Gary Hinzman shares his thoughts about the challenge of educating the public about how the criminal justice system operates, the danger of so-called “copycat” programs and the need to educate the public about what criminal justice reforms can actually accomplish.
Gary Hinzman has spent well over thirty years in the criminal justice field in Iowa. He has served as Director of a Regional Law Enforcement Academy, as Police Chief in Cedar Rapids, and is currently the Director of the Sixth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors for the American Probation and Parole Association as the President and has served as Vice President of the National Association of Probation Executives.
What do you see as some of the sources of failure in criminal justice?
I think part of the problem is that the public is often uninformed about what we do. Because of that, it’s easy to buy into quick fix solutions. I used to lament that I could articulate good arguments about the benefits for community corrections, but it took so long that I’d get 10 percent through and people would say, “lock ‘em up.” Once we started to develop tag lines about our business we gained greater success. APPA’s use of “A Force for Positive Change” and our own “Solutions for a Safer Community” really frame what our work is all about. Another issue for us is that policymakers create failures for us right off the bat with reactionary legislation. One current example in my home state of Iowa is a law that prohibits sex offenders living in certain areas. There has also been legislation for many sex offenders to be on electronic monitoring. Every responsible criminal justice and victim rights agency in state of Iowa has gone to the legislature and testified that these laws aren’t working. In a few years, it’s going to cost $4 million to support electronic monitoring. That’s a lot of money that could go into truly effective programming.
How do you change public opinion?
It’s hard, because we deal with an inherently negative subject matter to begin with. As a police chief in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I contracted with a major public relations firm to help us deal with the media. The press comes to us when there’s something horribly wrong. If that’s the only time the public see us, they start to associate us with negativity. So we have to buy good will by the truck load. Whenever we have the opportunity we have to be out in front with positive stories about our work. In reality we have to make the opportunities. I’ll give you an example. Our local paper had decided to do a story on absconders. At the time, we had started an enforcement unit dedicated to going after high-risk absconders, and instead of doing a negative story, the newspaper ended up writing about the positive effects of our unit.
What are some other “failure traps” that you see criminal justice agencies falling into?
One common issue involves something I call the “copycat” problem. I’ve seen this across the country, where a jurisdiction tries to copy a successful program without really thinking it through or having regard for proper implementation. In Iowa, for example, we created a computerized risk assessment tool that took 2 to 3 years to develop. A lot of people in other states have asked to have us to send them the program on a computer disc, but I always tell them I’m reluctant to do so. Our tool reflects a lot of judgment calls that the director of a corrections agency has to be comfortable living with. As a former police chief, it’s hard for me to be painted as soft on crime, so I was willing to take some risks. And then there are issues like the availability of treatment resources, availability of sanctions, and programming which differ from state to state. In the end each department must develop a tool like this that is custom designed for their use. It is true with all programs and the implementation of them. They must be done with fidelity.
Does the public expect too much from parole?
Once an inmate comes back to the community, parole will often get blamed for failings of what society and the prison system could not accomplish before then. For example, we had a group of mentally ill offenders who were getting released in Iowa directly to the community without any support or treatment services. They were staying in prison until the last possible moment because prison counselors did not want to recommend their release to the Parole Board, but when their day did come, they would be sent out the door with $100 in their pocket, a bus ticket, and sent back to their community. So we worked with the prisons and asked, what type of cover fire would you need to release some of these people six to nine months early under some supervision? We created a special program with the prisons and the parole board along with a community advisory board to help give us needed support, and so far, we’ve achieved some good results with the program. A outside follow-up evaluation over the past six years shows a success rate of 65-70% with this group.
What was your reaction to the Urban Institute’s 2005 report “Does Parole Work?” that answered the question largely in the negative?
I wasn’t as upset as some of my colleagues as the report pointed to areas that needed change or reform. However even the report’s authors will admit that the results were skewed by some large states that have the worst numbers. Still, though I could have dismissed it given Iowa’s relatively good results, I think it caused all of us to think about the failures of the system and what we need to do to correct them. As one of the authors of “Transforming Probation Through Leadership: The ‘Broken Windows Model’ we were also making critical comments about the field we felt needed reform. It is good to cause discussion, reflection, and bring about new promising practices. A critical review is the first step in this process.
How hard is it to sell modest results to the public?
With our very best programs, we might expect a 30 percent success rate, not that it couldn’t get better. When I tell groups this, they say, 30 percent, is that all? Yet when you look at other professions such as medicine, doctors have about a 30 percent chance of solving a major health issue once they’ve diagnosed someone with a critical health problem. We have to educate people about the work we do and the success we have. In part, it’s about how you frame an issue. In public opinion polls across the country, the courts along with probation and parole got miserable approval ratings, but when you describe the outcomes of a program that gets a 30 percent success rate, you would find overwhelming public support for those programs. It was a misunderstanding that left unchecked caused negative perceptions.