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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In New York City, a man named Michael Tyson, not the boxer, became the first person to die from COVID-19 at the Rikers Island jail in April of 2020. He had been incarcerated for two months. The reason he was there, missing appointments with his parole officer. Later that month, Raymond Rivera was the second person to die on Rikers Island from COVID-19. The reason for his nearly year long stay at the facility, again, a technical parole violation.

Although these stories sound extreme, 25% of all people incarcerated in the United States are there because of parole violations, doing things like missing a check in, failing to pay a fee, failing a drug test, or even just staying out too late or traveling without permission. Ironically, programs like parole and probation were invented to keep people out of prison, not to lock them back up.

Although it might not always work that way, as public awareness and opposition to mass incarceration increase, correctional administrators are increasingly relying on what they call alternative models to mass incarceration, like parole and probation, also electronic monitoring and diversion programs. While politicians laud the so called alternative models, criminal justice advocates say that in many cases, they're just an extension of the punitive model that they seek to replace and the private corporations are making big bucks in the process.

With me now are Bianca Tylek, Executive Director of the advocacy group Worth Rises, and Vincent Schiraldi, co-Director of the Columbia University Justice Lab, and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. Now, as many of you know by now, the segment is part of our series in partnership with the Greene Space and Worth Rises, about the business side of the prison industry.

We're having these conversations on Mondays to preview Tuesday night Greene Space panels on the same topic. They happen at 7:00 PM on Tuesdays. You can sign up for tomorrow's on parole and probation by going to the greenespace.org. Bianca, welcome back. Vincent, welcome to WNYC.

Vincent: Thank you, Brian.

Bianca: Hi, Brian, nice to hear you too.

Brian: Bianca, you write in the Worth Rises report on this issue that private prisons have been preparing the shift for decades. What's the shift, and how has the private sector been preparing for something that probably most of our listeners don't think of in terms of privatization, which is probation and parole?

Bianca: Absolutely. The conversation around a criminal justice have now been going on for a few years. Over the course of the last few years, we've started to see bipartisan support for criminal justice reform, and other changes in the space. We're seeing new bills passed and all of that. The question is, where is this going?

There are a lot of folks who are starting to call for and recognize the levels of incarceration that we have today are just not ethical, they're not sustainable, and it's clearly not a working system. The private corporations are starting to see this narrative and this truth revealed, and it's fearsome. It suggests to them they're business, [00:03:44] in incarcerating people might be dwindling. We actually see that as a criminal justice reform movement has been advancing private corporations gearing up for that shift.

Private prisons in particular, which were instrumental in paving the road towards incarceration, specifically around mandatory minimums and truth and sentencing laws and three strikes laws, have now been over the last decades spending hundreds of millions of dollars, in the case and GEO Group actually a billion dollars, acquiring electronic monitoring companies, day reporting centers, residential reentry, halfway houses, all of these types of new correctional institutions that some are calling alternatives that we know are recreating incarceration in our community.

Brian: Now listeners, we invite your voices and your stories on this series every week. If you are currently on parole or probation or under community supervision or attend or attended a diversion program or are monitored electronically, any of those, what is your experience with one of the so called alternative models to incarceration, and how does it affect your life, day to day? 646-435-7280.

We also invite you to call if you ever had to go back to jail or back to prison because of a parole violation. 646-435-7280. What was the violation, if you want to say, and how did that upend your life? What do you think is fair in this regard? 646-435-7280. You can also call in if you're a parole officer, or if you work in a diversion program. What are your experiences working in this space?

Does it work from your vantage point, as a parole officer, for example, or do you see ways that it exploits people who had been incarcerated and needs to be reformed? Maybe sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and you want to talk about that. 646-435-7280.

Again, we invite your stories, if you are currently on probation, or parole, or under community supervision, attend a diversion program or monitored electronically, you can call if you were in the past as well, and are now done with all that. What's your experience today?

People who work as parole officers or others in the system, again, also welcome to call. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. As calls are coming in, Vincent Schiraldi, you formerly worked in New York City's Department of Probation. For a lot of listeners who don't know, what's the difference between probation and parole?

Vincent: Both of them were established in the 1800s during a time when the whole system was at least extensively built on rehabilitation. Penitentiaries were supposed to rehabilitate probation and parole or focused on rehabilitation. Probation, arguably, was an alternative to getting locked up at a sentence that you get, when you're getting sentenced and you'd be supervised by a probation officer instead of going to jail or prison.

Parole was when you were already in prison and they were determining whether you should be released now or later and they would evaluate how you did in prison, were you repentant? Did you go to programs? Then they release you. Then when they release you, somebody like a probation officer called the parole officer would supervise you on the streets when you came home.

Brian: To go a little bit more into the history, I think you tell a story of the year 1841 when a Boston bookmaker named John Augustus is thought to have founded the idea of probation. Who was he, and what was his motivation, if you want to tell that story, and does parole have a similar history?

Vincent: Augustus was, as you said, a bookmaker in Boston. He was a Temperance Movement guy. He was essentially in recovery. He saw that these people were getting sent to jail, a house of corrections from pretty low level crimes, many financial crimes, public drunkenness, things like that, and he thought he could help.

He started, actually, literally to bail people out and he said, "Work that out with the judge, I'll bail you out. We'll come back in a period of time, generally a pretty short period of time, and if I can help this person from your life around, don't send someone to the house of correction." That's what happened.

Thousands of times over a 14-year period, he and increasingly his colleagues in the Temperance Movement just volunteered, went to court, bail people out, brought them back. Their lives were presumably changed, and the courts didn't lock them up. I think four times, in those 14 years, the courts ended up locking somebody up for not doing well during the period of time they were being supervised.

That mushroomed within the beginning of the progressive year around the turn of the century state after state after state started establishing probation by law. Now, parole, we are responsible here in New York for parole. It was initiated overseas in France and Australia and Ireland and it was adopted by Zebulon Brockway, had great names back then, who was the brand new warden of the Elmira Penitentiary in 1876.

He felt that people shouldn't just get a flat sentence and then be released from prison, but that they should earn their way out of prison. If they work real hard, they should get out early, but if they did get out early, maybe out conditionally. Again, he would bring some volunteers to help observe them, support them, and supervise them. If they did well, they'd be released and then parole would end, recall that parole. That also spread around the whole country.

Brian: As I read the history, at a certain point, the idea of rehabilitation became divorced from the idea of probation. First, a few Supreme Court cases diminished legal protections for people on parole and probation. Then there was a report put out by the city of New York called The Martinson Report. Tell us this history. Who was Robert Martinson and how did he start to "turn rehabilitation into a dirty" word as you put it, Vincent?

Vincent: That's right. Two things happened simultaneously. One was Richard Nixon and the Republican Party launched a Southern strategy to peel off Southern voters and Northern suburban voters from the Republican Party. They were reliably Democratic and they felt that using the race issue would help peel some of them off, but they didn't overtly go after black people.

They tried to racialize both crime and poverty issues. Nixon famously launched the war on drugs in 1971. Starting in 1972, the prison population started rising and rose every single year until 2009, as Bianca mentioned. It's about a five-fold increase in the number of people in prison.

If you go back to the '70s, we had about as many people per capita in prison as most European countries. Now, we have generally about five to seven times as many people. It was a very successful, very terrible effort to increase mass incarceration. I'm not sure back in the '70s anybody ever thought it would grow that much.

Brian: Grow that much in terms of who's incarcerated. I know you're in the middle of the story, but I want to play a clip that I think our listeners will find very interesting that illustrates this. It's of Robert Martinson who ran that Martinson Report Group for the City of New York. He's talking to 60 Minutes in this clip in 1977. The 60 Minutes segment is about how juvenile crime is way up in New York City, which the segment argues is because kids aren't facing harsh enough penalties. Here's a short clip of Robert Martinson. He says it's because--

Robert Martinson: The juvenile justice system today does not do an adequate job. All these kids seem to know about the criminal justice system as that they're talked to. They're talked to by judges, by probation officers, by correctional counselors. What they really need, it seems to me, is a certainty of being caught and certainty of being punished.

Brian: Put that into context for us.

Vincent: Boy, did we get that certainty? The number of people locked up, the number of people under supervision mushroomed like no country in the history of the world. The Martinson releases this report out of the City University of New York, essentially says nothing works when it comes-- At least he frames it as saying nothing works when it comes to rehabilitating people and the whole system pivots.

Prisons start to become more punitive, but probation and parole start to emulate their big brother, the prison system. They start carrying guns, wearing flak jackets, handing out intermediate sanctions, putting people on electronic monitoring, and then this is where it gets to Bianca's point, which is, this happens at the same time when we're having tax revolutions and cutting taxes.

Nobody wants to pay for all this probation, all his parole, all these prisons. We start to charge people under supervision, we start to prioritize, we start to milk the poor for the punishment we're meeting out to them. It has disastrous consequences, which I'm sure the rest of the show is going to be about.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Baxter on Staten Island. You're on WNYC. Hi, Baxter?

Baxter: How are you, Brian?

Brian: Thanks for calling.

Baxter: Thank you for having me. We have a very bad experience with parole and probation, very bad experience. These agencies should become an investigation by the Department of Justice. Parole is incompetent. They're very incompetent, sorry. They're very incompetent. I have documentation, affidavits I could send to you so you can view what they'd done or what they're doing

Brian: What happened in your case?

Baxter: In my case, they placed a violence tag on my record to hold me. My sentence was one to three by and they've kept me another year on a bogus claim of homicide that occurred and I [unintelligible 00:15:08] which never occurred. You hear me good?

Brian: Yes.

Baxter: They placed a homicide on my record and held me for a year on that homicide, a false homicide charge. I had to write to the commissioner at that time to get released. I was held a year, this new year, on the false charge and payroll appeal division say it was correct and it was not correct. Even Supreme Court in Queens Island said the charge was false. They didn't believe my [unintelligible 00:15:38] and they held me a new whole year.

Parole is corrupt and criminal. They should be investigated by Department of Justice. Totally, Brian. They're terrorizing and torturing people. Probation is no different. You got [unintelligible 00:15:52] payroll in Bronx County, is no different. [unintelligible 00:15:55] also propositioned me sexually. He invited me to his peers while [unintelligible 00:16:01]

Brian: That's why I'm going to leave it there. I appreciate your call. Of course, we can't verify the allegations in his story, Bianca, but do some of the larger themes there ring true to you?

Bianca: Yes, absolutely. I think whether it's corruption outright or corruption in just how the system exists, I think it's important to understand. As Vinnie was telling the story of how we really co-opted and transformed different aspects of the way in which probation and parole has been intending to be used and where it is today, I think so much of that is shaped by the industry that decided to get involved.

What used to be something that we're hopefully going to see people into a different path or support them into a different direction, we have seen really just about net widening the system and capturing more and more people into it. We see as I was explaining earlier, these major private prison corporations now moving into community corrections specifically for things like electronic monitoring.

The largest private prison corporation that we are familiar with in that context and from previous week, Geo Group, is in fact the largest electronic monitoring company in the country. They're with other comrades in the field like Attenti, SuperCom, and Securus, which also has an electronic monitoring arm.

They are working to expand electronic monitoring to claim that it's an alternative to incarceration. Let's be clear. It is just e-carceration. It's transforming our communities into carceral settings. On top of that, and perhaps more importantly, electronic monitoring has never freed anybody.

It is, in fact, expanded the number of people on supervision and correctional control. One of the things I just like to say is if the same people are at the table looking for solutions to mass incarceration that helped create it, it's probably not the table that's going to come up with the solution. [crosstalk]

Brian: I see we have the director of an Alternative to Incarceration program calling in. Edward in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Hi, Edward?

Edward: Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to respond. I'm a forensic psychologist. I'm the clinical director of a program for attorneys to incarceration for clients that have substance use and co-occurring severe mental illness. To your question that you said what is the experience that I've had, I worked directly in Queens with the district attorney's office there and defense bar.

I got to say that it's mixed. I think that the DA's office and defense bar do a great job of trying to work collaboratively in terms of identifying underlying conditions, but when we try to refer clients to programs in the community, that's where sometimes we will not have the appropriate resources to help our clients with the underlying issues that may have got them involved in the criminal justice system in the first place.

That's been my experience. With our program, I believe in terms of recidivism rates, we've had about, I believe, 60% to 80%, which I think is average in terms of people that have completed our program and then are not incarcerated within a year of completing the program. I just wanted to add that commentary.

I do hear the other side of it, where it might feel to clients as if it's another form incarceration, especially if it's something like sending a client to a residential treatment program. I just wanted to add my thoughts in terms of the success and how it is working with an alternative to incarceration.

Brian Lehrer: Edward, thank you very much. Bianca, I was surprised to learn that many diversion corporations partner with prosecutor's offices who often receive a percentage of the fees paid by participants. Does that give them an incentive to push people into diversion programs?

Bianca: Absolutely. I think there's a really big difference between government run diversion programs, nonprofit diversion programs, and for-profit diversion programs. In the example that you're putting on the table, yes, there's actually a lot of companies, a good number, one called Correctives Solutions, that actually goes after people with low level crimes who they think that they can essentially who might be charged, who might not be charged, who they can convince a prosecutor to put into their program, which they have to pay for, and they will share some of those proceeds with the prosecutor's office.

It's not just that type of diversion program, there's actually a diversion programs with major corporations like Exxon and Walmart, where people will be required to do unpaid work as their diversion program. Those are actually agreements between those corporations and often some kind of facilitator who might be a for-profit might even be a nonprofit and the prosecutor's office. There's quite a number of diversion programs that are very clearly holding incarceration over people's heads to exploit them.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Vincent, I want to give you the last word. A bill did just pass in New York to restore voting rights to people on parole. I think that's surprising to some people that you can vote if you're still on parole, even though you serve your time behind bars. I also know you're pushing for legislation in New York state called the Less Is More Act. In our last 30 seconds or so, want to tell people what's in it?

Vincent: Yes, Less Is More would substantially reduce the ability of parole to revoke people and send them to prison. It would also on the flip side incentivize good behavior by giving people time off of supervision, reduce the amount of time you're under supervision by for every month you behave well and don't get in trouble.

Senator Benjamin and assembly member Forrest have promoted this. There's a wide range over 150 organizations supporting. There's eight district attorneys. That's step one for me. Step two is we have to capture the $680 million worth of savings from not revoking people and put it into the kind of programs that will help people turn their lives around.

Brian Lehrer: Got you. Former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, now co-director of the Columbia University Justice Lab, Vincent Schiraldi and Bianca Tylek, Executive Director of Worth Rises. Listeners, you can hear more on this topic from both of them and others in tomorrow's Greene Space event on the topic that's at 7:00 PM and you can sign up by going to the greenespace.org. Meanwhile, Vincent and Bianca, thank you so much.

Vincent: Thank you for having me on.

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