Reentry Beat Intro Voiceover 00:00 This is the Beat – a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Interview TeNeane Bradford 00:08 This is TeNeane Bradford with the COPS Office. With me today is Glenn E. Martin, vice president of development and public affairs and director of the David Rothenburg Center for Public Safety at the Fortune Society. The Fortune Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to the successful reentry and reintegration of individuals with criminal histories. Glenn, thank you so much today for your time. Can you tell us a little bit about the Fortune Society and your work there? Glenn Martin 00:33 Sure, thank you for the opportunity. My role at the Fortune Society is vice president of development and public affairs. In that role, I’m responsible for fundraising for the agency, communications, and, probably just as importantly, our advocacy work. The agency was founded 46 years ago to respond to the high level of needs of people involved in the criminal justice system. It started as a volunteer self-help advocacy organization with just two volunteers, two people who had been involved in the criminal justice system themselves. If you fast forward to where we are now, we’re a very large, direct service organization but we continue to be an advocacy organization. Some of the services we provide include employment services, education, health care, mental health services, drug and alcohol treatment. We help people to reconnect with their families. We provide alternatives to incarceration, so we’re also working at the front end of the system, if you will. And as I mentioned earlier, we continue to be an advocacy organization. TeNeane 01:34 I know you’ve done a lot of work around employment for individuals with criminal records. Could you tell us about some of the difficulties these folks face in trying to find work? Glenn 01:43 Sure. After coming out of prison myself—as I mentioned, half the staff at Fortune have done time in prison—I personally had the experience of visiting over 30, 40 different employers and being discriminated against based solely on the criminal record, even though I would argue that I was qualified for the position. Every day at Fortune we see this play out, unfortunately, for our clients who come out of prison who want to do the right thing, who want to get a job, turn their lives around. Unfortunately, employers are responding to their legitimate liability concerns, but they create these blanket policies on not hiring anyone based on having a criminal record. What we’ve seen and what we know from the research is that actually diminishes public safety. So we spend a lot of time building relationships with employers, small, medium, and large, and using the relationships that we built with them and the trust we built with them to get our clients in front of them, so that they have an opportunity to compete for the job like anyone else. So the idea is not that you shouldn’t look at the criminal record. You should. You should figure out whether there’s a relationship between the conviction and the job that person’s applying for. But once you get past that level of analysis, the question is, “How do you create a space for people to fairly compete for a job?” The fact that we’re able to leverage Fortune’s reputation, legitimacy, and experience in increasing public safety to help a person get through the door means that more of our clients have the opportunity to get a job than they would if they tried on their own. TeNeane 03:14 Of course, I’m sure the fear is that, in this time of high unemployment you have people saying, “Why is no one helping me find a job but they’re helping an ex- offender and I never did anything wrong?” How do you respond to that? Glenn 03:27 Sure. So I hear that all the time. I always tell people, even if you don’t believe in helping people coming out of the criminal justice system, to be quite frank, if you care about your wallet and you care about the taxes that you pay at the end of the week, this is something that you should be focused on. There’s a significant correlation between unemployment and recidivism. Simply put, people who are not working tend to get in trouble at a much higher rate than people who are spending 8-10 hours of their day with an employer. The other piece is, think about how many things we tie to employment in this country: a person’s identity, their health care, dental care, and all these other sort of things. The more quickly we get our folks connected to the labor market, the better chance they have of succeeding, the less opportunity for them to reoffend, which means that the average Joe Public who is asking these questions about, “Why do this?” spends much less on a person being reincarcerated. I always say that people with criminal records, job seekers with criminal records, are unfortunately at the back of the line. With the economy today, the line has gotten that much longer. The question is; how do we make them competitive? How do we get them back to work? How do we break the cycle of recidivism? Even if you know nothing about criminal justice and you don’t have compassion for these folks, just think about that bottom line. I think that’s enough to say that we have to do things differently; we have to get people employed. TeNeane 04:50 Absolutely. You were part of a conversation that the COPS Office sponsored a while back on this idea of racial reconciliation between law enforcement and communities of color. What are your thoughts on that issue? Have we made progress? Have we gone backwards? Is there still a very long way to go? Glenn 05:05 That’s a really good question. I was involved in a discrimination study with Princeton University a few years ago. Prior to being involved in that discrimination study, I would do this work and I would try to stay away from the conversation about race ‘cause it can easily alienate folks and it becomes a much more difficult conversation. What we found in that discrimination study is that a white person with a criminal record has a better chance of getting a job than an equally qualified black person without a criminal record. Then when you attribute the criminal record to the black tester, his call backs are reduced another 57 percent. That alone, that sort of statistic, is stark enough, but when you look at the anecdotal stories that I was able to see day-to-day as the project manager, it got so really bad for our testers who are actors—they were not people with criminal records, they were folks posing as people with criminal records. Some of our testers, the people of color, couldn’t finish the study because they were so impacted by day in, day out recognizing that they were actually being discriminated against in, I think it was 2007 at the time. Coming back to the conversation about racial reconciliation and have we moved the ball, I’ll start by saying, just the fact that the Department of Justice’s COPS Office is having this discussion says, “Yes, we have moved the ball forward.” We have people in leadership—in government—that are saying, at the least, we need to have the conversation. People need to be in a space that’s not as comfortable as we all would like. We need to figure out what are some of the underlying dialogues in the communities that are being policed that lead to the feelings they may have about law enforcement and the reduction of legitimacy of law enforcement and the impact that it has on police legitimacy and so on. In that regard, the fact that we’re having a conversation and that we have all of the various stakeholders in the room means that we have moved the ball forward. Do we have a long way to go? Absolutely. It took us a really long time to get here. I would argue that we are at the tail end of four decades of tough-on-crime policies that unfortunately have further mired us in a system that ends up with a recidivism rate of 66 percent over 3 years. Any other industry in the United States with that sort of failure rate would not continue to exist, right? We have to ask ourselves what’s working, what’s not working. The conversation about race, and dialogues in communities of color, historical dialogues, has to be part of that discussion for us to find a solution. TeNeane 07:35 OK, with that said, what could law enforcement do differently to improve relations with communities of color? Glenn 07:40 I think that it’s so easy for law enforcement to see themselves sort of working in a silo and just responding to crime. I would argue that we need to pull the lens back considerably so that law enforcement sees itself as part of the larger picture of public safety. So it’s amazing because this country’s in the middle of what I jokingly term as “reentry mania”—this recognition that we have over 700,000 people coming home from prison each year and there are some cities, many cities, that are not that large. So what are we going to do about these large amounts of people coming home from prison, keeping in mind that there’s also a large number of people coming home from jails also. There’s been a heavy investment by the federal government. States have followed suit. Localities have followed suit. In many ways we’re being a bit schizophrenic if we don’t have law enforcement as part of the discussion. We have to increasingly remind law enforcement that they are part of this larger movement to increase public safety. As much as we’re working on the back end, the question now is how do we spend the next few years thinking really hard about what we do in the front end where there’s actually a considerable amount of discretion in terms of how we respond to crime. Whereas we have to ask ourselves, “Have we gone way too far down this slippery slope of criminalization of behavior, behavior that wasn’t criminalized just a few years earlier? How do police officers in that interaction there on the street where they have the discretion, see their interaction with the suspect, with the person that they’re engaging, differently?” Right? If you’re going to do these large amounts of stops, for instance, how do you change that interaction? How do you make it more meaningful? Why is it so foreign, the idea of a police officer saying to a young person of color in the community, “I’m going to search you because the assumption is that you made a furtive movement or you did something that looks suspicious?” Once we get past that point and I’m comfortable about my own public safety and the safety of the community, why can’t police officers talk about resources available to young folks to turn their lives around? What I’ve seen increasingly, even in the community I live in, in Harlem—one of the communities that are high crime, disproportionately impacted by crime and law enforcement—is that, unfortunately I feel like police officers can do more to, not just engage the business owners and the churches and the faith-based institutions and so on, but to engage those young men of color that are on the corner, before you’re actually to the point where you suspect they did something wrong and the engagement is a mostly negative one for the individual. Redefining the role of law enforcement so that law enforcement leadership and the people on the ground, where the rubber hits the road, sees their role differently. TeNeane 10:21 Good information. So where do you think the criminal justice system has to head in the coming years if they want to both make our communities safer and improve relationships with communities of color, which many people would argue is the same thing? Glenn 10:35 Yeah. We have to be careful of going down this similarly slippery slope only watching the numbers and only watching statistics because that usually translates into, “What is the low hanging fruit? What is the shortest distance between crime and the elimination of crime in the immediate?” Whereas the people who live in these communities, they’d love to get rid of crime in the immediate, but they’re also thinking of long-term public safety and moving away from the historical context of the way law enforcement has engaged their communities. I think it’s incumbent upon the law enforcement community to work more closely with these communities, to redefine their roles, to respond to community push-back in terms of current law enforcement practices, and to work collaboratively. Long term public safety is not going to happen as a result of a police officer on the street. You can stop a lot more bullets with hope than you can with handcuffs. Until we get back to the point where we recognize that the community must be an integral part of the response to crime, we’re unfortunately going to keep watching the numbers and forgetting that. It gets to the point where if you erode police legitimacy, then what’s the value of watching the numbers if people are no longer calling the police when they’re victimized? I think that’s one huge part of it. The other thing about the direction of the law enforcement community for me is about recognizing that while people of color may live in communities that are high crime, that also means that they live in communities that are high victimization. If you don’t have the resources to deal with the trauma, that manifests itself in criminal behavior itself and it becomes a never ending cycle. TeNeane 12:17 Thank you so much, Glenn, for sharing with us today your expertise and your time. We’re looking forward to many more conversations. Glenn 12:24 Thank you for the opportunity. Beat Exit Voiceover: 12:27 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. ####END OF TRANSCRIPT####