Translator: Araminta Dutta Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
You've heard about mass incarceration,
how the war on drugs and mandatory minimums
has contributed to the US incarcerating five-hundred percent as many people
as the rest of the world.
Today, we're going to look at a related issue;
what happens when all those people are released from prison.
Ninety-five percent, pretty much everyone in prison,
will be released.
They will have paid their debt and they're coming back.
Our criminal justice system should be a system of rehabilitation.
So, if it's doing its job,
you would expect that people who get out, get jobs and stay out.
But in fact, two-thirds of people are reincarcerated within three years.
It's an expensive problem.
If someone has served a typical three-year sentence,
that means you and I, as taxpayers,
have invested $100,000 in their rehabilitation.
But here's what blew me away.
One in five people walking into prison
are going in for breaking the extra rules of probation and parole;
for doing things that if you or I did them,
wouldn't be an offense.
To be clear, these people have not been convicted of a new offense.
Technical violations are things like missing a court date,
a parole or therapy appointment, not having a stable job or housing,
not paying fines.
In fact, I know of multiple cases where people have been picked up
because they were in hospital
when they should have met their parole officer.
Speaking of hospitals, let's compare our criminal justice rehabilitation system
to another rehabilitation system we're all familiar with - healthcare.
This might not be an obvious comparison, but bear with me for a moment.
When my grandfather was released from hospital after his hip replacement,
he received medication, exercises, had physiotherapy appointments each week,
regular visits with his physician,
somebody in the assisted living facility cleaned his wound;
there was this comprehensive plan
to make sure that the time and money invested in his surgery wasn't wasted.
Let's compare that to when someone gets out of prison.
Imagine Michael,
a young man picked up for a burglary and found with OxyContin in his pocket.
He serves his three years and then he's released
with twenty-five bucks, a bus ticket, and the clothes he stood up in.
That's it.
The first thing Michael did
was buy his first ice-cold Coca-Cola in three years,
and that tasted pretty darn good,
and peanuts that had the taste of freedom roasted right into them.
He took the bus,
and when he got off in Times Square, he didn't know what to do,
surrounded by the hustle and bustle and the noise and the crowds!
I mean, like, where do you start?
He was overwhelmed.
All he knew was he had to find a place to sleep
and to get to his first parole appointment in a couple of days.
There is no comparison, is there?
As I've traveled around the country, listening to people who have gotten out,
this word "overwhelmed" comes up over and over again.
You see, Michael had been institutionalized.
Almost every decision and every hour of his day had been managed for him.
And suddenly, in this very fragile state of transition,
he had a whole bunch of big, important decisions to make
and twenty-four extra hours a day to manage,
but his decision-making muscle had atrophied.
He just didn't know where to start.
As a condition of parole,
Michael had to go to a substance abuse group,
see a counselor,
he needed help from a housing counselor to help him find a place to live,
he needed help from a workforce counselor
to find an employer willing to hire someone with a felony conviction,
and, of course, he had to go see his parole officer
and show up with all the paperwork
to prove he'd been doing the things he was supposed to do.
If he didn't satisfy those conditions,
then the parole officer can haul him before a judge,
who can revoke his parole and send him back to prison.
That is why, one in five people walk into prison, technical violations.
Imagine you have a massive project,
and the project manager has no tools,
and he is the least organized person on the team.
It doesn't matter how hard everybody else is working;
that project is not going to be a success.
That role of project manager is the role we have put Michael in.
Let me show you what happens
when the housing counselor and the workforce counselor don't talk
because of privacy rules.
They get Michael a place to live on one side of town
and a job on the other side of town working the breakfast shift.
The trouble is,
transit isn't that reliable really early in the morning,
so the second time Michael was late,
he lost his job,
which meant he couldn't afford to pay his counselor,
nor could he pay his rent.
So that pushed him back into homelessness
and needing all those services all over again.
Of course, when he told his parole officer that he lost his job,
well, then she was really interested!
And Michael? Well, Michael was ...
... overwhelmed.
It doesn't have to be like that.
In healthcare, there is an approach called patient-mediated exchange
that allows a person to get their own information,
and once they have it, they can give it to somebody else,
including another professional, like a healthcare worker.
It's called patient-mediate exchange in the healthcare world,
and in the criminal justice world,
it didn't have a name because it wasn't being done.
So we decided to change that.
I want to show you what happens when everybody can work together.
Michael can answer some simple questions to help him find the services he needs
and get connected with a service provider in his community
even before he is released from prison,
so he knows what to do as soon as he gets out, on that first day.
He can build a plan, and his workforce and housing counselors, substance abuse,
can all contribute to that same plan
that he can share back with his parole officer.
Michael can access this on his own smartphone.
He's in control.
And so, as he goes to each of his appointments,
he can, for example, take a photograph of a job application and upload that,
just like you and I would take a photo of a receipt
and submit it to our expense reports.
He can actually physically check-in at a location
to demonstrate he did go to that job interview.
There's a calendar, and that means that all the different caseworkers know
where Michael is supposed to be and when,
so they don't schedule things on top of each other.
It means Michael knows when he's supposed to be in court,
solving the problem where the notice is mailed to some previous address.
Who knows where?
And with a messaging function
that allows everybody to talk together about Michael's case,
with Michael in the middle of the conversation,
it is much easier to respond to unexpected situations.
So maybe workforce and housing can now get Michael
a job and a house on the same side of town.
And maybe, just maybe,
the relationship between Michael and his officer will get better
with better communication.
To be clear, we know that coordinated case management,
with sanctions for screwing up, actually works.
Works in terms of reducing recidivism, and works in terms of reducing costs.
The Washington State Institute for Public Policy looked at this sort of situation,
and they found,
looking at savings to taxpayers and to the participant,
these programs save about $15,000 per person.
What we also found
is that it looks like it works for the individuals themselves.
Here are some early results from our jail reentry program
that we're working on here in Georgia.
"I felt for the first time that there were people who would really help me."
"I used the calendar, so I actually knew what I was supposed to do."
"I got a promotion, so now I can save up for a car."
"I wasn't so overwhelmed and knew what to do."
The technology is simply a way
for the person to access the resources that are already in the community,
but it makes it possible to manage reentry.
It puts everyone on the same page,
and it gives the individual a beginning of a sense of control.
Let's go back to the medical field for a moment.
Healthcare has been adopting patient-centered technology
for quite a while now.
There are dozens of apps for diabetes
that put the doctor and the patient on the same page.
They guide the patient
so that they aren't so overwhelmed in managing their condition,
and they allow for better, more timely interventions,
which leads to better outcomes.
Why would this kind of thing not work
for people who have even more things to manage
and much higher consequences of failure?
I don't want to imply that technology is the whole answer here.
There is no easy button for reentry,
and nothing will replace the face-to-face interactions
that help somebody like Michael
transition from institutionalized thinking to independent thinking.
But if we are able to share information in a way that respects Michael's privacy,
we ought to be able to see those same, improved interventions and outcomes
that we see in healthcare.
What I'm talking about here is self-sufficiency,
and we speak about self-sufficiency
as though it is about having enough money to live on.
But self-sufficiency is also about making good decisions,
about self-management.
It is about making case management
change from being something done to a person,
to something done with and by them.
This is an incredibly expensive problem.
It costs about $60 a day to keep somebody in prison,
and if you add that up for all the people on technical violations
in even a subset of states, it is a billion-dollar-plus problem.
This really is worth working on.
What I'm talking about is giving people like Michael
a fighting chance to make it on the outside,
which benefits them and their families.
It also helps parole officers, who do an incredibly difficult job,
with heavy caseloads and very little recognition.
Of course, it also helps us, as taxpayers and as people living in the community.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheering)