Ed Rhine is the Deputy Director of the Office of Policy and Offender Reentry for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. He received his B.A. degree in Sociology from Ohio University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from Rutgers University. He has served in administrative positions in corrections in New Jersey and Georgia. He teaches part-time as an instructor in the Sociology Department at The Ohio State University.
Many people in the corrections field were critical of a report, written by Amy Solomon and colleagues at the Urban Institute, showing that parole supervision had little effect on re-arrest rates. What did you think of the report and the reaction it received?
What was exciting to me about Amy’s report was that she took a serious look at the right questions and framed what she found in terms of recommendations to the field. That’s why I was disappointed by the reaction of some people, because I thought it gave us a good opportunity to tease out lessons learned from failure. My response to Amy’s research was to work with the American Parole and Probation Association and the Editor of its journal called Perspectives to put out a special issue centering on this topic. Several of the articles pointed to the fact that we’re learning more about what makes offender supervision effective. Now Amy and I and others are about to put out a piece on how to reposition parole in the context of the larger commitment to reentry.
What accounts for the reaction of the field?
There are a couple of issues involved. One is ownership. There are a lot of things that influence recidivism that are out of the hands of parole. The problem is that people who are quick to say “don’t hold us accountable” come off sounding defensive. The second issue is more general. We can have 99 folks on parole who make it, but one individual who commits a horrendous act of violence can topple the entire edifice of corrections. It’s corrosive to practice and morale, even though we can predict time and again that it will happen.
Is there anything corrections can do in advance to inoculate itself against the fallout from inevitable tragedies?
It’s not easy. Todd Clear has a book called “Imprisoning Communities” in which he talks in one section about educating citizens that they don’t live in a risk-free world. The question is how you temper expectations. I think Connecticut, where there was a terrible incident involving two parolees, is a good example. My sense is that key stakeholders, including the Governor, were quite measured in terms of how they responded to the crisis. They took sensible steps to address the issue, rather than engineering a complete overhaul. You need to be working constantly with the Governor’s staff and people at the cabinet level to say, “We cannot guarantee that individual tragedies will not happen. But we must always be working to adopt strategies that contribute to community protection.”
What would you tell the Governor about what you’ve accomplished in Ohio?
If I had 30 seconds with the Governor, I would say that we’ve made a tenacious commitment to getting reentry right. I would be candid that we do not know the impact on recidivism yet, but that we’ve made changes in our information systems so that we can get reliable information and learn what our shortcomings are.
What have you learned?
We are keenly aware that more than 60 percent of our prison population comes in with less than 12 months to serve, and 50 percent of that cohort comes out in 6 months or less. We have over 2,000 offenders a year with less than 90 days to serve. We end up looking more like a defacto county jail system, not a prison system. In response, we’ve adopted more of a short-term offender approach for offenders serving twelve months or less, instead of trying to be all things to all people. Another interesting lesson we’ve learned is that we have too many programs. The dilemma we face is that we’re spread too thin, and we end up having gaps in delivery when staff move on or are promoted. We’re about to adopt a core set of evidence-based reentry programs, which is going to be a major change, since we have hundreds and hundreds of programs in place right now. From a strategic point of view, we’re clearly moving in the right direction. The question is going to be, when is this going to show up in our recidivism data? We’re showing a steady 38 or 39 percent return to custody over a three year period, a rate which hasn’t changed much in the last few years.
Are you hopeful about the direction the field is moving in generally?
I have a book in mind that I’ve started to outline called “Sobering Prospects: A Skeptical Affirmation of Prisoner Reentry.” I’ve spent close to 30 years in the field, and I’m cautiously optimistic that the paradigm in corrections is shifting to a more balanced and sensible take on the implications of prisoner reentry. We have 28,000 people coming back from prison every year in Ohio. That’s pretty sobering. I think the reentry dialogue has shifted the focus to where it belongs, which is how to better prepare people to return home to stay. While that brings me confidence, I am mindful of the enormous challenges we face. Even something like the Second Chance Act, which is a wonderful piece of legislation, includes language committing grantees to a 50 percent reduction in recidivism over a 5 year period. I think that’s ludicrous – it sets people up to fail. I worry about reentry imploding over this and the elevated expectations that seem to be associated with its continuing expansion across the corrections field.
You said earlier that it’s important to learn lessons from failure. What have you learned?
I think the issue that doesn’t get addressed sufficiently is the agonies of implementation. Assuming that the principles that drive effective correctional programming are present, it’s the critical ingredient to effective programming. So much has gone on in the field in the last 20 years, and there’s a body of research and literature that is very proscriptive in terms of how to do effective reentry programming. At the same time, there is a growing science of implementation that shows that when you do implementation well, you produce a greater treatment effect. People aren’t paying enough attention, if any, to this issue.