By Sheriff Stan Hilkey, Mesa, County, CO
Law
enforcement officers are familiar with the term "prevention" and
understand that any time you can be proactive and direct energy towards
problems, rather than simply reacting to them, you nearly always have
positive outcomes. Prevention in the context of “recidivism” may be less
familiar to us, though, and so we may be missing out on some of the
most meaningful reform in the criminal justice system.
At those times when a crime occurs, law enforcement, specifically the cops on the street, have perfected the process of walking a person to the front door of the justice system and pushing them inside-- and this is the point at which we have traditionally stood back, dusted off our hands, and declared it’s up to the “system” now to deal with this person. We are also often the biggest critics of the system as we stand on the front step as spectators of what occurs after the arrest.
At those times when a crime occurs, law enforcement, specifically the cops on the street, have perfected the process of walking a person to the front door of the justice system and pushing them inside-- and this is the point at which we have traditionally stood back, dusted off our hands, and declared it’s up to the “system” now to deal with this person. We are also often the biggest critics of the system as we stand on the front step as spectators of what occurs after the arrest.
There is now a large body of research available to us that demands our action to improve the front end of the system. It turns out that interventions on reducing recidivism should start at the point of arrest, rather than starting at the point of trial or conviction, and the entire front end of the justice system, prior to trial or conviction, has remarkable ramifications for recidivism and our officer safety.
By
concentrating on a person’s risk to re-offend in the future and
determining this risk through the use of validated risk assessment
tools, we can begin the process of working to reduce future crime by
that person. Understanding risk in this context and mastering our
system’s response to different levels of risk must become as familiar to
us as determining probable cause to arrest. If our system responds to
medium and high-risk individuals in a way that is known to work (through
Evidenced Based Practices), then their likelihood to re-offend in the
future can be positively changed. Conversely, the research also points
out that if the system over-reacts to people with low risk
determinations, we can actually create people more likely to reoffend in
the future than if the system did nothing to them. Think about that ... our system’s reaction to low risk people can actually be causing harm
in the context of future crime and future victims.
We
know that most people charged are eligible to be released from jail
prior to plea or trial, but traditionally the process for determining
release does not have a mechanism to consider a person’s risk in a way
that is supported by research. Usually, people are told a dollar amount
based on the offense for which we arrested them. As a result, high-risk
people are frequently released back to the community, while low-risk
people sit in jail. That is a backwards scenario and is harmful on both
ends. It is time that law enforcement leaders, managers, and officers
become knowledgeable of, involved in, and supportive of pretrial release
programs that use research-based risk assessment as a foundation for
pretrial release decisions.
There
are three primary reasons that we must support and be involved in this
reform. First, at its core, pretrial release without research-based risk
assessment creates a fundamental unfairness that very often favors the
most risky and punishes, prior to conviction, the lower risk people. As
defenders of civil liberties, our action is demanded. Second, when we
look our communities in the eye, we must be able to assure them that we
are involved in and supportive of practices that endeavor to keep high
risk people contained and that we thoughtfully manage those that can be
released in terms of the long range goal of reducing recidivism in our
country.
Finally,
in the interest of the protection of our own, we should absolutely
support systems that use limited jail bed space for those that are the
most risky to our officers. Just study the case of Maurice Clemmons, who
on November 29, 2009 murdered four Lakewood, Washington police officers
while they sat together in a coffee shop. Clemmons, who was out on bail
at the time, was, by all accounts, very high risk. But he was able to
get out of jail by paying money, money that was presumably set high
enough to keep him locked up but didn’t.
This
reform, supported by resolutions from the International Association of
Chiefs of Police and the National Sheriffs’ Association along with many
other national justice organizations, is coming, and our opportunity to
shrink the ever-expanding universe of our criminal justice system and
make our communities safer is coming with it. -Stan Hilkey is the Sheriff of Mesa County, Colorado. Mesa County, a research site for pretrial reform, which recently received an award from the National Association of Counties for their progress in changing their pretrial release practices to a research based risk assessment system. They’ve demonstrated a lower FTA* rate, a more effective use of jail beds for high-risk offenders and are managing lower risk offenders in the community with no increases in community danger.
*failure to appear in court
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