< Previous10 PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 45, NUMBER 1 We seek to create a system of community justice where: A full range of sanctions and services provides public safety by insuring humane, effective and individualized sentences for offenders and support and protection for victims; Primary prevention initiatives are cultivated through our leadership and guidance; Our communities are empowered to own and participate in solutions; Results are measured and direct our service delivery; Dignity and respect describe how each person is treated; Staff are empowered and supported in an environment of honesty, inclusion and respect for differences; and Partnerships with stakeholders lead to shared ownership of our vision. The American Probation and Parole Association is an affiliate of and receives its secretariat services from The Council of State Governments (CSG). CSG, the multibranch association of the states and U.S. territories, works with state leaders across the nation and through its regions to put the best ideas and solutions into practice. BOARD OF DIRECTORS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Tim D. Hardy President Brian Lovins President-Elect Susan Rice Vice President Tom Gregory Treasurer Joseph Russo Secretary Gene Cotter At-Large Member Alisha James At-Large Member Francine Perretta At-Large Member Erika Preuitt Immediate Past-President Veronica Ballard Cunningham Executive Director PRODUCTION STAFF Veronica Cunningham Editor in Chief Kimberly Kras Perspectives Co-Editor Jason Stauffer Perspectives Co-Editor Nathan Lowe Production Coordinator Julie Pelstring Designer Aaron Burch Copy Editor SERVICES DIRECTORY General (859) 244-8000 Publication Orders (859) 244-8204 General Training Institute (859) 244-8204 Information Clearinghouse (859) 244-8204 Membership (859) 244-8212 Request for Training (859) 244-8057 Resource Expo (859) 244-8206 Advertising (859) 244-8212 Communications should be addressed to: American Probation and Parole Association c/o The Council of State Governments 1776 Avenue of the States, Lexington, KY, 40511 Fax: (859) 244-8001, E-mail: Website: Perspectives is published four times annually by the American Probation and Parole Association through its secretariat office in Lexington, Kentucky. ISSN 0821-1507 Reprint permission. Direct requests for permission to use material published in Perspectives in writing to perspectives@csg.org. © 2020 The Council of State Governments5 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION American Probation and Parole Association 21 800.622.1644 | www.NCTI.org | info@NCTI.org Evidence-Based Curricula & Certification Training from NCTI in Partnership with APPA National Curriculum & Training Institute®, Inc. | 319 E. McDowell Road, Ste. 200 Phoenix, AZ 85004 © 2 01 1 NC TI . A ll rig ht s re ser ve d. NCTI’s renowned, evidence-based curricula and the only APPA-accredited facilitator training in the field, comes with a complete system of powerful tools that helps you discover an effective path to Behavior Change. Call today to find out how NCTI can help you. With More than Curricula Alone... NCTI’s Complete Behavior Change System gives you a support structure that makes referring professionals’ work easier, strengthens program fidelity, and enhances learning by clients. 12 PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 45, NUMBER 1 Geo Care Monica Hook Marketing Communications Director 621 NW 53rd Street, Suite 700 Boca Raton, FL 33487 Phone: (800) 241.2911 x 1230 Email: monica.hook@bi.com Website: https://www.geogroup.com Intoxalock Linda Vadel Affiliate Marketing Coordinator 11035 Aurora Avenue Des Moines, IA 50322 Phone: (515) 251.3747 Email: lvadel@intoxalock.com Website: https://www.intoxalock.com LifeSafer Pete Andrews National Director of Business Development 215 Southport Drive, Suite 400 Morrisville, NC 27560 Phone: (919) 280.6846 Email: pete.andrews@lifesafer.com Website: https://www.lifesafer.com Micro Distributing Roy G. Whiteside, Jr. Vice President Micro Distributing II, Ltd. PO Box 1753 620 Kennedy Court Belton, TX 76513 Primary: (254) 939-8923 Office: (254) 939-5867 Website: https://www.micro-distributing.com/ Management and Training Corporation (MTC) Alisa Malone Director, Partnerships 500 N. Marketplace Drive Centerville, UT 84014 Primary:(801) 693-2600 National Curriculum and Training Institute Gary Bushkin President 319 East McDowell Road, Suite 200 Phoenix, AZ 85004-1534 Phone: (602) 252.3100 Website: https://www.ncti.org Promise Diana Frappier Chief Legal Officer 436 14th Street, Ste 920 Oakland, CA 94612 Phone: (415) 305.4560 Website: https://joinpromise.com Attenti Kerri Ryan Director of Marketing and Business Development 1838 Gunn Highway Odessa, FL 33556 Phone: (813) 749.5454 x 1275 Email: kryan@attentigroup.com Website: https://www.attentigroup.com averhealth Justin Manni Director of Business Development 1700 Bayberry Court, Suite 105 Richmond, VA 23226 Phone: (848) 992.3650 Email: jmanni@averhealth.com Website: https://www.averhealth.com Cordico Brady Pilster Director of Business Development 2377 Gold Meadow Way, Suite 100 Gold River, CA 95670 Phone: (844) 267-3426 Email: Website: https://www.cordico.com CoreCivic Shannon Carst Managing Director 5501 Virginia Way Ste 110 Brentwood, TN 37027 Phone: 303-842-8301 Email: shannon.carst@corecivic.com Website: https://www.corecivic.com Corrections Software Solutions James Redus President 316 North Lamar Street Austin, TX 78703 Phone: (512) 347.1366 Fax: (512) 347.1310 Email: jredus@correctionssoftware.com Website: https://www.correctionssoftware.com Corrisoft Susan Harrod VP, Sales & Marketing Corrisoft 1648 McGrathiana Pkwy, Suite 225 Lexington, KY 40511 Phone: (217) 899.5323 Email: Website: https://corrisoft.com/ Equivant Caryn Shaw 1764 Forest Ridge Drive Suite A Traverse City, MI 49686 Phone: (330) 470-0618 Fax: (330) 494-2483 Email: caryn.shaw@equivant.com Website: https://www.equivant.com Corporations with an interest in the field of probation, parole, and community corrections are invited to become APPA corporate members. Corporate members receive benefits such as enhanced visibility among APPA’s international network of community corrections professionals, as well as shared information on the latest trends and issues that specifically affect community corrections. APPA CORPORATE MEMBERS13 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION APPA ASSOCIATE MEMBERS AdventFS Daniel Flick Sales Manager 2927 Ring Road Elizabethtown, KY, 42701 Phone: (270) 209.0422 Email: jjhartlage@adventfs.com Website: https://www.adventfs.com Precision Kiosk Technologies David Kreitzer General Manager 2855 Country Drive, Suite 100 Little Canada, MN 55117 Phone: (651) 383.1213 Email: dkreitzer@precisionkiosktech.com Website: https://precisionkiosktech.com Reconnect, Inc Sam Hotchkiss Founder & CEO 1 Faraday Drive Cumberland, Maine 04021 Email: info@reconnect.io Website: https://www.reconnect.io SCRAM Systems Jennifer Mill Marketing Manager 1241 West Mineral Avenue Littleton, CO 80120 Phone: (303) 785.7828 Email: jmill@scramsystems.com Website: https://www.scramsystems.com Securus Technologies Jose Andrade Vice President, Sales 14651 Dallas Parkway, Suite 600 Dallas, TX 75254 Phone: (800) 844.6591 Email: jandrade@stopllc.com Website: https://www.securustechnologies.com Shadowtrack Robert L. Magaletta ShadowTrack Technologies, Inc. Cypress Bend Office Building 1001 Ochsner Blvd., Ste. 425A Covington, LA 70433 Office: (985) 867.3771 Ext 120 Email: Website: https://www.shadowtrack.com Sierra Wireless / Omnilink Thomas McKay Senior Marketing Manager Omnilink 400 Interstate North Pkwy Suite 900 Atlanta, GA 30339 Phone: (877) 687-7795 Email: Smart Start, Inc. Michelle H. Whitaker Conference and Promotions Coordinator 500 East Dallas Road Grapevine, TX 76051 Phone: (919) 604.2513 Email: michelle.whitaker@smartstartinc.com Website: https://www.smartstartinc.com The Change Companies Jesse Tillotson National Director of Justice Services 5221 Sigstrom Drive Carson City, NV 89706 Phone: (888) 889.8866 Email: jtillotson@changecompanies.net Website: https://www.changecompanies.net Track Group Matthew Swando VP of Sales and Marketing 1215 North Lakeview Court Romeoville, IL 60446 Phone: (877) 260.2010 Email: matthew.swando@trackgrp.com Website: https://www.trackgrp.com TRACKtech Ben Williams Vice President - Business Development 6295 Greenwood Plaza Blvd, Suite 100 Greenwood Village, CO 80111 Phone: (303) 834-7519 Email: ben.williams@tracktechllc.com Website: https://tracktechllc.com/ Tyler Technologies Larry Stanton Director of Sales - Courts & Justice 5101 Tennyson Parkway Plano, TX 75024 Phone: (904) 654.3741 Email: larry.stanton@tylertech.com Website: https://www.tylertech.com Uptrust Susan Rice Director of Community Supervision Partnerships 1 Sutter Street, Suite 350 San Francisco, CA 94104 765-469-1593 Email: Website: Vant4ge Sean Hosman National Sales Leader – Public Sector Vant4ge P.O. Box 802 Salt Lake City, UT 84110 Phone: (877) 744-1360 Email: Website: https://vant4ge.com/14 PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 45, NUMBER 1 RACIAL INEQUITIES AND OUR NEED FOR CHANGE15 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Dr. Martin Luther King national attention was given to this controversial case, in great part due to Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, and it helped shine light on the need for criminal justice reform. (Harksen 2020) Then there was Kalief Browder, who was jailed on New York City’s Rikers Island at age 16 after being accused of stealing a backpack. He refused to plead guilty, maintaining his innocence and insisting on a trial, but due to repeated delays he ended up jailed for three years awaiting trial, and nearly two years of that time was in solitary confinement. By the time of his release at age 20, he had changed. A few years later he committed suicide, reportedly due to the effects of his confinement. About six months before his death, a New Yorker reporter interviewed Mr. Browder and published an article about his case in the magazine (Gonnerman, 2014), making him a symbol of what many From arrest to conviction, sentencing to release, our criminal justice system is broken, especially for people of color. Reforms are long overdue at every stage in the process, as illustrated by horrific examples, research studies, and decades of failures. Consider Walter “Johnny D” McMillian, an African American male from Monroeville, Alabama, who was found guilty of murder in 1988 after a trial tainted by police coercion and perjury. The jury had decided on a sentence of life imprisonment, but the judge used a controversial judicial override power to instead impose the death penalty. Between 1990 and 1993 four appeals were filed but turned down by the Alabama Court of Appeals. It wasn’t until 1993 that the Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision and ruled that Mr. McMillian had been wrongfully convicted. By that point, he had served six years on Alabama’s Death Row. Considerable 16 PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 44, NUMBER 4 viewed as a broken criminal justice system. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio cited the article when he announced an effort to clear backlogs in state courts and reduce the inmate population at Rikers. Mayor de Blasio’s actions were a start, but there are countess stories of injustices in our current criminal justice system. We can’t simply ignore that we are dealing with a flawed, unjust, and sometimes merciless system. For example, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander (2010) takes the position that the United States criminal justice system uses the war on drugs as a primary tool for enforcing both new and traditional modes of discrimination and oppression against people of color. These new modes of racism have led to not only the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but also a disproportionally large rate of imprisonment for African American men. The scope of this problem is confirmed by The Sentencing Project’s report to the United Nations (2018), which describes in detail how the criminal justice system in the United States is the largest in the world. At the end of 2015, more than 6.7 million individuals were under some form of correctional control in the United States, including 2.2 million incarcerated in federal, state, or local prisons and jails, making the U.S. the world leader—by far—in incarceration rates. The Sentencing Project’s report also stated that African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested. Once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted, and once convicted they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. African American adults are 5.9 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and Hispanics are 3.1 times as likely. Extrapolating from the data, one out of every three black males and one out of every six Latino males born in 2001 could expect to go to prison in his lifetime, compared to one in 17 of the white males born that year. In No Equal Justice, Georgetown law Professor David Cole states: These double standards are not, of course, explicit; on the face of it, the criminal law is color-blind and class-17 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION blind. But in a sense, this only makes the problem worse. The rhetoric of the criminal justice system sends the message that our society carefully protects everyone’s constitutional rights, but in practice the rules assure that law enforcement prerogatives will generally prevail over the rights of minorities and the poor. By affording criminal suspects substantial constitutional rights in theory, the Supreme Court validates the results of the criminal justice system as fair. That formal fairness obscures the systematic concerns that ought to be raised by the fact that the prison population is overwhelming poor and disproportionately black (1999, pp. 8-9). From these and other statements, and based on the data and evidence, I conclude that our current criminal justice system has had a shockingly negative effect on communities of color, including economic oppression. Disparities don’t exist in just one area of the criminal justice system. As this article will describe, they exist throughout the entire system. Indeed, The Sentencing Project’s 2018 report to the United Nations outlines racial disparities in every aspect of the criminal justice system from policing to collateral consequences. Policing: In 2016, The Sentencing Project reports that black Americans comprised 27% of all individuals arrested in the United States—double their share of the total population (U.S. Department of Justice-FBI, 2017). Black youth accounted for 15% of all U.S. children, yet made up 35% of juvenile arrests in that year (Puzzanchera, Slinky, & Kang, 2017). What might appear at first to be a linkage between race and crime is in large part a function of concentrated urban poverty, which is far more common for African Americans than for other racial groups. This accounts for a substantial portion of African Americans’ increased likelihood of committing certain violent and property crimes (Peterson & Krivo, 2012). But while there is a higher black rate of involvement in certain crimes, white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by blacks and Latinos, overlook the fact that communities of color are disproportionately victims of crime, and discount the prevalence of bias in the criminal justice system (Ghandnoosh, 2014b).18 PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 44, NUMBER 4 Pretrial: Bureau of Justice Statistics data, as reported by The Sentencing Project, show that African Americans who were pending trial in 2016 were incarcerated in local jails at a rate 3.5 times that of non- Hispanic whites (Carson, 2018; Zeng, 2018). These disparities stem in part from the policies and practices of policing, as described earlier, but are compounded by factors introduced at this stage of processing. Given that nearly two-thirds (65%) of people in jail in 2016 were being detained prior to trial, policies and decisions influencing pretrial detention play a key role in driving the disparity in the jail population and beyond (Zeng, 2018). Pretrial detention has been shown to increase the odds of conviction, and people who are detained awaiting trial are also more likely to accept less favorable plea deals, to be sentenced to prison, and to receive longer sentences. Seventy percent of pretrial releases require money bond, an especially high hurdle for low-income defendants, who are dispropor- tionately people of color. Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to be denied bail, to have a higher money bond set, and to be detained because they cannot pay their bond (Jones, 2013). They are often assessed by the courts to be higher safety and flight risks be- cause they are more likely to experience socio- economic disadvantages and to have criminal records. Implicit bias also contributes to people of color faring worse than comparable whites in bail determinations. Sentencing: According to the Sen- tencing Project, Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that although African Americans and Latinos comprise 29% of the U.S. population, they make up 57% of the U.S. prison popu- lation. This results in imprisonment rates for African American and Hispanic adults that are 5.9 and 3.1 times the rate for white adults, respectively—and at far higher levels in some states (see Zeng, 2018). Notably, these dispar- ities exist for both the least and most serious offenses: • Of the 277,000 people imprisoned nationwide for a drug offense, over half (56%) are African American or Latino 19 AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION (Zeng, 2018). • Nearly half (48%) of the 206,000 peo- ple sentenced to serve life or “virtual life” (50 years or longer) in prison are African American and another 15% are Latino (see Nellis, 2017). • Among youth, African Americans are 4.1 times as likely to be committed to secure placements as whites, American Indians are 3.1 times as likely, and Hispanics are 1.5 times as likely (Sickmund, Sladky, Kang, & Puzzanchera, 2017). Although levels of youth confinement have significantly declined in recent years, the racial gap between black and American Indian versus white youth has increased (Rovner, 2016). The racial disparities in the adult and juvenile justice systems stem in part from the policing and pretrial factors described earlier. These are compounded by discretionary de- cisions and sentencing policies that disadvan- tage people of color because of their race or higher rates of socioeconomic disadvantage (Ghandnoosh, 2014a). These include: • Biased use of discretion: Prosecutors are more likely to charge people of color with crimes that carry heavier sentences than whites. Federal prosecutors, for example, are twice as likely to charge African Americans with offenses that carry a mandatory minimum sentence than similarly situated whites (Starr & Rehavi, 2013). State prosecutors are also more likely to charge black rather than similar white defendants under habitual offender laws (Crawford, Chiricos, & Kleck, 1998). • Policies that disadvantage people of color: Drug-free school zone laws mandate sentencing enhancements for people caught selling drugs in designated school zones. The expansive geographic range of these zones, coupled with high urban density, has disproportionately affected residents of urban areas, and particularly those in high-poverty areas–who are largely people of color (Porter & Clemons, 2013). Legislators in New Jersey scaled back their state law after a study found that 96% of persons subject to these Next >