STATISTICS

Yesterday, I had a stack of assessments ready to staff with Barry. It took all day--literally.

I can go for months without a "referral"--meaning that I do the evaluation and decide not to refer for commitment. I've got the best statistics of the four of us. This is important because it means when I actually refer someone and am sitting in the witness stand, I can truthfully testify that I refer less than 2% for commitment. Ninty-eight percent of these guys, I send home. Only 2% get referred for commitment. This means I only refer the "worst of the worst" which is what we are supposed to be doing. This goes over well with juries.

Last week, while Eric was in Kansas I referred someone. I spent the weekend writing his report and will do Probable Cause on him before the end of August.

Yesterday, we staffed this stack of assessments I'd done and three of them "went bad" meaning they are referrals. One of them was a rapist who also engages in sodomy--multiples times. Then you need to add on the 1st degree murder he did. First degree murder always makes things worse. Then, there was the parole violator sending nude videos of himself engaging in autoerotic activities in front of a web cam to eight teenage girls in 8 different states. He'd already had a contact offense and been caught previously (and gone to prison) for his autoerotic activies with a web cam. Then, there was the guy who claimed to be an "in the closet" homosexual and chooses little boys (4 times) to avoid being rejected by other adult homosexuals.

Each of these cases will require reports that take no less than 16 hours to write, probable cause hearings, trials, and hours of court prep. None of that is a big deal. That's just work. I get paid to do work.

My first thought was 'my stats are going to be ruined'. Barry pointed out that I have the bests stats of the four of us and one bad stretch won't ruin two years of stats. If I think logically, I know Barry is right. Truth is, that I'll probably pull a four or six month stretch when I refer nobody. And, the stats will be OK in the long run. Not thinking logically, I'm going to do an evaluation tomorrow where the guy raped 4 different women (meaning four different cases and four different sentencing dates), all strangers and all in public places. All those components drive his scores up. I suspect, I'll need to refer him also. And, then there is another guy on Monday who is a parole violator. Unfortunately, while on parole he actually arranged in person meets with little girls (for sexual purposes) and with a couple of cops. The cops were not amused! Neither was the parole board. Fortunately, the little girls got away when they realized what they had walked into. But, his scores went up. He also got in trouble the last time I evaluated him when he showed up for the interview wearing no underwear. I did not discover this. The Correctional Officer discovered this during the body search. The inmate didn't do anything to me, but I'm sure the CO probably wrote him up. All that sends his scores up.

I'll settle myself down and just get the work done. We're just going through a bad stetch. The work load is really heavy on all four of us right now and we're all getting assignments of guys who are doing unacceptable bad things repeatedly and guys violating parole. In the long run, the stats will settle down and things will be OK.