SPEAKER 1: Welcome to Justice Today, the official podcast of the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs, where we shine a light on cutting-edge research and practices and offering an in-depth look at what we're doing to meet the biggest public safety challenges of our time. Join us as we explore how funded science and technology help us achieve strong communities.
ANGEL SANCHEZ: Hello, everyone, I'm Angel Sanchez, a visiting fellow with the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Department of Justice. In my current role, I focus on improving corrections and reintegration and increasing access to higher ed for people inside and after prison. Today, I and my three guests are here at the NIJ 2023 Conference, which is a big deal, first conference in a very long time. And we just participated in a great panel focused on meeting people where they are. Today, I have with me Stephen Tripodi from Florida State University. I have Marina Duane, coming to us as a research fellow from the University of Chicago, and I have Dr. Dan O'Connell coming to us from the University of Delaware. Now, before we get started, Stephen, welcome.
STEPHEN TRIPODI: Thank you very much, Angel. It's quite an honor to be invited to be on the panel here at the NIJ Research Conference. I'm excited to talk more about the research that we presented in yesterday's symposium.
ANGEL SANCHEZ: Definitely looking forward to it. Marina, welcome.
MARINA DUANE: Thank you, Angel. Similar to Stephen, I'm honored to be here, and it's particularly exciting to be at the panel where we discuss meeting people where they are, instituting positive culture, and really giving people opportunities while they are incarcerated.
ANGEL SANCHEZ: And Dan.
DR. DAN O'CONNELL: Also glad to be here. Thank you for inviting us, we were super excited. When you're doing a panel presentation, you always run out of time at the end, and so when we found out we would have time to continue our discussion here, we were happy to oblige.
ANGEL SANCHEZ: Yeah, that's exactly what I was most excited about, as you all know and heard me share on the panel. You know, having gone to prison at the age of 16, that was my last arrest before, you know, after being in and out of the system as a teenager, you know, I served over 12 years in the system with the highest level of education available to me was a GED and ultimately was released on 12--after 12 years on 10 years' probation and homeless, with little reentry support. Thankfully, I was able to find a homeless shelter that received me, a community college that welcomed me, and that's where I began my prison-to-law school journey. Today, I'm a licensed attorney, but the reality is that all my successes, in reality, were not because of prison but rather in spite of it: in spite of the lack of support, the lack of benefits, the lack of encouragement and hope that one ought to find there, to—for one to turn their life around.
And so for me, it was habilitation for the first time. I came from a world where there wasn't mainstream society, so this post-prison experience was my first time being "habilitated" not rehabilitated. Now, we know that 95% of people are going to come home, and they're going to re-enter society. So it's not just in the individual's benefit to be prepared, to have been exposed to mainstream society, and to be a contributing member of society, but it's also in the public's interest. It increases public safety, it helps communities, and hopefully, starts breaking some generational barriers. To do that, however, we can't just wait for individuals to be getting out, and we can't just be focusing on those individuals that are getting out at the expense of the ones that have long-term or indefinite sentences, and are forced to stay in because carceral systems create carceral cultures. And whether those cultures are healthy and supportive of pro-social preparations is going to be determined by the kind of preparation opportunities people have inside. You all, in this panel, were able to present some research, talking about the benefits, the opportunities, and even the challenges of bringing these type of support services into an environment like a carceral setting which itself can become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
So to get us started, I want to give each of you a chance to briefly talk about the research you presented because I had the benefit of sitting through it and learning a lot from it, but I would love for the public to also get to hear about this. So Dr. Tripodi, I want to start with you. Could you share a little bit about your research--the research you conducted and some of the insights you've gleaned, and why you thought it was important to conduct this research?
STEPHEN TRIPODI: Of course. Thank you so much, Angel. And before doing that, I just want to say how much I benefitted from meeting you, Angel, yesterday, and how motivated I am by your story that you briefly shared here and we'll talk more about I'm sure. Having people with lived experiences add meaning to the research is so important to me, so thank you.
And I have been doing research with incarcerated people and or formally incarcerated people since my doctoral program in Austin, Texas back in 2007. I am very passionate about doing anything that I can to help individuals, families, communities impacted by the criminal justice system improve their lives in any way; very passionate about helping incarcerated people feel a little bit better at the end of the day, whatever that means; trying to improve conditions. And I have been working a lot on prisoner reentry and jail reentry, too, over the last handful of years.
This project that we're talking about here is led by Dr. Kerry Pettis, Dr. Tanya Ren, and myself. And we are implementing and evaluating a trauma-based program that includes community—programming for community stability for 18 to 35-year-old men released to, primarily, Jacksonville, Florida or Tallahassee, Florida. This project--the trauma-informed care project is called RISE, it stands for Resiliency In Stressful Experiences. It's a cognitive-behavioral-based program that's also present-centered, in that we do not ask the participants to talk about their specific lifetime traumatic events because we don't want to risk them being re-traumatized by talking about this, so it's a present-centered approach. And RISE has four different modules. The first module occurs while the research participants are still incarcerated. They have up to four sessions while incarcerated. The module one sessions focus largely on psychoeducation and stress reduction. Modules two through four take place in the community, after they're released from prison, and initially they work on emotional regulation and understanding their triggers, and how to respond to their triggers. Ultimately then, more regulation in module three, along with trauma processing and starting to work on housing and employment stability. And then in module four, they work on triggers, interpersonal skills, and maintaining positive trajectories.
This is a randomized controlled trial in which participants are randomized to either the group that gets RISE or to a treatment-as-usual control group. We have recruited over 400 participants thus far, and what--the preliminary results that we presented in this conference, this NIJ research conference, is looking at before intervention--looking at pre-test and post-test for those who, one, finish the in-prison portion of programming, and two, those who finish all of RISE programming. And we saw that those who finished in-prison RISE programming, those four sessions in prison, when they got out, we talked to them again approximately a month after they got out, and they had improvements in substance use disorder severity, impulsivity, coping, and hostility. So we're starting to see promise there in this correctional-based programming that the four of us have discussed, it's so important to able to provide--to be able to provide these services and improve their conditions in any way that we can. And then those that finish all of RISE programming improved their substance use disorder severity from baseline, which was measured before they started the programming in prison, to the secon
