“Trail ‘em, Nail ‘em and Jail ‘em:” Issues with U.S. Parole

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: And next, to the U.S. justice system and the problem with parole meanwhile concerns around went — concerns abound when it comes to American prisons, it’s not usually focused on people serving time outside. According to our next guest, the situation there is so dire that some would rather stay in prison than deal with parole. Vincent Schiraldi is the secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services, with a new book, “Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom.” And now, joins Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: Thanks, Christiane. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for talking with us.

VINCENT SCHIRALDI, AUTHOR: Thank you for having me, Michel.

MARTIN: So, your book called “Mass Supervision.” I think a lot of people have heard by now — they’ve heard the term mass incarceration. But what’s mass supervision and why did you write a whole book about it?

SCHIRALDI: Yes. It’s kind of interesting, like probation and parole fly under the radar of criminal justice reform, research, philanthropy, media, there’s twice as many people on probation and parole in America as there are in prisons and jails. And about a quarter of everybody entering prison every year enters not because they committed a new crime, but because they violated some technical term of their probation or parole, staying out past curfew, associating with someone with a felony record, getting a credit card when you’re not supposed to, things like that. But (INAUDIBLE) for the rest of us but — can land them in jail and do quite a bit.

MARTIN: So, how did you become acquainted with this as a problem that needs to be faced, or at least something that needs to be talked about? Because it’s just — it’s kind of invisible to the rest of us unless you’re related to somebody who is affected by it or you are yourself.

SCHIRALDI: That’s exactly right. So, one of the things I often ask people is, what’s your favorite probation movie? Because most people can name their favorite prison movie, but we don’t really kind of have a mental picture of parole or probation supervision.

So, I got this job from Mayor Bloomberg in 2010. He was recruited me. I wasn’t — I was going to be done with government for a while, but he recruited me. And I didn’t — I had never worked in probation or parole before. And so, what I did was I started with a 19-session listening tour and, you know, I talked to my staff that were probation officers and they were miserable in their jobs, and many of them had committed suicide with the service weapons that my predecessor had supplied them with. You know, moral was just in the toilet.

And what it was, was largely a staff full of people, of color, African- American, Latino folks imprisoning for taking tack fouls another group of black and Latino folks, and there was a lot of strain around that. And they straight up said, we lock these people up because you make us do so.

We feel like if we think somebody deserves a second chance, we don’t want to give it to them because if that goes foul, you’re going to throw us under the bus. And that was pretty sobering. And then I went into court, you know, I was visiting the different offices and the five boroughs in New York City. I went into court twice, I saw people voluntarily tell a judge, send me to Rikers Island, one of the most violent jails in the country. I’m done being under parole.

I saw this one woman convulsed in tears because she was a single mom, we wouldn’t let her bring her daughter to her meetings with the probation

officer and she just — she didn’t have the money to hire a babysitter and was running out of favors with her relatives and friends. So, she said, I can’t do it anymore. My mother is going to take care of my daughter. Send me to Rikers for six months and I’ll be done with all of this. And I’m thinking, what do most people think we get out of this? What do most politicians think we get out of this? I think we get rehabilitation. I think we get diversion from incarceration. And what I saw was we get (INAUDIBLE) them in jail.

MARTIN: Why though? Why though? Because one of the points you make in the book is that it’s hugely expensive.

SCHIRALDI: Yes.

MARTIN: I mean, this is like a whole bureaucracy. Like the money that you spend, you know, chasing people down or locking them up, it’s hugely expensive. So — but — so, why do you think it’s persisted to this extent?

SCHIRALDI: Yes. And when I went inside and I started to meet probation and parole officers — now, of course, there’s going to be some mean ones in there, but most of them are not that. A lot of church going people, a lot of hard-working people and they basically feel like, from the top, from the governor, from the mayor is this pressure to never make a mistake.

And so, if you make a mistake and it blows up on your boss, your mayor, your commissioner, your supervisor, then you are going to get thrown under the bus by those people, even humiliated, you might get fired. In my department, they used to transfer people to very inconvenient locations. If you lived in Queens, they transferred you to Bronx. If you live in the Bronx, they transfer you to Staten Island just to make your life hard. There’s no upside for you as a probation officer or parole officer to take a chance, because if that person lives a happy and healthy life, you get nothing for that.

Where is if they reoffend, you’re made to be a fool, you might lose your job. And so, while it costs society money, it doesn’t cost me as a probation or parole officer anything. In fact, if you think about it a different way, it’s the only way I can with the stroke of a pen spend $50, $60, $70,000 a year. If I want to get drug treatment, if I want to get this person a job, an apartment, those things I got to beg for. If I want to send them to prison, all I got to do is violate them.

MARTIN: So, you’ve talked about how this kind of this terrible feedback loop, how it cost society a lot of money, how it basically creates a really kind of toxic, dispiriting, you know, environment for people who are actually doing it. What about the people who are affected by this? I mean,

I’m thinking about you’ve told a number of examples in the book, but one that I think a lot might remember is the hip-hop artist and activist, Meek Mill. This is the case that came to public attention. So, you just talk a little bit about it?

SCHIRALDI: So, Meek Mill was on probation for a drug gun charge that he committed when he was 19, or he was accused of, the facts, I thin, were somewhat in doubt and later he won an appeal. But before that happened, he was on probation — he was supposed to be on a probation for a short period of time, I think 18 months. But the judge kept on him because he — she felt he was not completely fulfilling his obligations. So, she kept extending his probation over and over again.

He was on a probation for 12 years. His whole young life. At the end of which, he was accused of popping a wheelie on a borrowed motorcycle and on getting in an altercation with a paparazzi at an airport. Both of which cases were dismissed. But you can be incarcerated for dismissed cases if you’re on probation. So, the judge incarcerated him for two to four years in prison.

This guy was a performing artist. He had been out for 12 years without reoffending. He was a philanthropist. He was doing good works. And the judge just violated him because he stepped out of what she considered out of line. And this just blew up.

And then, Jay-Z, Robert Kraft from the New England Patriots, the owner of the 76er’s, Michael Rubin, formed a group called the REFORM Alliance to bring attention to this and try to essentially reform the system.

MARTIN: So, let’s contrast that with another case that got very little attention, it’s something you write about in the book, a man named Thomas Barrett. Tell us about him.

SCHIRALDI: So, Thomas Barrett was a pharmacist down south, down in Georgia. And he stole some drugs from the pharmacy he was at. He became addicted to them. So, he lost his job and became homeless, lost his family and was in and out of sort of alcohol abuse. Stole a can of beer, $2 can of beer from a grocery store, got arrested for that. Was fined, was unable to pay the fine. And in some places, they have privatized probation, essentially, it’s a private company that supervises you and the government doesn’t pay money for that. You, the person on probation, pay the money. So, now, he’s trying to pay money for a private company. Pays a fine. And also, they start adding things on, like electronic monitoring or drug testing, all of which comes at a cost. And he was selling his blood to be able to make those payments. And eventually, he just fell so far behind he ended up paying $1,000 in fines for this $2 can of beer and fees for the company and — because he couldn’t keep up with payments, ended up doing a year in jail. Again, not because he committed any crime, just because he couldn’t make his payments.

MARTIN: What I think I hear you saying is that people basically get locked up for not having money. Is that —

SCHIRALDI: Yes. The system — so, what happened was, as we created this system of mass incarceration and mass supervision, this happens at the same time as a major taxpayer revolt in the United States, we start to reduce social services and support, we certainly don’t want to raise taxes to pay for somebody to be on probation, to pay for somebody to go to prison. So, we’re trying to do all this tough on crime stuff on the cheap, as elected officials.

And a natural outgrowth of that is to charge people to go to jail, to charge people to have a public defender, to charge court fees and to charge people to be on probation and parole. So, now, you’re taking this group of folks that wasn’t really making it all that well to begin with and saying, you got pull extra money out of your pocket to be able to pay for your probation. And when I interview probational officers about this, they hate it, right? They hate having to chase people around for money and how much of their time goes into strategizing, how to get the money out of this person. So, they’re doing things like showing up on the days that checks arrive before the guy’s wife and children get a chance at that check.

MARTIN: Are you serious?

SCHIRALDI: For food and rent.

MARTIN: Are you serious? I mean, you’re saying —

SCHIRALDI: That’s what you have to think about it as a probation officer. Because half of your salary is coming from those fees.

MARTIN: So, now, the question becomes, what’s a better way? Because you can see where some people might be listening to our conversation and they will say, OK, that sounds bad. But if somebody’s committed a major crime, somebody’s hurt, somebody’s killed, somebody’s raped, somebody’s burglarized my house, stolen my car, I want somebody following up to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Is there a better way?

SCHIRALDI: Couple different options I think that are out there. One is, less is more when it comes to this now. Literally, the governor of New York signed legislation two years ago called The Less Is More Act. And they just trying to a tut (ph) a bunch of nonsense out of New York State’s parole system so that people can be violated for less fewer things. So, for example, staying out past curfew, which is kind of an old school thing.

People work night jobs now. I mean, New York City is 24 hours a day.

So, things like that, getting rid of a lot of the technical violations. And also, shortening the amount of time that you’re on parole. So, every 30 days you don’t get a violation in New York, 30 days you behave, you get 30 days off your parole. So, if you got three years of parole and you never misbehaved, you’re done in a year and a half.

So, a lot of states have done things to sort of strengthen the footprint and punitiveness of probation and parole. Some states like California have also captured the savings and put that money into the mental health treatment, victim services and things like that in their counties. So, California reduced the number of people under supervision by 170,000 people and put about $150 to $200 million a year out to their counties to provide services and supports. So, those are some things states and counties could do. I also suggest that people consider abolishing supervision for some categories of people. So, for example, misdemeanors. Some of these states down south that have had these pay to be on probation situations with private companies have abolished their supervision period and it kind of doesn’t make much difference. You could still order a person to go to drug treatment, could you still order them to get anger management class and then come back every six months to the judge.

You don’t actually need to pay a bunch of people to chase them around to catch them doing stuff that you may not care that much about. So, there’s definitely things that people can do. Harder the reason I wrote the book is because a lot of elected officials have no idea about what kind of contribution this is making to the systems. In New York, for example, it was costing over $800 million a year for technical parole violations. Part of the reason that Governor Hochul signed the Less Is More Act.

MARTIN: Do you — but you can see where, for elected officials, you know, that next election comes around, it’s like, why did you make it less tough on criminals? Why did you, you know, defund the Corrections Department? You know, why did you — you know, your — it’s the classic, you know, you’re soft. How do you argue with that?

SCHIRALDI: You know, I think that it’s interesting to think about the system we have now and imagine deploying the resources we put into it in a different way. So, imagine instead of having a bunch of bureaucrats follow people around and have them pee in a cup and violate them for noncriminal acts, if we put that into drug treatment or put them into jobs or put them into housing, I think that when you talk to the public about things like this and even a lot of elected officials, they can see that there could — it could be a reasonable trade-off here. Not when you just do nothing, but when you do something but that that something makes more sense.

When I interviewed for my job with Mayor Bloomberg, that’s exactly the conversation I had. I said, imagine I came to you with $80 million, which was my budget, and you know, 30,000 troubled and troubling souls and said, do whatever you want to fix this problem. I’m pretty much what you wouldn’t do is run out and hire a bunch of civil service protected, disinterested bureaucrats to have them meet with them for five minutes, you have a caseload of 100 people, five minutes would be a lot to meet with them once a week. I’m pretty much you wouldn’t do that. They said, no, I wouldn’t do that. I said, well, I’m betting — I went to your probation department, I’m betting that’s what you got right now. And he looked over at his deputy mayors and they said, that’s pretty much what we got. And so, it (INAUDIBLE), it just doesn’t make sense. I mean, you get a few minutes with most elected officials, they’re kind of with you on that one. It’s different than prison. This is — and I’m not saying all the people in prison believe — need to be there. But in prison, at least you have incapacitation that you’re buying. You’re not buying that with probation and parole.

These folks are walking around on the street today without enough resources to make it and we’re spending a ton of money on curfew violations. It just doesn’t make sense. And a lot of politicians when they hear it, they believe it.

MARTIN: What’s keeping you going? I mean, because it would seem that you’ve seen a lot. I mean, you’ve seen the trends go either way. I was just sort of curious like how you maintain your optimism?

SCHIRALDI: Yes. So, I’ve been in these 43 years now. I started, you know, 1980 as a house parent at a group home. And for the first, you know, 30 plus years, 37 years of that, the prison population went up every single year. And, you know, you could fill a very small room with the number of people who really cared about that, other than the people in prison and their family members. Most people would just enthusiastically cheering that on.

And now, for the last decade plus, the conversations changed a bit. There’s been a more nuanced conversation. There’s a lot more people. Even young people. I used to be the weird dad for my kids, right, that I was the guy that worked with all the criminals. Now, I’m kind of cool because I work in mass incarceration and, you know, my kids friends send me their resumes to help them find jobs. And you know, I half joke about that, but that’s — there’s a difference. There’s a difference now that young people at philanthropy, that researchers, that some elected official actually care about the collateral consequences of this mass incarceration that we built. It’s somewhat unprecedented from a historical standpoint and in a racial sort of disparities and unfairness that goes along with that and its ineffectiveness. And the fact that we can even have that conversation today, we really couldn’t have it 30 years ago in any serious way. That kind of keeps my hopeful. It doesn’t mean I believe nobody should ever be confined for our safety. I do be some people should be and I know that a lot of people — you know, some people don’t. They think it should all be abolished. I’m not one of them.

But I think that way fewer people should be locked up and I think way fewer and maybe even no people, at least in some groups of people, should be under supervision. I think we can do better.

MARTIN: Vincent Schiraldi, thank you so much for talking with us.

SCHIRALDI: Thanks for having me.

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