Commissioner Vicki Reed joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss the intersection of juvenile justice and child welfare, highlighting the importance of collaboration, care, and community in supporting vulnerable youth and preventing their exploitation.

Vicki Reed has dedicated her career to child welfare and juvenile justice, with over two decades of experience working with system-involved youth. She holds a degree in law enforcement and a master’s in criminal justice, and has been a strong advocate for vulnerable children in both public and private sectors. Vicki has served as a juvenile probation officer, the director of a youth-serving agency, and has helped shape state-level training for child welfare workers in Kentucky. Beyond her advocacy and service as Juvenile Justice Commissioner of Kentucky, she is also an accomplished author. In her previous appearance on this podcast (episode 246), Vicki discussed her novel The Car Thief. In this episode, she shares insights from her latest novel, Sleight of Hand, which also draws from her extensive experience working with youth.

[00:00:00] Sandie: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, brought to you by Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice, here in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we equip you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in the fight to end human trafficking.

[00:00:22] Today I’m thrilled to welcome back Commissioner Vicki Reed. To the show, Vicki has dedicated her career to child welfare and juvenile justice, with over two decades of experience working with system involved youth. She holds a degree in law enforcement and a master’s in criminal justice and has been a strong advocate.

[00:00:48] For vulnerable children in both public and private sectors. She has served as a juvenile probation officer, the director of a youth serving agency, and helped shape state level training for child welfare workers in Kentucky beyond her advocacy.

[00:01:11] Her service as Juvenile Justice Commissioner of Kentucky. Vicki is also an accomplished author. In her last episode on the podcast number 246, we talked about her novel Car Thief. If you haven’t listened to that episode. I encourage you to check it out because today we’re diving into her latest novel Sleight of hand, which also draws from her extensive experience

[00:01:47] Well, commissioner Vicki Reed, it is a delight to have you back on the ending Human Trafficking Podcast.

[00:01:55] Vicki: And I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:58] Sandie: Since we talked the first time in episode 2 46 about your book, the Car Thief, and what we learned there about juvenile justice. You’ve written another book you’ve served as. The Kentucky Commissioner of Juvenile Justice, and I’m excited to ask you some questions today about your experience. first of all, I wanna know why you decided to come out of retirement and become the commissioner. Well,

[00:02:32] Vicki: an interesting story because probably nobody was more surprised than I was. I had been retired for a number of years and was really enjoying. consulting and writing and, and speaking and just having my own time to do things. But, when the position came open, I just really was sort of a calling to, to be able to take the, the top position and I’d worked in the agency before, underneath.

[00:02:55] And so to be able to have that, that top position and do all the things that I had always. Wanted to see done was just too good an opportunity to, to pass up. and so it was a, it was a wonderful experience. It was difficult in many ways. And I did learn that you can’t always do what you wanna do because you run into, uh, many issues.

[00:03:14] And one of the big problems right now across the entire nation, maybe the entire world. is it’s very difficult to get staff now so that if you don’t have staff that really sort of inhibits how much programming you can do and how much counseling you can do.

[00:03:27] So, it, it was an interesting experience and I promised to do it through, through the end of one term and I did. And so I’ve retired again and gone back and that’s when I finished, the second book and now I’m doing some consulting work with the National Partnership for Juvenile Services.

[00:03:41] Sandie: So let’s talk about the difference between juvenile justice and criminal justice, adults and youth. What are the different goals?

[00:03:52] Vicki: Well with adult corrections, you know, the, one of the primary things, of course, is public safety, and it’s not that juvenile justice doesn’t have that as well, but there’s a certain, punitive, point with adult corrections that we try to avoid. With, with juvenile. And one of the reasons is that it doesn’t work.

[00:04:11] Uh, we’ve seen that, you know, do you remember all the bootcamp hysteria? Everybody was having bootcamps. Oh, boot, straighten up fly rights and discipline. We’ll put that kid, they’ll learn that, you know, whatever. And then they did the studies and the recidivism rate was out the roof. It was like 80 to 90% scared straight, a complete failure.

[00:04:29] It, all these things that feel good and sound good to folks, but actually when they do the studies. Just don’t work. So what we do know is the more rehabilitative, you know, mental health counseling, pro-social activities, resources, a good education. And the other thing with the kids is if you have a, a 17, 16, 17-year-old who.

[00:04:50] Ends into a life of crime and does it for the next 40, 50, 60 years. You’re spending millions and millions of dollars on that individual. Where if we can, you know, get them going right in, in their teenage years and they can go on and graduate, they get a job, they, whatever, they become a functioning part of our society.

[00:05:09] everybody wins.

[00:05:11] Sandie: That’s a good point. This is a a smart fiscal decision too,

[00:05:16] Vicki: If you wanna look at it just in the hard cold facts that that alone.

[00:05:21] Sandie: But in reality, these. Are young people and they’re valuable and we’re not going, they’re not going to become throwaways, which, I’ve talked to kids who feel like they are throwaways. So let’s talk about the difference between your two books, because they’re a great way to.

[00:05:45] Begin to understand how we take care of kids with special circumstances. They may be living in an abusive environment, a neglect environment, which is abusive, and for their safety for their. Health, they are taken out of the home. So first, usually we see they go into child welfare and are presumably then given a placement in foster care.

[00:06:21] but the juvenile justice is the side where you did all of your work. So your first book that we interviewed you on back in episode number 2 46 was about your side of the house, the juvenile justice, and we met. Kelly and tell us a little bit about Kelly’s background that made him such a great way to teach us about the resources available through juvenile justice

[00:06:53] Vicki: Right. And that was the McCarthy ifand this, this, I, I decided to, and really the impetus for this was I was gonna write a nonfiction book about juvenile justice and I just couldn’t get it going. And I thought, well, what if I took a hypothetical kid and just took him through the system in a typical manner that kids do, where a lot of them.

[00:07:11] Start with child welfare issues and then come into juvenile justice and in Kelly’s case, even beyond. So, that, that was just kind of the whole thing where he was, you know, through the death of a family member, entered care and then, that didn’t work out well. And, you know, he took to the road, ran off, uh, got involved because he was stealing to live into juvenile justice.

[00:07:33] And then again, the theme with both of these books is. The books aren’t just about the kid, they’re about the adults. that impact. And it was not for a few very caring adults, the story could have turned out much different. And so the next book, sleigh of Hand, the one that just, just came out with the card on it.

[00:07:52] And I have to tell you from my book launch, we had cupcakes with edible rice cards tucked in

[00:07:57] Sandie: Oh my goodness. Oh

[00:07:59] Vicki: the kids, read them. They weren’t very TAs, I don’t think. But it, it was a, we had the whole casino thing going

[00:08:03] Sandie: So, before we talk about the book and the story of Alex in your second book, tell me how you chose to use a deck of cards in a book.

[00:08:18] Vicki: Well, and when I was in college, I took a recreation class because it was at, you know how college is with one of those times that you can fill in a nice class thing? And each week we had a different thing. We played pool One week, we did sports things one week. And one week we did magic tricks.

[00:08:34] And I was introduced to a ALI card, and you can look on Amazon for about seven bucks. You can get you a deck. And, uh, this, this is a special deck where if you flip it one way, you see all of like the ace of diamonds and you flip it the other way, it looks like normal cards. Uh, it’s because of the way they’re shaved.

[00:08:51] So anyway, I had that deck of cards and I had. Had in my purse, and I was a probation officer and I had a, a new probation officer. I had this kid who came in and, I mean, he was just like, you know, muttering wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t look at me. I was getting absolutely nowhere and out of desperation, I yanked that card thing out.

[00:09:09] I said, you wanna see a card trick? And just said, here, stick your finger in there. And so I did the card trick and he was just amazed. I mean, all of a sudden he was looking right at me like I was some sort of. You know, ’cause after he pulled out four or five asy diamonds out of the same deck and I kept showing him their regular, he thought I was really some magical person.

[00:09:26] And I have used those cards for, for 50 years out of all the things I learned in college, that was the most useful.

[00:09:31] Sandie: My goodness. Okay, so, so you share that trick at the beginning of this second book. So the first book was framed by our juvenile justice system. Now our. Star in sleigh of hand is in child welfare, and it’s very clear that this young boy is close to crossing over into territory that will end up putting him into juvenile justice.

[00:10:07] And so with 64 placements finding. A foster care home that is going to be sustainable seems impossible. when I read in the first chapter, 64 placements, I thought, what, so tell me what you know about placements.

[00:10:32] Vicki: well it’s, it’s interesting because, you know, usually placements for younger kids are fairly easily done. Uh, and I knew do know that child welfare. Through the pandemic also had issues with having enough foster homes, and that’s always a, an issue, but it’s obviously the more difficult a kid gets, the harder it’s going to be to find a foster care placement for them and.

[00:10:53] Sandie: you

[00:10:53] Vicki: We had kids from that we would offer to, not even just foster care, but group homes, residential care, children’s homes, you know, the Green Valley, blah, blah, blah, and all that. And some of them would charge a thousand dollars a day and we would refer a kid and they wouldn’t take them, for even a thousand dollars a day.

[00:11:11] Sandie: stop there. A thousand dollars a day.

[00:11:15] Vicki: Yes,

[00:11:16] Sandie: So, so, okay, so I’m gonna be your average reader and tell you some of the things I thought when I started reading this, 64 placements. First thing popped in my mind is, what is wrong with this kid? What? What do you say to me?

[00:11:34] Vicki: Right. Well, and I think anybody would think that, well, this must be a really horrible, awful kid who’s gone through 64 placements, and I won’t, put it on rose colored glasses. A lot of times it is. Any kid who’s had 64 placements is more than likely having some issues. But the thing is, it’s like, is it.

[00:11:52] The kid that’s caused the 64 placements, or is it the 64 placements that’s messing up the kid? Because just like in Alex, a lot of times he moves from foster homes that have no, no reason, that of fault of his own. You know, his one of, one of his favorite foster homes, they’re moving to California and they don’t take him with him.

[00:12:12] Just because, and we, we’ve had instances where foster parents will say, well, I’ll take a, a youth from the, school age from six to 12, and on the kid’s 13th birthday, they say they’re no longer in our age range. Take ’em out.

[00:12:24] Sandie: Wow. So.

[00:12:26] Vicki: it could be a, a number of different things.

[00:12:28] Sandie: things. So one of the things that I enjoyed as I was reading is it felt like I knew what Alex was thinking when he said something. I found out why he said it.

[00:12:42] That changed my attitude towards him. And the reason I think this book is great for students thinking about going into juvenile justice or child welfare. Is because you weave in the experts as you help us experience what the child is saying and why they’re saying it. Can you give me an example of an expert that you wove into the story?

[00:13:13] Vicki: Well, I’m a, I’m a big fan of Charlie Apple. Stein who was, helped her with my first book, who wrote No Bad kids.com, or that’s his website. And the book was No Bad Kids. and so I’ve used some of his techniques through the years and he and I got to be buddies. And so, I said, I’m, I’m gonna use some of these in your book.

[00:13:30] And he was like, oh, that, well, that’s fine. And one, one of my favorite things when, when Sam, the caseworker first meets with Alex, and,it just shows you the difference that. Sam Smart and knows what he’s doing. And he says to him, he goes, wow, 64 placements. That’s quite a number. How did you manage that? And the kid looks at him and says, no one tells me what to do. And Sam said is thinking in his head what I call automatic adult responses. Well, that’s the kind of thing that got you into a place like this. Well, I’m telling you what to do. Well, that you know that you’ll never get anywhere in life with an attitude.

[00:14:04] And do you think that kid hadn’t heard those kind of things all his life and he’s just. Another adult, whatever. But Sam is smart, and so Sam looks at him and he says, ah, an independent thinker. I get that. And the kid looks at him like, oh, this cat’s different.

[00:14:23] Sandie: So we’re learning how to change our attitude while we’re reading the book. Instead of saying what we wanna say, our automatic adult response, we actually follow the guidance of what’s his name again? We’re gonna put a link.

[00:14:41] Vicki: Charlie Stein.

[00:14:42] Sandie: Charlie Stein, and wow, what a way to learn because now I am waiting to see if it works.

[00:14:49] And it did. It did. Giving a child some control is like basic parenting. I remember when my daughter was two years old and I said, put your shoes on. We’re going, and she said, no. I was like, oh, wait a second. I stopped and then I said, do you wanna put your left shoe on first or your right shoe on first?

[00:15:12] Just giving kids an opportunity to make a choice. It put some of the power back in their hands. Um, when, when. Alex finally gets into a placement. One of the things that I learned from reading this story is how important it was to have a community around that child. Can you talk about the key people that helped that placement be sustainable?

[00:15:46] And it was his last placement. Oops, that was a spoiler alert. I’m sorry.

[00:15:51] Vicki: okay. That’s okay. That’s okay with I, I tend to have happy endings. I’ll just put it, that will really spoil there. Um, well, and that’s one of the things that’s, that’s very important that between looking at. Traditional normal foster care and therapeutic foster care is that you need to think of it more as a residential placement in a home.

[00:16:12] and you, and like Alex probably wouldn’t have made it in that foster home with Matt, the foster parent, if he didn’t have Sam helping them out and other people. So, you know, one of my, one of my gripes on this is we might pay a residential center a thousand dollars a day for a kid, but we pay foster care.

[00:16:31] $68 or whatever. And some of the foster placements that we use where we had success, we had a backup foster parent. We had aides that came in and took the kid out all day and tired ’em out. We had special educational programs. We, we could take that same money. And hopefully much less because you’re not having to pay room board, you know, the expensive staffing type things and surround that kid with services that, the wraparound approach that, that they do sometimes also nicely with kids who are still home and you, you basically, what does this kid need?

[00:17:03] And it might be some pro-social activities, things to keep ’em busy and you know, mental health counseling. So if we wrap those services around a kid, we’re gonna see a lot better. I just have to read one little thing. It’s like. I, I didn’t even know this one, right? There’s an epigraph, that’s what it’s called when you see a poem in the first book.

[00:17:20] And, and this one, this thing was on the his, on my office for 50 years and I got to put it in the book and it’s, he drew a circle that shut me out. Heretic, rebel, a thing to fly, but love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle that took him in. And so that was sort of the whole thing for the book, is that we had these adults who come to, you know, assist this kid.

[00:17:42] Sandie: Wow. That’s so good. So let’s talk just for a second about pro-social activities. That’s a nice word. I like it. I’m gonna write it down. What does it mean

[00:17:56] Vicki: It means that you can’t just say no. You have to have give thing kids something to say yes to. So you just can’t say, don’t use drugs, don’t do this, don’t whatever. You know, what am I supposed to sit in my house? And a lot of times what I have learned from my time in detention, we, one of the detention centers here in Lexington is not very far from the Kentucky Horse Park.

[00:18:16] Folks know us. People out of the country, they know Lexington, Kentucky, world famous for our horses. And most of those kids have never even been there. It’s two miles away. And I’m always amazed at the things they haven’t done. They’ve never. Been on the Easter egg hunt. They’ve never flown a kite. They’ve never walked in a creek.

[00:18:33] They never saw pet a horse. They have lived such confined lives, and so one of the things is just exposing kids to the good things that are out there and giving them things that they. Can enjoy and do, and that will help build competencies and competency build self-worth. Self-worth means you’re more likely to be successful.

[00:18:55] So, you know, it’s great to have the kid in counseling, but maybe instead of three times a week going to counseling, two times a week they go to counseling and one time they go, uh, a music lesson or an art therapy class.

[00:19:06] Sandie: So I’m gonna start a drive to collect used saxophones and give them out at juvenile detention centers. That sounds like fun.

[00:19:16] Uh, there’s lots of research that shows that developmental assets reduce some of the. Issues that we call behavior problems just because the kids have something positive to do. So pro-social activities, put that in with your deck of cards for your tricks to help young people become stronger. Um, so when I’m thinking about some of the.

[00:19:50] Experts that you wove into the story and we just talked about,uh, why can’t I remember his name, apple.are there some others that you helped us, begin to experience so we could understand Alex’s way of thinking and why the adults around him didn’t understand why he did things?

[00:20:19] Vicki: I mean, there’s a number of I, some of the names are just not gonna come to me. It’s like sand and the reindeer. I know ’em when you say ’em,

[00:20:25] Sandie: Uhhuh

[00:20:25] Vicki: think of them all off the top of my head. But there’s a number of, of really good folks, and Rick Miller is another one who did Kids at Hope. which is one thing he was talking about that that.

[00:20:35] Hope drives humanity that these kids have to have a reason. If you think nothing’s ever gonna get better, then there’s no reason to try. and so this was sort of with Alex’s thing, he was like, just, you know, he’d shut down. I don’t, I’m not gonna care, I’m not gonna do anything they want me to do. And that, that’s one of the things we go back to the pro-social or, you know, protective factors we, we talk about with kids is that sometimes you just sort of have to rewire the brain and that.

[00:21:01] Positive experiences help undo some of those adverse childhood experiences, those ACEs that people talk about so much. So that’s another thing to keep in mind with the kid is that, they need to, uh, and the, oh, I’m trying to think of his name, Richard something, the big guru on violence with kids.

[00:21:19] He said, if you show me a kid at a school and he has one adult in that school who thinks that kid is great, he’s not gonna be a problem. It’s the kid who don’t have anybody that you have to worry about.

[00:21:30] Sandie: So commissioner, the number of placements that your hero in the second book Alex had was 64. What do statistics tell us about the hope he had for his future year?

[00:21:50] Vicki: Well, I think obviously after that, you know, you’re sort of not wanted obviously, and. One of the statistics that you know, he’d shared before was that kids who have five or more placements are 90% likely to enter the juvenile justice system. And there’s several studies that have been done that one I think was put out by Georgetown Law, which is a horrifying statistic to think that if you’ve moved five different times in foster care, that you’re almost certain to go to juvenile justice.

[00:22:18] And so one of my things is, well, if we know this, why don’t we take that information and. Flag it. After two or three placements, this kid gets a mark in his file and everybody in the office around child welfare or whatever, sits down and says, we, we need to stop this. We need to see what we need to do to make sure that this kid isn’t going on to four or 5, 6, 7 placements and, and on.

[00:22:41] And this also came up from Kentucky. There was a piece of legislation about from the schools and uh, because the superintendents had so many kids during pandemic and with the opioid epidemic. In their school systems and they said, we have these kids and they’re just changing schools all the time. They change a plate.

[00:22:58] We had a seventh grade boy who’d been in four different middle schools and that year’s only half over. and they get pulled out for foster care appointments. They get pulled out for court and they’re not, they’re getting very poor education. So that’s another way, you know, the, the good education that we can get kids that they don’t fall behind, you know, do they need tutoring to catch up?

[00:23:17] Uh, can we do some special things? Can we, can we do things for these kids that we do for our own? Because you and I put our kids in music lessons and sports and we take ’em on family vacations and stuff, and we need to do that same thing for these kids.

[00:23:31] Sandie: if we move, they move with us. So, um, the connection here with our, our kids who are more vulnerable to being commercially sexually exploited or recruited into labor trafficking, Is born out by other interviews that I’ve done with survivors.

[00:23:52] Most recently I interviewed, a gal, Alia, in episode number 3 38, and she had been in the system. That’s how we talked about it. And she had recommendations about how we can do a better job before she ended up in juvenile justice. And I think you’ve got some recommendations because these kids, we call them dual system kids, they were in child welfare.

[00:24:29] Now they. They became system involved with juvenile justice, which changes the expectations for their future. They get with juvenile justice, they have access to rehabilitation, but they have to make some choices to actually do that work. And they need people around them like your character did, like Matt and Sam and others in the community.

[00:24:57] So let’s talk about the recommendations.

[00:25:00] Vicki: One of them, just before I forget it because you’d mentioned the human trafficking. Uh,one thing we know is kids do best in families. So I’m not saying. There aren’t any kids that should go to what we call congregate care, which is group homes and the residential, but

[00:25:15] Sandie: Congregate care should be for just the youth. They really need those complex services that just cannot be handled in a family situation. And there are some kids like that, but for most kids, even some that you might think, are family, can’t be successful like Alex can be.

[00:25:33] Vicki: And one of the reasons that it’s best to be in families is. We were talking about human trafficking is that, you know, there are traffickers out there. They know where that group home is, and they know those kids that come and go, and they target them for a couple of reasons. One is because they know probably they don’t have much of anybody that cares about ’em because they’re in a group home.

[00:25:52] Because they’ve had trauma and so many vulnerabilities, they, they target them. So that’s one reason among many that we ought to keep kids in a family situation as as much as possible. But the other thing is, is just to realize we shouldn’t silo these kids into different organizations. You’ve got child welfare, you’ve got juvenile justice, and the one we didn’t talk about was mental health.

[00:26:14] And I know you have some background in that, uh, type thing. And so it’s. You know, it’s the same kids. So you have a girl who is either being sexually abused or feels like she’s at risk of it. Okay? She’s a child welfare kid right now. She runs away because she’s scared that, that somebody, either they’re doing something to her or they’re about to.

[00:26:34] So now she’s a status offender. She can be charged as a status offender,

[00:26:37] Sandie: What? What’s a status offender? Is that like you get in trouble for something you haven’t done yet?

[00:26:43] Vicki: It is what you can do if you’re a kid. That’s an offense. That’s not an offense for an adult. So if you don’t go to school, you can be charged with truancy. I, as an adult, if I don’t go to work, they don’t charge me with, you know, you didn’t go to work and lock me up. Uh, run beyond control of your parents and in different states, call ’em, you know, children in need of services and.

[00:27:02] Persons in need of services and that sort of thing, but they’re, they’re kids that you can oftentimes put in detention or in some other long-term care because of that status. So, you know, so you have a girl who runs away now she’s in that different category, and then so she steals to eat and she gets picked up for shoplifting.

[00:27:21] Well now she’s a juvenile justice, but she’s got mental health kids. She’s a mental health kid. It’s all the same kid. They all have the same needs, and so there needs to be a whole lot more collaboration. and some states do that very well, and some do not. Some have it very divided. Once they’re yours, they’re yours, and there’s a lot of finger pointing.

[00:27:39] I don’t want ’em, you take ’em and you spend your money on ’em. Uh uh. So we need to have, uh, Indiana does a good job. They have a, a particular, they have a whole dual status team where if they’re involved in both agencies by law, they have to meet. And work for the best interest of that kid. So there, there needs to be a lot more collaboration among them.

[00:27:59] Sandie: I love that and, and you’ve modeled that in your transition from being more on the criminal justice side of things and juvenile justice probation officer, and then to becoming a commissioner and making. Your dreams for change start to at least make progress. So as we wind up here, what is your call to action to people who read one or both of your books?

[00:28:32] Why should they read the book and what should they do afterwards?

[00:28:38] Vicki: One of the reasons I wrote these books as I hope people in the biz. Would enjoy them, but it was really more for the general public because people don’t know. And the biggest thing is to become informed. People just, you know, they don’t know. They think boot camps are great or they just think, you know, all foster care is either girly great or really bad.

[00:28:57] so this is, this is a way to take people. And because everything is confidential, you can’t get behind those doors as a. Person just on the street. So this is a way to just expose people and have them understand who these kids are. And if you can help in some way, being a foster parent’s, great.

[00:29:14] I that would be wonderful. And I realize that’s not for everybody, but you can do other things. You can, I’ve got my casa blanket back here, uh, here, here in America anyway, you can become a court advocate where you’re assigned to a kid and you become their advocate as they go through the system. If nothing else, you can help donate to foster care organizations.

[00:29:33] So they do have those clarinets and saxophones and can afford to pay for music lessons and art lessons and so forth. So there’s many ways that that people can help.

[00:29:44] Sandie: I love it. Commissioner Vicki Reed, I am sure you’re gonna write a third book and I will be looking forward to that episode. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank

[00:29:57] Vicki: Thank you very much.

[00:29:59] Sandie: Vicki, thank you so much for joining us again and for sharing your experience and powerful storytelling. Listeners, I encourage you to take the next step by visiting our [email protected]. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the important conversations.

[00:30:22] We are having. We’d also love your help in growing this podcast. If you know someone who would benefit from today’s episode, whether they’re working in child welfare education, or simply care about supporting youth in their communities, invite them to subscribe and join our. Podcast community. You can also connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to stay updated on future episodes and resources.

[00:30:56] Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in two weeks.

[00:30:59]