Reforming Criminal Reform [Podcast]

In this episode: from living under a bridge to building bridges between policy and practice, CJ Appleton’s story is one of resilience, purpose, and possibility. Appleton is a new faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. After a rocky start to his academic career, including dropping out of college and becoming homeless, today he’s eager to bridge the gap between criminology scholarship and US policy. His focus is on desistance, the process of ending a criminal career. Duke Sanford interim Dean Manoj Mohanan hosts.

Conversation Highlights

Responses have been edited for clarity.

on his college missteps

I had a successful high school football career, and then I ended up having the opportunity to play at Oregon State University. I wasn't prepared for the celebrity status that you have as a Division I athlete in a small college town. You just go everywhere, everything's free, and everybody wants to talk to you. It's unforgiving. When all of what you have is wrapped up in the athlete identity - if that goes left or right - then it's heavy on you, because it's so much of a part of who you are.

In college the people who had nudged me from adolescence weren't there, and so I got off-line more than I'd ever been before. I didn't know how to bring myself back, just as far as going to class, showing up to my meetings, being responsible.

on OVERCOMING EARLY STUMBLES

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I got connected with a mentor, and he said something to me that was very pivotal. I was a 27-year-old man, I had no education. I had none of the things that I thought I should have at 27. I was very aware and sensitive to that. And he said, "How could you be expected to go somewhere that no one ever taught you how to get there?"

He taught me to be driven by principle. We are the type of people who do what we say we're going to do. We walk with integrity. We do things to a certain standard whether you want to do them or not. These are some of the things that I didn't have the ability to do before we started working together. I took those principles into community college. I was always smart enough. It was the execution of being a student that I was missing. And so, when I took those principles back into my education, that first term back, I got a 4.0 for the first time in my life.

on pursuing a PhD

I always thought I was going to make the NFL, and it's famously 1% of all people who try make the NFL. And then when I saw 1% of the population has a PhD - for me it was like, “Here's my chance to do something that is not professional sports, but it's better in many ways.”

on choosing to focus on Criminology

I was in a Master’s sociology program. There was a scholar who came in and did a talk about the work he had done on syllabi in the '80s. He found out that if you have five different students [and] they all read the same words, they get five different things from those syllabi. I thought, “Wow, that would be interesting to do on probation and parole,” because probation and parole also have a syllabus. When you're on probation, the first thing you get is a paper telling you all the rules you need to follow. They’re giving the same piece of paper to everybody, but I'm wondering what are the different messages that people are getting? That set me on the journey to switching my discipline to criminology.

On his professional focus: ‘desistance’ (ending a criminal career)

I'm very fascinated by behavior change and people's change generally, probably because of my life and how my life went in one direction and moved back to another direction. 

There are two different ways that people approach desistance. One way is trying to view desistance as a process -- a person decides they may want to change, they think about it, they try a couple of things, it doesn't work. And eventually, they get to the point where they desist.

But there's another branch, more of a quantitative branch, that considers the actual ending point. How can we know, as a society, the point when we no longer need to worry about that person being as risky as other groups? Research has shown that, at the 7-year point since a person’s last criminal act is when a former criminal becomes statistically indistinguishable from the general population. That research has guided some efforts, like in Portland, Oregon - at a 7-year point of being crime-free, we should open up pathways for expungement and paths similar. 

What my research is focused on is understanding that process. So - where does it begin before you are able to stop committing crimes? Who do you have to become? How do you view yourself in a way that maintains and sustains that desistance beyond the point where you no longer commit?

ON how Childhood trauma connects to criminal choices

I did my dissertation on the effects of childhood trauma on a person's criminal career – from onset all the way through desistance. I'm working right now actually to try to coin a term that I'm loosely calling “anchor identities,” acknowledging we have parts of ourselves that are like “anchors” that we carry with us through life.

Criminality is not the beginning of our lives. People had lives before that, and they're often carrying with them the baggage from earlier in life. So, they also need to redeem themselves from those moments too.

CJ Appleton is an Assistant Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy. His research is involved in translational policy and practice in criminal justice systems. Appleton earned his master’s degree in sociology from Portland State University. His commitment to probation and parole scholarship brought him to George Mason University to pursue his PhD in Criminology, Law, and Society.