Let's Find Common Ground - Finding Common Ground on Re-Entry from Prison

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

America has the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Once people leave prison the hope is that they’ll be law-abiding, productive members of society. But all too often this isn’t the case – four in ten prisoners are back behind bars within three years of release. In this episode, we meet two men who want to fix the US’s flawed re-entry process. And they come from very different backgrounds. Former prison warden and overseer of regional prisons, Daren Swenson, has spent his career in corrections. Georgetown University professor Marc Howard is a reformer who has long campaigned for the rights and humanity of incarcerated people. They were brought together by Convergence Center for Policy Resolution to come up with solutions that take into account both the dignity of people re-entering society and the public safety implications of their release.

The US has the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Once people get out of prison, the hope is they'll be productive members of society, but all too often. That doesn't happen. In this episode, we meet two men who want to fix America's flawed reentry process. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Melntite. Darren Swenson is a former prison warden who has spent his career in corrections.

Georgetown University Professor Mark Howard is a reformer who has long campaigned for the rights of incarcerated people. They were brought together by the policy resolution group Convergence. You'll find out more about them later. At first, each man was nervous and a little wary of the other, but they actually had much more in common than they realized. Richard kicks us off. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are released from

jails and prisons in this country, and at the current rate about four in ten former inmates are back again behind bars within three years. That's a very sad statistic that represents an enormous amount of failure in pain, doesn't it, Mark? Absolutely. I think it's very troubling, and I think we all need to think about solutions to the problem. I think that the initial reaction that many people have is to blame the people themselves who wind up going back. And perhaps in some cases, that's true, and I never want to take away a person's responsibility for a crime that's committed. But I also think

that we need to think about the conditions of confinement so that when people are incarcerated, we can find better solutions that will help them succeed when they come home. Yeah, I would totally agree with Mark. I think that it's a very sad statistic that we're not achieving the outcomes that we're looking for to help people make a successful re-entry when they're out released from incarceration. And I think there's lots of opportunities for not only improvement in the way that we treat people,

but innovation and thinking about alternatives to incarceration. And I think if we really care about public safety about the costs of incarceration, which are staggering, the country spends $85 billion a year on corrections. Then we would realize that there are better ways of solving this problem, so that if we support people, if we give them opportunity, if we give them education, if we give them work training, if we put them in a position where they have the support to succeed, they actually will succeed. There's a lot of evidence that shows that, and then they won't go back to prison,

they won't commit other crimes. And it be frankly much more cost effective to do so and more humane. We're going to talk about the reentry ready project that brought you two together in a minute. But before we do that, can each of you give us a sense of your your backgrounds? Perhaps Mark will kick off with you again. Tell us a little bit about your background in prison and criminal justice reform. Sure. Well, I came to it in a very roundabout way. I had a first career as a professor focusing on European politics and I was teaching at Georgetown University. But I had a personal connection to this issue through my childhood friend, Marty Tanklet, who was wrongfully convicted of double murder sentence to life in prison. And I got very involved in this case.

I even went to law school in order to help him gain his freedom and he was ultimately exonerated. And from that point on, I continued in this effort, became an attorney myself. I still teach at Georgetown, but I refocused everything I do in my research and teaching, which is involving prisons and getting people out of prison. And that includes wrongfully convicted people, but it also involves people who were guilty, who made mistakes, because I think there are much better ways in which we can support them.

So I've started education programs at Georgetown, and we offer several reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people. Darren, how about you? So I came from a different perspective than Mark Mark being a 30-year practitioner in corrections, spent my entire career working in prisons, starting as a frontline staff member and eventually becoming awarding at three different prisons, and then moving on to regional oversight of multiple prisons, work that entire career with Corsica, and have really enjoyed the opportunity to work with multiple government partners to help them tackle their challenges with corrections and incarceration in their state, and then have evolved into the last year into a new role where I'm the our vice president of reentry partnerships and innovation that is totally focused on opportunities that we can forge and things that we can be doing to improve the the exact things that Mark talked about at the beginning of the discussion around

human dignity, how we treat people, thinking more strategically about how to create those paths for successful reentry, and thinking about innovations in ways that we can do things that can help not only improve the reentry process but also alternatives to incarceration and programs that are preventive even before people get involved in the justice system. When you both began this process of working on the reentry project, both of you came from very different perspectives.

Was there any tension in the room, Darren? I think it's obvious that when you bring a group together to tackle a challenging social problem that have very wide perspectives and views on what are the right solutions and how can we best tackle this problem. I think there's just a natural little bit of sense of unease and a period of time that's necessary to get to know everybody and build some trust within the room so that we could have good open honest conversations and be willing to hear and listen to others' perspectives and I think that was probably the way I came into it, especially as a practitioner. And coming into a room there were two other corrections professionals that did this every

day that worked with the Justice and Vol. population and the rest of the room of 15 or 20 other people were all people that were either working in policy organizations or came from academia like Mark and so I think coming into a room where you're one of the people that are actually out there doing the work. It was a little bit intimidating and took some time to to settle in and to understand how we could come together to help tackle this problem. in and to understand how we could come together to help tackle this problem. Darren, you came from the private sector. Mark, you had a very different perspective on prisons. Were you a little bit suspicious of Darren? Well, I was certainly suspicious, I think, of anyone in corrections at that point in my career, in my journey, in this domain, because I came from a perspective that was really very focused on

the rights of incarcerated people, or the lack of them, and a lot of the indignities that they face. So I felt that I was a defender of incarcerated people. And coming from that perspective, I had a strong view, you might say strident view, which I no longer have now. And Darren has really helped me reshape that, that people working in corrections kind of were the enemy, were the problem. And through the convergence process and through our getting to know each other, I really came to understand the challenges of corrections, particularly of running facilities.

And also the good faith of many people, especially Darren, and the people he works with for finding good solutions. We actually have a lot more in common than we realized. The very first meeting we were actually seated next to each other at the first dinner, which turns out was intentional. I didn't realize that, but it went very well, and I think it started a process that's been really influential for both of us. Well, yeah, Darren, how do you feel going in? Tell us a little bit more about, were you nervous, uncomfortable?

Yeah, I think it was a little bit of mix of all that, actually. I think that any time you're going into a room, I think as a practitioner over time, I think I had some of the equal feelings about people coming from Mark's perspective of that they really don't understand what we do every day. And that to some people, it feels like it's so simple that we can just do A, B, C, and D and we can fix these problems.

But I really enjoyed Mark right away being open to listen to what those challenges were and saying, hey, I've been in prisons of toured prisons. And I think also the ability that I had to say to Mark right away, hey, I've been in prisons of toured prisons. And I think also the ability that I had to say to Mark, right away, hey, I'd love to have you come into our one of our facilities. Let's go see one together. I'd like to hear your perspective on what we're doing, how we're doing things, and immediately saying that,

I was open to hearing the things that Mark might have as suggestions of how we could do things differently. I think really helped start that relationship between Mark and I, and I've really respected his approach, and and the way he's done things and he's given me lots of things to think about that has helped me in my new role. So I really appreciate that. We'll tell us more about that. What happened? Well, I think that Mark immediately helped me think about when we've toured facilities pointed out things about how staff are interacting with the residents and the facility, talked about our educational programming, how we might be able to do things differently.

Mark has been open to invite me to come to his pivot program with the folks that are being released in his entrepreneur program and give me access to people who were formerly incarcerated to have just open conversations and really hearing from the people who are most being impacted by the system and being more open to hearing their perspective, the influence that we're having as they go through their journey of incarceration and Mark has really helped open my eyes to that. And from my perspective, there were some key steps. I think a big one that Darren mentioned was when he came to speak to the pivot program at Georgetown and I have to admit I had a little bit of trepidation because here we're having somebody who's a has a career in

Corrections who was awarding at three facilities who's a senior executive at Corsica coming to speak to a group of formerly incarcerated people who have been recently released and it turns out at least one of them had been incarcerated in a course of a facility where Darren had worked. And so I was worried that this could turn into almost like a standoff or a big heated exchange. And I was really impressed by how Darren handled it. There was mutual respect. And at the end there was great appreciation for what he had to offer. And I think it opened everybody's eyes in a new way, including mine.

Can I just tell, Darren, because we've heard about Mark's background and had this really interesting way that he got into this work, why did you go into your work? Well, I think it was a little bit of, you know, quite frankly, I don't think many people, when he had a career day and come in and ask, what do you wanna be when you grow up? People say a correctional officer.

That's really unfortunate because I think the more we can attract the right people into the career, the better chance we have to achieve the right environment of human dignity and the way we want to treat people and get better outcomes. But I say all that to say, I didn't initially start off my career wanting to get into corrections. I started off my career while I was in college thinking that I was interested in federal law enforcement and maybe even probation something on that side of the criminal justice system. But I had a college advisor who said that he had an internship at a halfway house and I took the internship at the halfway house and 30 plus years

later I'm still involved in the correction side of helping people while they're incarcerated. We're talking about reentry, but your industry, Darren, which calls itself corrections, is it too often involved in punishment and control rather than corrections, rather than helping inmates and eventually helping them to lead successful lives when they leave prisons and jails? Yeah, I think that's a little bit of a somewhat of a misnomer in the sense that yes, we are responsible for safety and security and yes, there are rules that we have to have within

a facility to maintain order and control. But I really think it's a philosophy in how you approach running your facility. One of the main keys that I've found, and luckily I had mentors early on in my career, was that to have good safety and control in order in a facility, the best way to achieve that is treat people with respect, create the human connection with people, create the opportunities for them to have programming and do things, and then you won't have as many issues with the control and the order in the facility. Over the years, there's been a shift in how programming has been offered in facilities, and there's been shifts back and forth between what some people might call warehousing of people

and not offering programming and just a period of incarceration to eliminate them from being in society. But I think we're in a real opportunity right now over the last 10 or 15 years to really look at that differently. Because if all you do is punish and control, you're never going to have a positive impact on the recidivism outcomes. Mark, what was it like when you met DARREN at that first convergence event?

Did you get on well right away or was there a gradual defrosting? Well, there was definitely a gradual defrosting. I mean, it's not like suddenly, you know, we started dancing or something. It was a process, you know, breaking bread, talking over dinner, sometimes small talk, sometimes about the issues, and having a very pleasant, enjoyable conversation. Over the course of the next few meetings, because I believe there were five, maybe six meetings that we had through convergence, we continued the conversation, and it was cordial, but then it became, you know, much more about the substance, And it was cordial, but then it became much more about the substance. And there was another time where Darren came to DC and we got together for

coffee or lunch. And it was a process, I would say. It wasn't sort of an instant transformation for either one of us. But there was a process of building mutual respect. And I want to say on the question of prison conditions that Richard brought up. I'm relentless in my defense of the rights of incarcerated people who are, I think, too rarely afforded opportunities for personal freedom, for growth, for safety even. And I'm always pointing out, and I did this in a book I wrote unusually cruel, that we don't live up to standards

that we should in this country. But what's interesting is that while delivering that message, you might think that Darren would sort of put his fist up or be defensive and we go at it. But I think I was impressed by his acknowledgement of that and his desire to change that and that led me to think I should be working with the people who actually can make those changes which people in corrections rather than just sit on the sidelines and yell and criticize How did your daughter play into this story of you two becoming friends?

I believe it would have been in the fall of 2017 or I can't remember, sometime during that academic year, my daughter was visiting colleges in her junior year of high school. She was a highly recruited athlete. And one of the schools we were looking at was Vanderbilt University, which is in Nashville. And so I reached out to Darren, let him know that we were going to be coming and said maybe this is an opportunity to visit the prison. But I'll also be with my daughter, who's 16, and who happens to have an interest in this work through our many conversations about it. And I said, would it be possible to have her join us on this visit? And the timing was

such we'd be coming straight from the airport going to the prison. And Darren found a way to make it happen. And we had a really positive experience, one that for my daughter was very formative and influential. And also, for me, I got to see Darren inside. So not just in meetings over nice meals and so on in Washington, not just speaking to the pivot program in Georgetown as a guest of mine, but then a senior executive in the facility where he has a leadership role. And it was wonderful to see how he interacted with the respect.

You might notice Darren uses the word residents. Richard, you've been using the word inmates, I noticed. That word from people on the inside is really negatively received. It's viewed as very dehumanizing, very pejorative. And I'm not saying this to criticize you, Richard. It's a process I think that all of us in society, and those in journalism are working through to try to use more humanizing language. But residence is a term that I think has really become more accepted.

Not many people in corrections use it yet, but Darren has been a leader in that regard too. And it's something I got to see just not only that he uses the word, but actually how he treats people, which is not as inmates, actually, but as human beings, and that's really important. I stand corrected, but I think that in overall use, outside of the prison community, inmates are still broadly used. Unfortunately, that's the case, but I'm hoping that will be continuing to change. Mark Howard and Darren Swenson on Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard. And I'm Ashley.

This podcast comes to you from Common Ground Committee and we have a lot going on in addition to this show. Join other common grounders. Go to our website, commongroundcommity.org and sign up for our newsletter where you'll be kept in the loop about all things common ground. And our YouTube channel has all of our podcasts and live event content as well. Last but not least, Common Ground Committee is a non-profit. Please consider a donation. It's easy. Just hit the Donate tab on the website. Now back to our interview with Mark Howard and Darren Swenson. What are some of the main findings of the project? How do you prepare prisoners for reentry residents for reentry into the workforce and into

family life? Well, you know, there's this saying, and I think it's very true, which is that reentry begins on the first day of incarceration. And it can be an empty slogan, but I think it's really important, and I think that was one of the guiding principles of the group, was that we need to think about from day one, how to work on and develop solutions that will lead to successful outcomes, which is people when they do come home, and we can't control when they come home. That's through a judicial process that's completely separate.

But in terms of who's incarcerated and what happens to them and their trajectory and hopefully not coming back to prison after they leave, we worked on and talked about different solutions that would lead to better outcomes. And the big one, certainly that I was emphasizing and that I think came up in a lot of our conversations was programming and support, which includes education and job training, but also includes mental health support, and just general well-being that will make it

so that when people leave, they're in a better place than when they came in. I couldn't agree with you more Mark, about reentry starting on day one. We actually have a living motto within our organization and we train our staff from day one, we actually have a living model within our organization, and we train our staff from day one that everybody is a reentry professional, no matter what your role is, not just our security staff or our programming staff or our educational staff. It doesn't matter who you are and what role you

play in our organization, that your first and foremost job is to be a reentry professional, because something that you're doing in your role within our organization can somehow be tied back to helping somebody think about how they can be better and how they can be prepared for release. That one example I would use of that is that even if you are a maintenance worker in the facility and you have residents assigned to a career to work with you,

you're modeling the employer employee relationship for that resident. When he's working for someone as a manager and a supervisor, they're learning skills, they're learning how to interact with other co-workers, if they're a four or five person crew, that may be working with that maintenance worker. So it's really breaking down for staff to understand that the work that they're doing is really critical

to teaching life skills and teaching basic elements of respect and how people can develop those skills that they may not have had that may have led to their incarceration or things that they've just never been taught or exposed to. Maybe you've never had a mentor, maybe you've never had a supervisor or a manager who's explained to them how to be a good employee. Back to the convergence process, Darren, how else did it help you rethink the way you do things?

One of the big takeaways for me from the convergence process was, what can we do as corrections practitioners to really try to start to attack the silos that are out there between agencies? And how do we start to do a better job of sharing data and information across agencies that are going to all be key to somebody's reentry. So whether that be, you know, the ability to have an electronic medical record that can transfer

with that person into the community to a community provider for good continuity of care. Whether that be the same thing within that medical record would be their mental health treatment to provide, to transfer to a mental health provider. Whether that's helping them actually have a resume from the type of work that I'm talking about, where they worked on a maintenance crew within the facility to be able to take that to an employer. How do you transition those things out? Darren, you mentioned this word, agencies. Do you mean state, federal, local, government

agencies, as well as the private sector, or mostly government here? Yeah, I think it's mostly, you know, Department of Health, Department of Human Services. It's a HUD. It's all the things that impact somebody's ability to get medical treatment, housing, employment, it's bringing all those folks to the table to talk about what are the things that each one of those agencies owns and is responsible for can make decisions in that about that person and how can we help them think about the things that are creating barriers for people who are formally incarcerated and trying to re-enter based on rules and things that have been set within their agency. One of the convergence projects, most striking recommendations, is to urge corrections officials to develop individualized reentry plans for residents.

What are they? And how can these plans be helpful? Mark, can you first address that? Sure. Let me just give an example following on what Darren just said. If a person who has mental health challenges or addiction history and is on medication that is helping that person, then gets released. But upon release, there's a gap of a week before something can eventually kick in, or the person just left on their own to figure out how to get that medication that they've been on, and they may go through withdrawal, they may have the problems that the medication's helping come back. And then that person slips and uses drugs, or rob someone to buy drugs, or has a mental health breakdown of sorts and then that person goes back to prison

Who's fault is that right because I think up till now? We said oh that person is a career criminal or addict or so on But I think what this larger perspective helps to show us is that we failed that person when that happens because There could have been a much better outcome and you multiply that by hundreds of thousands of people. And then you think about the cost involved, right? This is where the budget point comes in, is that then it's costing, you know, roughly between 30 and 60,000 a year,

depending on the location to keep somebody in prison. And so the integration that Daryen was talking about across agencies is so critical, because if they just are silos, which really has been the case, and still is the case, then they're just looking at their own budgets, and they're trying to fight for their own budgets, and their little fiefdoms, essentially, right, the directors of the agency. But if they start working together, they're actually going to bring the overall cost down significantly and have better outcomes for people and bring down costs and reduce crime.

Yeah, I mean, everything Mark said, plus I think from a practitioner perspective, the importance of the individualized plan for each person is that everybody has unique circumstances. I know that sounds a little bit elementary to say that it's individualized because everybody's unique, but as people are released, some people are releasing out into the community and they have a strong family support system that's waiting for them to come back. They have a place to live. They have a great opportunity for a job already lined up and they have this great support network around them. But even those people may have a spot where they don't have the right access to their treatment.

They might not have access to the right mental health provider. So you really have to dig into each individual person's situation and circumstances to understand what are their risks and what are their needs so that you can best customize that plan in a way to Mark's point that is not only most cost effective, but also gives them the best chance for success. Because if you just throw the kitchen sink at everybody and hope for the best, we get what we're getting today. Darren Mark and the other stakeholders made a lot of progress during the months they were

meeting through convergence. Darron says one of their colleagues, Rhett Covington of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Louisiana, is just one example of someone who's pushing things forward. I think that there's some really good things happening. I know that Rhett Covington and Louisiana, that was part of the group, has taken a lot of the takeaways from the actual model and is working on a pilot project to take several of the recommendations from the convergence outcomes and from the reentry ready project and is trying to apply them. And I know they've went through the planning stages and the processes and they've got the funding

and they're getting ready to kick that pilot off down in Louisiana and several of us that were on the project are still in contact with Red and following that process. And I think it'll be really interesting to see what some of the outcomes and data that come out of that are and really excited for Red and hopeful that he can bring that to the table. And I think also there's been great outcomes such as the work that Mark and I have been able to do together with the Frederick Douglass project. So I think for me that's been one of the

best takeaways from the whole process has been relationships that I've developed with people from very wide-ranging perspectives and giving the opportunity for us to think about innovative ways that way we might we may not be able to turn the Titanic in a year or two years based our recommendations, but we can all work together through our various resources and networks to be able to take these recommendations and be able to influence people to think about how they can either fund them or think about changing policies or doing things that can start to make these changes, but really excited about the project that Mark and I are working on together

with the Frederick Douglass Project, which was Mark's concept and Mark had loved it turn over to you to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, thank you, Darren. And the work that I've been doing that Darren alluded to is I founded an organization, the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, which has as its goal to humanize incarcerated people

through in-person and sometimes virtual visits. We're outside people get to connect with the humanity of incarcerated people because just as we talked about the visit that my daughter and I did in the facility in Nashville, the Darren helped facilitate, I've also myself been in dozens and dozens of prisons around the country and I've also, myself, been in dozens and dozens of prisons around the country. And I brought in, at this point, over 1,000 visitors to come inside through my Georgetown programs in particular. And every time the person has walked out and said that was an extraordinary and often life-changing experience where they realized that there actually are good people there, good people who have made mistakes, which we're trying to find a better path.

And that if we see their humanity and we care about them in a new way, we'll actually be as a society much more supportive of successful reentry. So even though it's about bringing people into prisons, the outcome is really about reentry. And I've been really happy that Darren through one of the coercive facilities in Colorado, Ben County, correctional facility has become our first partner where we've been facilitating visits both in-person and virtual. But a core of what we're trying to do is help society overall realize that there's tremendous humanity. And by that, I mean people with talent, people with character,

people who have families, who have stories, who have hopes, who have dreams, who deserve to be supported and recognized as human beings, which really hasn't been the case for so many decades in this country. And I think we're part of, as Darren said, turning that Titanic and this dimension of it is really important. And I've been appreciative that our friendship has also turned into this partnership that has really been very helpful for the Frederick Douglass project as we launched. Thank you. Thank you both so much for coming on Let's Find Common Ground. Yes, thank you.

Thank you for having us. Mark Howard and Darren Swenson on Let's Find Common Ground. We've produced this podcast in partnership with the Policy Group Convergence. Learn more about their work at convergencepolicy.org. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Miltite. Thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.