< PreviousJim: That’s a good question. You know, it changed over time as I went through. Louis Killion clearly was done. As time went on, in both undergrad and grad school, I gravitated towards the teachers that other people thought were kind of the hard ones. I liked that challenge type. And I’ll tell you one thing about me that isn’t like a lot of the students. I went to all the classes, and I read the shit. I don’t know why, you know? You think, why was I like that? I don’t know why, but I was. Ron: On the other hand, some of us are our own people. We don’t necessarily mimic somebody else. Would you think of yourself as more that person? Jim: Is this … the first line from the movie The Departed you’re giving me right now? You go watch the movie and listen to the voiceover from the beginning of The Departed. “Some people are products of their environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Ron: So, which are you? Jim: I guess we’re both, aren’t we? I wanted to have an impact. You know, looking back at some of the reasons I did what I did, there was a lot of anger in that, because I felt like people were doing things wrong—both running programs and evaluating them. Every one of the evaluations I worked on posed ethical dilemmas for me, because I thought the research was not being done correctly. For example, in the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment I knew that counting folks walking outside was not a good measure of fear of crime. When I asked my profs at Rutgers about it, they basically said “Do the job as directed or quit.” So, I thought I knew the right way to do these studies, but I needed to be in charge to get it done. I don’t know why I was like that, but I was like that. Ron: As you know, Gary Marx was a role model for me. I thought he is a sociologist that is more accessible, more interesting. He wrote with verve, whereas a lot of sociology put me to sleep, and his stuff never did. Is there such a person in your life? Jim: I guess one person that comes to mind is Todd Clear. When I arrived at Rutgers, he was doing all the training of probation departments on risk classification, and people looked down on training. So, he was going around the country with Vince O’Leary and instituting risk classification forms. I really liked Todd. I took a class with him, and he asked me to assist him in some of the training he was doing. After I graduated, he was the person who got me involved in doing consulting work for NIC (National Institute of Corrections). Also at Rutgers, there was a prof there that, again, most grad students tried to avoid. David Twain was a psychologist, but he taught the courses in planning program evaluation, and that’s the guy that probably had the biggest impact on me. He was into systems theory, systems analysis, and I’ve been stealing from that model my whole career. And he’s not known. You won’t know him, not a big name, but he had a big impact on me. He did not lecture like any professor you ever had. You’d have no notes. You have more notes right now than I would have had halfway through a semester with Twain, because he would come in and ask questions, and then he did the class from those questions, not unlike a philosophy professor I had in college, same thing. And he would ask a series of questions, and then the class went by how you responded to it, so it was back on you to do it. There was an integration of theory and research. I’ll say Dave Twain as a model. Somebody asked him to help them write a grant proposal, and he brought me in as a student. That was a very successful thing; $250,000 bucks in those days … (1978, I think), that was a big deal, and so I liked that. I liked getting those grants. And when I took the job in the county, you know, we got several grants, and they made an impact, so I liked that part of it, too. Now, part of the ego stroke is to compete and get, right? Ron: I was about to ask you whether anybody is Twain, as you describe him, was sort of a Socratic style. Jim: And it’s not my style. No, but I enjoyed that class. Everybody else hated it. I started out trying to do some of that. A lot of young professors, they try to do a lot of groups, and they try to do a lot of stuff, and maybe you get full of yourself over time. You feel like, well, I got a lot to say, so now I got to change my format, right? And so I did like that, and I do like to talk. But I wasn’t quite like Twain. Todd could do the same thing. Todd would ask a question, and he said, “If you ask a question, you can never answer it yourself.” That’s really hard to do. Todd was good at it from being a trainer all those years. Twain the same way. They teach you, you know, certain things. Those tricks are hard to follow in life.III.IMPACT OF SCHOLARSHIP Ron: Community corrections, what do you feel about the impact of your work there? Jim: I do think that the work that we did for the Smart Sentencing book had an impact on the field because it was saying something different than other people were saying. I hate to say that I’ve made my career as a contrarian, but I would say that at least in part that’s true, which has hurt me in terms of success. But I do think I’ve stayed true to that. If you read that book and you have a look at it, you’ll see that what we are critical of is this movement towards intermediate sanctions and this notion that surveillance— that you can reinvent probation as kind of community policing and it’s somehow going to gain public support and all that. So, we’re trying to get public support around that time, the early ‘90s, for alternative incarceration, and they did it by trying to say that you can develop a “Prison Without Walls” model, call it punishment, and mean it. Joan Petersilia took that up. The feds wanted to fund those projects that show that intermediate sanctions made a difference. So, they had definitely a push. If you were doing anything that was surveillance or control- oriented, there was a lot of funding for it. So, people were following the funding, and they were also, in their academic writing, saying things to support that. Ron: Sounds like you never fell prey to that “we’ve got to mimic the cop” stuff, but thought we should go in the direction of rehabilitation. Jim: If you look at Smart Sentencing, you’ll see that book really is about saying that surveillance-oriented programs are not the way to go. You had to integrate treatment and control, and [it] even goes back to the original Martinson work that you had to have both. You couldn’t just do one, and I think people misrepresented Martinson back in the ‘70s with the “nothing works” and the feds, unfortunately, funded the work, including my study. When you can get implementation to a certain level, you can have an impact, and the impact is not going to be based on the control aspects of it. It’s going to be a combination of treatment and control. That was not a message they wanted to hear. Ron: Do you feel you have a legacy in the community Jim: It’s funny you’d say that, because I noticed that when there was the Smart Probation initiative at the federal level, the background piece for reading was a piece I wrote for the Pew Foundation—high-risk times, high-risk people, high-risk places John Laub became head of NIJ [National Institute of Justice]. I sent him the Gary Marx piece that I wrote on police technology for some European journal that allowed us to be able to distribute it. What we highlighted was this area of police technology and [we] found that there’s no research, and he took that piece and sent it to his people and said, “Let’s develop a research program for all the police technology, evaluation research” …from the background piece by Byrne and Marx. For me it was a big deal. I’m not a policing guy, and Gary was just a critic of technology and surveillance and all that. It was a government document and it’s the most cited piece I have. Ron: So, let’s talk about the social ecology book. Jim: In 1984 or ‘85, titled Social Ecology of Crime, with Rob Sampson. I met Rob at a conference, and we put together a book proposal. Travis Hirschi was the editor and believed, along with the early Chicago School people, that our job was to present the facts to politicians, not to make policy. And so I had written—and I think it’s one of the better things I’ve ever written—a last chapter to that book called “Social Ecology and Criminal Justice Policy.” Hirschi’s reaction was “No, you can’t. This is too directive. You can’t do that.” I wanted to get the book out, so that last chapter never happened. Ron: Because of his belief that you shouldn’t talk policy. Jim: You’re not supposed to do it, which is funny, because at the end of his career, once he got into self-control theory and you look at the legacy of Travis Hirschi, don’t you think of the Oregon Social Learning Center, run by Patterson and the policy implications of self-control theory, which means you got to have early family interventions, early monitoring, or all that stuff? How is that not policy -oriented? Ron: A third area is prison violence. Now, that seems we talked about, community corrections and social ecology. Are they connected in some way? Jim: Again, serendipity. I was working on putting together some national surveys for Faye Taxman down in the Maryland, and she was actually in Italy at the time, and she said we should do a proposal to NIC. I said, “I got a three o’clock flight.” It’s like nine o’clock in the morning. I’m in the office. She says, “Just write the proposal.” There’s a new Director of Research at NIC, and she wants to actually evaluate this initiative, so it’s a big deal. So, I look at the request for proposal. I’ve got to leave in a couple of hours, so I just took the old Dave Twain model, you know, plus an action verb, and I said, okay, what do they say they want? It gets submitted, and two months later, Faye calls me up: “You know that grant you wrote in three hours?” “Yeah.” “It got funded for quarter-million bucks.” I’m like, “Wow.” Ron: Was the grant to evaluate a prison-based program? Jim: NIC had something called Institutional Culture Change Initiative. So, they were spending money to try to change the culture of prisons, and they had a strategy that they thought was not unlike trickle-down economics approach to culture change. They believed that if you could run training programs for mid-level managers and line staff, that if you could change the culture of the managers and the correctional officers, then it would trickle down and change the culture of the prisoners. They also hired, from the business school around the area, experts, management consultants to change the culture at the top. So, again, if you can change the top and the middle and the line staff, it’ll end up changing the culture of the prisoners. They didn’t deal with the prisoners. They dealt with the staff. It was the very first time that NIC let somebody else in to do something like that. There were nine prisons around the country that we went into. It was a great little study. They let us publish the study, and it turned into the Culture of Prison Violence book that we did, but that led me in a different direction. Ron: What was the big takeaway from the study? What did you learn about prison violence and being able to change it? Jim: There’s a lot of strategies you can use, but I don’t think that top-down strategy had an impact, because it wasn’t intensive enough. The programming was not there at a level it needed to be. It was the “emperor’s new clothes” type of thing. It was similar to a lot of reentry programs, too, in that when you actually look at it closely and you look at the expenditures and where they’re going, they’re not doing enough to try to have the impact. Ron: I’m want to talk a bit about another area— technology. Can you tell me about how that interest began and what you feel the impact of your work there has been? Jim: Well, technology was there from the beginning. The first thing I did was a national survey of intensive supervision programs and found that the word “intensive” meant different things in different parts of the country. Intensive in Massachusetts was four face-to-face contacts and six collaterals per month, whereas intensive in Texas at the time [was different], because they had one of the early electronic monitoring (EM) programs. Ron: What do you feel like you learned about Jim: It’s not the technology. It’s basically the program. As you and Gary once said, “EM is a technology in search of a program.” Ron: �������������������� Jim : I do think we’ve sold a lot of reforms to try to convince the public that we have control we really don’t have by using technology. “We have this technology, that technology, so you don’t have to be worried. You’re all set.” And that doesn’t get at the underlying core problems that people have that lead them to offend in the first place. Ron: There’s been a huge emphasis in the community corrections space on tracking technology. It’s gotten more sophisticated, satellite tracking , etc. So, what’s your thought about that at this point? If you were advising the Director or Commissioner of Probation in any state, and they said, “Jim, how much of an investment should we make in that area, and is it going to pay off for us in terms of reduced offending?,” what would you say? Jim: Hire people. I think we have to weigh the costs and benefits of “people” technology versus electronic technology, I’d rather invest in people than in the technology. I think a lot of it is “smoke and mirrors” or the Trojan horse, letting private for-profit companies get a foot in the door, as you and Gary Marx have written about and others have said. And I do think that’s true. The fear I have when we move in the direction of a quick fix in terms of public support, because they’re going to see how tough you are, is that really what you’re doing is giving up a level of public governmental control and giving it to the private sector, because the private for-profits are moving in. I mean all you have to do is look at Europe, those big private for-profit prison industries went big into community corrections about a decade ago, and they’re buying up all the technology. And they go into third world countries, and they kind of take over these whole countries, and so the big contracts are happening that way right now. So, I worry about that, that we’re basically making the community corrections function smaller. We’re giving it up to these other agencies so there’s less to do. There are some positive aspects of technology. I’m not sure how far it’ll go. I see, for example, the use of assistive technology built into your phone and mine but there’s a surveillance part of it. They can monitor your behavior, but they can also provide support apps and things like that for people. You and I know people don’t talk anymore. They text and do that. So, you could argue that having a text-based support, you know, mentor-type program could make a difference, in term of access to information and support. Ron: I want to ask about re-entry. Some say it’s one area in criminal justice where it’s been really hard to move the needle in terms of rates of reoffending post- prison. Your thoughts? Jim: When you look at, like, the long-term recidivism studies the BJS [Bureau of Justice Statistics] puts out across all kinds of jurisdictions, hundreds of thousands of people, and you see that 83% of the people that went into the prison system and then were released are re- arrested within nine years, that doesn’t suggest there’s been a lot of change that goes on. Parole success has pretty much stayed in that 50-60% range. Probation, back when you were young, when you were a probation officer, Ron, successful completion of probation rates were, in some states, 80-90%. And then they dropped down to being very close to the parole rates, down to, you know, in the 60s. And now, is that because we’re putting higher risk people into the system or is it something about the system itself and how they respond to people? That’s the big question. Ron: Are there reentry programs that you think are really the best models, with the greatest likelihood of success?Jim: I think the prison reform advocates do a disservice to the field by emphasizing the large gains that you can get by identifying so-called model programs. I’ve looked at them in a recent piece, and I don’t see it. At best, you see a modest impact of programs. Programs are not going to change people. People change people. There’s a lot going on besides going with one particular program. They make a difference, but on the margins—maybe a 10% difference between experiments and control. Ron: How would you invest in people in a way that you think would improve results? Jim: You need to hire a whole different group of people and with different training and background than we hire today. It’s something that Don Hummer and I have talked about. The skill set is wrong. It’s a mismatch. Criminal justice programs are a major part of the problem. They’re essentially public administration programs, and they’re not people-changing programs. I think you have to hire people like they do in some European countries with social work and psychology backgrounds that really have an orientation—that believe in at least the possibility of change. I know that the probability of change is low, but I do believe in the possibility of change, and you need to hire a line staff that actually are invested in change, and I don’t think we have that. Ron: It sounds like the European model is much more social-work-oriented than in the States. Jim: I did a presentation down in Florida two years ago. They asked me to answer a question: What are the characteristics of a good prison? In response, I presented the Norwegian model. Norway represents a whole different approach. If you really are interested in changing people, you’re going to actually have to do what we’re doing here, which is actively listen and deal with them. You can’t deal with reentry by itself unless you talk about pre-entry, which is the stuff that got him in trouble in the first place. Ron: Can you tell me about your Australia experience? Jim: Well, Australia was a lark, obviously. What they wanted was somebody to come in, rather than go for grants per se. They wanted to develop long-term relationships with criminal justice agencies. And that’s because the Vice Chancellor wanted somebody that would go in and initially do free work to get agencies to want to work with the university and develop MOUs to do further work. I decided to take that position, and obviously that was an adventure for an older man like me. I always thought the grants were too up and down and that long-term MOUs and relationships were the way to go, so it was perfect for me. And they gave me unlimited resources. Whatever I asked for, I had. And boy, when you have unlimited resources and you actually have some pretty good ideas, you get a lot done, so that’s basically what was the single best, you know, two years of my career in terms of being able to develop something. We developed an initiative with that government to look at performance measures in correction systems, institutional and community corrections, and a million-dollar MOU to start the first three years. And the thought was that once Queensland does it, other states will want to do it. So, we saw this as a giant thing. Well, wouldn’t you know it, government changed. That project was put on hold, and so that actually didn’t quite happen while I was there, and I had stuff going on at home back here, so I decided to leave. Then I started looking at all these evidence-based reviews. I break these studies out by country. So, here they are. Here’s the studies of policing. Here’s the courts. Here’s the corrections. Do you see what’s missing in the countries? Here, 40 of the 44 studies. Where were they done? The United States. Where were the other four done? The UK. How many were done in Australia? None. So I asked the folks in Australia, “Do you really want your programs to be based on what happens in another country, or do you want to base it on your country?” You need to have your own base of research. Well, it turns out they did have a lot of research, but it wasn’t the kind of stuff you could see in journals. Ron: You were involved in a prison inspection project? Jim: Well, they thought they were having a prison violence problem in Queensland. They wanted somebody to come in to really get at the root cause of the problem and make recommendations for change. So, the Inspector General of Department of Corrections brought me in—and, by the way, he went to every interview, every focus group…. We were a team. The IG and I, for whatever reason, we just meshed. That was probably the best working relationship I’ve had, doing those kinds of interviews, nobody stepping on your words. I had my ways of getting people to talk. I would ask the harder questions. He would ask the more ethics-related questions. Ron: What would you say the outcome was? Jim: Change. They made some changes. The IG argued that when you’re internal, you can’t go public and use the public to do it, but you’re more likely to get the actors to change, and you’re going to get more access to information if you’re inside-out than outside-in. Outside-in, you might be able to make a splash, but you’re probably not getting the whole picture because they’re not going to give it to you. So, you’re more likely to get the full picture if the research is done internally. I’ll give you an example of our work. For the private prisons, they had performance contracting there for private prisons, and in those performance contracts I could see that they were getting increased funding if victimization stayed below a certain level. In that contract there was an operational definition of victimization. If I am an inmate and punch you in the face, I’m the offender, and you’re the victim, right? That’s an easy one. That’s a victimization. But if staff punch me in the face, it’s not clear. An incident occurs, and it’s not clear if there is an offender or victim. So, by definition, in those performance contracts, some victimizations did not count against them for getting their goal. Immediately, I suggested we need to change the operational definition of how you count and how you monitor and control victimizations. You need to switch from the word victimization and use incidents. So, a simple little definitional change has a big impact on whether a system looks like it’s working better than it is. You get into the weeds when you see the performance contracts, and I think of that today when I think of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and my work for the Independent Review Board. There’s no performance contracting going on with the private for-profits. You get paid by the number of people going through the door, no performance contracting. You want to make a simple change and have an impact? Go to performance contracting. You want to know about reentry, making a difference, think about tying that to performance. Ron: Let’s talk about the Global Community Corrections Center. Jim: I was doing that in Australia, and five years later I resurrected it here at George Mason University. It’s basically a one-stop shopping resource for community corrections, policy makers, practitioners, [and] researchers around the world that want to study community corrections systems. There’s the World Prison Brief out there that has data on all the prisons in the world, but at present there’s no World Community Corrections Brief. So, we’re trying to create that same kind of model. And there are language differences, and there’s problems to put it all together, but that’s what we’re trying to do. We haven’t figured out how to get a permanent funding stream yet. We’re still working on that. That’s my endgame for what I’m going to do, come up with funding for that. IV.THE FUTURE Ron: Let’s now turn to the future. Let’s start with what’s the future hold for you. Jim: It could be great. I’m already working on study funded by NIDA [National Institute on Drug Abuse] and BJA examining service delivery for justice-involved veterans in Veterans Treatment Courts across the country. I’m the Project Director. And I have my journal and several writing projects to keep me busy. Applying for federal research funding is always a challenge. There is a lot of excellent competition. And the big one, of course, is my Global Community Corrections Initiative. We’re hoping to find some private foundation to fund them. That’ll be the big one. Ron: Lastly, I wanted to ask you about the future of community corrections. What are the new frontiers in community corrections? Jim: I think they’re going to probably have to hire a whole new generation of people. That’s what I’m seeing. I see a generational change, and you’ve seen it. They need to bring in a new generation of people that have that same change orientation, that actually believe in change. Ron: That probably cuts across all of criminal justice, doesn’t it? Jim: Yes. Don Hummer and I did a piece in federal probation on that. Don wrote it, and I played around with it with him. We need to think seriously about what skill set is needed. Germany does a lot of this with education. They go to industry, and they say, “What are the skills you need the people in your organization to have?” Then they design a curriculum, so they have those agree to hire certain number of our graduates. So, that’s a German kind of model. That’s hard to pull off. That requires universities and faculty to have a different orientation. You hear “Well, the current curriculum does not reflect the interest and skills of the current faculty.” The problem is that we’re seeing that the curriculum needs to fit the skill set related to the jobs that these kids are going to get. I’ve been here for almost 40 years. Seventy percent of our people go into local criminal justice. They’re probation officers. They’re police officers. They’re corrections officers. We need to present the curriculum in new and innovative ways, and that’s a hard sell, which is why CJ educational reform is difficult, because it means it challenges hiring practices. What are the skills? What’s missing? So, you want a new generation of police officers, and you want them to be able, when somebody is stepping on someone’s neck, to actually intervene the first day as a rookie with your supervisor? I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to train and educate a little differently. Ron: Last question. Would you do anything differently if you had to do it over again? Jim: No, probably not, because it would change other things. I had a pretty good career. I’d finish more stuff maybe!Connecting Top Employers with Premiere Professionals! Employers https://careers.appa-net.org Professionals The APPA Career Center provides all the functionality and reach of contemporary job boards while specifically focusing on the Community Corrections industry. *To receive these member benefits, login with your company’s primary APPA contact email. PLACE your job in front of qualified professionals. SEARCH our Resume Bank using robust filters to narrow your candidate search. 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CAREER CENTER39 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION HOW TO REDUCE JAIL USE FOR PEOPLE ON PROBATION: LESSONS FROM A PEER-LEARNING NETWORK by Ammar Khalid, Sam Hoppe, and Kevin Kuehmeier P robation supervision and jail incarceration receive much less attention in justice reform conversations than they should, given how many lives these aspects of the justice system touch. On any given day, the adult probation population in the United States is greater than the prison, jail, and parole populations combined (Buehler & Kluckow, 2024). Jails see over seven million admissions each year (Zeng, 2023), a significant share of which are the result of violations of probation conditions. Jail stays, even short ones, can have negative consequences for people not only in terms of further criminal legal system involvement but also in terms of employment, housing, and mental health (Frankel, 2020; Menefee et al., 2022; Dobbie et al., 2018). For all these reasons, understanding how to minimize jail use for people on probation is important to supporting supervision success, ensuring long-term public safety, and addressing mass incarceration. Since 2022, the Urban Institute and Justice System Partners has convened a peer-learning community of probation professionals across 11 jurisdictions to explore challenges and identify opportunities for reducing jail use for people on probation. The Probation Practice to Reduce Jail Populations Network (hereafter referred to as the Network) is part of the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a broad initiative supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for reimagining and rebuilding local criminal justice systems—reducing jail incarceration and increasing equity for all. Network sites have identified a few main priorities: Effective management of behavioral health and substance use issues among the probation population; Culture change around jail use by probation departments; and Collaboration with partners in law enforcement and the courts. This article shares knowledge from the peer-learning efforts regarding why it is critical to reduce the use of jail during probation supervision and highlights strategies demonstrating that it is possible for innovative probation leaders to accomplish this goal. THE EXTENT OF JAIL USE FOR PEOPLE ON PROBATION Over a fifth of people on probation do not finish their probation terms successfully (Kaeble, 2024). Many of them end up incarcerated in jail, often due to probation revocations, time-limited custodial sanctions, and probation detainers or holds. In 2022, nearly 92,000 people were in jail for probation violations nationwide, accounting for 14% of the total jail population (Zeng, 2023). This is partly because people on probation typically need to balance 10-20 supervision conditions that are challenging to follow over lengthy probation sentences (Phelps, 2018). However, these national figures mask considerable variation. An analysis of jail populations in SJC sites found that the proportion of the average daily jail population accounted for by people with a probation violation (either alone or coupled with a new offense) ranged from 9% to 51% (Roth et al., 2021). This analysis also found that the median length of stay for people in jail for probation violations was substantially longer than that for others in jail. THE DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS OF JAIL Over a fifth of people on probation do not finish their probation terms successfully (Kaeble, 2024). Many of them end up incarcerated in jail, often due to probation revocations, time-limited custodial sanctions, and probation detainers or holds. In 2022, nearly 92,000 people were in jail for probation violations nationwide, accounting for 14% of the total jail population (Zeng, 2023). This is partly because people on probation typically need to balance 10-20 supervision conditions that are challenging to follow over lengthy probation sentences (Phelps, 2018). However, these national figures mask considerable variation. An analysis of jail Next >