Friends of HOPE

HOPE Implementation Study, 2010

Thundercow — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:18:55 +0000

You can read the study here, in PDF format.

Judge Alm Named Jurist of the Year

Thundercow — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:14:16 +0000

Judge Alm has been named “Jurist of the Year” by the Hawaii State Judiciary. You can read the full article on Judge Alm.

Article on HOPE from The Champion Magazine

Thundercow — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:19:48 +0000

The attached is from the latest issue of “The Champion” magazine published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Read the Article in PDF format.

Where Hope Thrives, Star Bulletin Article

Thundercow — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:58:04 +0000

Where hope thrives

- Hawaii News – Starbulletin.com

An isle program that has cut drug abuse and new crimes by felons on probation might be used by other states

By Susan Essoyan

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Sep 06, 2009

A program that has dramatically reduced drug abuse and new crimes by Hawaii felons on probation is being considered as a model in several states and could soon double in size here. ”This isn’t a program — it’s a revolution,” said Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied the local strategy known as HOPE. “As a recidivism prevention program, it’s unmatched, and as a drug treatment program, it’s unmatched.”

Started in October 2004 with 34 offenders, HOPE now includes nearly 1,500 of the roughly 8,000 felony probationers on Oahu. The program targets those who have consistently violated probation conditions, including drug, sex and domestic violence offenders. But recently compiled data show that people in HOPE are less than half as likely to commit new crimes or fail drug tests as those on regular probation.

The formula is simple: careful monitoring and swift, certain consequences for each infraction. Every mistake — from a missed probation appointment to a failed drug test — will promptly land an offender in jail for a couple of days, and more for repeat offenses. Drug treatment is mandated for chronic violators.

The quick incarcerations are a big change from regular probation. Traditionally, offenders rack up a string of violations for months and months with no consequences before eventually having their probation revoked and getting thrown in prison for five or 10 years.

“That’s like ignoring your kid’s misbehavior and then a year from now disowning them and kicking them out of the house,” said Circuit Judge Steven S. Alm, who conceived of HOPE — Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement. ”You’ve got to have a swift and certain consequence for rule breaking,” he said. “With HOPE, they can put together the bad behavior with the consequence.”

On regular probation, offenders get a month’s notice before drug tests. On HOPE, they get just a few hours’ notice. But the HOPE probationers, who must call a hotline every morning to see if they will be tested, do far better. Take, for example, the 950 chronically noncompliant probationers assigned to HOPE who have been in the program for at least three months. While on regular probation, they failed more than half of their drug tests, even with plenty of advance warning. Within three months of joining HOPE, the failure rate dropped to 7 percent, according to data compiled last week by the state Department of the Attorney General. For people in the program six months, the rate falls below 5 percent and keeps dropping as time goes on.

“Some people that use meth and cocaine can stop on their own, knowing that there are certain consequences for violations,” said Alm, a former prosecutor. “A number of people need to go into treatment, but not everybody. HOPE is a very good way of separating out those groups.” Kirkland Tabanera of Wahiawa recently completed substance abuse treatment after being addicted to “ice” or methamphetamine for more than 15 years and getting busted for forgery. He said the HOPE sanctions helped straighten him out, especially after he was locked up last Christmas and New Year’s. He said his 7-year-old daughter asked him, ”Daddy, make me a pinky promise you’re not going back to jail.”

“Regular probation was more easier,” said Tabanera, 47. “HOPE, it’s more strict. You get immediate consequences. You go straight to jail. Even though you go to jail for a short time, it’s still going to jail.” ”I just hate going to jail,” Tabanera added, shaking his head and looking at the floor.

He got to the point where he was so worried about whether he was going to fail a drug test and get locked up that “it just used to ruin my high.”

“I started thinking, ‘Why use and stress myself out?’ Better just stay clean. But it took me a long time for think that way,” he said. “I always thought I could beat the system.” Although it took jail stints and drug treatment for Tabanera, many probationers shape up right off the bat. HOPE starts with a warning hearing with a judge, setting out expectations.

“The majority of the improvement happens immediately,” said Paul Perrone, chief of research and statistics for the Department of the Attorney General, who has been tracking the program’s results. “By and large, all they needed was the judge to tell them these rules are going to be enforced, and their compliance rates just shot up.”

In addition to cutting drug use by as much as 90 percent in six months and getting offenders to show up for appointments with their probation officers, HOPE has had another, far-reaching benefit. Preliminary data from a randomized, controlled trial funded in part by the National Institute of Justice shows that HOPE probationers committed less than half as many new crimes as the control group on regular probation.

“Putting somebody in HOPE instead of regular probation reduces the probability of his going back to prison by more than half,” Kleiman said. “For the $1,000 you spend on HOPE, you’re probably saving $10,000 in prison expense.”

Kleiman and Angela Hawken, professor of economics and policy analysis at Pepperdine University, are principal investigators in that research. As states face budget cuts and overstuffed prisons, HOPE may be an approach whose time has come. Kleiman touts it as a prime example in his book, “When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment,” just published by Princeton University Press.

HOPE’s impact has already attracted attention across the country and even abroad. Jurisdictions in several other states are considering HOPE as a model, either in probation or parole programs, including Washington, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and New Jersey, and there’s also some interest at the federal level, according to Kleiman and Alm. (Probation is a sentence, an alternative to prison, while parole follows completion of a prison term.)

In April, Alm was invited to Lisbon, Portugal, to present the HOPE program to the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, and the Swedish Carnegie Institute has invited him to

Stockholm in November to discuss it. ”The whole world has this problem and nobody’s come up with a clever answer,” said Dr. Larry Schlesinger, president of Friends of HOPE, a new nonprofit formed to support the program. “All of a sudden, out of a little court in Honolulu comes a clever answer for the rest of the world.”

A new grant of $420,000 in stimulus money will help expand HOPE locally by covering the cost of two more drug testers, two more probation officers, a deputy prosecutor and a deputy public defender position devoted to the program. ”I’m hoping to add another 1,500 probationers, maybe double the size of the program,” Alm said. “If you have something that works, that’s reducing crime, let’s put our foot on the gas and get more people into it. We’re helping all of these offenders, we’re preventing people from being victimized and we are saving taxpayer dollars.”

While the theory behind the program is simple, it is tough to pull off, requiring coordination among multiple agencies and personnel, streamlining paperwork and expediting hearings. Everyone has to work together, including probation officers, judges, court staff, sheriffs, police officers, prose- cutors, public defenders, jailers and treatment agencies.

At first there was resistance to what looked like a larger workload, but the quick results soon won people over. Surveys of probation officers show that “overwhelmingly, they love it,” Perrone said. “They feel like they’re actually able to help these people,” he said. “How can you help people who are physically absent or high as a kite? But if he’s sitting in front of me sober, I actually have a shot.”

Probationers, too, seem to appreciate the straight talk they get from Alm and the other judges, who have all had similar results. ”I thought he was a mean guy in the beginning, but as I progressed in this thing, he gave me chance. I respect the guy,” said Nolan Ogasawara, a former carpenter now completing drug treatment. “I think he’s really fair. He knows what he’s doing.”

HOPE has shown striking results for different groups of probationers.

Specialized Probation Unit

For high-intensity cases

» After six months in HOPE, as compared to baseline data before HOPE:

* 84 percent reduction in missed probation appointments

* 90 percent reduction in positive drug tests

http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?acti…20090906_Where_hope_thrives.html&partnerID=356589 (4 of 5) [9/8/2009 11:12:23 AM]

Where hope thrives – Hawaii News – Starbulletin.com

» Non-HOPE control group after six months, as compared to baseline data:

* 20 percent increase in missed appointments

* 6 percent reduction in positive drug tests

Source: Crime Prevention and Justice Assistance Division, Department of the Attorney General

General Probation Unit

» HOPE probationers compared to control group, in a randomized trial:

* More than 50 percent fewer arrests for new crimes

* More than 50 percent fewer missed probation appointments

* More than 50 percent fewer positive drug tests

Source: “Research Brief: Evaluation of HOPE Probation,” preliminary results, by Angela Hawken and Mark Kleiman, February 2009.

New York Times Reports on HOPE Program

Thundercow — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:54:32 +0000

The New York Times recently reported on the HOPE program. The Jeffrey Rosen article, “Prisoners of Parole” presents a thoughful and thorough look at the HOPE program, and is available here.

2009 Conference Wrap-Up

Thundercow — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:09:05 +0000

The 3rd annual Project HOPE/Disruptive Physician Conference was held Friday, November 13 at the Queen’s Medical Center Conference Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Around 100 people from the Law Enforcement, Corrections, Substance Abuse Treatment, Medical and Hospital and many other fields gathered to hear a full day of presentations, panels, and Q&A sessions with experts from around the country and beyond.

Disruptive Physician expert Dr. Michael Kaufmann of Ontario, Canada, and former Presidential Drug Czar Dr. Robert Du Pont joined Hawaii Circuit Judge Steven Alm, American Board of Addiction Medicine President Dr. Kevin Kunz, and President of Project HOPE and Pu’ulu Lapa’au Dr. Larry Schlesinger in discussing the challenges and new horizons ahead for successful treatment of addiction in general and in their specific areas of expertise.

Judges, public prosecutors, attorneys and defenders joined counselors, probation officers and health care deliverers in exchanging information and forging new relationships in areas that overlap their job descriptions, all with the goal of improving their service to the general public and the clients who need assistance.

See pictures below of the 2009 Project HOPE/Disruptive Physician Conference.

Dr. Kevin Kunz, Judge Steven Alm, Dr. Robert Du Pont, Dr. Michael Kaufmann, presentors at the 2009 Project HOPE/Disruptive Physician Conference

Conference Moderator Dr. Larry Schlesinger welcomes special guests at a private reception at Honolulu’s historic Washington Place, home to Hawaii’s Governors and their families during the 20th century and the residence of the last ruling monarch of Hawaii, Queen Lili’uokalani.

Special Conference Guests Dr. Michael Kaufmann and wife Judy, ABAM President Dr. Kevin Kunz, former Presidential Drug Czar Dr. Robert DuPont, Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Steven Alm, and Conference Moderator Dr. Larry Schlesinger enjoy historic Washington Place and prepare for the next day’s Conference.

Article: HOPE for Reform by Angela Hawken

Thundercow — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:30:29 +0000

HOPE for Reform

What a novel probation program in Hawaii might teach other states.

ANGELA HAWKEN AND MARK KLEIMAN

Probation would be a great alternative to incarceration — if anyone knew how to get probationers to comply with probation rules. Now there’s reason for hope. A novel program in Hawaii is demonstrating that it is possible to re-invent community supervision in a way that helps probationers toe the line, cuts recidivism, and curbs their flow to over-crowed jails and prisons. By closely monitoring probationer behavior and rapidly punishing violations with relatively mild sanctions — typically a few days in jail — the program provides much-needed structure to offenders whose lives are often in disarray. The program is aptly titled HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity

Probation with Enforcement).

The logic behind HOPE is appealing. The system takes into account what we know about criminals: Crime attracts reckless and impulsive people, for whom deferred and low-probability threats of severe punishment are less effective than immediate and high-probability threats of mild punishment. Delivering a relatively mild sanction swiftly and consistently is both more effective and less cruel than sporadically lowering the boom. As James Q. Wilson has remarked, no sane parent would try to control a child’s misbehavior by imposing tiny risks of horrible punishments months in the future. The formula HOPE follows for controlling hard-drug use in the criminally-active population is fairly simple:

Weekly randomized testing (or twice-weekly scheduled testing), to eliminate any “safe window” for undetected drug use.
Fixed sanctions on a set schedule: As little as two days in jail is adequate, so long as enforcement is reliable, with sentence length increasing gradually for successive violations.
A formal warning to the probationer in open court, putting him on notice that violations have consequences.
As short a time as possible between violations and sanctions. (For offenders with paycheck jobs, the first sanction could be deferred to the following weekend.)
Quick service of bench warrants on those who abscond.
Treatment services for those who prove unable to comply on their own.

So far, HOPE’s performance seems to match the promise. A group of methamphetamine-using probationers with records of poor compliance were put on the HOPE drug-testing-and-sanctions program and given a formal warning by a judge. Half of them began conforming right after the warning and never needed to be sanctioned. Overall, the rate of missed and “dirty” drug tests went down by more than 80 percent. Hawaii’s legislature has appropriated funds to expand that pilot program to 1,000 of the 7,200 felony probationers on Oahu.*

Mainland states will be looking to HOPE as a model of how to fix our broken probation system. There’s much to be fixed. Across the country, despite rules requiring abstinence, routine probation practices allow hard-drug-abusing criminals to continue using drugs with impunity, which in most cases means continuing to commit other crimes. The current system fails because drug testing of probationers is too infrequent, because test results come back too slowly, because sanctions are too rare, too delayed, and too severe (months, or occasionally years, in prison).

Probationers who fail to attend or complete drug treatment — even as part of diversion programs when they have agreed to treatment instead of incarceration — are rarely punished for it because overworked probation officers don’t have the time to do the paperwork leading to a revocation hearing. (And because judges don’t really want to put someone behind bars for months merely for a dirty drug test.) Even for those who abscond from supervision entirely, the risk of arrest is small. The judge may issue a bench warrant, ordering the police or the sheriff’s department to arrest the defaulter and bring him before the court, but police and sheriffs rarely give those warrants high priority. And judges, facing crowded jails, are as likely as not to sentence arrested probation absconders to more probation.

As a result, half to three-quarters of diversion program participants never start treatment or quit before finishing it. This has been the experience in California, the national leader in treatment diversion. The state’s diversion program (Proposition 36) was passed by popular vote, and implemented in 2001. Now it’s in trouble. Although savings from reduced incarceration costs have been substantial, the probationers’ low rates of compliance with terms of probation have led the governor to insist on either changing the program or cutting its already-inadequate budget. But the program’s sponsors are fighting in court to prevent making its nominal requirement for drug treatment real by providing for sanctions.

According to the defenders of Proposition 36 in its current version, the disease model of addiction somehow holds that sanctions won’t work — even though the research on contingency management shows it to be an unusually effective treatment approach. The people who treat drug abusers don’t agree with the Prop. 36 purists: Over half of the treatment providers in the UCLA Treatment Services Impact Survey said that sanctions would be a useful tool to aid treatment compliance.

HOPE has all of these elements, and it works. By substituting low-sanctions probation “modification” for probation revocation, Hawaii has greatly reduced the paperwork burden on probation officers and the time it takes to get to court. (A modification hearing now typically happens within two days of the violation.) And once the program establishes the credibility of its monitoring and sanctions process, the number of violations drops quickly, reducing the workload on probation officers and judges alike. Compared to drug courts and most drug-diversion programs like Proposition 36, HOPE economizes on scarce drug-treatment resources by not mandating treatment for those who are able to refrain from drug use on their own under the threat of sanctions.

HOPE turns out to work equally well at reducing other sorts of probation violations among probationers without drug problems. Similar programs have worked elsewhere, as long as the sanctions were actually delivered; where the sanctions weren’t delivered, they failed. There is little doubt that criminally active drug abusers will cut back their drug use drastically if they are convinced that using today means going to jail tomorrow. Project Sentry in Lansing, Michigan has been working smoothly for a quarter of a century; in an experiment in the District of Columbia Drug Court, the testing-and-sanctions track outperformed the mandatory-treatment track.

Actually delivering consistent sanctions poses a massive public-management challenge. The crucial problem is getting all of the elements of the system — judges, their staffs, probation officers, police, corrections officials, and treatment providers — to work together. Judges fiercely guard their independence; Maryland’s Break the Cycle program collapsed because judges refused to impose sanctions. Probation officers and court clerks don’t welcome the additional workload generated at first, when every missed or “dirty” drug test leads to a hearing. Police and sheriffs need to be persuaded not to just stick bench warrants in the bottom drawer and wait for an absconder to be re-arrested for some new charge. Jails face fixed costs of receiving a prisoner and releasing him, so jailers don’t like large numbers of short-stay inmates.

Most of these are transient start-up costs; once probationers adapt to the new rules, everyone’s workload decreases. In Hawaii, resistance to the program proved transitory in the face of success. But getting over the initial hump requires leadership, especially since most of the spending is at the county level (probation) or the local level (police and sheriffs) while the big savings accrue to the state in the form of reduced incarceration.

The benefits of mounting a HOPE-style program on a mass scale would greatly outweigh the costs. HOPE costs about $2,500 per probationer, including the costs of treatment, compared with about $1,000 for routine probation supervision. About half of America’s four million probationers are believed to have illicit drug habits. If a HOPE-style program were implemented nationally, it would cost about $3 billion per year on top of current probation costs — about six percent of the current cost of the “war on drugs.”

Most or all of that cost would come back as criminal-justice savings, in the form of reduced incarceration for probationers and reduced drug law enforcement costs due to shrinking drug markets, as many of the dealers’ most reliable customers stop buying (probationers account for about a third of the market). That doesn’t count the benefits to those spared criminal victimization, to probationers’ families, and to the probationers themselves.

Due to the persistence of Congressman Adam Schiff of California, the new authorization for the Office of National Drug Control Policy passed last year authorizes $15 million for grants to the states to run testing-and-sanctions programs. Our understanding of the effectiveness of these programs will improve as the number of testing-and-sanctions sites increase.

In Hawaii, it took the creativity, persistence, and persuasiveness of a visionary judge, Steven Alm, to make the cross-agency coordination effort work. Alm had advantages that wouldn’t be available elsewhere: not only his own energy and connections (he served as a local prosecutor and as the United States Attorney before going on the bench) but also Hawaii’s deeply collegial and collaborative public-management culture, an extension of the state’s broader aloha-and-mahalo traditions. It remains to be seen to what extent other jurisdictions, with different cultures and different institutional arrangements, can follow suit. But the only certain path to failure is not to try.

Angela Hawken is Assistant Professor of Economics and Policy Analysis at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and a Research Economist at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs. Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at UCLA. He blogs for The Reality-Based Community.