives and obstructs their ability to do the exact thing we want them to do, which is, you know, turn their lives around and live a happy, healthy, normal life.
Josh Hoe
You mentioned a few examples of programs that could help 10s of 1000s of people with work and housing, that would technically cost less than the cost of supervision. Can you talk about these programs a bit more?
Vincent Schiraldi
There’s a couple of my favorites. The Kinship Reentry, it’s just starting. We don’t have a lot of data on it, but it was invented by the Osborne Association, Liz Gaines’ organization, and funded by Trinity Wall Street. Initially actually funded – the planning grant was from the District Attorney’s office. And what it does is it recognizes the fact that a lot of people coming out of prison, they don’t have a good place to stay. Some folks have family members that are willing to take them back. But a lot of those family members are poor, and they don’t have the resources to have a bigger apartment. So now the guy is sleeping on the couch, and he’s not going to stay on the couch very long before he goes out, finds another place to live. And sometimes that’s a homeless shelter. So they basically provide stipends to families, mostly, it’s women, mostly, it’s a sister, or a mother or a girlfriend that people are returning to, so that they can essentially get a bigger apartment, the guy can live there. And they do it for women, too. I say the guy because it’s 85% men, but it’s true for women as well. And then they provide social services in that house. They call it kinship re-entry, which is similar to the notion of kinship care that exists in the child welfare system, where instead of paying some stranger to be a foster parent, they pay members of a person’s family. So, you know, that’s an interesting model. I love that model. It’s about $10,000 a year, way, way cheaper than locking people up in prison. And I think way better.
Josh Hoe
Were there other models that you think are interesting?
Vincent Schiraldi
There’s another one that a group called Impact Justice has – what’s the word I’m looking for? experimented with.
Josh Hoe
Impact Justice in Oakland?
Vincent Schiraldi
Yeah it’s called The Homecoming Project. And it kind of riffs off of Airbnb, in essence. A lot of folks in communities heavily impacted by incarceration, there’s older folks whose kids have moved on, and they got a house that’s got an extra bedroom or two. And many other more affluent communities are Airbnb-ing, those rooms to help pay the mortgage, pay the rent. They’ve essentially hooked up with people in the neighborhood. And they are renting those rooms out essentially like an Airbnb for people coming out of San Quentin till they get on their feet – six months, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, depends on the individual. While they are there, they provide them with wraparound services, resources to help them get back up on their feet. I love those two, because they don’t require you to stick 12 people in a halfway house; some of those halfway houses, or 12 people or 100 people or 200 people, some of them are big, and some of them are a lot like prisons, and most of us do better in a home-like environment. And so you don’t need to have a public use process for that, you don’t need to go through any big deal. It’s putting resources into the hands of community members. It’s recognizing that people in communities are themselves assets, not looking at heavily-impacted neighborhoods as just full of liabilities, which I think a lot of people do. So I kind of love those. I really kind of love those two programs. One more if it’s okay. When the pandemic hit in New York, and everywhere, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice was very motivated to reduce the population at Rikers Island. And they did. They went from like 5500, down to 3700. So it was a pretty big reduction. And one of the ways they did it was they got a lot of the people in Rikers, who are awaiting their hearings for technical violations out. They worked with the state, the state lifted the warrants on the folks, and the way they got him out was they contracted with the Exodus Program in Harlem, Julio Medina’s program, formerly incarcerated guys, most of their staff are formerly incarcerated. And they became navigators to help folks who weren’t really quite making it on parole to make it, and the city rented hotel rooms. Exodus helped people exit prison. And in the hotels, they put lots of social services and health services. So they really brought together the best of formerly incarcerated people, currently available services the city had, and housing. They treated it like an emergency. And what I guess I want to say is, if my son was looking at doing time on a technical violation, it would be a damn emergency. And so how can we, instead of dumping – nationally, it’s $2.6 billion we put into incarcerating people in prisons for technical violations. That doesn’t even include how much we’re spending on jails. How can we say, we need to access that money and treat the deprivation of liberty like it’s a precious commodity like we would treat it if it was our own son, or daughter, or husband or wife, or father or mother and pour those resources back into communities, so we can empower those communities, they can themselves design solutions that would work for them, and stop putting so many people back in on ticky-tack technical violations.
Josh Hoe
In New York right now, there’s something called the Less is More law. You mentioned that in the report, do you want to talk about what that includes, and what the prospects are for that?
Vincent Schiraldi
Basically, we took this problem and said, how can we negate some of the dumber aspects of it? And it’s a campaign that’s being run by the Katal Center, a Little Piece of Light, and Unchained, all of which have dominant leadership by people who are formerly incarcerated, and the Justice Lab and the Lippman Commission have been providing technical assistance, and law writing and things like that. So kind of a grassroots-driven piece of legislation; it would eliminate a lot of the ability to incarcerate people for technical violations, take some right off the board, like some of the ones I’ve mentioned, associations with somebody else, with a criminal record or a curfew violations, it just wipes them out. The few things that are left, it would very heavily limit how much time you can get on a violation: a week, for the first one, two weeks for the next one, and then 30 days for the third one, and never more than 30 days. One thing that’s super interesting that I didn’t even know before I started working on this is that people on parole in New York don’t have a right to release pre-hearing. So they must go in pre-hearing, there is not a recognizance here, and you only get incarcerated if you’re accused of a violation. It would actually give people the right to a hearing at which a judge would decide whether they should or should not be detained during the pendency of their case, while it’s being decided whether they actually committed this violation, and whether it’s serious enough to incarcerate. And then it would also limit how much time you can get on a violation if you commit a new crime; it wouldn’t add the whole rest of your sentence to whatever new sentence you get. It’s only a shorter period, I think it’s 30-60-90 days. And then finally, one of my favorite parts is every month you don’t get a violation, you get a month off your supervision. So if you have three years of supervision facing you, when you come out of prison, if you never get violated, you’re done in 18 months. And that’s not discretionary. It’s statutory just like good-time in jail. As long as you don’t mess up, you get it. So that puts the whole system on a diet, it does a lot less harm; it doesn’t wipe it out completely. But it really reduces the harm. I think the next step will be, and this is what I know folks are going to push for, is if it passes, calculate how much money it saves, and at least take a substantial portion of that and reinvest it in communities. So they can have a nurturing, welcoming place for people to come back to when they come out of prison.
Josh Hoe
I think you mentioned some examples in Colorado. I’m pretty familiar with the WAGEES model that’s mentioned in your report. Do you have any more thoughts about how community reinvestment could be a solution to this problem?
Vincent Schiraldi
Yeah, there’s a lot of strong research that says that more cohesive communities, communities with a lot more informal, local support, do better than even similarly situated communities that don’t have that. So when I was growing up, I’m Brooklyn, a factory town, it was very blue-collar. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is very gentrified now. But back then it wasn’t. And you know, there was literally that sort of old lady down the block that when she hollered at us, we better say Yes, Mrs. Jablonsky, or we were going to be in trouble. And Mrs. Jablonsky didn’t have a phone, a lot of people didn’t have phones back then. But somehow our mothers were all going to find out about it, right. That’s kind of informal social control. “But Mrs. Jablonsky also, when it was really hot, made us lemonade and cookies and stuff like that.” She wasn’t just sitting on the stoop yelling at us, she was engaged in a form of informal social control. And when we pivoted as a society towards mass incarceration, we simultaneously heavily disinvested in our urban areas and our poor, and we just took the resources out and replaced that with police and prisons. And we, in doing so, really cut a lot of the informal supports. And we jobbed it out to a less – what Bruce Western calls a thinner brand of safety – the safety that you only buy, when a cop is standing nearby, or during the time of guys in prison, and then only for the community, not for the person in prison. What we need to do is, as we envision ending mass incarceration, we have to have two parts to it. One part is to stop locking up so damn many people. But the other part is to capture those savings and reinvest them in communities because communities will create a thicker brand of public safety than we will ever buy from police and prisons.
Josh Hoe
So I’ve saved the really fun question toward the end here. Originally, I was gonna ask, is there a way to right-size supervision? But I decided to just ask, do we actually really need supervision?
Vincent Schiraldi
You know, I think supervision is one of those really, it’s a challenging thing to imagine an abolitionist approach to because some people are saying, Let’s reduce prisons and put a lot more people on parole and probation. And some of the states, for example, during the pandemic, that reduced their prison populations, put people on parole. And so you know, I think this is worth experimenting with. And if there’s ever any jurisdiction out there that wants to do so, please call me because I think it is worth experimenting with abolishing parole. Several entities have suggested that. Marty Horne, who was my predecessor, running probation in New York City, who ran parole for New York State, and then ran a prison system in Pennsylvania, suggested abolishing parole supervision, and just providing people with resources and supports in their own home communities. I feel like that’s worth experimenting with; I think if you captured these savings and put them into communities, and communities had a real hand in developing them, I cannot imagine that they wouldn’t do better than hiring some civil service protected bureaucrat to look through your underwear drawer once a week and have you piss in a cup and tell you to go forth and sin no more. And so I think it’s worth an experiment. And I think we should measure the hell out of it. There are other approaches that people suggest, which is to substantially reduce the number of people under supervision, provide resources, kind of the less is more approach, keep it in existence, make it hard to revoke, put fewer people on it and put resources into the community. I think it’s worth looking at both approaches and seeing which works better. I don’t think any of us, if we want to be honest, know what the opposite of mass incarceration looks like. Because we all grew up in mass incarceration, it’s been around, you know, it started in 1972. So a lot of us don’t know what a not mass incarceration society looks like anymore. And so I think we need to be a little humble about where we go with the dismantling of mass incarceration. For my money, I think it’s worth an experiment. I couldn’t, I couldn’t handicap which way it would go. I just think we need to be honest when we do what we do.
Josh Hoe
How do you think we get to the point where we can collect data and deploy data sufficiently in a world where the first time someone recidivates . . . one of the things I often say is that you shouldn’t calculate, you shouldn’t just make decisions based on if someone recidivates; you should check how much recidivism was done before a reform and after a reform. So how do we get to the point where we don’t immediately start moving to roll back things, when one person does one horrible thing [who] happens to be on parole or probation. Do you have thoughts about the Willie Horton-izing of these things? In our history here in Michigan, that’s been very significant as when someone does something on parole, then that tends to make it tougher for the whole group of folks on supervision.
Vincent Schiraldi
I was the head of Probation in New York City and Juvenile Justice in Washington, DC. And, you know, I had 30,000 people on my caseload, you know, in my organization’s caseload, we were supervising 30,000 people in New York, and had about 1000 kids in our custody in DC, at a time when the murder rate was pretty high when I was Commissioner, Director there. People did stuff, the kids, six of them a year, killed somebody or were killed, and it made the paper; I was constantly working with the City Council and the Mayor, to help them understand that this approach was better. We were using data the whole time. Same with probation in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg was no softy on crime, he was my boss. And he certainly wanted to know about it when somebody did something bad. But I always went equipped with data and with what we did on that person’s case; sometimes, frankly, we did a lousy job on that person’s case, sometimes a great job. And people live in the real world and bad stuff happens in the real world. So I think the conversation is different. The conversation when Willie Horton occurred, the conversation when Richard Allen Davis kidnapped Polly Klaas, and we got three strikes and you’re out, was just terrible. And I’m not saying it’s all over. I’m not saying it’s done. But I think we’re having a different conversation, a real opportunity to experiment with different approaches. And shame on us if we don’t measure those approaches when we do it, so we actually learn a real lesson and not just feel-good lessons or lessons that fit with our pre-ordained buts.
Josh Hoe
You already mentioned one book that you think people should read. But this year, I’m asking people if there are any criminal justice-related books, they might recommend to others. Do you have any other favorites you’d like to mention?
Vincent Schiraldi
Bruce Western’s Homeward, if you want to really learn about what the trip home is like. Bruce really did a nice job following people out of prison in Massachusetts, and delving very deeply into their experiences. That I think is a terrific book, and David Harding, Jeffrey Morenoff and Jessica Wyse, wrote On the Outside. It’s kind of a different look, different but similar look, to the experience of returning home from prison. I really think that the challenges people face when they come home from prison are just enormous. And our response is generally to threaten them with re-incarnation and supervise them in a very ineffective way. It’s a pretty pathetic approach to helping people succeed, post-prison. And it doesn’t improve public safety, or human dignity, or decency. And both of those books, in my view, really help folks stick their noses in deeply. And I am writing a book myself. So when I write that, I hope to be back on here and I can recommend my own book.
Josh Hoe
Oh, of course, for sure. Can’t wait to read it. How can people find your new report?
Vincent Schiraldi
Go to the Justice Labs website, which is justicelabs.columbia.edu
And if you want to do anything and involve yourself in the Less is More campaign, the organization is called the Katal Center. So it’s katalcenter.org. And the Less is More page is lessismoreny. But if you just go to katalcenter.org, not to confuse everybody, you’ll be able to find the Less is More stuff; it’s pretty prominent.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What questions should I have asked but did not?
Vincent Schiraldi
You know, I don’t think you missed too many questions. I’m a bureaucrat who’s never been on probation and never been on parole. I know you do this. But you can’t understand this problem until you’ve really had conversations with people under supervision. Josh, I know you know this more than anybody. But this is a human problem. And I’m the bureaucrat explaining it. Listen to the humans.
Josh Hoe
Well, I like to think of you as both a human and a bureaucrat. Thanks so much for doing this. It’s always a real pleasure talking to you. And I really appreciate you taking the time.
Vince Schiraldi
Thanks, Josh. Take it easy now. It’s really great being on.
Josh Hoe
And now my take.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the spike in homicides and domestic violence consistent with the onset of the pandemic. In some sense, it has become a Moveable Feast, an opportunity for everyone to use the spike in homicides to bash whichever reforms they don’t like, officeholders they want to bash, or parties they want to embarrass. But is any of that fair? First, yes, there has been a spike in homicides and in domestic violence across the country. But no, it is not attributable to any one reform, politician or party. How do we know this? Well, we know this because the increase in homicides and domestic violence has been nearly universal. It has happened in cities with Republican leadership and in cities with Democratic leadership. And it’s happened in cities with tough-on-crime prosecutors, and it has happened in cities with reformed prosecutors, and it’s happened in places that resist all criminal justice reforms, and it has happened in places where criminal justice reform is frequent. For instance, homicides have increased in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Fresno, Virginia Beach, Colorado Springs, Omaha, Miami, Tulsa, Bakersfield, Aurora, Stockton, Lubbock, Hialeah, San Bernardino, and many other cities with – wait for it – Republican mayors. So is the answer more police, more prosecution, and more incarceration? Probably not. First, we know that in 34 states and at the federal level over a lot of years, criminal justice reform has gone hand-in-hand with reductions in crime. In addition, where there have been crackdowns and more law enforcement – for instance, Operation Legend – arrests increase, but the homicide rates continue to spike even after those arrests. Research has also revealed that police clear a fairly low percentage of serious crimes, and their assumptions about deterrence are overinflated. In addition, there are potential opportunity costs. Investment in traditional enforcement can trade-off with, for instance, with very successful community-based violence interruption programs. We also know from long-term research that incarceration, even accounting for the time people remain incapacitated, causes more crime than it prevents, it actually makes our communities less safe overall. For many, this conclusion sounds counterintuitive, but to anyone who has spent time incarcerated, or to people who regularly visit prisons, it is not surprising at all. Prisons are trauma factories, they take people who already have problems and make them constantly stressed out, at risk, and often facing actual attacks and trauma. They can be placed in solitary confinement or disciplinary treatment, they can be under assault. Traumatized people traumatize people! And there are not many truly correctional programs in our corrections system. So yes, there is a spike in homicide and domestic violence. But first, the problem wasn’t caused by liberals, by criminal justice reform or by progressives. We don’t actually know what is causing the problem yet. This isn’t a dig on Republicans. The spike also probably was not caused by GOP mayors, GOP prosecutors, or tough-on-crime policies. Second, more policing and arrest definitely is not the answer. Third, other solutions might be better, but we need to invest in them. We need to stop reflexively reaching for the exact same easy answers that don’t actually solve the problems.
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