County program lauded nationally

WEST CHESTER >> The woman sitting across from Jennifer Lopez was on a one-way road heading toward state prison.

A native of Chester County who had accrued three arrests for petty crimes over the years, the woman had been in and out of the county’s criminal justice system over and over again. All of her sentences had involved only probation, but because she continued to violate the terms of that court supervision, she’d gone back and forth to county prison so many times that it seemed there was a revolving door for her.

“Six years had turned into 20,” recalled Lopez, the deputy chief of the county’s Department of Probation, Parole and Pretrial Services, which oversees those convicted of crimes that call for sen-

tences served in the county, not the state, corrections system. Nothing seemed to work to set the woman — whose identity Lopez shielded out of confidentiality — on the straight path.

“We were going to send her to state prison,” Lopez said, knowing what that would have meant to the woman and her family, including her children.

But at this hearing, held sometime in the mid-2010s, the woman’s daughter was allowed to sit in and participate. The girl, realizing the situation, told the probation officials involved to stop looking at the files that detailed the woman’s probation history and instead see her for who she was. People she loved had been murdered; she’d been subjected to physical and sexual abuse as a child, and domestic abuse as an adult. She’d lived in poverty and been a teenage mother, and like others used alcohol and drugs to mask the impact of all that tragic history.

“I began to see all these layers,” Lopez told a reporter. The woman was not so much a criminal as a victim of her environment — like the addicts Lopez and her colleague in the county’s Drug Court system that had been successful keeping them away from criminal behavior by

erasing the use of drugs and alcohol that led them into the courthouse in the first place. “I knew we needed to do better.”

What Lopez and others in the probation department came up with is the “trauma-informed” approach to dealing with women who find themselves in the criminal justice system.

Called Women’s Reentry Assessment and Programming (WRAP), it began with state grant funds in 2014. To date, more than 100 woman have taken part in the prison- and community-based programs it offers, and the county has seen the recidivism rate among female offenders drop by more than 60 percent.

Last month, it was announced that the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University had recognized the initiative as part of the 100 programs named as semifinalists in this year’s Innovations in American Government Awards national competition.

The WRAP initiative will compete to be named a finalist in the competition and have the chance to be awarded the $100,000 grand prize in Cambridge, Mass., this spring.

WRAP advanced from a pool of more than 500 applications from all 50 states, and was selected by the program

evaluators as an example of novel and effective action whose work has had significant impact, and which they believe can be replicated across the country and the world, according to a news release issued by the county commissioners.

“Statistics show that women are often sentenced to short periods of incarceration causing chaos and disruption in their lives without any real opportunity to address the cause of their crimes,” said Chester County Commissioners’ Chairwoman Michelle Kichline. “The WRAP program is transforming a male-centric justice system to one of connections and interventions that respect the life experiences women bring to the system.

“WRAP’s holistic and gender-specific approach is not only innovative, but it is highly successful. We’re pleased that an organization as esteemed as Harvard University’s Ash Center has recognized this innovation too,” Kichline said.

Added commissioners’ Vice Chairwoman Kathi Cozzone, “WRAP women are staying out of jail because the strategies and practices that respond to the traditional prison conditions are adjusted. For the first time in our system, trauma conditions are routinely screened and trauma-informed supervision and training is incorporated. Because of adjustments

like this, the women are empowered to change, grow and heal.

“WRAP is a program that is so easily replicated,” Cozzone added. “We are pleased that it is being recognized nationally and hope that communities throughout the nation will see the value of adopting it.”

And Commissioner Terence Farrell said, “One of the roles of Harvard’s Ash Center is to foster creative and effective government problem solving. The WRAP initiative has been proven to effectively reduce recidivism and probation/ parole violations for women in Chester County, and can certainly help to solve the problem of increased incarceration of women throughout the U.S.”

The WRAP initiative was launched in January 2014 following extensive research to meet the needs of women who have been incarcerated, who were struggling for basic survival or who were lacking in skills to transition back into family life. The program began with 50 women, working with one probation officer trained in motivational interviewing and trauma-informed approaches.

In two years, WRAP has expanded to the current census of 149 women, using three probation officers, two full-time community case managers and curriculums and tools that address women’s risk factors, one titled “Moving

On,” and the other “Self.” Both are offered not only in the county prison, but in the community as well, said Lopez.

The early parole of program graduates has reduced jail time for women by more than 1,500 days. Because of WRAP, arrest rates for women for new criminal charges have decreased by 61 percent since the start of the project, and technical violations of community supervision have decreased by 72 percent.

WRAP was developed with replication in mind and all aspects are easily transferable to any jurisdiction, a key component of the Innovations in American Government Awards competition.

“These programs demonstrate that there are no prerequisites for doing the good work of governing,” said Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in American Government Program at the Ash Center. “Small towns and massive cities, huge federal agencies and local school districts, large budgets or no budgets at all — what makes government work best is the drive to do better, and this group proves that drive can be found anywhere.”

Lopez said that the issue of how trauma in all its forms affects those who pass through the criminal justice system is now a central part of each probation staffer’s training. The impact differs between

women and men, but in its forms it can help deal with the notion of why offenders continue to repeat their past mistakes.

A probation official for 26 years, Lopez has seen the system begin to adjust away from the mechanism of dealing with probation violators simply by locking them up and instead looking towards ways of preventing further crime or violations.

With WRAP, she said, “It was time we needed to start listening to what (women in the system) needed. We didn’t listen in the 1970s, and the biggest thing is understanding the trauma. We started assessing offenders for trauma, and I was horrified by what these woman have gone through. These women have survived. They are resilient beyond belief. The fact that they are still standing and trying to move forward is just amazing.”

And the woman whose daughter demanded that Lopez and her colleague see past the files? She was give probation instead of prison and now frequents the office with hugs and kisses for those who are helping her.

“She is still struggling,” Lopez said. “But for 20 years she had been in prison at least once a year. It’s been three years now, and not once has she been back to jail. She sees the system as an ally now, rather than an enemy.”