The center answers several needs in an area of Florida particularly vulnerable to human trafficking because of its agricultural and hospitality industries. Affiliated faculty conduct research and provide consulting expertise to professions that encounter human trafficking, including law enforcement, nursing, social workers and nonprofits.

Potter brings a broad background in sociology to the director position, including experience in academia, Florida’s justice system and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He currently teaches criminal justice.

The center is supported by the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Foundation’s Human Trafficking Fund and is administered in cooperation with the Office of Global Perspectives and International Initiatives in the College of Sciences.

“We have a deep pool of researchers, faculty and students who are committed to using their expertise to combat this scourge on society. I’m excited to see this center grow and flourish under Dr. Potter’s leadership,” says College of Sciences Dean Michael Johnson.

Potter says he has several goals in mind with the new center, and collaboration with other departments and colleges is key to making them a reality. Any college, department or center is welcome to reach out to him directly, Potter said.

Rosen College of Hospitality Management, for instance, has teamed up with the United Abolitionists network of first responders to teach students how to recognize signs of human trafficking. Evolving technology used to cover tracks and illegally move people means digital forensics students need to stay informed of latest trends. The arts can play a role as a medium for raising awareness around trafficking.

“Like most social problems, this is not something that anyone owns or solves. It takes a team.”

“We’re bringing an interdisciplinary approach to this,” Potter says. “Like most social problems, this is not something that anyone owns or solves. It takes a team.”

By its simplest definition, human and sex trafficking is exploiting people for profit. Prostitution is a common example, but trafficking can also take the form of underpaying undocumented immigrants working in hotel kitchens or harvesting vegetables.

Central Florida is an attractive location for human traffickers with its booming tourism industry and proximity to several interstate highways. Potter foresees continued research collaboration with law enforcement, as well as promoting programs that benefit the campus community. Universities are a prime target for trafficking, and it is key that students understand how to prevent themselves from becoming victims.

“Our campus has done an excellent job teaching awareness and how to intervene when they see something wrong. Now we want to stop it from happening in the first place,” Potter says.

The award is given in memory of pioneering researcher Peter Lejins and is the highest honor bestowed on a corrections researcher by the national association.

“The Lejins Award is given to an individual who has produced significant research for the correctional community and has demonstrated personal commitment and contribution to improve the profession of corrections,” said James Gondles, ACA’s executive director.

Potter has conducted research and published extensively in the areas of crime and health, and particularly in areas where health systems and correctional systems intersect.

His current research interests include jail-based re-entry programs, community corrections and juvenile justice in the region. He places an emphasis on physical and mental health issues in and interventions with correctional populations.

In addition, Potter is working on substance abuse-related problems in criminal justice. He and Assistant Professor Jacinta Gau are collaborating on a study of efforts to reduce the impact of “pill mills” in Florida with support from the National Institute of Justice.

The ACA presented Potter with the Lejins’ award at its Feb. 4 meeting in Tampa. In addition to recognizing his research, the ACA highlighted Potter’s contributions to the development of the Prison Rape Elimination Act Standards and a range of “science to service” activities.

Potter thanked his colleagues over the years and the ACA leadership for their support of his work in bridging the academic, government and practice worlds. 

“The greatest contribution academic- and government-based researchers can make is to translate the basic research of the university into the hands of practitioners, either as teachers or consultants to the field,” he said. “My hope is to inspire the next generation of researchers to do this, regardless of where they happen to be employed.”

Potter is a native of Florida. He earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology (’75) at the University of South Florida and his master’s degree and doctorate in sociology (’77 and ’82, respectively) at the University of Florida. He has served as a researcher, educator and manager in education, nonprofit, and state and federal organizations over his work history. Potter joined the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ faculty in 2008.

To share the latest on what services work best, the Orange County Corrections Department and Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝’s Department of Criminal Justice recently held a daylong workshop for community members who work closely with offenders.

About 90 members of corrections departments, faith-based organizations and behavioral health care providers participated in the event, held June 13 at the Criminal Justice Institute at Valencia College in Orlando.

“One of our goals was to introduce to the community the value of using services shown scientifically to be effective,” said Professor Roberto Hugh Potter, the workshop coordinator and research director for the department. “These are known as ‘evidence-based practices.'”

Potter also wanted the participants to learn about a Transition from Jail to Community model that many Central Florida counties are adopting. One of its developers, Jesse Jannetta with the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., traveled to Orlando to speak to the group.

A key feature of the model, said Jannetta, is using evidence-based practices to assess an offender’s risk of re-offending and then using this assessment to link the offender to services in the community that address his or her specific needs.

The need to maintain these interventions in the community is critical, he added.

Potter built on Jannetta’s presentation by describing factors associated with repeat offending. He also discussed the need for quality data to help guide the development of “re-entry” programs.

In the afternoon, the participants selected to attend two of four break-out sessions. The sessions covered case management, cognitive-behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing and a family-focused intervention targeting youth.

Potter said evaluations of the workshop were “overwhelmingly positive.”

He envisions the workshop as the first in a new “science to service” training effort hosted by Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝’s Department of Criminal Justice and the Criminal Justice Institute at Valencia College with funding from Orange County Corrections.

Imagine a place where you don’t have to pay anything or maybe just $5 for a visit to the medical clinic, where your prescribed medications cost you nothing, where there is no penalty for missing work or school to go to the clinic, and where every individual has an absolute right to access and receive “adequate, reactive” health care.

If you want a glimpse of one possible provision of universal health care in the United States, check out your local jail, state or federal prison.

Every person in a correctional facility has the constitutional right to a professional medical opinion about their health condition and a right to the care ordered by that professional without interference by non-medical administrators. Because of this constitutional guarantee, correctional facilities were excluded from the Affordable Care Act, which will become fully implemented by 2014.

In the “free world,” about the only place anyone has a statutory right to that standard of health care is in an emergency room.

Correctional health has become big business, whether run by public agencies or the range of non- and for-profit health-care providers. Finding ways to reduce those costs has also become a concern for legislators and correctional officials. After all, this is a public cost funded by taxpayers, as is Medicaid, and taxpayers want their money spent wisely. Health care is not free.

So far, providing care has been mostly a shell game of cost-shifting by various levels of government using tax dollars. Now the need to find ways to reduce health costs begins in earnest. Perhaps prisons and jails can give us some good lessons.

Correctional systems have experimented with a variety of ways to reduce “unnecessary” utilization of medical services by prisoners, such as charging a co-pay for non-scheduled clinic visits. To many of us, a $5 co-pay sounds better than our current co-pay. If you make less than $1 an hour for prison work, that co-pay is considered by many to be a disincentive to seek necessary medical care, especially preventive care.

Many “prisoner-health advocates” object to a co-pay for non-scheduled sick calls. Note the “non-scheduled” part; the reality is that for regularly scheduled visits for such things as physicals or chronic-care conditions that already have been diagnosed, the prisoner does not pay for care.

One approach to managing health-care costs that is popular with many correctional systems and consultants is the “defined-benefits plan.”

Upon entry to the correctional system, an inmate or prisoner receives a booklet that details the standard medical services available to all prisoners. The cost of non-scheduled visits is detailed and an explanation of how those costs will be deducted from inmate accounts is provided, as well as the exemptions from having to pay.

Most of these service schedules follow the same guidelines in the health-insurance program many people have through employers.

In most facilities, access to health care begins with a “sick-call slip” provided to a triage nurse. The nurse determines whether the prisoner has an ailment that requires a visit to the clinic and makes arrangements with the correctional officers to allow the prisoner to attend the clinic.

A nurse, nurse practitioner or physician assistant sees the prisoner initially to determine whether the complainant needs to be seen by a physician.

If the answer is no, the prisoner patient is given whatever non-prescription treatment is needed and sent back to work or living quarters. If the answer is yes, an appointment is made with the physician at the next available opening.

Expect to see similar “gate-keeping” roles assigned to nurse practitioners, physician assistants and primary-care physicians in the near future, similar to what happens in Australia.

Through years of performing medical-services audits in Georgia prisons, visiting more county jails and state prisons than I ever wanted to – even as a criminal justice professional – I have discovered that how people perceive the quality and availability of medical care in prison is often colored by the care they had on the outside.

Those who had private health care in the free world tend to rate prison health care low.  Inmates who had no health care in the free world, other than an emergency room, tend to rate prison health care much more highly. One wonders whether a similar dynamic will play out with a universal health system in the United States.

Regardless of where one sits on the issue of transforming the public-health system or the health-care delivery system in the United States, the reality is that it will cost money. Ideally and hypothetically, if we invest more money in prevention — including behavioral and commercial changes by individuals and profit-making companies — we will reduce the “downstream” costs of health care.

Even inside the jail or prison, some inmates with chronic diseases on special diets still stock up on canteen items that counteract the best efforts of health-care staff. So don’t think that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s calls to limit high-calorie beverages won’t be followed by other items, and the list expanded.

Soon, everything I love will be immoral, illegal, or against the advice of the surgeon general.

Prison health care provides us with a glimpse into the mechanisms that can be utilized to transform public health and health-care delivery. Prisoner behavior in a highly controlled environment shows us the ways in which individuals can still resist the best health-care engineering efforts.

Transforming the health-care system will require a new level of social control in areas of behavior that extend beyond simply what is available at your local fast-food outlet.

In the end, we can learn a great deal by observing the health-promoting and health-defeating behaviors among prisoners – and we have a lot of those, unfortunately.

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Forum columnist Roberto Hugh Potter is a sociologist, professor and director of Research Partnerships in the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Department of Criminal Justice. He can be reached at rhpotter@ucf.edu.