Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was A Probation Officer For 20+ Years — This Is The Dark Side Of The Job | Paul Collette

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Paul Collette spent years working inside the criminal justice system as a New York probation officer before leaving to become a federal probation officer. In this episode, Paul pulls back the curtain on what probation really looks like, sharing real stories from the job while breaking down the biggest myths and truths the public gets wrong. He talks about supervising violent criminals and sex offenders, handling high-risk situations, and the daily pressure of balancing public safety with rehabilitation. From the differences between state and federal probation to the realities of working with dangerous individuals, this conversation offers an unfiltered, insider look at life behind the badge and what it truly means to work inside the probation system. _____________________________________________ #ProbationOfficer #CriminalJustice #TrueCrimePodcast #LawEnforcementStories #PrisonSystem #JusticeSystem #BehindTheBadge #realcrimestory _____________________________________________ Connect with Paul Collette: https://sapservicesct.com/about Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro: Supervising High-Risk Offenders on Probation 02:00 Meet Paul Collette: Life After 20+ Years in Probation 05:00 Therapy, Family & Rebuilding After Law Enforcement 07:00 Growing Up in a Military Family & Constant Relocation 11:00 Early Influences That Shaped His Career Path 14:00 Social Work vs Law Enforcement: Choosing Probation 17:00 First Jobs & Breaking Into the Probation System 20:00 Becoming a New York Probation Officer 24:00 The Reality of Probation Work: Stress, Risk & Responsibility 29:00 Probation Officers vs Police: Power, Authority & Limits 33:00 Supervising Dangerous Offenders: Daily Risks on the Job 38:00 Empathy vs Enforcement: How the Job Changes You 40:00 Transitioning From State to Federal Probation 44:00 Inside Federal Probation: Reports, Caseloads & Pressure 48:00 Judges, Sentencing & the Flaws in the Justice System 53:00 How Much Power Does a Probation Officer Really Have? 58:00 Transfers, Burnout & Career Turning Points 01:02:00 Becoming a Federal Sex Offender Specialist 01:09:00 Supervising Sex Offenders: Monitoring, Limits & Reality 01:17:00 Recidivism: Why the System Struggles to Prevent Reoffending 01:23:00 Restitution, Supervision & Overlooked System Details 01:28:00 Cooperators, PSI Reports & Prison Outcomes 01:34:00 Mental Health, Trauma & the Hidden Cost of the Job 01:41:00 Why He Finally Left Probation After 20+ Years 01:48:00 Advice for Returning Citizens & People on Supervision 01:53:00 Life After Probation: Therapy, Teaching & Helping Others 01:57:00 Final Thoughts on the Justice System & Closing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I-risk offenders were the ones we needed to be focusing on. Organized crime, sex offenders, the violent offenders, the people that are actively involved out there hurting people. In those conversations, how hard is it to leave your emotions out of it? If you had told me this that when I was in college, that I was going to be looking at men's weeners all day, I would have laughed and run screaming from the room. Do you find that the judge has already reached a decision before sentencing? One time my partner and I were walking in and I realized, oh shit, somebody's shooting at us. So say you're supervising me, I get pulled over by the state police. How long is it take for them to notify you?

I've never seen an SO, a sex offender, rehabilitate. Tell us about the toll the job takes on you. Paul Collette spent years supervising violent criminals and sex offenders, and the public has no idea what probation officers actually deal with. Paul, welcome to lockdown. Thanks so much for coming out here today. We just had a snowstorm last night in Connecticut. Thanks for inviting me, Ian.

I was worried I was not going to get here. But you know what? The roads, they did a great job. And I was actually lost some sleep last night. I was really excited about coming in today. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it, man. I think you're our very first federal probation officer, former federal probation officer. We've had state ones. How many guests have you had? Hundreds. Over 500 now. Over 500. Yeah, we just celebrated the 500th one a couple weeks ago. I had my girlfriend,

Lettiecheon. Thank you. Well deserved. How long have you been listening to the show for? About a year and a half. I listen to a, I have a lot of podcasts locked and loaded. in my Spotify account. And you know how the algorithm, like you listen to one and it shows you you might be interested in. And you popped up.

And I remember if the first, I first saw your podcast and I was like, oh, this is another. And I'm just, all due respect. I thought, okay, here's another ex felon who's just going to be interviewing ex felons. And then it was like, wait a second, you're interviewing agents and officers and entertainers and, you know, influencers. And I'm like, oh, I get it now. So I started listening to you and I just decided, you know, I got to get on your show. I got to try.

And so you reached out to me and thank you very much. Yeah, I think the law enforcement episodes really helped make the show special because we have so many. And now they're very trustworthy of the show that they could come on and it's a safe spot. And a lot of the big podcast do do law enforcement. You see Theo Vaughn. You see Joe Rogan. You see Sean Ryan do a heavy hitter, you know, law enforcement one. And it's good for long-form content, too.

It is. And a lot of ex-law enforcement officers, they're either fall into two camps. One, they just don't want to talk about the job anymore. You know, they have their own trauma or PTSD and they're just, or they're still kind of involved in that law enforcement realm. And they view this type of space is just sort of selling out. And the other half is people like myself who have these stories to tell, who have our own trauma, who have our own stories that we want to share with people to let them know what it was

like working in our particular niche field in law enforcement and our journey, and to have you offer this safe space for us in a very non-judgmental space and kind of tease out in this long-form podcast the ability to share their stories. That's why I love listening to these podcasts, and I love your podcast because I can listen to two and a half, three hours long, and it just goes by so quickly. And plus, I feel, I feel more grounded in my own personal and professional life that I have these type of safe spaces to talk to people in. And when I'm done, I think this is like probably the fifth podcast I've been on. Every time I'm on a podcast, people reach out to me and they're like, I thank you for your story. they talked to me about what their own personal and professional journeys have been like.

And in law enforcement, there are a lot of officers who just don't want to talk about it. This is sort of a taboo. You know, we don't want to talk about the bad stories. We don't want to, you know, these war stories. They just want to talk about, you know, how many people they have rested and, you know, what it was like when they were working for ex-agency. The glory days, I'm not about that. Part of my, good part of my career was not, it was not fun. It was not a fun career.

It was, every day was a drudgery. It was only towards the end of my career when I retired and then this new 2.0 version of myself that you see now. That's the best part of my life. I hate to say it, man. I love the way my life is now. But anyways, well, we can start at the beginning if you want, whatever you want to talk about. First, tell everyone what you do now and the services you offer here in Connecticut. Okay, so I'm retired after 24 years, federal law enforcement, was a former federal probation officer.

I am currently a therapist in private practice. I run my own practice called Compass Recovery and Counseling. I am licensed as a therapist in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In Connecticut, I'm in what we call an LADC. I'm a licensed alcohol and drug counselor. So for those of you that don't... So in Connecticut, we have four levels of master level therapists. We've got MSWs or social workers.

We've got LPCs, licensed professional counselors, LMFTs, licensed marriage and family therapists. and LADCs. My scope of practice or what I do is I only work with people that have a relationship with drugs and alcohol and co-occurring disorders. So co-occurring is, think somebody's addicted to heroin. Co-occurring is they also suffer from depression or anxiety. And I am by license only allowed to work with that specific population. So much like if you go to law school, you get a law degree and then you specialize. You can specialize. You can specialize criminal law, civil law, maritime law, you know, hedge fund law, or you go to medical school.

You get your MD, but then you specialize. I specialized in addiction, counseling, because that is the population that I've worked with my whole career, and I love working with that population. And so I think I have a lot to offer. When I retired, I opened up my own practice and then COVID hit, and we had to shut everything down for a little while. So everything moved online, and now I'm back back in the office again, but I also have a good part of my practice online as well. I am also a full-time college professor where I've been for four years. I'm an associate professor for the Connecticut State Community College System, and I am running the drug and alcohol addiction studies program at Nogatuck Valley,

which is in Waterbury at the campus there. So I've been doing that for four years, training the next generation of therapists here in Connecticut. So I'm busy. I love it. I'm also married. I have a wife who is a few years younger than me, my second marriage, who I actually love this time, unlike my first one, I have four daughters. So just so you know, I'm 58 years old, everybody, and I have four daughters, age 30, 24, six, and four. So I am in it. I love working. I love taking care of my family. And I just love this new version of myself.

And so I love talking about my journey to everybody who's interested. So did you, grew up in Connecticut? No, I was a military brat. So my dad was a colonel in the Air Force. He was a we call a navigator. So he flew the AC130 gunships. He was a lieutenant colonel. He retired to 20 years. We moved around a lot. I lived in places like Turkey, Arkansas, Florida, California. I forgot where else, a couple other states. Basically every three or four years we had to move. And so he did two tours in Vietnam, Panama and Granada. And he's my hero. He was a great man.

He's still alive today. He's 84 years old. My mom passed about two years ago. And he's retired living in Arkansas, living out his best days and just enjoying his life. But no, we moved around a lot. So I think this is probably the longest I've ever lived anywhere was in Connecticut. So I moved to Connecticut in 2006. Were your parents together growing up?

We had a really good family life, nuclear family. family. Mom was a homemaker. My dad was an officer in the Air Force. So when he was not deployed, he was gone and he would come home periodically. So I remember as a kid coming home, and there'd be this strange man standing in my kitchen in an Air Force uniform. Like, who's that? And mom's like, that's your dad. Like, oh, welcome, dad. So that was kind of odd, kind of navigating that, but my mom was a homemaker. So she took care of everybody. She took care of the house, paid the bills, fed us, made sure that my brother and I, used a couple years younger than me, were well taken care of. But that was, as a Gen Xer, we didn't have the internet in those days.

So, you know, I would come home from school and then go play outside in the woods and on the weekends and we would just have a great time. So I had a great life, no complaints whatsoever. Strictly, purely middle class, military upbringing, always moving around, always indoctrinated into that military culture. So for me, that was just kind of a natural progression of things. As I got older, I was always expected to join the military or have some type of job where I was working for the government. And ultimately, I did. I ended up working for the U.S. government for 24 years. And I also joined the Navy as a what we call it Master of Arms, which is the naval equivalent of a police officer. So I was in the U.S. Navy reserves for eight

years. And while I was also a Fed at the time. So it was a pretty colorful journey I've had. Do you think there are negative effects in your adult life when you move around a lot as a kid? That's a great question. Yes, and I'll tell you why. For me, it was every three or four years, as I was, as I hit my teens in early 20s, I would get this itch to move constantly. One of the negatives growing up in that kind of environment was, remember, there was no internet back then. And so I'd come home from school and my mom and Debbie in the kitchen, like, oh, we're moving again. I'm like, great, where are we going to? So I would go to school the next day and tell my few friends that I had that I'm, we're going to be transferring out again. There was no email.

You couldn't make long distance calls because long distance calls in those days were obscenely expensive. And so we would write letters to each other. That never really worked out. And so every couple years as I got older, if I was in a relationship, I would get antsy, like something's wrong. I should get out of this relationship. I need to move.

had trouble like holding down a job for a little while in my early 20s because I just felt like something I need to change. I would just get antsy. That was part of the military upbringing and having to move a lot. The good part about that lifestyle, though, was that it really expanded your worldview about how wonderful and diverse our planet is, you know, living in Turkey, living in California, moving to Florida, New Jersey, New York City. It was, was I had this ability as most people who are brats in the government, either civil service or military, the ability to kind of blend in wherever I would move. So I went to three different high schools. And each high school was just the ability for me to kind of show up and out of

the blue with no friends and quickly make friends. That was kind of cool. I enjoyed that. But once again, on the negative side, having lived in Connecticut now for a while, I have some friends that were born and raised here and they went to school, elementary school, high school, college with the same group of people and they're their lifelong friends. I don't have those friends anymore. I don't know what that means to have friends that long. So that's a negative as well. So there's pluses and minuses to having that kind of life and being born into that. I'm dug in now in Connecticut. We're not moving. So my daughters, they're going to grow up here in the northeast. And I like it. Snow.

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Fuel restrictions apply. See site for details. Oh, you know. Do you think you genuinely wanted to get into law enforcement as a teenager or is it so much as like pushed on to you? Things were never really pushed. That's a great question. Things were never really pushed on to me by my parents. It was simply, I'll tell you a story.

True story. So senior year high school, I come home and my mom is in the kitchen and I see my dad's car in the driveway. And I go, where's dad? She's like, oh, he's upstairs in your bedroom. Like, why's he in my bedroom? So I go upstairs. My dad's in my bedroom's got a tape measure. He's doing this.

I'm like, dad, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I'm measuring my den for when you move out of here. I'm like, what do you mean you're measuring my den? He goes, oh, well, remember when I told you a couple years ago that when you graduate from high school, you either join the military, you go to college or you go to trade school, but you have to leave. He goes, you have to leave. Oh, shit. He's serious. So I had to make a choice. What was I going to do? And that years later, I asked him, were you really going to kick me out? He's like, no, I was going to kick you out. But I just, I wanted you know I was, I was serious that

you had to make a choice. So for me, it was going to college. That was pretty much my journey. What I wanted to do was always expected that was going to go to college because my dad went to college. He has a bachelor's at a master's degree in business. And, you know, he was an officer in the military. So that was sort of the bar that was set for me. The bar that was set for me was, was I was expected to stand on my dad's shoulders and become better than him and, you know, professionally. And I still carry that today. I want my children to have those same goals. I want them to become more successful, if as not successful as me. But once again, at the time, I just knew I just had to work and do something. Law enforcement-wise, no, I thought I was just going to join the

military, but it wasn't until I went to college in my undergrad. So I went to, I have a bachelor's degree in art history, of all things. I changed my major like freaking seven times in college. Photojournalism, history, art history, I forgot what else, a couple other, you know, engineering, which I suck at math. That was stupid of me. By my senior year, I had enough credits to get a degree in art history. So I got my bachelor's degree in art history. But coincidentally, I was also taking some social work classes in my undergrad. And just because I just needed to fill some classes. And one of those classes was on death and dying. And as part of our assignment was we had to go either volunteer in a hospice or find some other place that people were

dying, end of life care. I got in my little head that, hey, the local police department flagstaff, they have what they call ride-alongs where you can ride along with the cops. I was like, oh, I've never done that before. That might be fun. Maybe we'll see some dead people out. This is my warp thinking. So I did a ride along with a cop, which was kind of fun. He was remembering.

He was a little burned out. He was about to retire. Didn't talk too much. It wasn't really cheering on the field of law enforcement at the time. And this was like 1988, 87. And afterwards, I found out that the Flaxat police department actually had a program where they had volunteers to do death notifications. So apparently at the time, police officers were not allowed to do death notifications.

So when somebody died, they were not sent a police officer to the house and formed the family. They would send social workers or volunteers. I volunteered to do that. And so I had to take a couple extra classes on learning about death and dying, empathy, counseling 101. And here I was as a young man still in college. showing up at some people's houses in Flagstaff knocking on doors saying, hey, you know, your daughter died in a car accident tonight. And there would be a police officer and under the social worker present with me, but I was the primary person to tell the family that.

So for me, it was a very eye-opening, humbling experience to do that kind of work. I don't know if I really enjoyed it as much, but I got credit for it. And so when I graduated from college, it sort of put me on a path towards this sort of quasi law enforcement career, probation, which basically you're a social worker with a gun. That's what probation officers are. And I moved to New York City right after I graduated. I had a girlfriend in college. She was from New York City originally. And so she graduated a year ahead of me and we stayed in touch. And she said, hey, when you graduate, why you come move in with me? So she lived in the village, Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan and was like, yeah, sure, moved in with her. Two weeks later, we broke up.

I'm still unemployed trying to find a job, nearly graduate from college, 1989, 90, and got a studio apartment. Remember, folks, this is when New York City was still affordable. You could still live on a decent salary there. Got a job at a hospital called Bellevue Hospital, which is in Lower Manhattan. If you ever watched the show New Amsterdam, that's Bellevue Hospital. So it's a city hospital, trauma hospital, also world famous for having a 24-hour psychiatric emergency room. My first job out of college was working there as what they call a clinical case manager. Basically, what that means is I was basically a caseworker working in the psych ER. I was part of a treatment team of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses,

APRNs, nurses who subscribe, and my job was to work with, we call the homeless, mentally ill population. Back then, we call them, we call them Micah, mentally ill chemical abusers. And so these are people that were coming off the street. They were having some psychotic episode. They were also addicted to substances, majority of which were homeless, majority of homeless individuals out there, even today, are addicted or have a relationship with drugs and alcohol. My job was to link them up with services to help them find housing. and get them on Social Security disability, get them on the Medicaid, the Medicare, whatever they needed, I would help them with that.

Did that for three and a half years. Love the work. Absolutely loved it. The problem was it only paid $24,000 a year. Now, this is in the early 1990s. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life at the time. I still had a bachelor's degree doing this kind of work in the psych ER. So now things started to crystallize for me a little bit.

all right, I've got some choices here. I could go into social work full-time. I could go into law enforcement because the cool thing about working in the psych ER was I would meet the NYPD, I would meet secret service agents, U.S. Marshal Service, probation parole officers. They would bring in their clients or their offenders or their arrestees into the psych ER if they needed to have an evaluation before they shipped them off to prison or jail. And so I would talk to these people and I would say, hey, what do you do for a living? And I was like, oh, man, I could be a cop.

Oh, I could do this. I could do that. So for those of you that aren't familiar with the New York City civil service system, all jobs in the city of New York are civil service, which means you have to take a test. Every job for the city of New York is civil service. So I took the NYPD exam, did pretty well on it. This is in the early 1990s. And I thought I was going to become a New York City police officer, which at the time was probably one of the coolest jobs ever. It was a very hard job to get also at the time. time. This is the, this is in the days when people wanted to become police officers. They offered the exam once every four years. That's how popular it was. So I would take the, I took the exam. 50,000 people showed up that day to take the exam. And you waited. You waited to go through the background investigation, the physical, the psychological examination. And if you were lucky, you would pass all those hurdles and then they would offer you a place in the academy, whenever that was. After four years, the test would expire, and you had to retake the test again to become a cop.

So they were about to hire me. I was slated to go to the next NYPD Academy class. Really excited about becoming a cop when the mayor at the time, Mayor Dinkins, to save money with the city budget, canceled the academy class. That was my last shot before the test expired, the list expired. So my dream of becoming an NYPD cop expired on that day. I had a choice to retake the exam and wait another four years, but I was just like, I'm not freaking doing this anymore. I can't keep doing this. So I took the test for New York City probation

officer, not knowing what that job was about. But I had the requisite qualifications. I already had a bachelor's degree. I already had some experience work in the psych ER. So I said, what else can go wrong? Also, at the time, I was in graduate school. I was going to Columbia University for their MSW program, their master's and social work program, did one semester and realized very quickly at age 22 years old, I did not have my own shit together. So how am I going to help somebody else with their shit? I couldn't be, I couldn't become a social worker. I wanted to become a therapist, even at that early age. I just couldn't do it. I was still figured my own place in the world. So it dropped out of graduate school. And when I dropped out of graduate school, New York City probation

called and I got hired and went through their academy class to become a New York City probation officer in 1993. Was that test hard compared to the civil service test? The NYPD exam was actually harder. The New York City probation exam was a joke. It was just basically some scenario questions. You know, you're meeting somebody like it would be like paragraph long form. You had to write in your answers, some multiple choice questions, some true, false.

And then, to be honest, I don't even know how they scored you on that. But it was also a combination of your education and experience. That's also how they scored you as well. So I scored somewhat high on it. But at the time, it really wasn't a popular job. So I didn't have to wait that long to be called. It paid a lot less than the NYPD, which is funny because at the time to become an NYPD to join the NYPD, you only needed a GED.

Now I think it's two years of college. I had a bachelor's degree. To become a New York City probation officer, you needed a minimum of a bachelor's degree with some experience. And it paid a lot less than a New York City police officer. Why do you think that was?

Why was there a flop like that? Because they didn't have a good union. I mean, at the time, there's 30,000 police officers in the city of New York. It's probably about how many there are even today. New York City probation, maybe had 1,200.

But it just wasn't, Probation is sort of the bastard stepchild of law enforcement, even today. A lot of people in law enforcement that work in the field kind of scratch their heads when they deal with probation officers or parole officers. They're like, what do you do again? You know, like what side of the fence are you on? Are you law enforcement or are you social work? Oh, you know, it was like, they used to call us hug a thug, you know, because I would have clients or offenders, clients that would violate. they would come into the office and they would test positive for marijuana, for instance.

Marijuana is the bane of every probation officer's existence. It was like, all right, it triggers a violation. It triggers a report to the judge. And it could trigger that person losing their freedom. But as a probation officer, we really tried to help those clients. We put them in drug and alcohol treatment. We give them a second, third chance. We would restrict their conditions of supervision a little bit. And so for me, at a young age, remember, I still wanted to be a cop. I still wanted do law enforcement. I kind of scratched my head like some of these guys really need to be incarcerated. They just, they're not cutting on our probation. But because of the nature of the work and my supervisors and the way the job was structured, we gave these individuals second, third, fourth, fifth

chances. And it was frustrating for me to see them constantly reoffend. And, and, and, you know, And sometimes commit even more horrific crimes on the public out there. You know, they went from nonviolent to violent offenses, and nobody was doing anything. So as the first line of defense, as a probation officer, I really struggled with staying in that career path. And so I was with the New York City Department of Probation for about three and a half years before I transitioned over to the feds. But while I was with New York City probation, I was able to get into what they call the Field Services Unit, which is the warrant division. So my last two years with city probation,

I was executing warrants going out at five during the morning, arresting people. That was fun. I got that out of my system a little bit, you know, playing cop. It's a pretty interesting stories. And, you know, I got enough experience where I got hired by the feds.

So now, what's the difference between a probation officer and a cop in that scenario then? Do you have the arrest powers? Are you carrying a gun on the Warren Squad? Yeah, that's a great question. So probation officer's jurisdiction only pertain to that particular offender or client. Okay. So somebody gets arrested, they're put on probation, right?

So instead of going to prison or jail, they will serve their time out on the street. So say somebody commits larceny. So instead of going to jail for one year, the judge will say three years probation. And then the judge imposes a bunch of what they call condition. right. I call them the Ten Commandments or the Thou shall nots. Thou shall not use drugs. Thou shall get a job. Thou shall provide for your children. Thou shall pay your taxes. That shall pay restitution, all these wonderful things that you're expected to do while on supervision. So as a probation officer, we would enforce the court's conditions on that particular client. And we would go out in the field. The field is going down in the community where they live. We would go out into the field, do unannounced home visits. random drug tests, would make sure, verify their employment, verify that they're not using substances, verify that they're paying their restitution, all these wonderful things that a law-abiding citizen does in today's modern society. But with the people that are on paper or probation

or parole, they're expected to really open up their lives to the probation officer. So I would show up sometimes 7 o'clock at night, knock on the door. You know, hey Rick, Paul's here, let me in. come into the house, we'd look around for things, make sure that they're compliant. There's nothing, there's no indication that they are going to relapse or they're engaging in any additional criminal offenses or conduct. An example I can give you was when I was a New York City probation officer, we did a home visit in a place called the Red Hook Housing Projects, which is in Brooklyn, at the time with a very violent area. These are massive housing projects that were several city blocks. And when we would drive up, my partner and I, we would show up looking for somebody,

usually when I was with the Warren Squad. On occasion, we would check in on people that were on probation, that were violent offenders. And when we would pull into the housing projects, we would pull our car into underneath the awning. We would never walk outside, walk through the courtyard, because we would get what we call airmail. People would stay on the roofs and they would throw bricks down on people. And so we pull our car underneath the awning and then walk in because on some occasions there would be a cinder block through the roof of your car. People would drop it out on you. One time my partner and I were walking in and it was, I remember, it was 5.30 in the morning. The sun was rising. Beautiful, beautiful sunny day. And I looked down at the ground and I see some dust

go kind of puff up. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. What is that? And then I'm, I hear a crack, like a pop, and then I see another one. And I realize, oh, shit, somebody's shooting at us. Somebody was shooting at us from one of the buildings about a block away. So we get back in our car, drive out of there. We call 1013 officer, you know, officer down off of these assistants, taking fire. And a bunch of cops swarm that area. We never got the guy. And that was my first experience to being shot at, which is kind of interesting. But I had to go back the next day, and I was visiting one of my offenders, my clients, and I'm going into his bedroom, my partner's talking to him out in the living room.

So what we do is what we call plain view search. So there's a lot of restrictions to being a probation officer. You just can't toss somebody's apartment, like a correction officer can toss an inmate's cell. They still have some civil rights here. And so one of their rights is I could walk into their house and I can look around in plain view and see if there's anything like, is there plain, like, is there drugs on the table, right?

Is there a firearm visible? Is there something that's indicating that they are committing another offense? I just can't open up drawers and toss mattresses. I cannot do that. I need a warrant to do that. Interesting enough, though, I walked into the bedroom and I'm looking around, and this was a young man about 1819. And I look at his bed and out of the corner of his bed, right underneath the mattress, I see

a firearm sticking out. the butt of a gun. And I was like, what the hell is that? Is that what I think it is? So I walk over, it's a gun. It's a gun. He tried to hide his gun and it was kind of peeking out from the mattress. So plain view, go into the other room, pull my firearm out.

My partner's like, what are you doing? I'm like, he's got a gun. We arrest him. I go back in the other room, make safe that weapon. We arrest him. And he's back out on the street a week later. It was just, it was crazy. You know, the judge was like, we can't.

There's no guarantee it was his gun. It was his, it could have been his mother or his cousin or his brother who also lived there as well. But it was his bedroom. Aren't there strict rules on that? Like when there's a felon living in the house with guns? Well, I mean, New York City is really hard to have guns. And so there was, yeah, it was an illegal firearm. So there was no reason why he should have had one.

So, but you're right, yeah, there are restrictions. So if there is a firearm in, if you're a convicted felon, and there's a firearm in the house, then yeah, you could be charged as felon in possession. But this is the early 1990s. This is the Wild West. Things are a little bit different now. There's a lot more restrictions and the courts do look at that a lot harsher than they did back then. And this is New York City. And even much like today, even back then, it was a very liberal court system. And so the courts tended to favor, tended to favor more the criminal population than they did law enforcement population for a lot of legitimate reasons. But for an officer like myself who's struggling to help this particular client,

you know, and after one, I'm even talking, like, dude, was that your gun? And he's like, no, man, it wasn't my gun. It was my cousin. He was showing up and he just hit it underneath there because he was going to go out later with it. He needed it. I'm like, why did you let him do that? He's like, because he's family. You know, how do you argue with that? You know, how can you tell somebody they grew up with that they have to make a choice, you know, between their cousin and living a abiding life when this is the only life that he's ever known. So for me, it was sort of a, kind of an awakening as I kind of progressed through my field. Remember, I was, I was born into a white middle class military family. And living in New York City at the time, working in law

enforcement was an eye-opener for me, working with marginalized populations that were, you know, who might have judged? And it was really an interesting fun experience at the time. But I knew, working for the city of New York as a probation officer was just not going to be sustainable for me in the long run, money-wise. Plus, I was newly married, just had a child, our first kid. And I knew I needed to ramp up my income and I needed to get a real legitimate career. In your experience, did you find that clients were friendly towards you, or did they treat you like law enforcement in the sense where they're anti, say, cop? Great question. They treated me more anti-law enforcement as a cop because, that's that was my persona at the time. I would not allow them to get close to me. I would not allow my clients. I would not, I was not humanizing them because I was taught that they, there's us and then there's them. They're on that side of the fence. I'm on this side of the fence. There's no gray area. And so as a young man in my 20s, working with that particular population, having been taught by the OGs, the older officers, that they're the enemy, we're the good guys, there's no,

there's no gray area. For me, it was always an uphill battle with my clients. I was always fighting them. I was always, I was coming home miserable. I was always yelling at them. I was, I was admonishing them. I was verbally admonishing them because that's just what I thought a probation officer was supposed to do. It wasn't until years, later when I was working for the feds and I got older and I started to really see what was happening on the other side that are like, wait a second. I'm working with officers that are just as much dirtbags as some of these people that I'm supervising. And some of the people, a lot of people I'm supervising are actually pretty cool. They're nice guys. And they made a mistake. Just like I've

made many mistakes in my life. So for me, that shift change happened later on in my career. Especially once I transitioned into working with sex offenders, which we can talk about later, but when I was with the city of New York. Bonjour, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget.

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or just grabbing one more spoonful of yogurt, Keep it real. Look for the seal. Real California milk by real California farm families. Yeah, it was simply, it was us versus them. It's also got to be a hard dynamic being in your 20s supervising, say someone that's 50 years old or 60 years old, just getting out of prison. It was incredibly interesting, to say the least. It wasn't difficult only because I had a job to do and I thought I did it pretty well. not really I was just following I was just following the playbook here are your conditions

of supervision this is what you're expected to do as long as you stay within that little box you and I are going to get along okay you report to my office as directed once a month once a week I'll come visit you out in the field randomly

as long as you piss negative as long as you're working we're not going to have a problem and that formula kind of works on the state and the federal side. Because that essentially is what probation and parole is. It is, here's your conditions, just adhere to it, and then we'll all get along.

Theoretically, what's supposed to happen is the probation officer, what we call triage. We focus on the more, we focus on the more violent offenders. We focus on more offenders that require additional supervision. And the low risk offenders, low risk. clients, you know, the ones we don't need to really worry about that much, can report via email once a month. They can come in once a month. We had, when I was with the feds, we had people come in and just once every six months. I had people I never even saw that would just mail in their form or report now at a kiosk. We had kiosk, you know, where you just kind of come in and deal

a little fingerprint and you, have you been arrested recently? No. Been using drugs? No. Are you employed? submit your pay stub through here. And that was it. Those were the we call the low risk offenders. The high risk offenders were the ones we needed to be focusing on. Organized crime, sex offenders, the violent offenders, the people that are actively involved out there hurting people. And theoretically, that system is supposed to work. But having been in the trenches for 24 years, I realized it doesn't work as well as a lot of people think.

because what's happening is they're hiring a lot of young officers that have very little experience, street experience. They don't understand what it's like to work with a 50-year-old person coming out of federal prison for 20 years. What kind of services that person need? Are they institutionalized? What's their life look like? I had a guy, he came out of federal prison. He did a 20-year bid, and this was in the New Haven office. he comes into the office

two days out of federal prison to receive me for the first time we're in the bathroom together because I have to if you had told me this that when I was in college that I was going to be looking at men's weeners all day I would have laughed

and run screaming from the room but that's what a PO does we have to observe people pissing in cups all day you know so he's in the bathroom he does his thing and he goes over to the faucet to wash his hands

and it's one of those faucets that are you put your hand under and the sensor and the water starts, there was no knobs. He's trying to find the knob. And I go, hey, Rick, just put your hand underneath. And he puts his hand under,

the water starts, and I'm watching his back, and he starts crying. Like, legitimately full on, he's having a meltdown. I'm like, what's wrong? He goes, I just don't understand this world today. He goes, when I went in,

there were no cell phones. There was no internet. He goes, even the fricking faucets don't even work the way I remember. I was like, wow, that's deep. That's a really deep experience for somebody like that to go through. And that was just one small, tiny little chamber of experiences that I was sort of developing as I got older as a PO, realizing that these are incredibly complex times that we live in. And these men and women that I'm working with are incredible.

incredibly complex and everyone has a really powerful story to tell and having to shed away that old version of myself viewing them as not the enemy but it's like they're the criminal I'm the good guy no it just was not it just that was just not sustainable for me because I was starting to develop my own trauma my own you know as I was developing my own career path and working with sex offenders, you know, I was realizing, man, this is, this is not what I signed up for in the field of law enforcement. And by the way, to go back, before I became a PO, when I was, before I became a New York City probation officer, I was a club guy. I would go to a, there was a club called the limelight, New York City, you know, I was in Chelsea, a place called the Batcave. I would hang out there. I would do,

I would do weed. I did some Coke. I did ecstasy. All of that, before I became a program. officer. Ironically, when I had to do my background investigation for the feds, they asked me if I ever did drugs. I was like, no, absolutely not. Because if I did, it would have been immediate even weed would have been in those days was a meet disqualifier. And so here I am getting hired. And you talk about being a hypocrite. I'm sure some of your audience members are being looking at me like, oh, you, God damn you. No, it's like, but it's true. Like, how can I supervise somebody who went to federal prison for ecstasy, kilograms worth of ecstasy when I did it when I was in my early 20s. That's how complex things are for me.

And as I got older and I started my brain matured and I developed this new version of myself, I realized, wow, this is something that I really need to be working on myself and what kind of person, what kind of man do I want to be? Do I really want to, why did I get in this field to begin with, which was just to help people, not to play cop, not to play special agent. What was the training process like for the feds when you decide to leave the state and join? It was a joke. So back in the early 1990, back in the, I got hired as a Fed in 1997.

1997 I was hired where they called the Southern District of New York, which is Manhattan. So Manhattan, the Bronx, and Westchester County, that's the federal district that I got hired in. So I got sworn in 1997. and they sent me away to the Probation Academy. At the time, it was a place, we call it Mytag. It was at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Maryland. It was three weeks long.

The probation, the Federal Probation Academy was three weeks long back then in 1997. It was mostly classroom training. That's all it was. How to testify in federal court, how to deal with the judges, how to write. And then you would turn back to your mother court where you were hired, and then everything was on the job training. Firearms was on the job training, how to testify in court, how to do supervision, all on

the job training. So for those of you that are interested in what federal probation really is, federal probation is divided into three different components. Pre-trial supervision, supervision, and pre-settation. reports. Pre-sentence report is basically an enhanced background investigation on the person that's been arrested. So somebody's arrested for drug distribution by the FBI. They go before what they call a magistrate judge. That's a federal judge. They go before a magistrate judge. And the judge determines if that person is going to be incarcerated while their case is pending or if they're going to be released out into the

community. If they're released in the community, that's called pretrial supervision. And so the judge, impose a bunch of conditions while that person is out on pretrial supervision while their cases pending in federal court. And we would do pretrial supervision. So somebody like me is a probation officer would keep an eye on that person, make sure, if it's a drug offense, making sure they're not using drugs, they're not associating with people that are on paper or have been that are engaged in criminal activity, felon or ex-felons. They're working, they're providing for their family. if they do have a drug problem, which a lot of did, they're in drug treatment. And then, once they plead guilty, because 99% of the time, most of these cases end up with a plea of guilty. Because,

by the way, the U.S. Attorney's Office is not going to bring a case against somebody unless they are 99.99% certain, they've got that person to write. So when it says United States versus your name, they got you. So that's why most federal cases end up being pled out. So once they get back in front of the judge and they plead out to that particular offense that they've been indicted in, now we step back in and we do what we call pre-sentence investigations. And so pre-sentence investigations are, it's just an enhanced background investigation, is we investigate their personal history, their characteristics, have they ever been arrested before? Do they have a history of drug and alcohol use? Have they ever been in treatment. We verify that. We speak to family members. We review their employment history.

All of that is put together as well as a description of the offense or the crime that they pled guilty to. Because federal judges aren't familiar with the defendant when they're in front of them, believe it or not. Other than when the judge took the plea, federal judges don't know anything about the defendant. So what's up to us as probation officers is to provide the judge a impartial document that explains. explains the history's background and their personal history and their characteristics. And so that will help the judge arrive at a more informative decision about what the sentence may be in this case. Do you think it is impartial? Because I know in my case, it was just copy and pasted from what the government wrote on their pre-sentencing memorandum. Probation officers are notoriously lazy. There's a lot of writing that goes on. A lot of writing. Do not become a PO if you hate writing.

because you're going to do a lot of writing. I got really good at writing. I can write 1,000-page novel right now if I want to. That's how good I am at writing. But yes, there are lazy POs out there that simply regurgitate what the government has given them. I am proud to say that my defendants that I did my pre-sense investigations on, I actually spoke to family members. I actually spoke to people that were involved in their lives because I thought it was very important. Because remember, when the person is in front of a federal judge, there's a thing called the federal guidelines.

So say you rob a bank, you're looking at potentially a guideline range of X number of months. So robbing a bank would be, it could be anywhere between 60 to 80 months in federal prison. Now, there is different factors that are involved that could impact, that could aggravate or mitigate the sentence. Was a firearm used in the commission of bank robbery? That could add more time to the federal sentence. Were threats uttered, like, I'm going to kill everybody in here unless you give me the money, that could be an aggravating factor. Was somebody murdered? Was somebody injured?

That could be an aggravating factor. Mitigating factors, something that could reduce the sentence. Maybe the person only robbed the bank. because they have a really bad drug addiction and they were just looking to get money to feed their drug habit. Maybe they were trying to pay the rent, and as POs were verifying that,

like, oh, yeah, maybe, so, yeah, Your Honor, they didn't have a lot of money and they're about to become homeless and that's why he walked in with a note into the bank. He pled guilty to bank robbery, but these are other factors you might want to take a look at. And so the judge, much like watching a thermometer, hot and cold in federal court,

is weighing all these factors when the defendant is there in front of him. And so it's the job of defense counsel, the attorney, and the prosecutor to argue to the judge what the most favorable sentence is. As probation officers, as federal POs, we provide theoretically an impartial view of the defendant that the judge can use to allow the judge to arrive at a more informative decision about what that sentence may be. So we work for the judges. So federal probation officers, So there's three branches, for those of you, don't remember high school, three branches of the U.S. government, right? There's the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branch. The judicial branch of the U.S. government is the court system, the federal court system.

The judicial branch has two law enforcement agencies, none people know about. It's the U.S. Supreme Court police. So the Supreme Court has their own police officers, about 180 of them work for the Supreme Court. And the Federal Probation Service. There's about 6,000 probation officers. across the country that work that are embedded in every single federal courthouse across the country. And that's a law enforcement agency. And so I worked for the judicial branch of the U.S. court system. We serve at the pleasure of the judges. It's not, there's no union. You serve at the

pleasure of the judges. So if the judge isn't like you, you can get fired the next day. Never happened to me, fortunately. And it was very rare when that occurred. But there was no civil service protection. And so it was really interesting to work for the court system like that because you would come into work and you would work with federal judges who are very, very intelligent people, but they live kind of in this little bubble of theirs. Most federal judges have Ivy League degrees. They, you know, they're nominated by the president of the United States and they're appointed for life by the Senate. So that's a pretty intense job to have. And, you know, they're nominated. And as a probation officer walking into a judge's chambers every day talking about a defendant

about why this person should get this sentence or why this person should not get this sentence, we would have these off-the-record conversations with these judges, was a very humbling experience for me and a very privileged experience because, remember, I have a degree in art history at the time. I didn't go to law school and have a federal judge turned to me and asked me questions about my report and what did I think about this particular defendant off the record. I thought was a very privileged place for me to be. And I really, that was one of the few things I really enjoyed about it. On the flip side, some of these federal judges are bad shit crazy.

They're just, I don't even know how they arrive at some of their decisions. And some judges are not nice people to deal with personally and professionally. I've lost count of how many times I was verbally reprimanded by a federal judge in chambers for something that they were looking for me to do that I didn't know I was supposed to do. Like, why didn't you get this information about this particular defendant? I had a federal judge that wanted me to pull some employment records about a job that was like 20 years ago. I'm like, that was 20 years ago, Judge, how is that relevant to the defendant today and the offense that they committed? That's not for me to say.

It's for me. I want it. And they would call it my supervisor and complain about me. And I'm being like, are you kidding? But you had to take it. There's just nothing you could do about it. So those are the people that we work for. So every day was a little different going in there.

In those conversations, how hard is it to leave your emotions out of it? Like say there's a defendant who has turned over a new leaf, maybe has been pending sentencing for years, is on the up and up. But he maybe did something terrible or something you don't personally agree with. How hard is it in those conversations with the judge? It's hard in the beginning of your career because most rookie probation officers, federal POs, fall into this camp where they just want to agree with the judge. So whatever the judge would say, they would just agree with. They don't want to rock the boat.

because they haven't found their own voice yet. For me, later on in my career, I would let the judge full on know what I thought about this particular defendant, that the information that I had, the judge didn't have, was my job to give the judge that information. It was all evidence-based, Ian.

I wasn't making up, like, I couldn't say, for example, if it was a sex offender, right, who was caught with 30,000 images of child pornography. I couldn't say to the judge, he's a piece of shit, even though he is a piece of shit, shit. That's an emotional response. The judge is looking for actual evidence that he's a piece of

shit. And so my job as a PO is to show the judge why I think he's a piece of shit. Well, he's 30,000 images of child pornography video and HD, and he was sharing and distributing those images, Your Honor, with at least 75 other people across the United States. And it appears he was also attempting to groom his seven-year-old niece. by babysitting her and trying to take pictures of her on his cell phone. That's why I think he's, that's why I think, Your Honor, he's at a high risk to, to be a recidivist, and why I think he should get the top of the guideline range. And we would.

We would suggest in our reports what they're, what we believe that they're sent should be within the guideline range, sometimes above or below as well. So later on in my career, when I found my own voice and I found my own confidence, and I found my own confidence in dealing with federal judges, and that occurs over time. I had no problem telling a federal judge what I thought about a defendant, a certain defendant. Whether or not they took that to heart, it's completely up to them. Most judges, most federal judges have been on the bench for a long, long time, and they do a lot of sentencings. And they're not idiots. They know what they're looking at. They review all the court materials. They read what defense counsel is also submitting to them as well

about that particular defendant. Remember, defense counsel is legitimately doing their job, and they're trying to get the best favorable sentence for the defendant. But once again, in federal court, most defendants have a plea agreement. So they've signed a plea agreement where they've agreed that they're going to be sentenced within a certain range, right? A certain range within, you know, 30 to 60 months in federal prison. And so the judge is kind of looking at that. Anything above or below is called a departure. So if the judge is like, I don't think this person should serve any time in federal prison for, you know, for drug distribution. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing.

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Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Valifu 527. While supplies last, selection varies by location. See Associate at Lowe's. Com for details. The judge needs to articulate why. Yeah, I know, like, in my case, I got departed, and I also went to trial, too. And the benefit, I think, of going to trial was the judge actually gets to know you because

they spend so much time with you. And my guidelines after trial were eight to 11 years or eight to 12 years. The government asked for six to seven. We asked for house arrest. And so he met in the middle at three. And then a year of house arrest on supervised release. But he explained that there was a departure because, because, because. because of my age. And you're lucky as well because, well, your age and also, I'm not, like,

do you have any previous criminal history before? No, I didn't have any. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot of factors that went involved in there, as well as, do you still have your pre-sentence report? Maybe. I'd have to find it. That would be interesting to have. Yeah, but it's literally, word for word, the pre-sentence memorandum for the government. Like, it's exactly, you know, it was very biased, you know? Yeah. I didn't like it at all. And, The guy that wrote it, I'd never met him before a day in my life. Like, he wasn't my supervising officer on pretrial. It was someone else.

So I thought that was strange. You just go in there, you meet him once, and then the next day he has this report or two days later. And he didn't really get the time to know me. It was just me, my dad, and my attorney in that office. Yeah. That was it. Yeah. And it was spit out.

And then some of the information wasn't even correct. But my only regret not doing was saying I should have said I had drugs. history so I could have gotten to the drug program. A lot of, it's double-edged sword, I'll tell you why. A lot of defendants do that. A lot of defendants will say, so for those of you that are listening here or watching, if a defendant does say they have a drug history in federal court and they need drug treatment, when they go into the Bureau of Prisons, they can join, I forgot the name of the-R-DAP.

What's it called? Ardap. So they can join the Ardap program and get time off on their federal sentence, which is cool. So instead of doing three years and then you get some time off for good behavior, you're out in year, you're out in two and a half years, you could get a reduced, even more of reduced sentence. You could be out in a year and a half or two years. That's cool. But here's the problem. If you say you've got a drug problem and you really don't and you're out on supervision, the judge is going to order a bunch of treatment. And so what would happen is I would get,

I would get clients out on federal supervision and I'm looking at their report and they're like, They've used heroin. They use fentanyl. They've used cocaine, all this wonderful. All right, let's put you into treatment because the judge ordered it. And then I'm like, Paul, I just said that to get the benefit. I'm like, dude, you got to go to treatment now for the next year. So a lot of these guys would get jobs that they would try to get their life back together.

But guess what? Now they got to go to an intensive outpatient program three hours a day, three times a week for the next six months. So it kind of bit them in the ass. Yeah, you got a few months off or you maybe got six months off. You got out a little bit earlier. but now you've got to do all this treatment to show the court that you are drug-free. So it can go both ways. Now, in your experience on sentencing day, I know that the probation officer, the pretrial officer, does talk to the judge. Do you find that the judge has already reached a decision before sentencing or is he actually taking his time to?

Yeah, some judges have. And they've told me in chambers. I've already reached a decision. I've not even met with a judge. There are several occasions in my career where I would show, up at chambers the day of sentencing, and the judge's secretary would come out and say, Paul, he's already made his decision. So I'll see you in court. And so as probation officers, we sit in the jury box. We sit near the judge to show that we're impartial. We don't sit at defense counsel, the prosecutor's table. And the judge has already made up his mind or her mind. Do you find that unfair? Yeah. It depends upon the sentence. Sometimes I come in there wanting to tell the judge something about this particular defendant.

wanting to answer the questions, hungry to share something about what I've learned about this defendant, good and or bad, and the judges already made their decision, and they just don't want to hear it from us. Some judges don't even like probation officers, believe it or not. There are some federal judges out there that won't even meet with federal probation during sentencing. They just don't do it. They just don't want their input. We didn't go to law school. Why are we doing federal guideline sentencing calculations?

you know, why are we meeting with the defendant before sentencing for, for what reason? A lot of these judges, some judges are pretty arrogant, you know, and they just don't want to lean on probation. On supervision, there are federal judges, but in particular, as I can think of one here in Connecticut, he will not violate a, he will not violate a sex offender for committing a new offense. Just won't do it. Or he'll make it really difficult. or if this particular defendant is using drugs and or selling drugs,

will not violate that person and set that back to prison. We're going to keep out on supervision. Despite numerous overdoses, despite numerous offenses, they just won't do it. I'm like, well, what's the point then of the conditions of supervision? Why are we even supervising this person? It gets frustrating sometimes as a PO. But they're a federal judge.

They can do it. whatever they want to do. They're appointed for life. They got a lifetime job. We're just trying to get to our 20-year pension if we're lucky to get to the end of this thing. And a lot of POs are just, some get very frustrated. And I was one of them for a while. But after a while, you know, like I said towards the end of my career, I'd say about the last five to seven years of my career before I retired, at that point, I just didn't give a shit anymore. I was just, I was already checked out. I didn't care, you know, when I transitioned to becoming a federal So in the federal system, there are different ranks. So the one rank is the line officer is federal probation officer. Above that is senior PO. Above that is supervisor. Above that is deputy chief and then chief. Much like a police officer, right? Patrolman, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, right, chief. Probation has sort of the same rank structure. So I was a senior probation officer in 2006. My marriage was going into the shitter. My

first one. So New York City, got hired in New York City. 2001 transferred to Texas for five years. Wow. Wanted to get out of New York. It was just time. So my first wife, we had a house of Staten Island, sold the house in Staten Island. I applied for a transfer. So federal district courts are run like their own little kingdoms. When you're hired as a Fed, you just can't transfer anywhere. You actually have to apply to another district, just like anybody off the street. So I was in New York City, I was in New York City Fed for about three and a half years. 2001, we decided when I get out of New York. And so I looked to Texas. I'm like, let's go to Texas and transfer there. So I had to call up the chief at the federal district court there, see if they were hiring for accepting transfers,

send in my application, had to fly out there, do another interview, test, just like I was. a guy off the street and I got hired. So I started my career out there at in Corpus Christi, Texas. I was there for one year. And then in the last four years, I was in Houston, Texas until 2006 when my marriage was going in the shitter. And my wife got homesick and wanted to move back to the East Coast. And as we're driving back, she told me she wanted a divorce. So that was a fun experience. So in 2006, we moved back to, I moved back to the East Coast where we were living. We lived in Rhode Island. for about a year, and then I moved after the divorce to Connecticut where I've been since then. But the funny thing was, so in 2006, I was in here for about six months. So I've been now a Fed for

almost 10 years. And so in 2006, they opened up a new position. It was called a federal sex offender specialist. What the hell is that? Much like the early days of the internet, what we were starting to see was a new class of offender. These were primarily men who were using the internet to facilitate the possession and distribution and manufacture of child pornography. So in the early days of the internet, we had these file sharing programs like LimeWire, and they were using these file sharing programs to distribute child pornography, video and photos with other like-minded collectors. We've never seen that before. And so the U.S. government was stepping in to start to prosecute these people. And they were prosecuting them. And then they were

coming out on supervision. This was a whole new class of offender that nobody had ever dealt with before. They didn't know what to do. Because federal sex offenders, for those that don't know, were primarily white, white male, educated, minimum high school diploma, on average college degree, master's degree, doctor degree, highly educated. A lot of them have really good paying jobs. We call that camouflage. because they're able to blend in. And they were using technology, phones with cameras, digital cameras, to create and manufacture child pornography.

And they were sharing that information, those images with each other over the internet. And they would come out on supervision, and they required a certain probation officer that was willing to supervise them. Nobody had ever done this before. And so when they announced the position, after I just transferred here,

and my marriage was in the toilet. I applied. I was like, I have nothing better to do. You know, it's a promotion. It's more money. Let's see what happens. So I remember it was actually a day before Christmas, ironically, and I'm walking with my kids, my little ones at the time.

And my phone rang. It was the chief. And she called me. She goes, hey, Paul, it's the chief. I'm like, hey, chief. What did I do wrong? She's like, no, no, you didn't do anything wrong. You know that position you applied for?

The promotion, like, yeah. She goes, well, you got it. Oh, my God. That's amazing. That's incredible. Thank you so much. She's like, you deserve it. So I remember calling my soon-to-be ex-wife with the good news and she didn't give a shit because she was checked out of the marriage.

And get back to the office thinking that I'm big shit. Well, it turned out nobody applied for the position. Nobody applied for that position. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted to supervise that. So I really wasn't that great. But I did end up supervising them for almost nine years. And that was quite an experience because while working here in Connecticut for the federal government,

I was the only sex offender specialist for the United States government on the East Coast for at least five years. I had to build up an entire program from the grounds up. I had to really bootstrap it. And that meant developing relationships with Interpol, with the FBI, with local law enforcement. creating a basically a cyber crime forensic lab, getting to try to get that started, finding software that we could install on offenders' cell phones at the time, making sure that the sex offender registry, which is newly created in Connecticut as well, that we had direct input in as to what would be considered legal and safe for the public to take a look at.

So now if you take a look at the sex offenders at registering here, Connecticut, I'm proud to say I have some direct input in that where you type in your zip code. You can see within a circle of actual registered sex offenders that live within your area. But those are just the ones we know about. So, yeah, so from 2006 up until I actually resigned from the position in 2011, I was the sex offender specials here in Connecticut. Now, how strict or is their supervised release compared to, say, a white collar supervised release? So that's a great question. So white collar offenders, white collar supervisors, they have a lot of restrictions, right? Taxes, income, verification type of employment, employment restrictions that they can and can't do.

People that they can hang out with. If you're a stockbroker and you, you know, embezzled, you know, $2 billion from a hedge fund, you're probably never going to work in that field again. But remember, there's a third-party risk involved. So getting a job in a bank, for instance, as a bank teller, probably is not going to happen. So there's a lot of restrictions that collaterally go along with that type of offense. Sex offenders are a little bit different. The conditions around that are wrapped around the actual offense and the risk level involved.

So, for example, somebody may have just been in possession of, say, 2,000 images of child pornography and their sentence for that. That doesn't mean that when they get out of federal prison that they get a job as a school bus driver, right, or get a job in a daycare because there's third party risk involved. Why? Because they're sexually attracted to children. And so a judge would impose a condition that you cannot go to where children frequent. You can't go to Chucky Cheese, for instance. They can't go to playgrounds. They can't hold jobs of public trust. They can't become a school teacher around children. They can't hold any responsibility over children or around children. And so those are sort of built in. to the conditions as well. Also, the other restrictions would be technology. So they use a computer to facilitate their offense, or they use a digital camera, or their cell phone. Now they can't have a laptop at home.

Now they can't have a cell phone. Now they can't get a job where there might be an internet. Well, the problem with that is, is that this is 2026 now. Everybody's got access to the internet. Everywhere you go, there's internet. you can go into refrigerators have access to the internet now cars have access to the internet so to say to somebody who's that you have an internet restriction in 2026 is virtually impossible

and so as a PO and as a federal judge they have to kind of weigh that and allow some measure of risk involved so for example an offender who was a he was file sharing a shitload of child pornography and he was a coder. He was a programmer. And that's all he knew how to do. So he gets out of federal prison and he wants to get a job at a tech company who knew about his offense and is willing to hire him with restrictions that their network is being monitored by their IT department. He's a really good coder. He knows like Ruby on Rails and all these other, you know, high, high level, you know, platforms or whatever they work on. And they were willing to assume that risk.

And so I had to go to the judge and say, Your Honor, you know, this is all he knows how to do. He can make a good living at it. He can pay restitution to the victims involved in the case. And, you know, the employer has got no problem hiring him. So the judge allowed him to work as a coder at the tech company. That's a rare case that that happened. but it does happen. Then again, I've had guys come out

and they try to get a job as a bus driver, school bus driver. No joke. One guy wanted to open up an internet cafe. In Thailand, he wanted to move to Thailand. I'm like, over my dead body, you're doing that, dude. Do most of these guys struggle to find work that are... A lot of them do.

A lot of them do. It's funny, not funny, funny, sad. Because I've witnessed it firsthand because as a PO, we would get alert. As soon as you come in, say, I'm duty officer. So I'm in the office. If there's any new arrests, I have to handle those new arrests as they come into federal. So I would get a list in the morning of any new arrests.

And so, oh, here's Rick. He's being arrested for possession or child pornography. So I would go to court as he's being brought in before the magistrate judge. And he's brought in and he's got his wife there. He's got his family members there, his mom and dad, maybe some friends. They are all around when he got arrested. And I'm like, do they know what the charges are? and as the defense counsel trying to articulate why he should get released out on pretrial supervision.

So you see your honor, you see all the support, you know, Rick has. His wife is here. He's got his friends and his family. It's wonderful. It's great. I love it. And then the prosecutor stands up and they start talking about the charges. And you can see the wife's expression change from love to horror.

Like, my husband is into what? He did what? and so we go from the day that they're arrested where they have all their family and friends there to the day that they're sentenced, there's nobody there. There is nobody in the courtroom. I have seen cases where, I would say,

85% of the time, these type of offenses, they've lost everybody. They've lost their friends, their family support network. The spouses divorce immediately. Children want nothing to do with them, adult children especially. And then when they get out of federal prison,

they've lost everything. And so now they're struggling to find work. But they got that big scarlet, literally scarlet letter on them. They have to register. Then they have all these restrictions put on them. I mean, cry me a river. I mean, you know, they've hurt children. Possession of child porn is just the same thing as hurting children

because they're victimizing children over and over again. And then you've got the guys that manufacture it that produce it by taking pictures and sharing it. The guys distribute it. It's just not one picture, Ian. It's thousands upon thousands. And a lot of these guys are collectors. And I've seen there was one particular offender, I think his first name, Frank Middlemasse.

He's still in a federal prison. I think he's going to die there. I hope he dies there. Sorry, Frank, if you're listening. When he was arrested by, he was arrested by ICE because ICE does investigate child porn cases, they went into his home and they found every form of digital media with child porn on it. So, for example, they found 8mm film reels with child porn on it. They found VHS tapes, DVDs, USB key drives.

He had been collecting and victimizing young boys for almost 40 years. and he was film strips. He had been collecting it. And so they found, I think it was over 100,000 images of child pornography in his house. He had pillow shams, a pillow with a cover of one of his victims made. He would go to bed. He put his head on the pillow. And so I'm doing my pre-sentence investigation on him.

And very articulate, well-spoken, very pleasant man to talk to. and I said, I always ask this question. I said, well, once this is over, what do you want to do? What kind of work do you want to do? He tells me, I want to open up a youth camp, and I'm going to call it Tree Frog Expeditions. Like, tree frog expeditions, a youth camp? He goes, yes, I'm going to have young boys. It's going to be a sleepaway camp for a week.

And I'm standing there, and the correction officer is standing there looking at me, like, Like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, okay, I think that's a great. Thank you very much. I wrote it down and made sure that was put in his report. And as I told, I told the federal judge that, I'm like, Your Honor, this guy is, he's a, he's terrible, horrible. He's a monster. He got 30 years for that because it was possession and distribution as well as manufacturing

of child pornography. But these are the people that I had to deal with. These are the guys. And then when I would supervise him, I would go out in the field. I would actually find victims, would find child pornography. We would do searches, and that was part of where it impacted me in a very negative way as well. Do you find a lot of these guys reoffend? All the time.

Well, they're always reoffending. And what I mean by that is that's a great question, Ian, they're always reoffending because they're always thinking about it. So I like to use the analogy of, do you have a favorite ice cream? Yeah, I'd probably say cookie dough or mint chocolate chip. Cookie dough or mint chocolate chip. So if I were to tell you tomorrow when you wake up, for now on, you can no longer have cookie dough ice cream for the rest of your life. You're going to think about it. Does that mean that whenever you see it, you're not, you're always going to like it. So for, for these SOs, it's not, they don't wake up in the

morning and decide, oh, I'm sexually attracted to seven-year-old boys or three-year-old girls. It's just their sexual, almost like the sexual orientation. They've always been like this. And so to say that you can no longer be sexually attracted to that is ridiculous. And so as a sex offender specialists, we would manage them. We don't, we don't rehabilitate them because you can't rehabilitate someone's sexual preference or sexual orientation for that matter. We manage them in the community by restricting their ability, hopefully to victimize children. No Chuck E. Cheese, no jobs for children are. I had one guy who purposely would find women that were single mothers, not to date the mother,

but he wanted access to her kids. So what he would do is he would go to Home Depot and he would hang out in like the woodworking aisle. And he would wait for women to come by with kids. And he would walk up to the woman and say, do you need help? I don't work here, but I'm a woodworker. And she was like, yeah, you know,

I'm just trying to figure out how to do shelves. And, you know, oh, this is my son. He's like, introduce to the son. And he was like, well, you know what? I, you know, are you married? No, I'm single. You know, I work a lot of jobs. Oh, great. You know what? I'm a carpenter. I could come over and show your son how to work, you know, some wood. I can come over on the weekend. And I like to install this for you. She would say, yeah, because she's overwhelmed. She's an overwhelmed single mother. And here's this guy who's offering to come over and help. And he's potentially sexually interested in her, but he's not interested in her. He wants access to the kid. And once she let him in, it's over. at some point. Now he's grooming the kid. That was his M.O. That's what he would do. So they're always thinking about it. They're always trying to maneuver their way to get around children. Fortunately, a lot of these guys are on lifetime supervision. I used to tell some of these guys, your probation

officer hasn't been born yet. So they just switch probation officers? indefinitely for the rest of their lives. And now, so in regards to like, say, a lifetime supervision versus, say, a three-year supervision, the Department of Justice will publish an article when someone's sentenced naming all the things the person can't do while on supervision. I think the public gets confused that that ends when the person supervised release ends. Yeah, it doesn't end. So for sex offenders, generally speaking, you're looking at minimum of, I think, three years or no, it's five years now. Five years, five, ten, fifteen lifetime supervision.

Most of the sex offender cases, especially the possession and distribution or lifetime supervision case, manufacturing especially lifetime. So if the person is 30 years old and they're sentenced and they get out, they're going to get POs until the day they die. They're always going to be on supervision. That's why I say your PO hasn't been born yet. Is it necessary? Yeah.

Yeah, considering what damage they've done to the community and the potential for harm. I've never seen an SO, a sex offender rehabilitate. They're always, I would always catch them. I would always catch them on their phone. they would be looking at images or trying to hide. I do random home visits, and I knocked on one guy's door, and I heard the sound of a window opening and closing

on the side of the house. I was like, it's not here a window open. So I'd go in the house, and there he was. Oh, hi, Paul. I was expecting you today. I go, where's the window? What are you talking about? The window you just opened.

I walked over the window. He had his laptop. He had a laptop. He had a laptop. He was supposed to have a laptop. It was on the other side. of the window. And that's why I seized it because I legally could seize it, open it up. And there is all, he's at it again. And so he caught a new charge and he went back to federal prison for that one.

I get calls from victims out in the community. The sex offender registry, I would get call from people who would call the state police and then the state police would call me up. I would be at six flags up in mass with my kids, my two daughters, and my phone would ring on a Saturday. And it would be the state police telling me one of my offenders had just reoffended and hurt somebody. This is on a Saturday when I have my kids for the weekend. And so that's what I was going through, that kind of trauma as well, because now was impacting my family. And so, you know, I'm now newly divorced. Struggling with that, parental alienation from my ex, you know, who was trying to keep the kids away from me further and further away.

And then when I would get my kids trying to devote all my energy to them on the weekends. And still, this is not a nine to five job. I'm still having to supervise these guys accessed accessible all the time. Yeah, are you working like 24-7? You are. You are working 24-7. You know, and this is the thing. They talk about, they give this lip service to quality of life, right?

You know, life work balance. There's no life-work balance when you work for the feds, especially federal probation. So, and I started to see a change when they started giving you, they gave us a Blackberry. Remember the blackberry's back in the, so they gave us a Blackberry. I'm like, oh, this is so cool. Now I can type, I can browse the internet. Now I'm hooked into the email system at work. So now I'm getting emails in the evening.

And then they give you later on, they gave you an iPhone. They gave you an Apple Watch. They gave you a laptop. They gave you a government car. All of these things, they're free. And you're thinking yourself, my God, look at my new iPhone. I got an eyewatch. It's showing off your eyewatched everybody.

no you're plugged in 24-7 now now you're working all the freaking time i remember i went on a cruise i took my daughters on a cruise for the first time in like six years i had a vacation with them and i remember my supervisor at the time he's like well i hope you're bringing your laptop with you i'm like why the fuck would i want to do that well in case the judge needs to get a hold of you i'm like i'm gonna be I'm going to be on a cruise ship in the middle of Bermuda, the Bahamas out there. Well, we're going to give you a hot spot as well.

So, yeah, I had to bring my laptop and my hot spot with me on a cruise ship for five days when I'm with my kids. And it was just like, but at the time, it's like a frog in a pot of cold water being turned up to boil. I just, you just accept it. That's just part of life.

And so, yeah, you're always working constantly. So say you're supervising me, I get pulled over by the state police. How long does it take for them to notify you? Depends on the police. Depends on the officer. That's a great question. A lot of times, I mean, the police would know, using you as the example, they would run your sheet and they would see that you're immediately, you're on supervision.

And so our name would be attached to you on your rap sheet. So I'd say anywhere between 60 to 70% of the time, the trooper would call us and say, hey, just so, you know, I pulled over, I pulled over Ian just to let you know. Now, one of the conditions of supervision, as I'm sure you're aware of, is you have to notify your probation officer within 72 hours of any law enforcement contact, right? And so I would sit back and wait for you to give me a call and say, hey, Paul, just so you know, I got pulled over today for speeding. I just got a warning, right? And I'm like, okay, this is cool. Yeah, you know, you're fully compliant. You're doing the right thing. But yeah. So it doesn't automatically go to you when someone pings the system. It doesn't automatically go to us, but we do eventually find out because as part of our job is we do have to run all of our clients or offenders through our system to see if there is any law enforcement contact. And so eventually I would find out, like say you never called me or the trooper never called me.

It was just a warning. I would have found out eventually. It could have been a week later or two weeks later because I would have looked in the system and I would have said, wait a second, why did state police run you on this day and this day? What happened? And then I would call you and say, you want to tell me what? on. I'm like, yeah, I got pulled over for speedy. It was just a warning. I didn't think I needed to warn you. Well, according to your supervision conditions, you're supposed to warn me within 72 hours. Now I got to notify the judge. All that bullshit. Do you actually notify the judge in those

situations, something like that? Like, are the conditions, do you have flexibility as a probation officer? The system has changed a lot. Now it's all evidence-based driven. Now it's, the numbers are very cold, so now you are required to do that. Yeah. At the very least, you have to document it let your supervisor know. There were times I didn't notify anybody because I was like, this is bullshit. They weren't sex offenders, by the way. They were just regular people that I was supervising. That was an audible that I made. That was a call that I made. Because this is the thing. Later on my career, I actually enjoyed developing relationships with my clients. I wasn't calling them offenders anymore. They were my clients. There were people that I was serving that I was

helping. Sex offenders were different. Those are people that I, but I will say some of the offenders that I did work with, some of the sex offenders, if not for what they were into and what they did, they're pretty cool guys. There's some pretty nice people out there. One guy was worth multi-millions of dollars, you know, but he was into little boys, you know. Another guy was a pediatrician in Stonington, you know. I went to his house because I was his pre-trial officer. and I was doing his pre-sentence report. He was a pediatrician who he would take boys with him to Disneyland. So he, in his house, he had a beautiful portion of 9-11.

You went to his house in his basement, I call it a, it was a honey trap. It was all Disney paraphernalia. It was, he had Disney paraphernalia, he had an Xbox, he had a PlayStation, he had Nintendo, all the gaming systems. And so at his practice, he would find young boys that would come in with single mothers that were overwhelmed. And he would say, hey, just so you know, once a year, I have a getaway. I'm taking these young kids with me to Disney World that never could afford the opportunity to go. And he would offer the women the opportunity to come with him. But guess what?

I can only pay for your son. you're going to have to pay for your own way. And the women would say, well, I can't afford it. And you know what? He's my son's pediatrician. What could go wrong? I could use the vacation. And so hand him off to the doctor.

It's just, it was mind-boggling to see. And so I would walk into his honey trap down. He had it all there. He was a Disney superfan. You know? He lost his license. Thank God. He went to federal prison.

So always reoffending, always reoffending. But that was, and I got really good at supervising these guys. I got really good at getting into their heads and figuring out what they were into because you had to. And so that's part of what we talked about, Ian, in terms of where I was in the beginning of my career versus later on. In the beginning of my career, I wouldn't take an interest in the personal life. Later on, I did.

Because number one, if you're a sex offender, I want to know what turns you on. What gets you off? Tell me about your secrets. And I would talk to them just like this, you know, hey, how was your day? What's going on? How's work going, man? You know, almost like I'm their friend because I wanted them to feel comfortable or wanted to have their guard down.

So the more I learned about them, I learned a lot about predatory behavior. I learned about where they would go to the watering holes. I learned about what turned them on. And so when I would do home visits, when I would see them in the community, I actually started to see and visualize if I was one of them, where would I do? Where would I go for my victims? And that really helped me a lot in terms of becoming a really very effective officer as well. Do you think there's such thing as innocent until proven guilty because of how strict some of these pretrial supervision rules can be?

Like I felt like when I got indicted, I was under the microscope and had so many rules. It felt like I was on actual probation. Yes. I do. I do. I, and here's the thing. I didn't. You, you.

you live that very unique experience, and then you went to federal prison, and then you were able to speak to other inmates that also went through their unique experiences, right? So I think towards the end of my career, I realize that the system is not fair, definitely not fair 100%. More importantly, I think that a lot of defendants, when they're in front of a federal judge, can't afford a really good attorney. And so sometimes their outcome is a little bit different. They can't afford to go to trial. They'll just take the plea. The U.S. Attorney's Office is really good at wearing somebody down. Most federal cases aren't resolved quickly. They take six months minimum to years. And so imagine waking up every day, as you did, not knowing what your life was going to look like a year from now.

You know, you just, some defendants just, and they've told me, they said, Paul, I just wanted it to end. I just was, I just wanted to plead guilty. You know, I knew I was not guilty. I just couldn't afford to go to trial. I just wanted the pain to stop. And so they would just go up in front of a judge and just plead guilty. And that was sad to me. It really was.

And sometimes the defense counsel will put pressure on them, you know. It's going to cost this money for much, this much money for a retainer. trial is going to cost you this much money. Well, they have a lot of overwhelming evidence against you. I mean, you did do this, right? Well, yeah, but they got you. So I'll try to work out a good plea agreement. Maybe if you cooperate, you get a nice, what they call a 5K, you know,

we'll get a reduced sentence there. But it's, it's, it's, it's, yeah, the system isn't fair sometimes. How did you feel about cooperators when you're doing their PSI? Because that's such a big part in the federal system. show me your paper, show me your PSI. What's going through your mind when you're sitting through and hearing some of these? I would laugh. You know why?

Because everybody cooperates. Everybody cooperates. When it says United States versus your name and you're looking at the federal guidelines, this amount of time, it's like, I'm going to make a deal. Let's make a deal with somebody. I mean, back in New York City, I did a lot of what we call the Witset cases. So it's the witness security cases. So for those, it's the witness protection cases, for those you don't know.

And I did pre-sentence reports on some of those individuals. One guy was a high member of the Latin Kings, and I did his pre-sentence report. And he was like the number two person of the Latin Kings at the time. And he cooperated. Another one was a member of the Gambino family. Ernest Montevichy was his name. He cooperated. They all cooperated.

they all cooperate. He's dead now, I believe. Hope you're dead. FBI wanted to do a search on his house because they felt like he had a girlfriend that was missing. He was gumad. He was married and had a girlfriend. They wanted to search his backyard.

They wanted to bring cadaver dogs out there. That was crazy. So everyone cooperates, man. Everyone cooperates. Now, whether or not you end up in the Witness Protection Program or you get a nice 5K letter, who knows, who knows. But when you're looking at time like that,

there's no honor among thieves. And I know that's a very cliche way of saying it. But because when the shoes on the other foot, the agents are in there and the agents are really good. You know, they're going to say, hey, well, just so you know, so-and-so is speaking us, and they're going to, we're about to cut them a deal. So you're looking at a five-year mandatory minimum for something.

And then if you cooperate, oh, you can just do three years and be out with your kids. Why not? So, yeah, when they get to federal prison, they got to show their papers and all that, and you could read. But inmates know that. Most inmates know that. I had an inmate showed up. He was wearing a t-shirt that said, no snitching.

I'm like, dude, you're one of the biggest cooperators on the planet. He's like, no, it's not like that. I'm like, it is like that, bra. What are you wearing that tea? You're not to fooling anybody. Because the inmates, as you probably know, it's like they look at their paper and they say, oh, this is what you were charged with. This is what your guidelines are. This is what your sentences.

It's far below what the guidelines are. You must have done something, right? Now, they're not going to get what they call the 5K letter, the cooperation agreement, but they can read between the lines and say, you must have given them something. This episode is brought to you by Subaru. Go further in a long-range Subaru hybrid, with up to 581 miles per tank in the forester hybrid. Longer range, better fuel efficiency, and legendary symmetrical all-wheel drive standard. The Subaru Forrester Hybrid.

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To get a benefit off your sentence. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. Do you ever have someone say, don't put that in my PSI or something, like for cooperating? So in the PSI, we can't say 5K. There has to be a separate document. It's not filed with the PSI. So when it's filed in federal court, It's a seal document that says that they cooperated.

So nobody else has access to that. Oh, so it's not on the PSI? It's not on the PSI. So why do all these inmates ask for your PSI then? Sex offenders, usually. So they have to look at the sentencing transcript to see if you cooperated them. Yeah, that they're not going to get. So they're going to get the PSI, okay, because the inmates can get a copy of their PSI.

But they want to see what you were convicted of. Apparently they've banned them now in federal prisons. Probably. Because it causes so many problems. It does. And I think that's a good practice as well. Now, tell us about restitution. What's a deal with it on supervised release, when supervised release ends? I know, like, on mine, I was ordered to pay $1,000 a month while on supervised release. And technically, that stops, like, on the day after supervised release. So how does that all work? I know people are curious about restitution. So restitution doesn't end. Restitution is always there. It always, so an example would be,

some, it was a woman who was a bookkeeper for a mid-sized company, construction company here in Connecticut. And she ended up, because she was the bookkeeper, she ended up embezzling like $2 million over the course of like 10 years. They didn't know about it. That's how much money they made, but it wasn't until about 10 years later they finally caught on. So it was $2 million with the restitution. She had to payback. So she gets sentenced. She gets off to federal court, off federal prison. She comes out. And now she's got this $2 million nut. She's got to So at the time of sentencing, the judge looks at how much what their income potential is. So when we talk about third party risk, she's not going to become a bookkeeper, obviously, again.

Okay. So what kind of job realistically is she going to have when she gets out? This particular individual, she was in her 60s. And the money was already spent. She bought houses and she bought, you know, Rolex watches and AP watches and took her family to Disney World and bought some property in Bermuda. All of that was, of course, seized by the government and whatever they did with it, but she still ended up owning a very sizable amount of restitution. The restitution just doesn't go away.

And so as a probation officer, what we look at is their income. And so I would look at somebody's, all right, so she's working at, say, Amazon now in the warehouse making $22 an hour. All right, how much can you live on and how much realistically can you pay in restitution? In many cases, I had a very soft spot for people like that, only because, there was no way in hell that they were going to pay that. And the way and what their lives looked like when they got out was nowhere near what it was when they went in. So a lot of them lost their families. They're divorced. Now they're living in a single room occupancy hotel someplace. Or, you know, they move back in with their adult children who are now providing for them. And there's

just no way they're going to pay that $2 million off. And so they pay $50 a month, whatever they could afford. As long as they pay something to the government, usually the U.S. Attorney's Office, which is responsible for collecting the restitution, is not going to bother them. But they have to make some type of effort to show that they're able to pay something every month. Now, if their lifestyle is far above what they're representing, right, they're driving around in a Mercedes G-wagon or, you know, and or they've got a Rolex watch and wearing Tiffany jewelry, and they're requesting permission for me to go to Bermuda with their husband on vacation and you still low $150,000 a restitution. Well, as a PO, I'm going to say, wait a second, hold on here, timeout. That trip to

Bermuda is $3,000. That $3,000 needs to go to the victims in this case. Well, my husband is paying for it. Well, it's joint and several, meaning that it's communal property, communal money. Your husband can pay for that. If you got a problem with it, let's just go to the judge. have the judge work it out, which oftentimes they would. And I would tell them you have a right to do that. But there are victims involved. And so, like, victims for me that I felt for were like the mom and pop companies that, you know, that kind of money that it would impact their lives. Or, you know, like the crypto people that would, people that were just ignorant and they lost their entire pension out of it, right? Banks, I had zero sympathy for. I didn't, I had banks calling me up left

and right trying to get restitution from a defendant. Banks would call? Banks. You personally? Financial, yeah, financial investigators. So some of these banks have financial investigators. They have whole wings. Their job is to stay in contact with like U.S. Attorney's Office and us to ensure there's a collection coming in.

They want their money. And so, I mean, I, a Chase investigator call me up and say, hey, you know, so Rick owes us, owes us $1.5 million in restitution. How come he's only paying $100 a month? and I'm like, well, because he's working at an Amazon warehouse, and it's all he can afford. Well, he was making X an X amount of money. I'm like, hey, listen, dude, I don't know what to tell you. That's my call.

And I don't even have to talk to you. You can talk to you as attorney's office if you want. I have zero sympathy for the banks. A lot of times I tell them pound sand. The smaller mom and pop, you know, the individuals, yeah, I had sympathy for as well. But once again, you can't get blood from a stone. The rule was as long as they were paying something. Now, some defendants or clients that are on supervision would try to get early terminated, get off a supervision early, which they have a right to do after a year.

If they owed a lot of restitution or they owed restitution, generally speaking, the probation office and the judges would not allow that. Do you find that most people don't have the intent to ever pay it off? I think, yeah, I think they do have the intent, but the amount is so high sometimes. and their life circumstances have gotten so worse after that they're just like, they're not going to pay. What I really enjoyed seeing was defendants when they would get out of federal prison and their lives became far, far more successful

than when they went in, right? Much like you, the kind of life that you've built for yourself and the platform that you have for people. How wonderful is that, that you were able to provide this kind of service, provide for yourself and your family as well? the kind of life that you have before, you know, whatever you were before you went in, the kind of person, the transformation that's occurring when you got out. That to me as a probation officer was the gear.

That's what got me off. That's because those stories were so far and few in between because many defendants is like a horse with blinders. They just can't see left or right. They're stuck in this pit of despair and they just wanted to end. They just like, I can't, you know, attorneys that would be indicted, right, federally for taking their clients. money or federal bureau prison correction officers sleeping with their

inmates. You know, that's sexual assault, dude. Inmates can't give consent. You just actually assaulted an inmate. No, she came on to me, said one guy. And I'm looking at her picture in the system. Really? Come on to you. Man, you must have been desperate. This was the guy who's about to become a U.S. Marshal.

He was a BOP correction officer about to become a federal deputy U.S. Marshal and had sex with an inmate. Was this in Danbury? Yeah, I read that article. Danbury's. I was in Danbury for a little bit too. Yeah.

I felt for the guy. I really, I felt bad for him. But guess what, dude? You just blew up your life married with kids. You blew up your life, man, for that. And, you know, the defense was that the inmates came on to him. I'm like, okay, but inmates are under the custody and control of the Bureau of Prisons, their property. They cannot give consent.

So they're victims. So now you sexually assaulted an inmate. And now you're on the registry for the rest of your life or X number of years. And now your wife divorced you. And now you can't get your dream job as a U.S. Marshal. And that, you know, all because you couldn't. But it is what it is. It happens.

You know, and I can feel bad for somebody like that. I have space for that. I've space for his family that has to pick up the pieces and move on away from him. I've space for the inmate that was taken advantage of. And I hope she got money out of it in a settlement. You know, she deserves it. But, you know, when I took this job and I raised my right hand to become a Fed, I knew what the requirements were. I knew I had to do certain things in my life that I could not.

not do anymore. I knew that for 24 years when I worked as a Fed, I couldn't smoke weed, much as I wanted to. And guess what? The day I retired, you're smoking. I went into the dispensary and I bought some weed and I did it and I hated it. I'm like, this was what I was waiting for. It sucked. So now I do mushrooms once in a while. Tell us about the toll the job takes on you. Like so many law enforcement officers we've talked to, yours is, you know, can be just as severe, especially when you're dealing with sex offenders and you're seeing and hearing these stories and witnessing firsthand.

So I've got a lot of PTSD and what I mean by that is working with federal sex offenders really impacted my how I view the world. Also how dark men, how dark the human condition can be towards children. I'll give you an example. with my kids at the playground.

And my kids are going down the slide. And I'm clocking this guy sitting on a bench in front of the slide. And some little girl goes down. She's got a skirt on. It goes up. She's going down the slide comes back down. And I'm looking at this guy and he's just looking at the girl. And I'm thinking he's a sex offender.

He's grooming her. He's going to clock or whatever. He gets up, walks to his car. I follow in his car, grab his license plate, get to the office and run it. He's nobody. He was just some dude in a park

reading a book. With my kids at Chuckie Cheese, I see some guy walking through the ball area by himself. He's a sex offender. He's trying to track down a kid. Some dad chasing this kid. Drink a little bit too much.

I forgot the amount of child pornography that I've looked at in HD with sound. Thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of images of children being sexually assaulted every day. Young victims that I would find in the field because, like I said, they're always reoffending. So guys that would be supervising, I would get a call, for instance, and, you know, Rick just reoffended on a cousin. he was at a family reunion that I had no idea he was at and sexually assaulted the girl in a bathroom

on my watch and so when that happens supervisors come in they lock down your file and they go what did you do wrong what did you not do correctly with this offender and my response is I'm sorry should we only supervise nice people I'm supervising predators what do you think predators do

and so second guessing me second guessing what I'm doing out there, images of child pornography, constantly being bombarded with, trolling being hurt all the time, victims out of the field. That was just repetitive eight years of that. And so it comes out in some really interesting ways.

You know, it comes out with getting angry all the time, drinking a little bit too much. Relationships, fragmenting quickly, inability to develop intimacy, sometimes, people, partners. So I met my second wife. And ironically, she was actually working at a group home with, he wasn't a sex offender.

He was a violent offender. And he's been convicted now four times in Connecticut already federally. He likes to threaten people. So he, at the first federal offense, he threatened to murder a Yukon basketball, female Yukon basketball player. This is a guy who loves to threaten companies. He loves to threaten individuals. For example, he'll be in the car with somebody

and he'll drive by a restaurant and he'll say, we have the best coffee in Connecticut. And he'll say, how do I have the best coffee in Connecticut? He finds out who owns the place and he'll threaten to murder him. You don't have the best coffee in Connecticut. This guy is so fucking twisted in his mind and he's always reoffending. I used to do home visits on him

and I would find letters written to women. He would go to the mall. He would find a woman walking to a car and he would leave letters in her window threatening to sexually assault or murder. And this is his fourth federal conviction. So my wife at the time, she was a caseworker in a group home working with this guy. And so I met her through him. So we kind of joke that this is a guy that kind of got her family started. We fell in love. So when I met her, I was still the sex offender specialist guy.

And I remember there were sometimes, and we were hanging out at night, she'd be, and she'd moved in my place at that point, at some point. And we, my phone rang. It was one of my offenders. And I remember yelling at him, like just cursing at him on the phone. You piece of shit, what the fuck? You did, da, da, da, da. And I'm just yelling and monishing him because he'd done something really stupid.

It was Halloween. And he was answering the door when kids were coming to the door. He's not supposed to answer the door when kids were coming to the door. because he's a sex offender, right? Well, it turned out that he put out a pumpkin on top of the door and a box and a bowl of candy in the front because he wants the kids to come to his door, found out that he was doing that. And so I called him up and yelled at him. I turned to my wife, and she's just looking to me like, who are you? My girlfriend at the time became my wife. So that's how it was kind of impacting me. And that's why I really kind of later on, I was like,

what am I doing with my life, man? I can't keep doing this. I'm a piece. what the fuck I can't do this forever I don't want to do this forever it was impacting me every single day on how I have children we my second wife and I want to have children together out of family I didn't want to it's not sustainable for me so I audited myself and I said why did I get into this field to begin with and that was to help people not to play cop not to play special agent was to actually help people change so I I went back to graduate school. Before I did, I went to the chief in my, in our district in Connecticut. And I told them, I said, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm done. So I took a demotion.

I went down from senior PO back down to the line. I took a pay cut. And I became a line officer again. Why? Because I went back to graduate school. Now, I didn't tell anybody I was doing that. Because I work with some really toxic managers, a supervisor, deputy chief and a chief. I call them the axis of evil, just terrible, horrible people. They're just terrible, pieces of shit. I hope you're listening. But thanks to them, I went back to grad school because thanks to them, I was getting written up. I was getting suspended for things that I just, you know, I was just, it was just, I didn't fit the mold of the kind of officer that they wanted. They wanted somebody that was very buttoned down, straight-laced, that they could mold.

than they could change. I wasn't that kind of officer for them. And I realized when I retire from this job, I mean, I didn't even know if I was going to retire, to be honest, and I just, I don't even think I was going to make it up my 20 years. That's how bad it was. That's how much PTSD I was getting. I was like, what am I going to do? Because let's be honest here, and I'm sure you spoke into a lot of, a lot of people in law enforcement, when they retire or they leave the industry, the field, they end up having to get another job anyways. The pension sucks. Federal pensions are measly. They're not that big of a deal. You know, you can go from making 130, 140 a year, and you've got to live on less than half of that, sometimes even less than that.

It's not a lot of money. And taxes, then you've got to pay for your federal health insurance, which sucks. Oh, you pay for it too. Yeah, yeah. As a retiree, so I work for the state of Connecticut now as a, as a teacher. As a professor, yeah. So I get state health insurance, which is great, Federal health insurance is like between $6 and $800 a month. It sucks. I'm paying this coming year, $800 almost for just me individually a month. It sucks, man. And federal bennies aren't that good.

So here I am about to get married to a woman I love who's so kind, so beautiful, and so smart. And having children with her, realizing I have a lot of. I like working. That's just how my dad, I just like working. That's kind of who I am. But what am I going to do? Being a probation officer doesn't translate well into the private sector. Those are soft skills. Put that on your resume. Oh, I supervised federal sex offenders. I want to get a job at Google. They're not going to hire you. It's like, well, what does that mean? And to be honest, nobody cares. Nobody cares what you did for a living, especially on the federal side. especially law enforcement these days.

That could be more of a negative. Because, you know, let's be honest, you know, there are a lot of bad cops out there, bad agents. ICE is doing some stuff out there in the community right now that are angering a lot of people. And wherever you fall on the political spectrum on that, I get it. But when you retire or you're looking for another job and you have that on your resume,

there are going to be a lot of doors that are going to be kind of closed off to you. And these are soft skills. They don't translate well. So I started this journey when I was in my 20s by going to Columbia to become a social worker, to become a therapist. Well, now, after all this time, I felt, you know what? I've got military, federal, local law enforcement. I've got all this.

I've been honing the craft of talking to people and building relationships with my clients, getting really good at it, helping them. I think I'm ready. So I stepped down from the position, went back down to the line, and I went back to the line, and I went back to graduate school in the evening at night. And at the time, my wife was my fiance now at that point, I told her. I said, listen, I want to step down from this. I don't want to, you met me when I was a sex offender specialist. How sexy is that, you know, but I don't want to do this anymore. I just, I want to become a therapist. And I think that's going to offer, you know, the best, best work life balance for us, good income, good money, and I'm going to be a lot happier. She was in. She supported me.

She's like, absolutely. So I said, listen, we're going to give up our hands. I said, listen, we're going to give up our happy hours and our day nights for a while because it's going to take a while. Because I got to grind away to get this work done. This took me almost three years and nobody knew at my job. I kept it a secret up until the very end. Nobody knew I was in grad school. Why? Because crabs in a barrel.

You ever work with toxic people? Yeah. And when they found out, it was interesting. In my office, like an idiot, I left out one of my college textbooks, my counseling tech books on my desk. and my asshole supervisor, she comes in, just before she retired, actually. And she comes in and she looks down, she goes, what's that?

I go, uh, uh, that's a college textbook. It's a counseling book. Yeah, it is. What are you doing? Oh, I'm in grad school. I become a therapist. She goes, you become a therapist. And then as she's leaving, she turns around and she goes,

I certainly hope you're not doing this on government time. I looked at her and go, no, I'm not, not, you can audit my, my computer logs. And she walked out. I was doing it on government time. Bitch. So, uh, an hour later, the chief called me up. And he, he said, Paul, I hear you in graduate school. I'm like, oh, what did you hear that from?

It's funny. Um, yeah, he goes, well, I wish you the best of luck. Thanks, chief. That was it. Um, so long story short, I got my degree in addiction counseling. and grind it away all those hours, thousands of hours to become licensed in Connecticut. And then while I was still the Fed,

you know, I became licensed and started to set up my own practice on the side. And then ultimately in 2019, retired and got out of the game. Didn't get fired. Didn't get fired. I made it to the end. Looking back, man,

I should have just left earlier. Ironically, I'm making more money than I've ever made. as a Fed now because of what I do. And I'm so much happier. No more PTSD. You know, I still have to deal with some of that once in a while. Rears his ugly head, but I'm fine. That's where the mushrooms come in. And when I did retire, actually, I did work briefly for the state of Connecticut at one of the federal prisons as a, I mean, state prisons as a addiction counselor for a year and a half. So I was an addiction counselor at Osborne Correctional, realized that made a mistake.

You know, I was like, what am I doing? I'm giving up, I'm basically a PO all over again. Love working with the inmates. The COs, man, those guys are burned out. There are some bad COs out there. And those state COs are shot. Did that for a year and a half. And then got hired by Connecticut State Community College as a full-time college professor, someone associate professor. So I was at, I was with the state working there. I saw the position opened up as a assistant professor running the Addiction Studies and Counseling Program for Connecticut State Community College. So it's teaching people on the associate degree level how to become an addiction counselor, not therapists per se, but an addiction counselor on the associate degree level. Applied for the

position did two interviews and I got hired and talked about imposter syndrome. I'm like, I did not expect to get hired. So I've been doing that for four years. Love it. Also run a very successful private practice as well, take care of my family. Yes, I'm retired. I get some federal bennies from that, but that to me, that part of my life is over. But working with that population, the sex offender population, as well as the regular supervision population, really help me. I think as as a professional, kind of ratchet up this new version of myself, this 2.0 version, which I love.

What advice would you give to someone going through the federal prison system? As an emma, going in? Or coming out of it for supervised release. So coming out of federal prison, make friends with your PO to the point where it become hyper-compliant. Federal POs hate paperwork. They hate paperwork.

If you can make their job easy by becoming hyper-compliant, meaning do everything they tell you to do, eventually they're going to leave you alone. Your job while you're on federal supervision, if you ever get indicted and go to prison, is to fly under a probation officer's radar, no matter what, because then they're going to leave you alone, and they can focus on other people because they're lazy.

They just want to do less work, because they're already overwhelmed. If they tell you to go into a drug program, go into a drug program. Don't fight back. If they tell you, don't do weed, don't do weed. Just don't. It's legal in Connecticut, recreationally, medically. It's still not legal federally.

All right. If they tell you to get a job, get a job. If they tell you to report as directed, report as directed. After a few months of that, they're going to leave you alone. They're probably going to forget that you're even on supervision. Going in, it's different. The only advice I could give is depending upon what you're being charged with, lean on your support network, lean on your friends and your family. If you can get a public defender, federal public defender, you don't need to hire a private attorney because the outcome

is usually, it's all going to be the same. Federal public defenders, generally speaking, have Ivy League degrees that are very, very social justice oriented, that know the federal judges, they have very close working relationships with the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Prosecutor, the Probation Office, and the Federal Judges. And they're very, very good at what they do. If you can get a public defender, don't hire a private attorney. Because a private attorney is just going to bleed you dry, and at the end, you're still going to have a plea agreement anyways. Regardless, it's going to be the same thing. Public defenders also know a lot of the agents. They know what to look for. They know if this case is a bullshit case. They know if the

This case is a winnable one. They know the judges. They also know where the judges fall on the sentencing guile. Some judges are very liberal. Some judges are very conservative. And so they're going to, they have these relationships with the court where they are going to let you know as a defendant, hey, you're being charged with this. If you plead to this and you're in front of this particular federal judge, you might,

potentially you're going to be looking at this kind of sentence. I think we got a good shot at no custody. or these are your other options. So that's the way it is in my experience. Well, Paul, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you, Ian. I had a blast, man. Yeah.

Once again, you provide so much to the community out here. You know, former inmates, felons, the law enforcement community, people that have this lived experience that I believe is so important because there are a lot of people that are suffering and have a platform like this is to be able to provide that kind of service for people and helping them change lives

and whatever they're going through. And as somebody who has his own practice, I love helping people. And so they can always look me up, type in my name, Paul Colette. I'm in Google, and I'm a pretty big search engine optimization.

You can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I am. You can put in the show notes of my website as well. But if you ever need any help, if there's anybody that's going through it, even on the federal side that's about to go into federal prison and they're looking at an ex-probation officer's input, I'd be happy to do that for you. The next line of prison consultants, ex-probation officers. You know, I won't even charge, dude. I'm not going to charge for it. I make enough money.

But, yeah, there are those prison consultants out there. Yeah, that's a pretty big industry. Good for them, you know, not to take away from them. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Ben. Thanks, brother.