The Big Picture on NYC Public Safety

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Matt Katz: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, reporter in the WNYC newsroom, and I'm filling in for Brian today. Before we keep going on with the show, a little bit more breaking news from the Supreme Court. This is from SCOTUS blog. The court agrees with the states that the Heroes Act does not authorize the debt forgiveness plan. This apparently means that the student debt forgiveness program is on ice. We will get into more of that later in the show with Elie Mystal. There was a six-three decision authored by the Chief John Roberts.

The court essentially struck down the Biden administration debt forgiveness program. Justice Kagan dissented, and she was joined by Justices Sotomayor and Justice Jackson from the left side of the court. We will get into more of that and what it means again later in the show. For now, though, we have Deanna Logan, the Director of Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. From that perch, she has oversight over the city's supervised release program.

Now that program following the handshake budget deal yesterday that we've been talking about between the mayor and city council, is getting new funding specifically to address what Mayor Adams has described as a recidivist problem on our streets and subways. Deanna Logan is joining us now to talk about that program and public safety in the city. Director Logan, welcome to WNYC.

Deanna Logan: Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

Matt Katz: It's our pleasure. Listeners, are you on supervisor release? Have you previously avoided a stay at Rikers Island because you were put on supervised release while you awaited trial on criminal charges? We're going to explain what supervised release is and where it's going with Deanna Logan. To ask a question or share your experience, give us a call. 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Now you can also text us at that number. 212-433-9692. Deana, can you first tell us what the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, which you run does? People may have heard of it but might not be sure how it fits into the public safety apparatus in the city. It's been described as the think tank for criminal justice policy in the city. What is it that your office does?

Deanna Logan: Yes, so that's a very good nutshell start to it. We refer to ourselves as MOCJ because the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice is a really huge mouthful for our people to have to wrap their minds around. We're an incubating think tank. We coordinate across the criminal justice system. We advise Mayor Adams, deputy Mayor Banks on criminal justice policy, and we represent the mayor with the court system, the district attorneys, the defenders, other state criminal justice agencies. We essentially work across the entire landscape of law enforcement. We work with all of our city agencies.

We partner with local organizations. We are the people who help implement the data-driven anti-crime strategies that actually keep the criminal justice system working in a more smoother operation. The strategies that UCS implementing are ones that are used to prevent offending and also that really focus on how we build strong neighborhoods that ensure lasting and durable safety for New Yorkers. Our main goal is really to support the most vulnerable New Yorkers across the spectrum of the criminal justice.

We focus on people moving through the criminal justice system, including those who are survivors of crime, being supported with a comprehensive foundation that allows them to successfully come back to be members of society.

Matt Katz: One of those programs that is under that umbrella is supervised release. I've been reporting on supervised release in recent months in my other role here as a reporter. I was amazed to learn that if you're arrested right now in New York City and a judge agrees to release you, you're now four times more likely to be put on supervised release than to get out on cash bail. It's become quite commonplace. Can you tell us what supervised release is and why it's become so popular with judges?

Deanna Logan: Supervised release started out providing supports for individuals that were on much lower misdemeanor-type offenses. In the last-- right before COVID, we expanded to include all offenses. Ultimately what it does is it assigns you to one of our great partner providers who will do an intake assessment of an individual. What that means is, is that judges know that they are giving somebody to a partner who is going to give that individual the tools that they need to make sure that they come back to court.

Because it is an individual assessment, it addresses the spectrum of underlying causes of why people commit crimes. Let's say, for example, I, Deanna Logan, have been ordered by Judge T to go to supervised release. When I go into the supervised release program, I meet with a case manager. That case manager does a comprehensive review of my history, almost like when you go to the doctor and they take a full medical. Then we start to identify the areas in my life where I really need to start working.

Am I unemployed? Am I undomiciled or am I in somebody's home couch surfing, which makes me vulnerable to be undomiciled? Do I use substances? What are the things that are going on in my life that we can start to work on as I case manager, make sure that you are aware of your court dates and touch base with you to make sure you're going back to them, supporting you in doing the work that you need to do on yourself as a person and going back to court to address and be accountable for the charges that are pending against you.

I think that's why you're seeing more judges taking advantage of this tool because it is a way of addressing the root causes of crime while moving a case successfully through the criminal justice system. With bail, people are paying money and then they're back in society and there is nothing that is touch-basing or giving people foundation in order to start addressing those root causes.

Matt Katz: Once bail reform came in in 2020, which prevented judges from imposing bail on many, many offenses, more people started getting funneled into supervised release. Like you said, the city started allowing anybody charged with any particular crime to be on supervised release. Is the program now overwhelmed? Can the nonprofits that run the supervisor release programs and hire the social workers to work with those who are pretrial, are they struggling given the numbers?

Deanna Logan: What we do know is that our partners have seen lots of challenges since the pandemic. One of the reasons being that there were many cases that historically had moved through the system and where we had that huge pause for COVID, many cases that would have been resolved have stayed in the system, and therefore individuals have stayed with our case managers for longer. As cases are not moving out of the system and more cases are coming in, there is the challenge of managing higher caseloads. We've been working with them to make sure that they are able to manage it.

They also noted for us the challenge that you alluded to in starting our discussion here, which was they were seeing individuals that they were not being as successful with supporting. Those are the people that we refer to as individuals that fall into a group of having recurring criminal charges in a very short period of time because they were not as susceptible to all of the supports that the providers had been providing that work for the majority of the individuals that are in supervised release. We started working and drilling down to identify the commonalities in that population.

As we move forward, we're working with those partners who are the providers to provide the supports that they need to be able to address all of the people that are now being sent to them by the court system.

Matt Katz: I think what you're referring to is you've talked about 9,000 people who have a recent persistent pattern of recurring criminal charges and missing court. Then there's among that 2,000 who go on to be charged with violent felonies. This seems like a relatively small number that maybe if there were-- and we know who they are and if maybe if there was a way of providing them services, maybe that could make some kind of difference.

The mayor's office yesterday announced that as part of the budget, $36.8 million will be added to supervisor release for a new intensive case management model. That's what they called it for recidivist. Is that what you're talking about? Is that the new element here? Can you tell us what exactly that means? What is more intensive program? What will that do?

Deanna Logan: That is correct. That's going to be part of our intensive case management that we're working with our partners to do. What it does is it starts to focus on the different risk factors and needs for that 9,000 population. What I want to make clear is it's not a tallied list. I think when people hear us talk about approximately 9,000 people, and then 2,000 of them that are going to go on potentially to have a violent felony offense that we hear at MOCJ have a list of individuals that we could say, "Yes, it's this person."

It's a trend that we see across the criminal justice spectrum when we're looking at the population of people that have been charged and arrested. Therefore, what we know is that we will have to identify the criteria that all of the individuals that fall into that 9,000 have in common. Again, the people who are rearrested for a felony when they were already in court on a felony offense, and they're also having a very acute period of many open cases that could include misdemeanors three or more within that last five years, plus multiple warrants because they're not coming back to court within that two or five year period.

For those people, we want to be able to identify the anti-social personality patterns, their attitudes of being pro-criminal actions, social supports that somehow continue or support their ability to engage in crime. Many of them have substance abuse disorder. Many of them are in familial or marital relationships that may not be functioning properly. They are either underemployed, unemployed, or do not have educational supports and they don't have pro-social recreational activities.

Focusing in on that population and then allowing our partners to scale back such that instead of one of the case managers having 25 or 30 people that they're managing, in this instance, we know that they need to have 10, because, within this population of 10, you want to have 5 that are people who have these high needs and then 5 that don't. The ones that have the high needs are the ones that we know have a nervous system response to things that average New Yorkers average citizens think of as part of their everyday life, but for those individuals, raises a heightened level of fight or flight for them and anxiety that won't allow them to move through the behavior.

Having that support of even having a case manager that meets them on the morning of court and says, "Hey, today is your court appointment. I'm here. We're going, let's go." Those types of additional hands-on will allow that population of people to be much more successful as they're moving through the criminal justice system.

Matt Katz: Interesting. Would there be more requirements on such people, like they have to show up more often to meet with their case manager or they have to stay on medication to deal with their mental illness, or they have to go to other social support programs? Will there be any additional requirements for this population with a greater need?

Deanna Logan: Yes, so individuals that have greater need are required to do cognitive behavioral therapy as part of their supervised release because we do want to give them the tools to start being successful on their own. That is definitely one of the components in addition to having more in-person touch bases with their case manager.

Matt Katz: I understand this is a theoretical question, but when I heard about this, I was wondering if something like this might be a way to provide services to someone like Jordan Neely, who cycled in and out of Rikers and was killed on the subway last month in the middle of an apparent mental health crisis. He was identified as somebody who is well known to social service agencies and to law enforcement in the city but was never able to get, and at least or maybe got some of the services he needed, but never able to stay with those services. Is something like this -- would that potentially help someone like Jordan Neely?

Deanna Logan: I didn't know the specifics of Mr. Neely's case but clearly being able to have a social network fabric that doesn't allow individuals who are in this high-need category to not slip through the cracks. Yes. This is part of how we sew up that network within our partners and give them the ability and the resources that they need to more intensely provide that kind of net for folks who don't necessarily follow through with their medication and who will need more touch bases to say, ''Yes, and remember, you're going to take your meds today and remember you have your appointment for the doctor.''

All of the things and the ways that we can ensure people are given the ability to succeed.

Matt Katz: This is the last question about this before we go to the phone lines, but the $36.8 million, it's called a pilot program. Will it cover the 9,000 people? That rolling number of people who have a persistent pattern of recurring criminal charges and missing court. Will that be able to provide more intensive outreach for those folks? Or is it just part of that population?

Deanna Logan: It is part of the population. As you pointed out, these are the things and the tools that we have been talking with our partners that we all believe will start to really move the needle in supporting the population. The pilot will be approximately 1,100 people by the end of fiscal year '24, and then expanding as we are looking at the data and looking at successes and modifying as well. Because we monitor all of our programs in real-time so that we have not only the partner providers letting us know, but we have individuals who go out and speak to the people that are participating and understanding where we see gaps in services so that we can start to tweak accordingly.

Matt Katz: Listeners, are you on supervised release? Have you previously avoided a stay at Rikers because you were put on supervised release while awaiting trial? Give us a call, tell us your experience, or if you have other public safety questions. We have Deanna Logan, the director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice here. Our number is 212-433-WNYC. You can also text us. 212-433-9692. Let's go to the phone lines. Pete in Brooklyn. Hi, Pete. Good morning.

Pete: Hey, how are you? Great show. Great topic. I'm 53 years old. I'm not on supervised release, but I know all about it. Now, I was on the streets of New York homeless for six years in the '90s. With that, I shoplifted and what would happen, I would go to court and they would instantly just be like, "Okay, 20 days or 30 days in jail." Me being an addict at the time you take that because C-76 has a program that will give you methadone or whatever you need for coming off of drugs.

In a way, I was forced to take these crimes that sometimes I wasn't always wrongful of, most of the time I was, but so now I have a monster record, and they still look back at it even though it's 25 years and I'm still having problems with it. If they had that release program, because what it was is they were giving everybody time in Rikers. Rikers had the most population in probably 1993 or 1994 with 18,000 to 19,000 people. I was in and out of there 30 times as a young white kid in a very tough jail to me like a prison.

You know what I mean? If they had that program for me back then, I would've definitely done it because, yes, I would miss court dates because my mind was on something else that was more important at the time-

Matt Katz: Wow.

Pete: - which beating my habit, and what I'm hearing with the mayor real quick is bits of Giuliani and him about the kid that died on the train. I slept on the train for four or five years and there's no way the train systems were worse now than they were back then. There was crisis. You'd see someone in crisis every day on the train, and they were just in crisis, and I'd helped them many times before in the past because all you got to do is ask them, "What can I do for you?"

Matt Katz: Pete, let me ask you a question, and I'm glad you're healthy and stable at the moment. That's good, but I'm sorry about your criminal record. I can imagine that being an albatross. If you had been released after being arrested and were linked to a social worker instead of being sent to Rikers like you would have been if it happened now through the supervised release program, and they said, "You can go to this drug counseling center and you could get substance abuse treatment, would you have done that if you had the opportunity, if you had somebody figuratively holding your hands and bringing you toward that?

Pete: If I was ready, and I really wanted to stop, that's the other thing people don't understand. We want to get better, but sometimes, like we're talking heroin only, it's very strong and controlling. Of course, I wanted to get help, but I had come, my last bid at Rikers Island was in September of 2000. From that day point, I haven't done any heroin.

Matt Katz: Pete, thank you very much for calling, and I'm glad you're clean and sober and safe. Deanna, that's an interesting caller. This program started before the Adams administration, but after Pete was on the streets of New York, clearly this supervised release is something that could potentially have helped him at the time. It's also part of the reason why there aren't 18,000 or whatever number of people at Rikers anymore. It's part of the reason why the population has decreased.

Deanna Logan: Agreed. And thank you, Pete, for coming on and being so vulnerable and candid about your experience because I think that is part of the things that people-- every day New Yorkers are not hearing, and they don't understand. People talk about being given an opportunity. You gave me an opportunity. When we're talking about people, like how Pete describes, who are in the throes of substance abuse, opportunity is not linear and neither is healing. It is a process.

People, as we know, we talk to our partners in the Office of Court Administration and in the mental health courts as well as in the drug treatment courts, it is a up-and-down process. People are going to have successes, they're going to move forward, but then they're going to have setbacks. Part of this is, how do you successfully support them as they're going through this healing process? I think for individuals who don't have that glimpse into substance disorders and/or mental health disorders, the way that it may be much more accessible to them is to think about personal griefs and losses.

The people who have lost a loved one and are grieving them, that process, too, is not linear. There will be days that are really days that you're up, you're moving, and you can just do the thing. Then there are going to be days that are really, really bad, and you can't move, you can't do the thing. What the case managers in the supervised release program helped to support are making sure that people know that there is somebody to help them in all of those things. As you know, New York City is a big city with a lot of bureaucracy and red tape.

I myself have gone, and just so that we're all clear, I am an attorney by trade. I have a jurist doctorate, and I've gone to certain places where I'm like, "Oh, my." It's taken me a good 30, 40 minutes to just figure out what the rules of engagement are and then navigate it. Now, think about doing that, and that's what I think about when we think about just the supports that we're giving people. Think about doing that when you're also battling substance abuse and your focus is someplace else on your own and navigating that. That is what supervised release is supposed to do.

Matt Katz: You're listening to the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Matt Katz and I'm filling in for Brian today. My guest is Deanna Logan. She's the director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. This is New York and New Jersey Public Radio. Let's go back to the phone lines if we could, Deanna. John in Woodside. Hi, John. Thanks for calling in.

John: Hi. It's my understanding that Bloomberg's approach to crime not only led to a steep decline in crime but to a cutting off the number of people in jail in half. Can you guess quote statistics on how well her approach is going?

Matt Katz: Deanna, tell us, are there statistics to indicate the effectiveness of supervised release in terms of reducing the jail population, in terms of helping people avoid arrest? I've heard criticism that there hasn't really been a study of this. It's just expanded and expanded because it seems like a good idea, but we don't necessarily know if that's the reason why the jail population has decreased and if it's had any effect on crime. Have there been any studies? Do you have any statistics to indicate the effectiveness of supervised release?

Deanna Logan: Yes. We actually review our numbers. What we did see was that 93% of the people who are going into supervised release are showing up for court. The purpose of supervised release, its main goal, is to have people return to court for their court dates. At least by the end of fiscal year '21, where we have good data, we saw that 93% of people return to court to answer their cases. We had 88% of people in FY22 that returned to court. We know that the jail population when you're talking about the Bloomberg years is significantly less than that.

The lowest jail population numbers happened in the height of COVID when we saw de-carceration efforts increase. MOCJ led a lot of the de-carceration efforts, getting our jail population down under 4,000 people incarcerated in jail. Many of those people were transitioned into our emergency reentry hotels where they received wrap-around services and did not see large numbers of rearrest for the populations who were going through many of the same types of supports that happened in supervised release as they were living in these emergency hotels.

We're now moving out of emergency, just like the population in the country. As we are moving out of crisis, we are transitioning into transitional housing, which again, will incorporate the same supports and many of the same connections for services that you have under supervised release for individuals that are in the transitional housing with the goal of ensuring that people are moving into more permanent housing. We know that our rearrest rates in FY24 was about 7-- we had no rearrest for 74% of the population that were in supervised release in FY21, and we saw that in FY22, we had no rearrest for 71% of the population.

People for the majority are being successful when they're getting the supports that they need to start building up themselves and changing their behavior.

Matt Katz: You mentioned 4,000 people at Rikers, so that was a low point. We're now back up to about 6,000. In order for the city to follow the law and close Rikers, as it's supposed to, by 2027, incarceration population has to be cut to like 3,300, almost in half. Does supervised release get us to that number? Is the city, is MOCJ doing anything else to reduce the population at Rikers in time for the 2027 deadline?

Deanna Logan: Everyone is working to make sure that we follow the law. Mayor Adams has made very clear that we are going to follow the law, and we are. We're working with all of our partners to, A, yes, make sure that people don't have to go into Rikers. If you don't add to the population, then it's not going to grow.

As we're looking at the people who are in custody, we worked with counsel, and we will continue to work with partners on a population review bill, which is Local Law 806 that got passed this year, where we will be reviewing individuals that are in custody to start being able to connect more people to resolution on their cases and/or move them out of the system by getting them connected to alternatives to incarceration that would, some include more programming that would be addressing substance abuse disorders that would put them in residential facilities, as well as thinking about those individuals that would benefit from going into programming that addresses mental health concerns.

On every front, we are using all of our tools as well as partners and strategies to work towards making sure we follow the law.

Matt Katz: I want to go back to the phone lines if I could. Let's go down to Florida. Roland in Tampa. Hi, Roland. Thanks for calling in.

Roland: Good morning. How are you?

Matt Katz: Good. Thank you.

Roland: Thank you very much. You guys at MOCJ are doing an incredible job. The mission statement is fantastic. We really got a close Rikers. My mother always -- she was Commissioner of Baltimore City, always said the Rikers was the world's largest facility for psychiatric and social problems and it was not supposed to be that. My question is on-

Matt Katz: I'm going to interrupt you, Roland, real quick. MOCJ is Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice in case folks who just listening-

Roland: I'm sorry, those of us who work at [chuckles] already get that.

Matt Katz: I got it.

Roland: The mission statement is great in organizational charts but some not-for-profits are not being paid the contractual funds that they do under contracts, the services that they perform on behalf of MOCJ. Sheltering Arms which was a derivative of agencies that were founded after the race riots in Manhattan during the civil war closed recently because they would do more than $2 million in reimbursement from the city for programs that they had performed in contract with the city but were not paid in time to their operating costs.

Just my question is that if these not-for-profits are contracting to do things that they can do and the city knows they can do and we're all on the same mission page, what are you guys doing to help make sure that we are being paid timely enough to carry out our financial obligations?

Matt Katz: Thank you, Roland. Deanna, do you want to respond to that?

Deanna Logan: Roland, thank you very much for that. That is absolutely something that we have been focusing on and as you know, working with our first Deputy Mayor and a lot of our partners at the Mayor's Office of Contracts Director Lisa Flores. We have been leveraging sister agencies to help us make sure that we are registering contracts on time so our partners can get paid on time. We are also doing a lot of capacity-building with our partners and education because part of that bureaucracy that I talked about when we're talking about grassroots organizations that are local that are doing this work.

Making sure that they understand the need for timely invoicing so that we can then process them all of the things move and unfortunately, the system sometimes move at a glacial pace but we are working to give better education and better tools so that when people understand how much time it takes to move an invoice, they're getting it into us as quickly and as timely as possible. Then we are committing our resources to ensure that we are processing those invoices as timely as possible to get them the cash in hand that they need. We have been able to make sure that people are getting advances once their contracts are registered.

Comptroller's Office is another great partner that has been working on just procurements and structures and has allowed us to come to them early before we've even put the contract in the system to talk to them about what it is and talk through and answer their questions in advance so that once they see that contract coming through the portal, they are in a much better place to move it faster and have moved it faster than the statutorily required 30 days for them to review. I hear you, you are not wrong and we understand that there are definitely challenges that were put upon partners that we need to remedy as a city and that we are.

Matt Katz: Deanna, thank you very much. We're going to leave it there today. My guest has been Deanna Logan, director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. Deanna, really appreciate you coming on the show. Hope we can talk again.

Deanna Logan: Oh, absolutely, thank you for having us and please feel free to reach out anytime.

 

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