Oral history interview with Amy Singer, 2015

Biographical Note

Amy Singer was a long-time staffer at Phoenix House (1994-2015), where she has held a variety of positions, starting as Director of Criminal Justice Programs and leading to her current title of Senior Vice President and Director, Public/Private Partnerships and Business

Scope and Contents

In the first session, Amy Singer discusses her career prior to Phoenix House, which included working in a halfway house, the District Attorney's office, victims' services, the Governor's Office on Criminal Justice and Alternatives to Incarceration in Massachusetts, and a private foundation that generated materials for judges hearing substance abuse cases. She shares her own philosophy on substance abuse treatment, discussing both therapeutic community methods and methadone. She also describes her impressions of the relationship between union politics, racial politics, and city politics during a brief stint with the New York City Department of Corrections. In the second session, Singer discusses leaving the New York City Department of Corrections shortly following the election of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and her introduction to Phoenix House as Director of Criminal Justice Programs. She describes Phoenix House's expansion into Texas in 1994, on prison-related contracts. She discusses the programmatic challenges of setting up programs in new states. She speaks on changes to the composition of the Phoenix House staff during her tenure, reflecting increasing medicalization of treatment, and corresponding changes in the therapeutic community model. She lays out the issues and challenges surrounding recent mergers and acquisitions. Finally, she discusses the rise and fall of a robust research agenda at Phoenix House, and the organization's relationship to federal funding. Singer begins the third session with an analysis of Phoenix House's lobbying efforts in a shifting political landscape, highlighting the shortcomings and challenges of changing healthcare policies, and how Phoenix House has had to adapt to ensure funds were available for their patients. She then details the internal debate in the organization regarding the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, and the differences of opinion that have emerged. Singer highlights how Phoenix House increasingly involves itself in more aspects of the policy side of substance regulation, and how government drug laws have in turn impacted policies within the program throughout the years. She gives particular attention to changing healthcare reimbursement policies, and how regional Phoenix House directors have continually been forced to adapt to meet these regulations in order to fulfill the needs of the organization from both an internal standpoint and a patient care standpoint

Subjects

• Criminal justice, Administration of--Massachusetts.
• Drug addicts--Rehabilitation--United States.
• Drug control--United States--History--20th century.
• Health insurance--United States.
• Imprisonment--United States.
• Interviews.
• Marijuana--Law and legislation--United States.
• Methadone maintenance--United States--History--20th century.
• New York (N.Y.). Department of Correction.
• Nonprofit organizations--Finance.
• Nonprofit organizations--Management.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Phoenix House (Organization)
• Singer, Amy, 1951---Interviews.
• Substance abuse--Treatment.
• Therapeutic communities.
• Vanderscoff, Cameron, interviewer.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015