The résumé that won John Koufos his job as national director of re-entry initiatives for Right on Crime, a project aimed at winning support from conservatives for criminal justice reforms, is one few would want. Before he landed on the radar of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the think tank behind the project, he was an ex-convict who had been disbarred from practicing criminal law in New Jersey, his home state.
Untypical as this career ladder may be, it has been effective: Two years ago, Mr. Koufos, 42, was tapped by the campaign to steer issues of “re-entry,” a term for the hurdles former inmates must clear so they can become productive citizens. Since then, he has opened doors in state administrations that might have remained shut. Part of the credit goes to the traction that re-entry issues are gaining in the bipartisan criminal justice reform movement. “It’s a natural progression,” he said, with more prisons being closed and more prisoners being released — like, for example, the hundreds of Oklahoma inmates whose sentences were commuted recently.
But Mr. Koufos’ firsthand knowledge of the troubles that mount when one is behind bars also deserves credit. “While I was in prison, there was a warrant for my arrest because there were weeds growing on my property,” Mr. Koufos said. “Nobody paid any attention to the fact that I was too busy being in prison to know I had a court date.” (He had been convicted in 2012 for causing a near fatality while drinking and driving.)
Among the states that have welcomed Mr. Koufos to make pitches about the benefits of criminal justice reform are Louisiana, Kentucky, Iowa and Nebraska. He is actively courting governors in several other states — some, like Pennsylvania, are less red than others — that Right on Crime is targeting with its official mandate to ensure public safety, shrink government and save taxpayers’ money. Ties to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Koch network, one of the conservative-leaning Right on Crime’s funders, have opened doors. “It’s definitely helped with the ability to access people who can make a difference,” Mr. Koufos said.
In Mississippi, for example, he helped persuade Gov. Phil Bryant to get behind a law to end debtors’ prisons. When Right on Crime dispatched Mr. Koufos to meet with state officials there last year, he thought he was being set up. “I figured, somebody wants me to fail or get fired,” he said. “I worried about how they would respond to an ex-convict lawyer from New Jersey.” But he was received more with interest than with animosity when he spoke in Jackson about reforms that were working in other states, such as the expansion of drug courts to more precisely decide who deserves imprisonment.
Six weeks after that trip, which concluded with Mr. Koufos meeting with Governor Bryant to push for a bill that would ensure Mississippians are not locked up automatically for an inability to pay court fines and fees, the bill was passed. So was a measure to allow inmates convicted of certain crimes to be eligible for parole after serving 25 percent of their sentence. “I told him that this is a package of really smart criminal justice reform that doesn’t make anyone look soft on crime,” Mr. Koufos said.
Mr. Koufos, a longtime South Jersey resident transplanted to Washington, D.C., came by his knowledge of what successful re-entry looks like in a couple of different settings. One was professional. From 2014 to 2017, he worked under the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey as executive director at the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, a nonprofit organization that is putting up impressive numbers. While the national level of recidivism hovers at 68 percent within the first three years of release, according to a 2018 Department of Justice report, the organization has a rearrest rate currently averaging 19.7 percent for its 6,000 clients. Its rate of reincarceration is under 10 percent. That is largely a result of what Mr. McGreevey called “the pick-and-shovel work” of setting up clients with housing, food, jobs, medical care and mental health treatment.
The other setting was Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, N.J., where Mr. Koufos spent the bulk of his 17-month prison sentence. In 2011, Mr. Koufos, an alcoholic since his teens, had driven his Lexus into a 17-year-old pedestrian after a night of drinking with colleagues at an Ocean County Bar Association event. He left the scene of the crime not because he wanted to get away with nearly killing a teenager, he said, but because he intended to go home and shoot himself with his registered Colt .45. Before taking his own life, he planned to clear up a few office matters for Veronica R. Norgaard, his law partner. Friends, including Ms. Norgaard and some he had met during the decade he spent doing defense work, sometimes pro bono, for the N.A.A.C.P., talked him out of suicide. Then a judge sentenced him to six years.
In prison, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and addressed the horrors of his childhood. In addition to being burned with cigarettes by family members, Mr. Koufos had been dragged around the country under assumed names by his bounty-hunter father. By the time he was up for parole in 2013, he had more than a year of sobriety behind him and a reputation among fellow inmates as a person of influence.
“Almost everyone asked me if I could help them get a job,” he recalled. “They’d be like, ‘I feel like a loser because I can’t provide for my kid.’ The idea of work becomes a big piece of your self-worth when you’re getting out of prison.”
Getting work as a former convict, though, is a challenge for familiar reasons. Beyond the stigma, practical concerns, like a lack of identification documents and transportation, are lurking. And that’s where Mr. Koufos thought he could be useful. In 2013, he reached out to Mr. McGreevey with a plan to use his legal network to dismantle barriers to obtaining driver’s licenses. At the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, he enlisted more than 60 friends from the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division to clear up old warrants, fees and tickets, pro bono. In his three years at the nonprofit, Mr. Koufos helped secure more than 400 driver’s licenses and paved the way for the Supreme Court of New Jersey’s recent dismissal of 780,000 tickets. He also did advocacy work at prisons, where he described the benefits of signing up for re-entry services to men with whom he was once locked up.
Mr. McGreevey still feels indebted. “John’s keen intellect and understanding of public policy have been tremendously valuable,” he said. “But his life experience, traveling the road from indictment to release, was maybe even more important for us. He’s acutely mindful of the challenges that court-involved persons confront.”
Mr. McGreevey is a Democrat. Mr. Koufos is a registered independent. That is not something they often discussed while working together. But when Mr. Koufos accepted his Right on Crime job, Mr. McGreevey was supportive like other Democrats, such as the progressive-minded television commentator Van Jones, who have gotten behind criminal justice reform as outlined by organizations with ties to the Koch network.
“At the end of the day, however anyone comes to the place of prison reform, we’re grateful,” Mr. McGreevey said.
Mr. Koufos is still friendly with Mr. McGreevey but is more likely to mention a different governor when he talks about his work in New Jersey — Chris Christie. His biography at Right on Crime nods to Mr. Christie, the Republican who funded the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation but with whom he did not work daily. It does not mention Mr. McGreevey, with whom he did. Mr. Koufos rejects the suggestion that the profile was scripted to better align him philosophically with his new organization.
“No one’s ever given me any political pressure to do anything at Right on Crime,” he said. Instead, he said the pressure is to follow the campaign’s credo of putting differences aside in the name of meaningful change. “There’s a theme we use that they repeat at every Koch seminar, which is that you have to unite with anybody to do good.” That slogan can be traced to Frederick Douglass, who said it slightly differently — “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong” — more than a century and a half ago.
Mr. Koufos does not deny equivocating when talking to audiences of different political temperaments. “I talk about public safety everywhere I go, but when I’m in red states, that’s what I lead with because that’s the issue everyone cares about,” he said. A major project of Right on Crime is called Safe Streets and Second Chances. When he is in blue states like New Jersey, where he still occasionally addresses audiences, he focuses his talks on social issues, like work force development.
And the tactic seems to be working. Mr. Koufos is not the only advocate breaking down barriers to re-entry on a national level. But the results he and his staff of five have achieved are notable. In addition to helping end Mississippi debtors’ prisons with Right on Crime, they are pushing for bills that allow returning citizens to check in with parole officers by video, so that crucial work hours aren’t disrupted. This month, they will meet with Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania in the Capitol to discuss probation reform, which they hope will pass this session. They are also singing the praises of the First Step Act, which Right on Crime spearheaded and President Trump passed last year, wherever they go. The idea is to encourage states to copy the federal measure.
They are positioned, through Right on Crime, to be persuasive. “How many changes are people who refuse to work with the Koch network making happen in the majority of states that are Republican controlled?” Mr. Koufos asked. “None. Do you think Just Leadership” — an organization whose mission is to cut the country’s prison population in half by 2030 — “is going to be able to go to Alabama and make things happen? Of course not.”
That would be like thinking that people who have never been to prison can assess the realities of returning citizens better than people who have been paroled, he said. Mostly, they cannot. Unless they are astronauts.
“Prison is like the space program,” Mr. Koufos said. “You’re in the middle of nowhere, and at some point you come back in. If it’s not done well, if you’re not adequately prepared for that landing, you’re going to burn up.” Steering your spaceship strategically, to the right or left as needed, might be the best way to avoid getting too close to the sun.
Tammy La Gorce is a journalist who writes frequently for The New York Times.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | How a Crusader Wins
Opinion | How a Crusader Wins
The résumé that won John Koufos his job as national director of re-entry initiatives for Right on Crime, a project aimed at winning support from conservatives for criminal justice reforms, is one few would want. Before he landed on the radar of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the think tank behind the project, he was an ex-convict who had been disbarred from practicing criminal law in New Jersey, his home state.
Untypical as this career ladder may be, it has been effective: Two years ago, Mr. Koufos, 42, was tapped by the campaign to steer issues of “re-entry,” a term for the hurdles former inmates must clear so they can become productive citizens. Since then, he has opened doors in state administrations that might have remained shut. Part of the credit goes to the traction that re-entry issues are gaining in the bipartisan criminal justice reform movement. “It’s a natural progression,” he said, with more prisons being closed and more prisoners being released — like, for example, the hundreds of Oklahoma inmates whose sentences were commuted recently.
But Mr. Koufos’ firsthand knowledge of the troubles that mount when one is behind bars also deserves credit. “While I was in prison, there was a warrant for my arrest because there were weeds growing on my property,” Mr. Koufos said. “Nobody paid any attention to the fact that I was too busy being in prison to know I had a court date.” (He had been convicted in 2012 for causing a near fatality while drinking and driving.)
Among the states that have welcomed Mr. Koufos to make pitches about the benefits of criminal justice reform are Louisiana, Kentucky, Iowa and Nebraska. He is actively courting governors in several other states — some, like Pennsylvania, are less red than others — that Right on Crime is targeting with its official mandate to ensure public safety, shrink government and save taxpayers’ money. Ties to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Koch network, one of the conservative-leaning Right on Crime’s funders, have opened doors. “It’s definitely helped with the ability to access people who can make a difference,” Mr. Koufos said.
In Mississippi, for example, he helped persuade Gov. Phil Bryant to get behind a law to end debtors’ prisons. When Right on Crime dispatched Mr. Koufos to meet with state officials there last year, he thought he was being set up. “I figured, somebody wants me to fail or get fired,” he said. “I worried about how they would respond to an ex-convict lawyer from New Jersey.” But he was received more with interest than with animosity when he spoke in Jackson about reforms that were working in other states, such as the expansion of drug courts to more precisely decide who deserves imprisonment.
Six weeks after that trip, which concluded with Mr. Koufos meeting with Governor Bryant to push for a bill that would ensure Mississippians are not locked up automatically for an inability to pay court fines and fees, the bill was passed. So was a measure to allow inmates convicted of certain crimes to be eligible for parole after serving 25 percent of their sentence. “I told him that this is a package of really smart criminal justice reform that doesn’t make anyone look soft on crime,” Mr. Koufos said.
Mr. Koufos, a longtime South Jersey resident transplanted to Washington, D.C., came by his knowledge of what successful re-entry looks like in a couple of different settings. One was professional. From 2014 to 2017, he worked under the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey as executive director at the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, a nonprofit organization that is putting up impressive numbers. While the national level of recidivism hovers at 68 percent within the first three years of release, according to a 2018 Department of Justice report, the organization has a rearrest rate currently averaging 19.7 percent for its 6,000 clients. Its rate of reincarceration is under 10 percent. That is largely a result of what Mr. McGreevey called “the pick-and-shovel work” of setting up clients with housing, food, jobs, medical care and mental health treatment.
The other setting was Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, N.J., where Mr. Koufos spent the bulk of his 17-month prison sentence. In 2011, Mr. Koufos, an alcoholic since his teens, had driven his Lexus into a 17-year-old pedestrian after a night of drinking with colleagues at an Ocean County Bar Association event. He left the scene of the crime not because he wanted to get away with nearly killing a teenager, he said, but because he intended to go home and shoot himself with his registered Colt .45. Before taking his own life, he planned to clear up a few office matters for Veronica R. Norgaard, his law partner. Friends, including Ms. Norgaard and some he had met during the decade he spent doing defense work, sometimes pro bono, for the N.A.A.C.P., talked him out of suicide. Then a judge sentenced him to six years.
In prison, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and addressed the horrors of his childhood. In addition to being burned with cigarettes by family members, Mr. Koufos had been dragged around the country under assumed names by his bounty-hunter father. By the time he was up for parole in 2013, he had more than a year of sobriety behind him and a reputation among fellow inmates as a person of influence.
“Almost everyone asked me if I could help them get a job,” he recalled. “They’d be like, ‘I feel like a loser because I can’t provide for my kid.’ The idea of work becomes a big piece of your self-worth when you’re getting out of prison.”
Getting work as a former convict, though, is a challenge for familiar reasons. Beyond the stigma, practical concerns, like a lack of identification documents and transportation, are lurking. And that’s where Mr. Koufos thought he could be useful. In 2013, he reached out to Mr. McGreevey with a plan to use his legal network to dismantle barriers to obtaining driver’s licenses. At the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation, he enlisted more than 60 friends from the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division to clear up old warrants, fees and tickets, pro bono. In his three years at the nonprofit, Mr. Koufos helped secure more than 400 driver’s licenses and paved the way for the Supreme Court of New Jersey’s recent dismissal of 780,000 tickets. He also did advocacy work at prisons, where he described the benefits of signing up for re-entry services to men with whom he was once locked up.
Mr. McGreevey still feels indebted. “John’s keen intellect and understanding of public policy have been tremendously valuable,” he said. “But his life experience, traveling the road from indictment to release, was maybe even more important for us. He’s acutely mindful of the challenges that court-involved persons confront.”
Mr. McGreevey is a Democrat. Mr. Koufos is a registered independent. That is not something they often discussed while working together. But when Mr. Koufos accepted his Right on Crime job, Mr. McGreevey was supportive like other Democrats, such as the progressive-minded television commentator Van Jones, who have gotten behind criminal justice reform as outlined by organizations with ties to the Koch network.
“At the end of the day, however anyone comes to the place of prison reform, we’re grateful,” Mr. McGreevey said.
Mr. Koufos is still friendly with Mr. McGreevey but is more likely to mention a different governor when he talks about his work in New Jersey — Chris Christie. His biography at Right on Crime nods to Mr. Christie, the Republican who funded the New Jersey Re-entry Corporation but with whom he did not work daily. It does not mention Mr. McGreevey, with whom he did. Mr. Koufos rejects the suggestion that the profile was scripted to better align him philosophically with his new organization.
“No one’s ever given me any political pressure to do anything at Right on Crime,” he said. Instead, he said the pressure is to follow the campaign’s credo of putting differences aside in the name of meaningful change. “There’s a theme we use that they repeat at every Koch seminar, which is that you have to unite with anybody to do good.” That slogan can be traced to Frederick Douglass, who said it slightly differently — “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong” — more than a century and a half ago.
Mr. Koufos does not deny equivocating when talking to audiences of different political temperaments. “I talk about public safety everywhere I go, but when I’m in red states, that’s what I lead with because that’s the issue everyone cares about,” he said. A major project of Right on Crime is called Safe Streets and Second Chances. When he is in blue states like New Jersey, where he still occasionally addresses audiences, he focuses his talks on social issues, like work force development.
And the tactic seems to be working. Mr. Koufos is not the only advocate breaking down barriers to re-entry on a national level. But the results he and his staff of five have achieved are notable. In addition to helping end Mississippi debtors’ prisons with Right on Crime, they are pushing for bills that allow returning citizens to check in with parole officers by video, so that crucial work hours aren’t disrupted. This month, they will meet with Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania in the Capitol to discuss probation reform, which they hope will pass this session. They are also singing the praises of the First Step Act, which Right on Crime spearheaded and President Trump passed last year, wherever they go. The idea is to encourage states to copy the federal measure.
They are positioned, through Right on Crime, to be persuasive. “How many changes are people who refuse to work with the Koch network making happen in the majority of states that are Republican controlled?” Mr. Koufos asked. “None. Do you think Just Leadership” — an organization whose mission is to cut the country’s prison population in half by 2030 — “is going to be able to go to Alabama and make things happen? Of course not.”
That would be like thinking that people who have never been to prison can assess the realities of returning citizens better than people who have been paroled, he said. Mostly, they cannot. Unless they are astronauts.
“Prison is like the space program,” Mr. Koufos said. “You’re in the middle of nowhere, and at some point you come back in. If it’s not done well, if you’re not adequately prepared for that landing, you’re going to burn up.” Steering your spaceship strategically, to the right or left as needed, might be the best way to avoid getting too close to the sun.
Tammy La Gorce is a journalist who writes frequently for The New York Times.
To receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article