hello my name is ron f day i'm the vice president of programs at the fortune society welcome to both sides of the bars discussion driven show that examines the legal system from various perspectives including people most impacted during each episode we discuss critical questions about how the current system operates momentum for change within social justice movements and the impact these issues have on the lives of everyone that they affect we actually the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments about these episodes with us on twitter using the fortune s o c today show is tied to a spot light on ma supervision rethink in technical violations here with me today are two experts on this issue tanya pearce thank you for joining us and vincent sharod the who is known social work and co director of the columbia justice lab we know that for the most part there's been a discussion around mass incarceration we've talked much less in our community about mass supervision a lot of people end up in our jails they aren't necessarily on post fully supervision but many people who end up in our prisons and the majority of people who are in the system or in our prisons as we know but a lot of these individuals end up transition in to push really supervision whether you're in federal custody or state custody you oftentimes on supervision a lot folks violated based upon conditions very petty conditions non criminal offenses we want to shed some light on this particular issue great so we feel we're going to have a great conversation with you and i want to start with you vinnie because you've done a significant amount of research around this particular issue not just in new york but around the country so you can set the context for what's happening around punctually supervision respect me eighteen hundreds and they were on a bash adly merciful they were focused on individuals trying to turn people's lives around and it pretty much existed that way all the way up to the one thousand nine hundred and seventy s when we launched the war on drugs to wong crime and we started mass incarceration and what happened then is the notion was the nothing works when it comes to rehabilitating folks right the notion you can only have about other people by the way not about your own child let's say right you never think that about your own good and so at that point prisons had something to fall back on they had punishment they had their warehouses probation parole really didn't have anything to fall back on they were only about rehabilitation at that point so they pivoted and they started to follow their big brother to prison and became more punitive more about surveillance more about locking people up they start calling themselves community corrections slap an electronic monitors on people it worked they grew massively for fall since that time but the money didn't grow so now you've got peals with massive case loads no money to really help the people who might need housing or education and jobs nope no resources for that or very few resources for that so what started happening is that they used the resource they had prison that was always available you could maybe you could find a drug treatment program or a job program for people but you can always find a prison cell and so now you've got four million five hundred thousand people under supervision probation or parole that does not fall equally across all races and classes people of color  more likely to be under supervision one at a fifty five dollars people in america is under supervision want to twelve black men and about a quarter of everybody going to prison every year is going not for a new crime but for  purely technical violation in new york just as one example if you're talking about parole probation is an alternative to getting locked up or at least it was designed to be that parole was advancing  originally designed to advance people's release if they behaved well in prison right those that's the difference for folks who don't know in new york everybody who leaves prison depressingly comes back within three years but four out of five of the people come back come back for a technical parole violation not for a new crime so if you just want to kind of think about what kind of impact this has on people's lives it's that kind of impact that it can you before we turn to utah and to give some personal experience about it with some of the reasons that people in that going back for good good question so technical violations would include missing appointments using drugs moving without telling a parole officer or your probation officer staying out past curfew associated with people with a criminal record and many of them are established with good intent by the way the notion that people who have committed crimes might not want to hang out with other people of committing crimes that it does not it's not nonsensical but then when you start to look at the numbers and one of the twelve black men is under supervision and one of the three black men has a felony record in america how you going to live in brownsville or more somebodies neighborhoods that are have heavy people in the going back and telling you you were in a situation that would be very much unlike me for people who want to tell us you know a little bit about yourself and how this particular issue has impacted you hi served six months at the brooklyn halfway house on said one i lived at the halfway house that was when i knew that violate in pro probation that's what we have in the halfway house in a federal system was very easy the notion of going to work and getting your life back on track is very difficult there because once they the explain the roles you start to fill the trauma that this is going to be a hardship one of the traumas that began is you must find a job within fourteen days or you are subjected to possibly being sent  back second once you find a job you have to pay twenty five percent of your gross now for that reason alone i sor people go back weekly it was a regular occurren in the brooklyn halfway house unfortunately for us women they didn't have the space for the u s marshal to come in take out who they would return and they would take us women out every morning at a drop of a hat and keep us locked out of the room for anywhere from sixty minutes to an hour and a half this was nd nature once a week twice a week whenever the u s marshals came and it was mostly primarily because people just couldn't afford to pay twenty five percent of their gross to the halfway house because now you no longer have coffee or you don't have dinner money even though the halfway house is supposed to provide that sometimes you come in a little later from work the kitchen is close it doesn't compensate for people who work in long island where you have to pay mass transit then you have to pay the long gallery road after giv then than just being released into the community and as you're saying i mean you said we have another conversation that it was almost better being in prison than being in a halfway house and that's like on thinkable you think you're making the transition and you want to make your life better as you prepare for your ultimate release of the community it's the trauma it's to trauma is the fear of constant fear from the time after you get your intake until you are off the ankle monitor you live in constant fear when i was on the ankle monitor at home during the night out because three or four times now how am i supposed to get up and go to work at six am if i'm called from you have and you have to speak on a telephone and you have to give your phone number so at so am you have to say your full name and you're in it and your numbers and you're dead of sleep so you can't even just say hi and fall back to sleep you know to get up and you have to get out there and they have to have like a full conscious whites not just sleepy voice your full voice with your name and your numbers and everybody's exposed to that who's yes at home confinement on home confinement so i  good to like think about like other how do we get to the entities right now as commissioner of probation in new york city which is one the biggest probation department in the country and folks didn't come to those jobs to want to do bad stuff to people then you come to work every day to want to do bad stuff to people but you know you had this thing that originally was about rehabilitation and over time you get more and more people added to your caseload not more and more resources that's what's happening to you if you're a pos meanwhile the rest of the world is getting on friendlier and on friendlier to people on probation and parole with felony convictions you can't move into public housing you can't get this job you can't get that job you can't get this license all sorts of stuff is happening so this is all combining to the perfect storm and now your appeal with lots of people on your caseload and not a lot of resources and a lot of problems it's an incredibly stressful job and what what struck me was if you're a pos and you've got somebody on your caseload that maybe they've messed up they've missed a couple of points mims they've been oppressed tested dirty once or twice you have to ask yourself a question if i take a chance on this person and they go and live a happy healthy productive life i actually get nothing for that i don't get to add a boy i don't get a plaque nothing but if they go out and re offend i could get demoted i could get fired i look stupid in front of my coworkers because of sap because i took a chance on a person you know i mean we're asking for like heroic stuff out of people i'm frankly most people are here as most people are just regular people and they want to make it to retirement and so we've set this whole thing up if you were to design the thing to produce the kind of really kind of stupid stuff that we saw but calling people in the middle of a night or violating people for missing appointments if you if you were designing something to result in that you could hardly do better than the exact system we've designed right it seems like according to this conversation default if officers say i don't want the hassle of having you know issues are ravages you know violate the person you talked about we have a separate conversation we talked about some experiences that are similar to tanya same can you share those with us you have a couple of people who yet you know about who were violating some really horrible situation yeah i mean i've been known as not i've been researching this and writing about it you know more and more people calling me and telling me stories and i research them to find out if they're really true or not because i don't say something out loud i'm not no it's true but you know most people have heard now about the the killing of nipsey hussle but most people didn't hear about was when he got killed he was donating clothing to a guy in a halfway house and was trying to find work so t did nice clothes right so this guy got shot right alongside nipsey hussle while he was receiving his donation and he went to the hospital and his parole officer violated him and his violation was associated with a known new york there was a gentleman named jose rivera who was out on parole and he had of substance abuse problem and a heroin addiction became homeless stop seeing these p o ends up you know being sick and going to bellevue hospital while he's in bellevue his parole officer finds out about it and goes in and while the guys on his deathbed his parole officer finds it files a technical violation so again why would it i guess it's tempting to think of parole officers as just indecent people and i think that's a cop out because you always i think just like in any other behavior have to ask why people doing that and i think people are doing it because if set up this environment where if it's just completely risk averse and people just file a violation because that's the safe thing to do and i'm a trying to excuse it by saying the my point is we need to change the rules if we want to behavior to be different it sounds like you're saying as an outreach coordinator when i came when i came home so my job was to go out to go to the bible president's office to go to different offices while my employer had sent a letter to the halfway house and told them that on this monday that i would be going to pick up literature from the president office for a campaign that we would do it in coney island i went as i normally would to go to work  in at work and then i left and i went to the bible president's office while the ankle monitor started buzzing and it started buzzing and then it started to log me so it started buzzing in alarm and so i quickly gathered the material and it tells you and you have to call want to stop bugs in the alarm it like making you know making noise on your leg you know legace shaking and it wasn't like like a phone ringing  that means you have to come once it rains that means you have to come to the halfway house immediately so i grabbed i gathered the materials and i rushed straight to the halfway house because that's what that sound means while when i get  the staff took me in they put me in a room and they tell me that i was violated i showed i had a copy of the letter because i you know you learned to not trust certain things i had the letter with me as well as the receipt that it was e mail and i showed them so what the staff did was they pulled on the screen and a pen pointed exactly where i was at the bottle president's street and that's where i was supposed to be i told them i said you had the letter she says no you can't you can't do that they started after that point i had to check in i went back to work the next day at that point they kept calling my boss on his personal cell phone where was she even though at this point my boss said you can just come to the office and work just do you not to five in the office to send you out while they start a call and him on his cell phone personally where was she what is she doing when i'm in route to work and three weeks later he had to actually believe because he was personally the so many people going back inside it makes it look like all these people are bad oh they go to prison they come out and he go back that's right but when you go back for non criminal offense like not reporting for think in everybody's going back to prison that's mostly everybody's moment the prison without the context is like no people are going back for these really petty things that's why if you look at new york parole you think have everybody comes back in three years for new crime no have everybody comes back but most  eighty percent of them come back for not a new crime so what do we do about this i know you're working on some lessons more jump in some other stuff to get into some legislation that is going on a bunch of different states but also as a probation commissioner i did a lot of stuff that wasn't legislative you can just do stuff there's a ton of discretion but some of the legislation st basically what it says is let's reduce the number of things for which you can be violated when you get if you do get violated make make it short not easy or let's make it a week because we want to send a message to somebody in the year to get a message make it a short period time so maybe we could keep a job right and then that's the negative side on the positive side we're saying if you have three years parole incentivize people just like you do in jail and say all right for every thirty days you don't get a violation you get thirty days off the end of your parole so if you don't get ever ever get a violation you're done in eighteen months the people can string together eighteen months of good behavior chances are going to be fine after that but then the most important part is how much money this cost is cost three hundred and fifty million dollars the technical violators in new just in new york that's what the lipman commission found and then actually two billion eight hundred million dollars on technical violations if we could stop violating people and capture that money and help purchase the kinds of things that they need like housing and job training and education and substance abuse counseling and all the kind of stuff that the fortune society provides if we could by those kinds of service people then we would need to violate them so but we don't have that money that's the only population going up but then we start again hearing from around the state it was really interesting to hear what's going on in the rest of the state because in all the points of the state like in new york every day they're having hearings and you have a legal aid lawyer the rest of the state there's no representation is no right to representation so a lot of people are just going to hearings by themselves and in some place then we have hearings once a month so if you get violated the day after the hearing examiners are then you wait a month even get your  hearing and so like tompkins county the sheriff signed on the d a signed up lots of people signed on because they have all these people sit and wait and many times when they actually have the hearing me the find out they didn't do it or that it was not that big a deal so they let him go back to the community but meanwhile they burned a month or three weeks or two weeks whatever it is just waiting for that here so people losing jobs and losing and housing opportunities etc are going back in and like you said they're not going back in people are not going to have housing point things go away in a couple weeks and we have a couple of minutes left but tanya duffy want to hear you you know as someone who has this particular experience what would you suggest and so far as change because it is a human course not just a financial course so this would you just suggest addition to some of things that when you say that really needs we need to do to change the system i believe that you need to go in to the prisons when people are preparing to come home because people that are in prison preparing to come up are eager to come home and do right meet them that they need that the employer employment agency begin to discuss with people while they're there so when they come home that job opportunities are there to begin to start to unify with the family and seek out it because that's what we do when we're preparing to come home once you know your thirty is so small that they don't have anything over the average job is minimum wage even after fifteen dollars an hour now in new york that still is not enough to because you have to pay for your own coffee they no longer give you a laundry money you cannot do your laundry here's the it's nothing left once you give one hundred and twenty five dollars a week out of your pretax money so when we have two minutes or so left we want to talk about sure before we exit sure has great so we'll have a lot of people that are in the systems that are working in the systems not just advocates not just people on probation but people running the systems believe what i just said that there should be smaller more focused and more rehabilitat and in august we launched exit which is executives transforming probation and parole which is sixty probation and parole commissioners who say let's make it smaller let's make it more rehabilitative let's no violent too many people kind of like the less is more act in new york which didn't pass last year but we hope is going to pass this year so it's not this is mainstream thought amongst people in the field and now we just have to get policies and practices to follow alongside having in ministry is involved is clearly critical because you you have district attorneys you have a minister it is having them on the side of this you know some people like oh you think about corrections like we don't want to close jails we want to close prisons even if it's nonsensical for them to stay open so but thank you for doing that because getting all these folks to be committed to sin less provoking insight you share here today to our national audience especially people watching from behind the walls i found today's episode interesting and perhaps a call to action to mobilize reform issues in your jurisdiction if you're interested in finding out more about the fortune society please visit our website at the fortune society dot all or visit us on facebook black type in unfortunately this is ronald f day and i appreciate your joining us as we critically look both sides of the bar