The Cook County Story

Elizabeth Glazer: Great. Thank you so much, Sara. That was really such an incredible and enlightening description of what's a really complicated idea, an awesome power, a last resort, and great to understand also, as we'll learn from our next panel, the kinds of pitfalls that also exist. You have to get the right person as a receiver. How long does it go on for? What happens if it doesn't work?

So our next panel, we're so grateful to Cook County. For those of you tuning in who don't know, Chicago is in Cook County, I think is probably sort of the biggest population center in Cook County. And our next panel was involved in the receivership, or as it was called there, a temporary administrator, of the juvenile facility in Chicago. I'm just going to really quickly give kind of a one-sentence introduction of the cast. You can go to either the Columbia Justice Lab website or Vital City and have a full bio of each of them. Just incredibly impressive people.

So Theresa Abreu ran the detention facility while the temporary administrator was in place, and crafted and implemented major operational changes that we'll talk about. She had earlier come from the state's attorney's office that represented the county and the litigation, and subsequently and interestingly worked for the union that represented the correctional officers and worked as their counsel.

John Curran worked in the state's attorney's office during the period the detention facility was under the administrator and has great insights from the county's perspective, and he's currently an Illinois State Senator. Tom Geraghty is a law professor from Northwestern. He was what's called the next friend in the litigation, we'll talk a little bit about that, specifically standing in for and representing the rights of youth who were detained. And Ben Wolf was the legal director of the ACLU who led the plaintiffs in the challenge over many, many years, as we'll learn at the detention facility.

So this is a correctional facility that faced many of the same issues as New York City, successfully shaped and used this power, and ultimately restored the facility to county operations, and a lot of similarities to New York City: a big city, troubled facility with high violence, inhumane conditions, failing management, decades of litigation, a powerful union, complicated politics.

So I want to jump right in. And Ben, perhaps I could start with you. Could you give us a little bit of a Cliff Notes of what were the conditions that spurred the litigation? And what was the role that the litigation played in persuading the county to agree to an administrator?

Ben Wolf: Thank you, Liz. We have a sort of a checklist of possible deficient conditions in an institution when we take a look at it, and the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center pretty much had all of them.

It was chronically overcrowded. Kids were often sleeping in day rooms on the floor. It was completely chaotic. They had no way of determining whether staff showed up on time. There were constant fights between the youth and an enormous amount of abuse by staff. I think there were about 15 or 20 staff people that just chronically beat up the youth there. Most of the staff were not like that, but there was a group that nobody wanted to fire that was there, that created an atmosphere of violence.

The place was filthy, riddled with rodents and insects. And the youth themselves often complained about the fact that they would have bugs crawling on them when they went to sleep. The health and mental health services, the kind of thing involved in the California litigation, were a chaotic mess. The institution was frequently sending the youth to the hospital because they had serious asthma attacks, for example, because nobody had provided an inhaler, or broken bones from injuries that went untreated, and eventually resulted in hospitalization. So what we faced was a chronically dangerous and mismanaged institution when we sued in 1999.

EG: And there were many years of litigation leading up to the moment when, ultimately, there was an agreement with the county. How is it that those many years of litigation got to the point where the county agreed that this was the right way forward to have a receiver? And I know each of our other panelists have pieces of the story. And I'll try to orchestrate it, but also feel free to leap in.

BW: I'll start, but obviously, Senator Curran, Tom Geraghty and Theresa Abreu very well all have a perspective. We took each of the steps that one takes before a receiver to try to address the problem. So first, the memorandum of agreements, the consent decree required that the county submit a plan to fix the problem. The county never could come up with an adequate plan. We had monitors in place who kept reporting some of the problems, not as many as we think were there.

And our next friend, Tom Geraghty, who taught at Northwestern Law School, arranged constant interviews with the children at the facility with the youth conducted by Northwest at the facility, with the youth, conducted by Northwestern Law students, which was a great resource, and they kept telling us that this step wasn't working and that step wasn't working.

Finally, when all of those things didn't work, we asked the court to appoint a more aggressive monitor, we called her a compliance administrator, who practically lived at the facility, Brenda Welch, and reported how bad things were and that things hadn't gotten better.

And we had an independent group of experts craft a plan that was supposed to let the county know how to fix these problems, and the county neglected that plan and chose politics over the choices of the experts again and again, and the problems persisted.

So finally we filed a motion to appoint a receiver, and the judge wanted us to negotiate a remedy. At first we didn't succeed. Then the judge did set a date for an evidentiary hearing and we had productive negotiations with the county. And I'm not sure if John was there yet, but his predecessors, Pat Driscoll and Pat Blanchard were very committed to try to solve the problems. They would've fought us if we had a hearing, but we had principled negotiations and it resulted in the appointment of a transitional administrator, and we agreed on the person once we agreed on the process.

EG: So essentially at the point at which there was going to be an evidentiary hearing of which all the conditions that you've described might've been described in court in pretty vivid detail, Senator, from your point of view, was that an important piece in persuading the county to accept an administrator or were there other currents?

John Curran: The factual evidence being compiled by the plaintiff's evidentiary was put together, that was critical in convincing the county officials that going to trial, these are going to be the facts allowed, the strong likelihood that you would not prevail and you lose a certain part of control in the litigation, that it was best to have more say with the appointment of the TA. And the county officials did ultimately see that as a more productive path. And we were able to agree and present an agreed request for a TA to be appointed.

EG: And it's interesting that in your situation, it wasn't called a receiver, it was called a temporary administrator. What was the reason, what did that... I don't know whether Tom or one of you wants to weigh in on, did that reflect some kind of negotiation with the county?

Thomas Geragthy: I can weigh in on that for a moment. I think the need, as we saw it back then, and Ben and Senator Curran have described the history of this very well, the need was to have someone in place in the detention center as an administrator and someone who would run the detention center on a day-to-day basis, putting together a team of really independent administrators to manage the center.

And I think you'll hear more about that, how important that was from Teresa, who was really in charge of that process. But we recognized that it probably wasn't enough to have someone on the outside, maybe a receiver who was not there on a day-to-day basis, and that we needed someone who was actually an administrator and who had administrative experience and who could put together a team to manage the center.

EG: It's a big thing for government to hand over this kind of power and to work with a team to shape what the order is, meaning, what the order is that shapes those powers. Was there anything in particular that from each of your perspectives, made it more palatable or made it seem like really the only way to address the conditions from the county's point of view?

JC: Well, really having... I think Tom hit on a very important point, having the administrator actually be the one running the facility. The dynamic in county government, certainly in Cook, the facility was a department under the office of the president, the county board. So having someone appointed by the county board running the facility as you try to reform it with outside entities monitoring, ultimately as much as maybe they work with and lean on that administrator, that administrator had to go up the overhead structure, political or oversight structure of county government and that would ultimately prove to be burdensome.

So having the TA actually placed with the ability to go to court if they weren't getting the requisite cooperation and relief from the county government, certainly I think was a dynamic that... You see all the attempts to comply with the memorandum of the agreement prior to the appointment of the TA that failed, that's where that dynamic, I think, really set it on its course to ultimately resolve the issues.

EG: So I want to move a little bit to how the receiver was selected, what criteria you used, how that order was shaped, because that, as Sara has pointed out, was one of the most important things, who it is you get, and how that person is able to work with and select a team. I'm wondering if one of you could speak to that?

BW: We needed someone who had run and fixed juvenile detention facilities that had problems and Earl Dunlap, the person that we ended up choosing, both sides ended up choosing, and the judge agreed to appoint was the leading person in the field really who had a record all over the country of addressing these problems.

We also, because we were so concerned about the politically corrupting influence of Cook County at that time, we needed somebody who was completely independent as Sarah Norman said they needed in California, somebody who had no ties to anybody in county government in the City of Chicago and any of the local forces. And Earl was that, he was strong, and independent and knowledgeable.

EG: So one of the things that people are often concerned about is how long it takes when a receiver is in place. A receiver really is kind of the last resort. In our own situation the monitor has described these polycentric circles of dysfunction going back multiple, multiple years, and how hard it is to unwind that and to create a management structure.

I'm wondering, Teresa, you were so deeply involved in trying to figure out where the issues were, how operationally to address them, how to deal with the day-to-day politics of people who were in the facility, who are still in the facility, who you fired, who you didn't. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you approached that task?

Theresa Abreu: So I think it's important to note, it took about two years to even partially stabilize the facility once the transitional administrator got there. He brought in a team of experts in various subject matters to come in and work on all the different areas that were under the consent decree.

And he really wanted to make sure that there was an internal team that could implement all of these changes, because at the end of the day, we want to make sure all of the changes that are in place can be sustained. So one thing he wanted was someone from the state attorney's office that had a strong labor and employment background. So it was someone from the inside that can come over to the facility and work with him and really work with all the labor and employment issues. Because what we do know is that the staff are critical to any change.

So we had to make sure that we understood what were the problems with staffing. We knew it was numbers. We knew that the type of people we wanted working with youth were changing, it wasn't the old correctional model. And we had to really create process procedures, hiring processes, trying to remove some of the red tape that existed to be able to bring that on.

So he was able to form an internal team that we work with every single day, because I think that's critical. That transitional administrator was there, his experts were there, and worked to make the change, but also to make sure that the bench was being built, that everyone who was there could continue all the changes. So-

EG: Experts working side by side with people who already were in the facility and had already been working there.

TA: Or hiring people that could come in, but that planned on staying there post-transition. And so through the court orders... Because the most important thing, and I think what led to the success is the collaboration between all the parties, so plaintiff's counsel, defendant's counsel, the federal judge, all the parties that were involved, because it really did take so many people and so many groups of people to one, try to bring the population down as well as try to keep the environment safe.

EG: That's quite a tall order. Those folks, including the union and others that may have had a history that may not have always been totally perfect.

TA: No.

EG: How did you build that kind of relationship so that it was productive?

TA: So through the court order, we were able to have a third party recruiting firm come in and really kind of take over. The transitional administrator tried to work within the existing processes to onboard people, and it wasn't working. We weren't able to bring people on as quickly as we needed to. So we were able to have this third party expert come in and assist with that function, but also work hand-in-hand with the current HR department.

We also had to bring in a third party security firm because we needed more bodies. So I know one of the things that were mentioned is even if you had the numbers of staff, you had so many people that were out, that from a day-to-day standpoint, you couldn't staff safely. So we had to bring in those resources to help supplement the current staff.

But really what happened is we had a very significant plan. So we had to change the type of people that were working with you. So all of our basically direct care staff had to reapply for their positions.

So as you mentioned, the unions are very strong in Cook County. I think the most important thing is at the end of the day, management and union have the same goal, which is to create a safe and healthy environment for staff and for kids. Now, do both sides always agree on how to get there? Often not. And during this process there was often many disagreements about how to get where we needed to be, but I think we tried to... For me, I always look at the unions as a partner to change as opposed to looking at them as the enemy, and really try to embrace and have them be a part of the process.

And when there were times that they either didn't want to or couldn't be a partner is when we had to go above and beyond, maybe bring in the powers of the federal court, such as bringing a third party staffing firm to come in and do it.

So it was a very difficult time, we had so many death threats, so many significant death threats I had an armed guard. So not only were you trying to change culture, trying to improve conditions for youth, but all the stress of all those other things coming in and it really being a scary environment. And so I think you just really need to have people who are passionate about working with youth.

I think the thing that the transitional administrator understood is you have to bring people with leadership skills even if they're not in leadership positions. For me, I ended up running the facility, I had no operational knowledge. I was taught all of those things through it, but he could see that the leadership team that he put together, and trust me, it wasn't me. There was plenty of other people on the team that helped to make it successful, but he could see that they had the ability to do so and then he just provided them the resources.

So what we needed to do is make sure that the staff that we had, as Ben said, there were a lot of really good staff, is giving them the tools to be successful because at the end of the day we want them to go home to their families and we want them to work successfully with the kids. You can't do that if you're working a million hours.

EG: One of the things that you mentioned Teresa, and Ben you mentioned, and Sara sort of noted about the sparing use of these awesome powers, is when you decide to use those awesome powers of the receiver and when you don't, and I wonder if you guys could speak to what is it that you thought you were able to do in Cook County with a receiver that was not possible? With the previous decades of monitors and other efforts?

BW: The transitional administrator worked for the court, and so he had the ability to go to his boss, the federal judge, and say, "This isn't working. I recommend we do this to fix it." And that was a whole different dynamic. He would try the procurement system in Cook County, he couldn't get anything done for months. He would try the hiring system, couldn't get anything done for months. He would try to get current staff to keep the place clean, couldn't do it. And he would go to the judge and present the compelling suffering that was happening as a result of these terrible problems and say, "This is how I want to fix it." And the judge granted him that authority. Sometimes the union opposed it, but they never made a good case, until one much later, for how there was another way to do it within the current framework.

TA: And Ben, that's super important, is the fact that these court orders allowed us to bypass the procurement process. So in the beginning, the transitional administrator tried to go about the typical processes in county to bring in any sort of product or resources. It was so bad that he had to use his own money to pay for things for kids. Staff had to occasionally buy things as well.

And so through the court order, we were able to set up a separate funding process that third-party contractors could be contracted with, supplies and necessities could be purchased very quickly. There were days where staff were running to Costco and Sam's Club and just trying to get things in that the kids needed because it was just so difficult to get it.

So again, I think he really tried to work within the process, but once it hit a point where it was creating a dangerous environment and we weren't seeing the speed that we needed, that's when we had to go and use those powers with the federal court.

TG: I think the other thing was that Ben and Teresa and Earl and Brenda Welsh established a very credible relationship with the judges who were involved, because the judges knew... And we had two judges assigned to the case in this litigation. The judges knew that they were hearing from people who were in the detention center on a daily basis, more than a daily basis, sometimes 24/7, and that the information that was being provided to them was accurate and was being provided by people who were really dedicated to the mission.

So that relationship, which spanned about seven-and-a-half years or so, was critically important to the process of improvement. And also when we did need to go to court, it met the judges listened to Earl, listened to Brenda, listened to Teresa, listened to Ben very carefully.

EG: And Tom, that issue of actually building that trust with the judge is so critically based on actually knowing what's going on in the facility and being able in a clear-eyed way to say, "This is working, or this isn't, things are getting better or they're not." And you, as the next friend, with your students, actually played a very important role in having a finger on the pulse speed of how your clients... what the conditions are with your clients. I was wondering if you could describe that a little bit?

TG: Over the years. We put together each year a team of... I'm remembering 20 to 25 law students each year who would go out to the detention center and interview the youth in the detention center. We developed a protocol for those interviews so that the interviews covered very specific information about conditions within the detention center. And that information was provided to Ben and his team at the ACLU. And we also did have to secure, and we were able to secure the cooperation of the Cook County Public Defender because that was an issue as to whether or not our law students should be talking to clients of the public defender's office. That was something we had to negotiate, and we did.

And then the other factor I think was that there was a community of lawyers who had experience in representing youth who were confined in the detention center. And so there was sort of a critical mass of lawyers who knew apart from, or maybe in addition to the information that was collected by the students, what was actually going on at the JTDC because many of us had spent a lot of time there interviewing our clients and observing the conditions. And this went back even before the lawsuit was filed.

EG: One of the things that one of you said to me, not that we prepped beforehand at all, but was that court orders don't make hard problems easy. You had to know when to go to court to enforce rights and when to take another route. So it was a delicate kind of balance.

And I imagine the delicacy of that balance was particularly sharp when it came to firing, potentially, and hiring. And kind of as I understand it, you really reshaped both the management structure and just the operations of the facility. And I'm wondering if one of you could talk about what that process was like and how you... Teresa, you had mentioned it took two years really to get to a point where you began to have the foundations of a well-run facility.

I'm wondering if you could talk to how those personnel processes happened, what the relationship was with the union, how you resolved what must have been a difficult set of circumstances?

TA: Where staff were willing to make the changes that were needed through the reform effort, we wanted to make sure that we can retain and train those staff. And so that was why we introduced a new hiring process, had people reapply for positions, but we had over 200 staff that did lose their jobs based on the new process, the new criteria. And so we were able to keep many of our staff, but we also had to help transition those staff out, help them find other opportunities.

I'm not going to pretend it was a cakewalk with the unions. I've been on the union side after the fact. It's very difficult when you're there to represent your members and you have federal court orders that you can't do it because they're saying, "We're going to do this anyway." So really the relationship ebbed and flowed throughout all those years of doing it, and I'm sure it continues to have its ups and downs.

But again, I think for me personally, as long as I started every meeting, every negotiation with that common goal being the focus, we were really able to work through many of the issues.

Now, there were definitely significant ones, like I said, where certain sections of the collective bargaining agreement were suspended. And so that's how we were able to bring in third party, change the recruiting and hiring process, changed how we staffed because we were a huge facility, but we broke it up into 10 separate detention centers under one roof. And staffing mirrored that, meaning someone from one unit couldn't work in another. And so that was a big issue and a big point of contention with seniority rights and some various other things.

But I think what we tried to do is create a healthy environment for staff as well, because if we didn't focus on staff wellness, and we didn't want people to work seven days a week, double shifts every day, there's no way that they could work with youth in a positive way if they were constantly under that pressure.

Because what we were requiring staff to do with this change took a lot more emotional toll and emotional energy than what used to happen 20 years ago.

And so it's... Again, you have to work collaboratively when you can.

EG: Can you explain that a little bit?

TA: Which part?

EG: What you meant by the emotional toll?

TA: Sure. The old model was staff guard. There really wasn't any expectation to engage with inmates or youth or incarcerated folks, everyone calls it something different with adults and kids. But now we were asking for them to exhibit using behavior management skills, learning new skills to talk and work with youth. We weren't locking kids up all day long. They had to create activities and meaningful activities, culturally relevant activities.

I think the important thing too is unfortunately 98% of our youth were youth of color. And the focus during this transition was making sure the staffing mirrored that. So that was a big focus for the transitional administrator. Almost all of the leadership staff were people of color, to mirror the youth that they'd be working with every day.

But really you have to engage with the kids all day long. And even if they're being aggressive, or they're upset is they have to work with the youth and work to calm them down so that they don't have to go hands-on. They're not getting risk of getting hurt, but they're not locked up in their rooms like they used to do. So that was much easier.

At night staff had to make sure they were awake and checking on youth every 15 minutes, or jurisdictions have different timeframes. So it was a total different expectation, and a very different set of skill set, one that they didn't have or didn't expect to have in the beginning, that we had to make sure that those that stayed were able to make those changes.

EG: So interesting. And Senator, it was such a change in correctional practice, correctional theory, it affected operations, it affected collective bargaining agreements, how power was deployed. To what degree do you think from the county's point of view, the receiver to some degree, this may be the wrong word, but to some degree gave cover to changes that the county believed would lead to a safer environment?

JC: Well, I would say it also gave the county a lot of heartburn too. Costs increased significantly with reclassifying those positions and raising the educational requirements of the position also came significant salary increases for all staff that remained.

That was, I'm sure, part of the TA's buy-in from staff. They had a safer environment to work, they had a more collaborative environment to work, they had better direction, and they were making more money.

I think from the [inaudible 00:56:50] perspective there was early on, there was a lot of resistance to the TA and what he was rolling out. I think we got some change in 2010 when President Preckwinkle was elected. She had come over from the City of Chicago as an alder woman, and she had a very, I think, different perspective on youth in an incarcerated setting, and still does today, she's still the county president, and created some departments within the county that were more collaborative.

So as a client, my client became more collaborative and more engaged on the litigation after that occurred, which certainly, I think, increased the level of cooperation from the county.

There were things that the county could not do. Some of the procurement stuff mentioned, you would have to have a court order because otherwise county government has to have certain systems and checks in place. And that's why bureaucracy government often moves a little slower because you have to ensure everything's appropriate.

So my client... I think as Earl got things more set up, more structured, he refined his policies at the same time, the governmental entity involved certainly started to buy in more and more into this process. So I think it came together very nicely. On my end, certainly made my job easier in representing Cook County.

EG: So at the end of the day, you guys have described this very long period of lead-up of decades of litigation finally entering into this sort of extraordinary order, providing special powers to the temporary administrator, or is often called the receiver, and then seven years of very, very hard work. But that actually, I think, and you guys tell me, in this line of work, seven years to untangle this degree of complex problems is actually considered pretty quick. Has that been your experience, each of you have such deep experience in these kinds of litigation?

JC: I would just offer that I would consider it six, because I think the facility was a year earlier. Every other pre-trial juvenile detention facility in the state was run by the chief judge of the particular circuit. Cook County was the anomaly.

So the state had stepped in and passed a law to put the facility under the office of the chief judge of Cook County. So we had the added complication of also transitioning the center to a new employer, not the receiver, or the TA didn't have to bring it back to the existing employer, but also had to get a new employer integrated and up to speed on operations. And I would say that that was the last year, from my perspective, I don't know if-

EG: So whether six or seven, I'll give you six, blink of an eye. Do you want to comment a little bit on why it takes so long to change a failing institution into one that provides the kind of safe and dignified environment that you produced in the end?

TA: Well one, it is much more complex than I think people realize. With Cook County, and I've worked in other court orders, monitoring, I've never seen one with so many identified issues. They were from sanitation, to food service, mental health, medical, education, fire plans, cameras, everything that could go wrong went wrong. And so really that timeframe is a very amazing timeframe.

And I think how we got there was through this legal process, having multiple experts in all these different areas that could come. And basically we had to create multidisciplinary teams where it wasn't working in silos. Everyone had to work together. All those functional areas had to work together.

And so I think making sure that the people that were involved wanted to see that change happen. Because really at the end of the day, if you don't see that or want that, you're not going to get there. And even today, we have some of the same folks that were brought in under the transitional administrator that are still there today, working through this, trying to maintain what was created by the team.

BW: You have an organizational culture that involves hundreds of people, almost all of whom have only worked in this broken, dysfunctional, violent, filthy environment. And you have to transform that with training, with leadership, with time, with hiring new people, with perhaps having to get rid of the abusive people. And it takes time to change an organizational culture and not to mention all the problems Teresa raised about bringing in the right equipment and getting the doors to work right and all of the physical procurement issues involved. And changing an organizational culture takes several years and it might be easier if you had a lot of people who worked in a good place and knew what that was like, but we didn't and I don't think Rikers does.

EG: Yeah, but ultimately you guys were incredibly successful. I mean, stats don't say everything, but they certainly say something. There was a 22% reduction in recidivism and people returning to the facility 18 months after they had left. And in comparison of measures with other facilities across the country or key metrics on safety and wellbeing and other things, the Cook County facility really stood head and shoulders above it. Do you have any wisdom for us on how you maintain...? And ultimately the facility was returned to the county. How do you maintain that? I think, Ben, you're always quick with a quip, but you had said something like, "It's not so easy to fix a broken culture, but it's also not so easy to break a fixed culture." And I wonder if you guys have any insight for us about what happens afterwards? How do you maintain your gains?

BW: Well, it's a similar thing. If the organizational culture involves a lot of people who've seen it work right, then that has some staying power, but with broken leadership... And I'm not saying the current leadership is broken, I really don't have much experience with it, but with broken leadership and time, it is possible for places to deteriorate and I hope that hasn't happened. It certainly isn't where it was when we filed the lawsuit, but you need public sources of accountability, including independent inspections, including data that's made public about performance, and the transitional administrator created some of that. Some of it has been watered down, but some of it hasn't.

TA: Yeah, I was also going to say if you have strong policies, procedures, and quality assurance in place, and it's so ingrained into the day-to-day, like Ben mentioned, maybe some of it gets watered down, but I think it's really difficult to ever go back to where that was. And if that is kind of leading your day-to-day operation and making sure you're following those things and continuing to do best practices out there and making sure you're as transparent as possible, I think then people are still looking at you and you're still trying to do the right thing by the kids and staff.

EG: Great. Well, I want to just wrap up with a bit of a lightning round. Each of you bring such different perspectives on this and have had such deep experience. I'm wondering if I could go around and if you had one piece of advice to give a jurisdiction that may be on the brink of a receivership, is trying to figure out the way forward, what would that be about what you've learned or the things that a jurisdiction like New York should pay attention and be most concerned about? Ben, I'll start with you because I'm so fascinated by the role of the next friend in the juvenile context and potentially what that kind of role might look like even in an adult context, but whatever you're comfortable saying, Ben.

BW: Well, as you quoted me saying, litigation doesn't turn hard problems into easy ones. And so even with an outstanding transitional administrator and a terrific supporting staff and judges who wanted to do the right thing and counsel for the county who were trying to fix the problem... Even if we had our disagreements, we always felt like they were trying to fix the problem. And a passionate next friend who was in touch with the children and created a mechanism that we had information from our clients all the time, even with all that, it still took over seven years. And so I would say don't be impatient and keep listening to the incarcerated people about what's really happening. And frankly, I do worry that a US attorney's office isn't always the best forum for that. Plaintiff's lawyers need pressure on them just like everybody else and they need to hear if their clients are unhappy. And I think the structure has to be set up so that the court and the US attorneys hear that.

EG: Great. And Tom, maybe I could go to you next. Apologies. Because you certainly provided a lot of that accountability structure and many other things, but what would your advice be?

TG: Well, I think two things. First of all, I think we were working in an environment and during a time when there was a lot of interest in what was going on in our juvenile courts, so there was a lot of outside public support and support of county government for what we were trying to do. That's number one. And mobilizing that support, I think, is extremely important. And keeping the public's focus on the problems that Vinnie described, I think, would be important. The other thing is, as I said before, putting a team of really talented people onsite, and the reason I like the term temporary administrator or administrator is because the key to this, in my view, was really effective and dedicated administration. People who were onsite, who were there every day, who were visiting the facility, who were in touch with the kids was absolutely critical. And Teresa and her team, Earl and his team, and Brenda Welch really, I think, put the whole thing together and it was just very gratifying to be able to rely on what they were doing on a day-to-day basis.

EG: Fantastic. And Senator?

JC: I would say quickly it was to the county's great benefit to be at the table negotiating the appointment of the TA, negotiating the powers that the TA would exercise in that appointment order. And any government entity once appointed, it's obviously in their best interest to be an active participant. And I think through the period of time of great transition under Earl, the county was an active participant, so that was definitely in the county's best interest.

EG: Fantastic. And Teresa, do you want to give us your final hoarding words of wisdom before we-?

TA: Sure. Well, Tom took part of my thunder, but really the key is you have to have the right people and understanding that one person cannot bring this change about. It has got to be a team of people with a shared vision and start identifying those people that believe in the direction that Rikers is going. They don't have to be in leadership roles, but start identifying those people and start getting them ready to be a part of this change and just continuing to keep your eye on the prize, which is making things better for staff and the people that are incarcerated.

EG: Well, thank each of you so much for taking the time and helping us here and showing us an example of a receivership that was incredibly successful. So thank you for your wisdom.