Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Innovation and Criminal Justice in Wisconsin  Walter Dickey  3/24/13 UP852  cc >> Good afternoon, I'm Emily Aurbach and thanks for coming out this afternoon for the talk that's part of Eloquence and Eminence, emeritus faculty lectures. This series is in its nineteenth year, and features UW facility that are retired but are known for their teaching excellence and scholarly research. We are sponsored by the division of Continuing Studies, the Institute on Aging and the Anonymous Committee. This afternoon we are being taped by Wisconsin Public Television for later broadcast on University Place so I will at this time ask if you would please turn off you cell phones. My favorite cell phone story is that during my son's wedding, right when the minister asked for the ring, the phone rang. It was in the best man's pocket. So I think for all our sake, we turn the cell phones off. Following today's talk there will be cookies and punch in the lobby, and a chance to talk informally with our speaker, and with each other. I hope you join us next month for the final talk in this year's Eloquence and Eminence series. Professor Richard Knowles, emeritus professor of English will, on April 28th, be speaking about Shakespeare at APT, past and future. 

If you're not on our mailing list, if you don't receive this Eloquence and Eminence brochure, please leave us your name and address or e-mail address on the form outside in the lobby by the brochures. I've also left out some invitation to the tenth anniversary graduation ceremony for the UW Odyssey Project which is a free college humanities course for adults near the poverty level. It's a great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Professor Walter Dickey. Professor Dickey was a member of the law faculty from 1976 until his retirement in 2011. For much of that time, he was faculty director of the Remington Center of which the Innocence Project is a part. The center has provided thousands of law students with the opportunity to provide service, do research, and gain experience in criminal justice. He also served as the director of corrections from 1983 to 1987 and is federal monitor of the supermax prison at Boscobel. He has taught and written extensively about criminal justice issues. Professor Dickey's talk today is entitled Innovation in Criminal Justice: The Wisconsin Approach. Please welcome Professor Walter Dickey. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> Thanks very much for being here. Thanks very much for having me. This is a subject dear to my heart, and I'm honored with the opportunity to talk with you a little bit about it. I think there is a very distinct Wisconsin approach to criminal justice. Though, it would be inaccurate for me to lay claim to being the originator of it. I think if you think of it as a kind of tree, the trunk of the tree is really made up of Frank Remington, Margo Melli, and Herman Goldstein, three members of the faculty who were here when I joined the faculty and were profoundly influential in my own personal development but I think, more importantly, profoundly influential in shaping education, research, and service in the criminal justice field. And as I said, if there is a tree as a way of thinking about it, they're the trunk, and I feel like I'm one tiny branch that sort of use the principles that I learn from them, sometimes in ways that are distinct, sometimes in ways that sort of imitate a lot of the work that they did. But, as I said, I owe them profound thanks. I think we all do because they've really shaped this field in ways that I think are enormously constructive. Among the things that I learned from them was about my responsibility to what I've come to see as my clients. 

You might say, well, who are your clients? And, actually, I think of it, as a faculty member at a public university, as being a pretty long list. First of all, there are law students. After all, this is a professional school. We're in the education business, and we obviously have a very strong obligation to our students. Obviously other academics. If we want to develop the field, contribute to its understanding, we have obligations to them. But some of the things that I think are distinct about Wisconsin really are our belief that we have obligations to policymakers, governors, legislators, congresspeople. To executives, police executives, wardens, correctional officials. Obviously to prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, members of the legal profession. And we have an obligation to try to assist them and help them do better what they are charged with doing. 

So one way of thinking about what we've tried to do is to develop knowledge and bring it to bear on behalf of our clients, obviously in close partnership with them because it can't be done any other way in the hope that the system can be a better one as a result of our work with it. Now, I think it sort of asks the question, how do you go about doing that? How do you develop useable knowledge that's a value to those multiple, and in some ways diverse, clients? And here, let me sort of pause and tell you a little story. When I was a first-year faculty member, I think it was, I can see myself standing on University Avenue with Frank Remington, and I offered to him the idea that I was going to write an article about second degree murder. Second degree murder in Wisconsin, like about everywhere else, is called depraved mind or depraved heart murder. It's very badly drafted, not very well understood, sort of begging for clarification, and it seemed to me that I knew something about it and might add something to our understanding of what it was and how it might be reformed. And Frank said to me in a very kind sort of way that the number of people who could make substantial contributions by reading law books and thinking deep thoughts were few. He was too kind to say, and you're not one of them. [LAUGHTER] But that was the pretty clear implication. And what he said by way of follow-up was, better to go out into the world and to develop new knowledge by observation of that world and then to come back and think about the relationship of what I've observed to the already developed knowledge, and try and explore its significance. That was probably in 1976 or 1977. 

Four or five years ago, and I thought a lot about that over the years, about Frank's advice, really took it to heart, explored its meaning, and I wrote the following, which I think is maybe a more precise and developed explication of what he was really conveying to me about what I should do with my career. I wrote, "With knowledge of the accepted wisdom about intractable problems, search out new knowledge, previously undiscovered facts, previously missed connections between facts, and by an active imagination, place that new knowledge in revealing relationship to what is thought to be already known. The path to value for a law professor, at least law professors having capacities and deficiencies like mine, runs through the closely observed world by way of the active imagination." In a sense, that sort of sums up what I thought I've been doing all these years. Now, that's pretty abstract, so let me see if I can't illustrate it with a few very concrete examples. Just one other thing, in the sort of theoretical sense by way of introduction is to say this is a form of action research. That is to say, it's research that is devoted towards solving the problem and is loyal to the action as opposed to some hypothesis or theory. The way I think about it is I've engaged in a lot of probes in the world, and those probes have elicited information, but in a sense they've also disturbed the world, which in turn results in an alteration of it, which in turn generates new facts, change that itself has to be observed and taken into account. So let me quickly, actually sort of backwards, go through three illustrations to try to make these points a little bit more concrete and really talk about sort of what we've tried to do. And I'll start with one more recent one and then end up with some observations about the Remington Center, which I think is probably the most important stuff that I've been involved in. The first one I think of as what I call the problem of Chicago and Lake. 

About a dozen years or so ago I was asked by the United States Department of Justice to make myself available to jurisdictions that were trying to develop new approaches to prosecution. This was called community prosecution, and it really was not very well defined at the time. I think it's better defined now in ways that I'll explain. But the basic idea was business as usual. Prosecuting the cases that the police bring to us was not a satisfactory deployment of our resources if what we wanted was safety and justice. And jurisdictions were themselves involved in probes, and I went all over the country. Minneapolis is only one of the places, that's where Chicago and Lake is, Indianapolis, Oregon, Boston, lots of places where we tried to help jurisdictions think about what they were doing differently. And Minneapolis, at that time, had a woman who was the district attorney, Amy Klobuchar, she's now the senator, very thoughtful person, and she asked us to go up there and work with the prosecutors to police the community members because one of the problems that they had decided to undertake, as I said, what I thought of as the problem of Chicago and Lake. Chicago and Lake is an intersecting streets on the south side of Minneapolis. And it was a place that was once vibrant. 

Not too far from the Honeywell campus. There remains a big bus terminal on the corner. Actually, it abutted the street because this was a major north/south transfer point. Actually, one of the largest, I think the largest Sears warehouse in the world was located very nearby. It had been closed and abandoned and was now the scene of all kinds of criminal activity. A lot of drug deals, prostitution, and a lot of what follows from that kind of activity, a magnet for people trying to steal from those who are in these kinds of places. As I said, once vibrant, I think that may not be fair to it. There was a lot of economic activity, a hospital nearby. Though, the place was obviously deteriorating. And the question was what to do to make this a safer place. 

And I think it's fair to say that the criminal justice folks were not satisfied with simply reliance on arrest, prosecution, and conviction of all of those that they might capture who had committed offenses in this area because I think their experience had been that reliance on those kinds of interventions really hadn't yielded very much in the way of public safety. So we worked, and I by no means want to take credit for all the ideas that emanated at what came to be called the Phillips Partnership. But let me just tell you some of the things that evolved as part of the sort of strategic thinking with community members, police agencies, community groups, and others in the area. First of all, we got the Sears warehouse torn down because it simply was a place that nothing good was happening in. And if anything was going to make a difference here in terms of this magnet problem, we were going to have to do away with that. Secondly, the bus station, because it brought so many people in such density into this area and therefore was also a magnet for people victimizing them for other kinds of activity, it needed to be moved off the street so that the buses could pull in so that you didn't have the concentration of people and so that the police could actually patrol during moments of high density in an effort to try to make sure that a lot of the criminal activity didn't occur that had been going on. The hospital was really worried. In fact, the hospital was thinking about moving in part because their employees didn't feel safe, and they're actually losing employees. And they decided to devote themselves, at least temporarily, to try to work with the Phillips Partnership to try to make this a safer place. And they decided that they were going to try to make available housing for their employees in the area, underwrite loans and mortgages and the like, because they thought if they could bring those folks into the area to live, they would benefit because they'd have employees who were reliable and there, and who actually were committed to the hospital and to their careers there and were committed to the place. 

In terms of just flat out more typical criminal justice activity, one of the things that we suggested we needed to think about and look at was if there are a lot of arrests going on here, who's actually being arrested? And what we discovered when we looked at that question was that an awful lot of the people being arrested were people on probation and parole. And they had been drawn to this area because, in a sense, there are vulnerable victims available to them, and they were trying to take advantage of those vulnerable victims. So what we did was we decided to make as conditions of supervision of those offenders this a no-go area, meaning they weren't allowed to come to this area around Chicago and Lake. But the problem really was how to enforce that. And the reason there was an enforcement problem was Minneapolis, like most jurisdictions in the United States, had what are called dispersed caseloads in probation and parole. Just like Wisconsin, just like every place else. The first case that gets probation this agent gets, next one the next agent gets, next one the next agent gets until all the agents have got a case, and then they go back to the first agent and then that first case goes there. So the agent's caseload is dispersed all over the city or the county, depending upon the jurisdiction. Actually, in Wisconsin we pioneered changes in that approach to probation and parole. Instead of having dispersed caseloads, we gave agents  responsibilities for neighborhoods and for areas. 

We tried to connect them to community groups. Had them concentrate their attention in particular areas and not be all over the city spending their time running from here to here to there but actually feeling a responsibility for a place. Well, actually, this was where the sort of bureaucracy of corrections proved a little bit difficult, but we eventually overcame their resistance to changing the way they are organized and got a couple of parole agents assigned to this area and assigned to a lot of things to do but among them to enforce the no-go area so that we could try to have fewer people who obviously were being drawn to it for the wrong kinds of reasons there. And who, frankly, could make exceptions to those kinds of rules because there are obviously legitimate reasons why people on probation and parole might be in this area, and unless you had some knowledge about it, you could not, in any sort of sophisticated way, make the kinds of exceptions that ought to be made. Well, again I won't go on too long about it, but there was an enormous reduction in the amount of crime in the area. Although, I would not define public safety as a reduction in crime. One of the things I'd come to learn over the years is that public safety is actually a condition in which we live and free to go about our business, free of victimization and the fear of victimization. And what we wanted to create in this area was just that. A place where people could come and go and be free of victimization and the fear of it and by coming and going, themselves create public safety. This is an example of what we've called trying to use naturally occurring forces to create public safety because of our view that the criminal justice system is actually a fairly puny productor of public safety and that public safety is much more function of informal forces, these kinds of naturally occurring forces to which I've obviously just made reference. 

Maybe I could sort of put this in counterpoint to an experience unfortunately I had in Milwaukee which came to be known as the problem of 9th and Concordia. I was asked to go to a public meeting in Milwaukee, and the public meeting had to do with an area around the corner of 9th and Concordia, a very high crime area. All kinds of problems. I won't go into it in any great detail. But I attended the meeting, ostensibly because they thought they wanted my help in trying to figure out how to make this a safer place. And at the beginning of the meeting a community police officer got up and he talked about how unsafe it was and how they were doing two things. One was they were making a lot of arrests. They'd made 94 in a three-month period, which is a pretty high number. That's one a day in a fairly concentrated area. And they were seeking two-year minimum prison sentences in every case because this is basically low level drug dealing or stuff associated with that. 

Well, I asked the officer the question, as a result of these 94 arrests in the last three months, how safe is it? And his answer was, well, we, meaning the police, try not to go there. Why? Because it's so unsafe. And I said, it seems to me, if that's true, business as usual, more of the same, isn't really likely to yield the kind of solution that we want here, and we've really got to start to think more expansively about it. Now, again, that was the wrong political moment to suggest anything but more arrests and more prison sentences in Milwaukee, at least insofar as Milwaukee politics were concerned, because that was viewed as liberal and all this other kind of stuff, and they really didn't want to think about the problem in any way other than the way they were thinking about it. And, I'm sorry to say, that's been my experience with Milwaukee. Although, I think recently the new district attorney there, for example, police chief have certainly changed and improved that. But I put that in contrast to my Chicago and Lake point. Again, to make the point that the criminal justice system as a producer of public safety bringing to bear its traditional instruments, arrest, prosecution, and conviction, really is a relatively puny sort of instrument if what we want is this condition to which I made reference. That's one of the reasons I think measures such as arrest, prosecution, and conviction aren't necessarily indicators of public safety because obviously 9th and Concordia had plenty but very little in the way of what I'd call safety. And that really played a role at the corner of Chicago and Lake, but actually it was the invocation of naturally occurring forces and other kinds of guardianship, another idea that we've developed that I think produced much more public safety. 

The second illustration I'd like to talk about here is what is called the Wisconsin Idea Seminar. I'll tell you how this developed. I worked with the jury instructions committee for many years and we tried to draw up jury instructions that were understandable so that judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendants, juries obviously would know what it was they were supposed to be finding if they're in situations in which jury instructions came into play. And I used to go up and advise the jury instruction committee. We used to meet monthly. And one of the things that I noticed was that when we went out to lunch or when we had dinner, had a drink before dinner and stuff like that, the judges invariably, invariably, turned the conversation to sentencing. And it was clear as you listened to the judges talk about sentencing that this was the most difficult thing that they did. They were looking for advice, feedback, hence they're putting this into play in all these informal conversations to a great extent because they felt constrained when they went to their home jurisdictions to talk about it. There was who are they going to talk about it to? The lawyers, etc, are all people who are going to appear before them. They can't necessarily seek advice from them. 

Now they're in a setting in which they could get advice, and so they used to talk to each other about it. So what we decided to do was to get, or try to, we succeeded to get a grant from the United States Department of Justice to put on what we call the Wisconsin Idea Seminars. And what these were devoted to was to try and provide guidance to judges at sentencing. And what we did was we got judges, very good ones, we got prosecutors, we got defense attorneys, we got corrections officials, and we got law students, and we had a series of seminars over the course of about three years in an open-ended, somewhat open-ended sort of way in which we're going to try and figure out how we could provide greater guidance and assistance to judges as they went about sentencing. Now, understand that at this moment Wisconsin has got a purely indeterminate sentencing system that's very low or non-existent minimums, very high maximums, and enormous discretion for the judge to set the sentence within those low minimums and high maximums. Now, at that time, and it continues to be so, "guidance," came in a couple of different forms. One of the forms of guidance are what we call grid guidelines. The federal sentencing system or federal sentencing guidelines are classic illustration of a numerical system that tries to give advice, I use that word loosely because I have such contempt for this system, to judges about sentencing. It tends to be a very clerically driven, grossly unfair sort of system. You'll just have to take my word for it. 

I could explain why, but that was a sort of form of guidance. A second form of guidance were historical facts. Historical facts meaning what judges have done in the past with offenders who look like this one. That's obviously useful information. A good starting point, but in and of itself, there are so many variations, etc, that it doesn't necessarily provide a lot of guidance. Although, it provides some, and, in an interactive sort of way, one could actually learn, make greater inquiry about those cases. A third way that guidance was given is what I would call factors to be considered. And what factors to be considered really means is over the years the Supreme Court has said the following factors are probably considered at sentencing. They tend to be either aggravating or mitigating. And a judge in sentencing would go through the list and say I've considered all these factors and the sentence is whatever the sentence is. 

Now, we started these seminars, and I have to say the students played a really important role in them because in some ways students can ask questions that faculty members and other can't ask, and because we had an ongoing seminar with the students in which we talked about our experience with the judges and prosecutors, etc, they were really very well prepared, did a lot of research so that when we actually had the quarterly, or so, meetings they could really inquire of the judges, press them, and I think on the whole proved enormously helpful. But we started out actually thinking we knew the direction that the seminars were going to take. We worked with judges in other situations, Delaware, Alabama, and a couple of other states. And in those interactions, what we discovered was for the most part what the judges wanted were what I came to call exemplary sentences in archetypal or difficult cases. And by that, I mean almost every judge in this group had been called upon to sentence the social studies high school teacher who is an otherwise solid citizen but got drunk at the Christmas party and killed somebody or injured somebody in their car as they were driving home. The second time burglar. The low level thief. The pedophile. We could obviously go on. And what we thought the judges were going to want were, as I said, exemplary sentences, meaning we would take these cases and we would talk through with this very thoughtful and informed group what they thought the right sentence would be in the Wisconsin system. 

And that would be a kind of starting point or a benchmark. We'd explain why these factors led to this or that or the other thing. And a judge sentencing a burglar or a pedophile or whomever the case may be would be able to make reference to this exemplary sentence, not follow it, copy it, whatever, but use it as a starting point, understanding reasoning in it, and see why the case before them was like this or not like this, in what ways being not like it would lead them to do one thing or another, and, in a sense, develop a whole system of guidance around, as I said, this idea of the exemplary sentence. Now, these had proved quite useful and quite popular in other states. And let me stress here the need for guidance. I said a minute ago Wisconsin had this system that gave enormous discretion to judges, still does in the Truth in Sentencing area, although it's even worse in some ways now than it was then. Worse in the sense that their discretion is unconstrained and actually has a more profound impact on the execution of the sentence. And there's certainly a need to do what I would call bring the rule of law to bear on sentences. Because otherwise sentences seem to be the product of instinct, the product of politics. These points were made quite profoundly. 

We had really thoughtful judges in this seminar. One of the judges, a judge from Stevens Point, at one moment said when I sentence somebody and the person is standing before me, I give a speech and then a number comes out of my mouth, and I don't know what the relationship is between the speech and the number. Another judge from Milwaukee was prompted by that to say, here's how sentencing feels to me. I sit in court, the prosecutor gives a speech, the defense lawyer gives a speech, I give a speech, and then the guy goes to prison. And, in a sense, I think what we came to realize was these judges felt that they, well, I mean, let me say one other thing that came up in the discussions. One of the questions that was asked was, what role does media attention play in your sentencing? And the judges, to a person, acknowledged that the notoriety of the case and the attention of the media to the sentence influenced the sentence that they imposed. To which the defense lawyer said, we all know that, that's why we try to get our sentencings scheduled for Friday afternoon because the chances are on Friday afternoon the press is out on the golf course rather than in the courtroom, and we're much more likely to get a fair sentence. Well, it turned out what the judges were looking for wasn't exemplary sentences, but, rather, what they were looking for was what I think of now as the application of law to the sentencing decision. That is, an analytical interaction of facts and law and reasoning to a conclusion about what the appropriate sentence would be. I say that because out of this seminar we developed a whole approach to sentencing called the Rule of Law approach. 

It was adopted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It's been adopted in many other places. But the basic sort of idea behind it, I could elaborate at great length, is just to say this: the starting point for thinking about a sentence ought to be with a question of purpose. What is the purpose of the sentence? I would say there are only two purposes. One of them is public safety, and the other one is just punishment. And the public safety realm one is prompted to ask the question, what is it that we're afraid of from the person who is before us? Second question that has to be asked is, what are the strategies or instruments available to me to achieve that purpose? This is one of the ways that we defer, some people, for example, would say rehabilitation is a purpose of sentencing. We would say rehabilitation is an instrument that can achieve public safety, but it's only one instrument and it has to be looked at in connection with the other available instruments in deciding to what extent we ought to rely on it in a particular case. After thinking about what the purpose is, after thinking about what the available instruments are, the judge has got to come to a draw conclusion about the plausibility of the various instruments available to them to achieve the purpose that they've identified as proper. In law terms, you might think of that as the burden of proof. Which one is the most plausible? One of the things that this method, and I've greatly simplified it, leads you to realize is that what matters in the sentence is its content. 

One can consider whether remaining in the community, for example, is a plausible way of achieving the purpose. One can ask whether going to prison is a way of achieving the purpose. Which is more plausible of the two? Should it be some combination, etc. and what it leads you to realize is the question of duration, instead of being the first question, actually out to be the last question because when you've identified what strategy you think is the most plausible, why you think it's most likely to achieve the desired result, what the content of the sentence ought to be, now you can make a judgment about how much of it, how long you need it, in order to achieve the desired outcome. Well, again, I've said we've oversimplified here, but this is an idea that really took hold in a lot of places. One of the consequences of it was the United States Department of Justice put on a series of what were called executive sessions. They were held here at Wisconsin and at Harvard. And these executive sessions were thought to bring together people who were the most knowledgeable of sentencing and corrections in the hope that we could develop better approaches and ideas about how we sentence and how corrections operate. And this method that I've just very quickly described to you became a prominent product of the work of those executive sessions because they were very well received by the people who were there, more publicized. Actually, I think probably were better received in the United Kingdom than they were in the United States. Although, there have been a variety of different states that have, in one form or another, tried to adopt this approach to sentencing. 

Again, I say that to make the point this is an effort to solve a problem, and in solving the problem develop knowledge and usable knowledge of a kind that's useful to one of the audiences or clients that we think we should be trying to serve. Finally, I want to talk about the legal assistance program or the Remington Center. I've probably gone on a little bit too long here about the others, and this really is the one that I think probably I should have featured more than any. You may know it, Emily, in her introduction, mentioned the Innocence Project. Actually, we've got a bunch of different projects. The Innocence Project is one of them. We've got a restorative justice project. We've got a family law project. We've got a reintegration project, an appeals project, a federal project, a prosecution project, a defense project. We've got about 160 or 170 law students in full-time internships during the summertime, most of them in prisons but others in other settings. 

And I want to tell you a little bit about what the theory of that is and how it came about because I think the story of how it came about really informs much of what I've said to you already. The program actually began with no reference to legal services at all. What I just talked about in terms of projects all sound like legal services, and they all are, but, actually, it started out because Frank Remington believed that future lawyers needed to know how the criminal justice system operated. And he said if prison is the medicine we're prescribing, we sure as heck ought to know what the effect on the patient is of prison. And he got some money together and got students placed in the prisons, not as law students, but for a summer as the assistant phy ed instructor, the assistant librarian, the assistant social worker. And the idea was not to provide legal services, the idea was to observe and interact and understand. Well, it didn't take too long before a staff member came to one of those law students and said there's an inmate who needs some legal help, would you give it to him, thinking that a law student ought to be prepared to do that. And what the social worker actually asked the law student to do was to draw up papers that would permit him to give permission to his daughter to get married because his daughter was under the age of majority, and at that time you needed the written permission of one parent, and he wanted to give his daughter that permission. Well, it didn't take long before we started to think, well, maybe what we ought to do is try to make legal services available to the inmates, and we did it in a very indeterminate sort of way. This is a time at which the definition of the legal problems of inmates, pretty much in the legal world, has to do with conditions of confinement. 

Due process before you get disciplined. Whether or not your mail can be opened. Freedom of religion sorts of questions. All obviously very important questions, but they're the kinds of things I think you'd expect lawyers would identify as the kind of legal problems that they could help inmates with.  Our idea was to be much more open-ended. And what we decided to do was to try to see every new inmate who came into the prison system and give them what we called a legal physical. We called it the diagnostic interview. And instead of saying to them, was your mail opened before you got it, we asked them whether or not we could be of help, and we provided them with prompts. I say we provided them with prompts because realize most of the inmate's experience with lawyers has always resulted with them going to jail or prison. That's how they think about lawyers. 

I had the effrontery to write an article for which I was criticized when I came up for tenure in which I asserted lawyers were actually members of a helping profession. And the person who was reviewing me for tenure said, you've got to be kidding. And I don't think the inmates saw us as members of a helping profession either, but we thought there's great opportunity in capacity to be members of a helping profession. So, when I say we did a diagnostic interview, we asked questions such as: how's your family? Have they got any problems since you're in prison? We asked very specific questions like, did you work before you came to prison? Answer: yes. Did you file your income tax for the year? No. Did you have money deducted? Yes. Have you got a W-2? No. If we got you a W-2, would you like to file because there's a chance you might get a refund? Yes. Well, we're going to try and get you W-2, get the name of the company, help the guy file because, obviously, even a small amount of money is useful to the guy in prison. We came to refine our views of this and started to think of what we were trying to do with these people in institutions as have them at peace with the legal system. 

And when I say at peace with the legal system, I mean a variety of different things. One was if they were fairly and justly convicted, we wanted them to know that. Secondly, if they weren't, if they had a beef or had a claim of innocence, we wanted to explore that and put it to rest one way or the other. But we wanted them to be at peace with the legal system in other ways. We wanted them to have gotten credit for the time they spent in the county jail. If they had support obligations, we wanted to have a schedule for them to fulfill those support obligations so that when they went back out into the street they had made some contributions, however modest, to the welfare of their kids and could continue to do so without sort of breaking them. As I said, we wanted them at peace with the legal system in part because if the prison had anything good for them, we thought they were going to be much better at receiving whatever it was the prison that'd be good for them if I said they were at peace with the legal system, and we thought when they went out, if they were at peace with the legal system, they were much less likely to do something that was going to get them in trouble and back into prison. To a great extent, we promoted the idea that legal services are just like psychological services and are just like medical services. They're just as vital to the inmate. They're, frankly, just as vital to the institution, and, therefore, they ought to be supported in ways that would, as I said, have the inmates be at peace with the legal system. 

As I said, this was a probe into the world. We didn't know very much about it. I'm now starting to talk about our much more refined ideas. So, when I say we have a reintegration project, we have a project that tries to help guys make sure that they're at peace with the legal system just before they go out. We have an innocence project devoted to pursuing those people who have got plausible claims of innocence. We've got an appeals project that tries to help them when they're appealing their case. We've got a family law project because so many people in institutions, men and women, have got family law issues, and we want to have those kinds of matters resolved. Now, as I said, a probe of a very general kind actually now has become much more refined. It started out with a half a dozen students, and Frank and I now, as I said, we've got 160 or 170 students in the program at any one time, summer, spring, fall, all year round, they're in full-time internships during the summer. But among the things we were trying to do obviously was to learn about the situation of inmates, and we've learned an enormous about it and about the legal system. 

We've written, not me, the people who direct the Innocence Project have learned about claims of innocence, about why the system makes errors, have tried to correct those kinds of errors in the system so that people are not wrongly convicted. So, we've obviously tried to develop useable knowledge. We've obviously also tried to educate law students because the primary instruments of all the things that I've been talking about are students going to the prisons every week, dealing with the inmates, trying to solve these kinds of problems. In saying that, I say not only that we think we've educated law students, but we've learned a lot about how law students learn. We've learned the value of experiential education. We've learned that an awful lot of what we're trying to do in classrooms can be done in other settings and be enriched by the context of these real life and human problems. We've learned that different people learn in different kinds of ways, and the more variety of opportunities we can afford students to learn, the more likely they are to learn. And, in a sense, we've asked ourselves the question, how do you know when somebody has learned something? The students are all writing their exams, now they're typing their exams, but obviously one of the tests of learning in the situations that I'm talking about is in execution. That is to say, if you use the analogy to dance or the piano, we're not asking the students to comment on how to play the piano, we're trying to teach them to play the piano. And in a professional school, that seems to us to be profoundly important. 

And obviously knowing the law in the books but knowing the context, knowing the people, and having to interact in ways that enrich the sort of context and situations seems to us to be vital, at least for the kind of learning that we're hoping these students will do. I say the kind of learning we're hoping these students will do, what is it we're trying to help them learn? More than anything, we're still back at Frank's starting point. We want them to understand how the criminal justice system works, and we think that by immersing them in this system and providing them with guidance, opportunities to reflect, classes, etc, they're likely to learn far more than they otherwise might. We think we're educating future leaders and we think if they've got the kind of knowledge that they're going to gain here, they're going to be much more effective as judges, lawyers, prosecutors, but also members of congress, members of the legislature, etc. But, I have to say, this thinking about what it is you want them to learn has very much animated everything I've done because one of the thoughts that's prompted by the kind of work that our students have done is this question about what's the role of the lawyer in our society. And it prompts you to ask, what's your obligation to the client? What's your obligation to others? To victims? What's you obligation to the society at large? And if you think about the sort of array of possibilities to whom you owe obligations as a sort of universe in which there are a lot of planets, obviously there's gravitational pull by some planets, the client, who rightly has more gravitational pull in most situations than any of the other planets, but the other planets have got some gravitational pull too and should. In some situations, they've got even greater gravitational pull. And, therefore, at its most basic point, it seems to me, one is afforded the opportunity to think about how one ought to approach one's clients and what one's obligations are to them and how those obligations interact with, to use one word, the obligations that one has to others. Now, you may think, well, yeah the clients, inmates, they're a very identifiable group, and, without doubt, they're a group of clients to whom we have felt profound obligations. But remember, as I said a few minutes ago at the outset of this little talk, that I view our clients as far more than those clients or law students. 

I mentioned governors and legislators and policymakers and prison wardens and the like. And while you might not think so, all of those clients have some things in common. Let me read to you very briefly and very quickly something I wrote about all those clients and how we think we should interact with them. "Many are reluctant to acknowledge their need for assistance. They're constrained by their circumstances and capacities, by a lack of clarity about objectives, by uncertainty about how to best pursue their objectives and the likely outcome might be if pursuing them in a particular way. Perhaps most significantly, they are subject to the grind of every day life which limits the remarkable human capacity to develop systematic knowledge about problems, to imagine plausible responses, and to conceive in way the effects of whatever action are taken to alleviate them." That's really the situation of that array of clients. I don't care whether it's the governor or the inmate. They're constrained in that sort of way, but they also have lots of capacities. And one of the ways that I've thought about what I've done over the years and what I think is distinct about the Wisconsin approach is to try to engage those clients knowing what their strengths and their weaknesses are, knowing what their capacity is and their deficiency is, and try and develop knowledge that's useable and useful to them that they're actually willing to embrace and use. And, again, that goes for the inmates, it also goes for the governors. 

I could go on much longer, and I've gone on longer than I should. I should have probably stopped 10 minutes ago, but I'll stop right now and ask if there are questions. [APPLAUSE]