Sneak Peak To Forensic Social Work with Jacoba Rock

Sam Butler: Thank you for tuning in to BroncoTales with the College of Health Sciences. Dr. Rock pursued a master’s of social work at the University of Denver. She then earned a PhD in human development and family studies from Penn State University.

Dr. Rock now works as a clinical assistant professor of social work at Boise State University and has been with us for just over two years. Dr. Rock’s specialty dives deeper into the vast field of social work where she found her true passion, forensic and criminal legal social work. She has worked on hundreds of juvenile life without parole or juvenile transfer cases, as well as cases where clients are facing or serving a sentence of capital punishment. Another aspect of Dr. Rock’s job relates to state and national level policy initiatives and program development in various sectors of social work and social work education.

I’d like to warmly welcome Dr. Jacoba Rock to the podcast. 

Jacoba Rock: Thank you. I’m Dr. Jacoba Rock. I am a licensed clinical social worker. I’m also a clinical faculty member at Boise State School of Social Work. And I love my degree in social work. It’s been useful in a lot of ways.

My focus is on working in the criminal legal system in order to create change for individuals who are in the system, like young people who are incarcerated. But also to change the system through evaluation and advocacy for system change in courts and in correctional settings. 

But I didn’t always know that that’s what I wanted to do. When I was younger, I really wanted to be a writer and a journalist. That’s what I originally went to college for was to become a journalist. I think I thought I’d be like Lois Lane and report on the exciting things going on in the world. But at that time, when I was in college, journalism was, it was unclear. It was uncertain what the future of journalism would look like because the internet was just becoming popular. So I’m kind of dating myself here. At that time, I specifically wanted to be a magazine journalist, and it looked like magazines weren’t going to have a future at that time. 

So the entire industry was like really depressing. I got an internship at a music magazine that I was all excited about, but everybody there was like really downtrodden about the state of journalists. So at a certain point, I wasn’t nearly as excited. But it turns out writing is really important. I use writing a lot for research and for advocacy efforts. And so in the end, I’m glad that I was excited about writing and got some training in good writing.

The other thing that sort of led me to where I am now is that I grew up with an incarcerated family member, a family member who’s still incarcerated. I spent my childhood visiting regularly, going into prisons, and that wasn’t like my friends, where I was different from other people, or at least I thought. And some of that was because I grew up in a very white community in Pennsylvania.

So I don’t think a lot of the community interacted with folks who are incarcerated or had family members incarcerated. But I remember sort of being curious about the prison environment early on, because it was obviously a very different setting from kind of my neighborhood and small town area. Also, like having a lot of empathy for what people experience when they’re behind bars. These are–prisons are very like dirty places. They don’t get good food there. It’s, there’s–you know, a lot of, it can be very depressing and isolating. And so, you know, I grew up developing that kind of like empathy and lens.

And so I didn’t know that’s what I wanted to pursue professionally. I think that for many of us, what we ended up doing in our careers dovetails in some way with our personal and family life experience. So my family had experienced a lot of adversity and trauma. My family member going to prison was just one example of that. But I think that led me to be more empathetic and feel for people who are also going through challenges. And that is very common for social work students to have some sort of adversity in their background. Where, you know, they now want to help others because of the challenges that they’ve been through or they’ve seen. 

Sam Butler: That’s understandable. So, of your degrees and work through college, which piece did you enjoy doing the most? 

Jacoba Rock: Sure. So, I love my social work degree. I received, like you said, my MSW from the University of Denver in 2010. And my specialization in that program was with high-risk youth. So, I learned a lot about how to assess youth, some of the research behind youth decision making and challenges, particularly for youth from marginalized backgrounds.

And in a social work degree program, you get to engage in field placements. I had two of them and had the opportunity to work directly with youth while I was in the program. Youth who were specifically incarcerated and in other ways in the criminal legal system. So that really allowed me to pursue my area of passion, but also have support from faculty and figure out how to apply the skills and knowledge that I was gaining in my program. And now, as a professor, that’s exactly what I get to help with: supporting students in the classroom side, providing them with the skills and knowledge they’ll need. And then they also get an opportunity to use those strategies out in the field. 

Sam Butler: So yeah, and you mentioned an alternative dispute resolution certificate, I believe. What does that entail? 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, so in addition to my MSW, just before I went to my MSW program, I was running a restorative justice program that was based in a police department in Longmont, Colorado. I had also run a restorative justice program at a university campus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I got my undergraduate degree. And so I was interested in gaining some more skills useful to the restorative justice process.

Restorative justice is used in a lot of different settings as an alternative way, an alternative method to responding to crime or conflict. In the program that I was running in the police department, police officers would refer cases of both juveniles and adults. Usually, low-level cases and tried to basically avoid sending them through the court system by instead having the community use dialogue, restorative dialogue. Where community members would come together, as well as the people who are responsible for the crime, the people who were impacted by the crime, to discuss what had happened, how they were harmed, and what needed to be done about it. I ran that program and wanted to get an advanced degree that would allow me to better understand conflict, how to manage conflict, and facilitate those kinds of conversations. 

Sam Butler: Are you from Colorado? 

Jacoba Rock: I’m not from Colorado. I spent the first 10 years of my degree there and then moved back to Pennsylvania and my family, especially to take care of my dad. 

Sam Butler: Yeah, so for anyone who doesn’t know what social work as a whole looks like, instead of just your specific niche–things such as counseling, rehab, and therapy. What can someone expect from any social work or job in the field? 

Jacoba Rock: So, social work is a very broad field. It’s one of the helping professions. We consider ourselves to be helping professionals. A social work degree can be used to do a lot. We consider social work practice to occur at what we think of as micro, meso, and macro levels. 

At the micro level, we’re engaged in direct practice work, helping individuals and families, and groups in a variety of settings. It could be in health care, like in a hospital or a treatment center, mental health care specifically. There are a lot of social workers who provide therapy and counseling, licensed social workers, or substance use counseling specifically. We work in schools. We work in child welfare. So, just a variety of settings where people need help.

So, my focus in the criminal legal system is a pretty small niche, but growing quickly. A lot of people recognize how much need there is. But there’s a real need everywhere. I would say that we’re different from other direct practice mental health professions like psychology and some of the more psychology-rooted professions in that we also are interested in pursuing social justice and looking at systemic and social issues that are the root of those problems that people are encountering, in addition to just the individual level. 

So that kind of separates us from other helping professions. But we also operate at meso and macro levels. And what I mean by that is at the meso level, we work a lot in organizations. We do program evaluation. I engage in program evaluation specific to criminal legal issues and other research. We do policy advocacy. We do community organizing more at the macro level. So we do practice across levels where we’re not all directly serving or providing therapy or counseling case management. Those are their kind of day-to-day roles where we’re interacting directly with people. 

Sam Butler: So, it is more broad level than like a high school therapist or counselor per se. You do more than this social justice aspect. 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, it could be. I mean, school social workers interact with youth just like counseling or psychologists might, but often address some of the more systemic issues, especially those encountered by young people from marginalized backgrounds. 

Sam Butler: What program here at Boise State are you a part of and does Boise State as a whole offer in social work? 

Jacoba Rock: So I teach primarily for the MSW online program. We have an MSW program that is present both online and in person. So you can complete an MSW degree at Boise State online or in person on campus.

We also have a BSW program that is in person. So, an undergraduate degree in social work. And we are in the process of developing a BSW online program as well. So we have online and in-person options in Boise, but I primarily teach at the graduate level. Also in the MSW program also has an advanced standing option where either in-person or online students who already have a BSW can complete an MSW degree in as little as a year. 

Sam Butler: And what do those classes that you teach look like? Do you do a lot of projects, a lot of like reading and stuff like that? 

Jacoba Rock: Sure, so we have a variety of classes in our social work programs. Some are more practice-oriented classes where students learn skills like counseling skills for helping individuals, families, and groups. We also have classes that are more focused on research and program evaluation, or even just how to use research in the field. We have field courses, so while students are out in the field, which is a big, important part of a social work degree.

While students are out in the field engaging and helping people, they also take classes alongside that work to help support them in doing that. The classes that I primarily teach are a program evaluation class, a couple of human behavior and social environment classes, where students learn underlying theory, they learn why problems exist, and what to do about them based on theory and research. I also teach a class that focuses on identity-specific considerations. So the reasons why people might experience oppression or marginalization are because of certain identities that they have. 

Sam Butler: Yeah, that sounds interesting and a lot more involved than like a therapist at the high school level or college level, and more based on like the systematic, like you said, the systematic ideas. As we’re like, I remember my, my high school counselor did a lot of like, oh, class changes. Oh, helping sign up for college, stuff like that. 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, yeah, a school counselor in the K-12 setting is usually focused on more academics. Like you said, a therapist’s role is a little different. And social workers can be and often are therapists. Therapists are a role instead of a degree. A variety of clinical degrees can get you to a point where you can be licensed and be a therapist.

So, social work is one option, and psychology or psychological counseling is another option. So there are a lot of social workers who become licensed and do become therapists. I am not personally. In fact, I tried being a therapist for a little while, and I was terrible at it. But a lot of people do that. And the degree and the ongoing training are well-equipped to help someone become a therapist. 

Sam Butler: And that brings up another question of mine. What is a licensed social worker? What does that entail, and what does it mean to be a licensed social worker? 

Jacoba Rock: Sure. So you can practice as a social worker in some spaces without licensure. It varies by state, but in many states or most states, it’s required or at least strongly expected to have licensure in order to do direct practice. So some of those, like therapy or other roles where you’re directly interacting with people in need, you need a clinical licensure in some states.

So it varies by state. In some states, you can get licensed at the bachelor’s level. But in all states, you can get licensed with an MSW from an accredited program. And then you also need to take a test and get some additional supervision hours. But many, if not most of our students pursue licensure just to broaden their career options and be able to have that credential to do direct practice if they’d like to do that. 

Sam Butler: So it’s a pretty standard thing that most social workers have done. 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, I don’t know the exact numbers, but I would say a lot of the field gets licensed. Many of our faculty not only have their MSW, but are also licensed in at least one state. Many of them are licensed in Idaho. 

Sam Butler: Okay, and it’s specific to each state?

Jacoba Rock: Yes. So you can be licensed in multiple states. I am, but it is a lot of hoops to jump through. There are some national efforts to actually create processes whereby you can more easily be licensed in many spaces because now with telehealth, I can get requests to work on it, you know, clinically. And so licensure can be a barrier, and that might…

Sam Butler: Do those tests look significantly different in each state because of the different state laws? 

Jacoba Rock: No, it’s a national test. Different states require different types of tests within that national platform, like some require clinical or generalist tests. It actually gets pretty complicated.

As I should say about our MSW and BSW programs, we work hard to support students as they pursue these options. So I’m also an advisor. As a professor, I also do some advising of students, and they’ll meet with me and try to figure out, well, I live in the state, but I’m moving to this state. So, how do I get licensed, and do I even need to get licensed? And so we provide a lot of support to help people figure those things out. 

Sam Butler: Other than being an educator–like what is your outside of Boise State job entail and look like for you? How do you manage it all? 

Jacoba Rock: Sure. Well, I don’t manage at all. I should start off by saying I dropped balls in different places in my life. But, you know, many of us faculty, full-time faculty, get to do some really cool things in our areas of specialization. Some of my clinical colleagues also provide therapy. I don’t, like I said, that’s not my strong suit.

But I do practice like many of my other colleagues. I also engage in some research, like some of my colleagues as well. But almost all of my practice and research outside of higher education focuses on the criminal legal system. And it has for a long time. After I received my MSW, I briefly tried out working in child welfare. It was also not something that fit well, not only with my abilities, but I found it to be really triggering in a different kind of way, especially working with young children. And I found myself drawn to working with teenagers, like the unruly teenagers who aren’t following the rules.

And teenagers and young adults have become sort of my focus within the criminal legal system is how the system responds to young people, especially young people who come from really rough backgrounds and have made really poor choices. So, in my niche, if you call that criminal legal or forensic social work, there are a variety of roles that you could have. So we talked about the difference between like a degree and a role. Some people are therapists in prisons or in reentry centers. Some people do case management, and they help people reenter, or they help them,–or some people focus on assessment while people are in jail, or you know, it’s being determined what they are going to need. So, I do some of that direct practice work and assessment.

Some people are working out in the community, engaging in advocacy and programs and policies that will benefit this population. Really, the focus of my work in assessment and advocacy grew in 2012 and 2013, when there was a Supreme Court ruling at the national level that basically said the life without parole sentence for juveniles that we’ve had in the United States was unconstitutional.

So, what that meant was that it was not constitutional to send youth away for life for something they did, regardless of what they did, unless we considered the unique circumstances of their life. And we had hundreds of young people who were serving life without parole at that time in the United States. A lot of those cases were from the 80s and 90s. So in 2012, 2013, when this ruling happened, actually, it was a series of rulings. A lot of those people were in their 30s and 40s. So I started meeting with that population and going back and looking at their life histories. And many of them had come from severe trauma, child abuse…

Sam Butler: Is that what you mean by the unique circumstances? 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. So, my job was basically to learn about their life stories, to find out how they had been coping while they had been incarcerated, and serving this time of life without parole. As you can imagine, I mean, if you get told as a young person, you’re 16, 17, that you’re gonna spend the rest of your life in prison. You feel pretty hopeless and depressed, and some of them have taken their lives.

Many of them had tried to take their lives and had struggled with severe substance use issues. But also, many of them had done quite well and kind of grown out of their unruly teenage behavior. But they have and they continue to be one of my kind of focuses is that young people, no matter how terrible decisions they’ve made, should have an opportunity for growth, which is why we, as a country, formed a juvenile justice system is because we believe that juveniles are different. And that is research supported, right?

We know that juveniles aren’t fully developed, including that we know a lot more than we did when the juvenile justice system was founded in the late 1800s. We know a lot more than we did then about the brain. The brain is continuing to develop, and young people can’t make the same types of decisions that adults make, especially in a peer pressure and substance use kind of environment.

So, I’m getting off subject a bit. My goal was to go back and assess their life stories and understand how they had sort of got to that point, how they were doing while they were incarcerated, and then also, what is their potential? If they were to get a reentry opportunity, even if it was 10, 20, or 30 years down the line. What could they do with their lives?

And it turns out many of them were already doing a lot of good things. Like I had a client who had earned a doctoral degree. I had a client who had learned a variety of languages while incarcerated. I had many clients who were helping other people, incarcerated younger versions of themselves to make better choices, and wanted to do counseling or peer specialist kind of work. So I wrote up these, and I continue to write up these long reports in order to advocate for them to basically have another shot.

So, my role is not in any way to say that someone’s not guilty of something. I believe that probably many of my clients have made really bad and harmful choices. Some of them aren’t as bad of choices as the ones they were convicted of because many sort of take the fall, so to speak, for adult co-defendants. Many of my cases were something called felony life cases, where the juvenile was involved in a felony. For example, a car theft or a drug deal that resulted in someone getting killed. And they weren’t the ones who shot the gun. 

Sam Butler: But they’re involved. 

Jacoba Rock: They were present, and that resulted in them getting a life without parole sentence. And so they clearly made very harmful and very immature decisions, but it was because they were immature, right? Because they’re juveniles.

So the goal was to sort of say, like, this person needs services. This person needs an opportunity to grow and change, and to be back out in the community where they can and will do better. And we do have some–many of these guys have been resentenced and have been, and I say guys, because most of them are male, not all of them. But many of them have been resentenced, in the limited research that we have indicates that many of them are doing quite well. They’re not these hardened criminals, right? They made bad choices as juveniles, harmful choices, but they are able to be productive and safe members of society and to do different things. 

So, I advocate for opportunities, basically. And I also advocate for, yeah, and I advocate for system change. I advocate for programs and policies that will give people an opportunity to change and won’t do as much harm. When I went back and looked at these old cases, there was a lot of harm done by the system. They were speaking of mental–other mental health professionals. There were psychologists who had labeled these youth in really harmful ways, which had those labels stuck with them. And been a barrier to them getting help and to creating change in their lives. So I went back, did some digging, and tried to correct these things. I also tried to work at the system level to make sure that these kinds of atrocities don’t happen again. 

Sam Butler: And when you say you’re kind of learning and advocating for them, are you spending time in the juvenile center talking to them, learning about them, stuff like that–as like multiple people at a time, do you meet with one person, like what does your clientele kind of entail?

Jacoba Rock: First, I should say that as a full-time professor, I only take two or three cases at a time. So I do this, you know, in a pretty limited way, also because I’m doing research and system work. I don’t do a lot of direct practice anymore.

But yes, it is individual meetings where usually many meetings, because it takes a long time to get to know someone. And yeah, work for an assessment. I’m not only individually meeting with them, but if they’re adults, they’re in prison, even if they were sentenced as a juvenile. 

Sam Butler: Right.

Jacoba Rock: And I’m not only going in and meeting with them, but I’m contacting their family and trying to get the family involved in a healthy way. I’m meeting with their attorneys. I’m meeting with other experts. And I am also trying to advocate for more capacity, some more social workers, to be able to do that kind of work at the organizational level. So, I’m not bored. We keep busy in our area of practice. 

Sam Butler: What do you think the biggest problem in the justice system as a whole, not just the juvenile system, is? 

Jacoba Rock: I should say I don’t call it the justice system. And increasingly people refer to it as a criminal legal, or juvenile legal system. Just recognizing that a lot of people don’t experience justice, including people harmed by crime, often don’t experience justice. They don’t experience restoration or healing through the system.

I think that kind of answers your question because one of the biggest problems is that we’re not clear about why we have the system or what it’s supposed to be doing. There’s clearly a punitive orientation to these systems where, at least for the criminal legal system, we outwardly say, like someone did something wrong, there should be a consequence, right? But then we also have treatment services, we have people trying to do healing work out in the community. We have people who say it doesn’t matter how much someone has healed, gotten better, or how safe they are; they should be in prison anyway. Even if they’re perfectly safe. 

So we don’t really know what we’re doing with the system. And as a result, it’s unclear how we fix this system. So the system treats people really desperately. There are extreme racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal legal system, including in Idaho, where there’s an overrepresentation of the Latino population in prisons and jails. Across the country, a significant overrepresentation of black and brown bodied people, as well as people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, poor people is disproportionately in the system. So, I think as evidence that the system isn’t working, there are extreme disparities. There’s a lot of ineffectiveness, it’s extremely costly, it costs a lot of money.

That may not be the main reason I want to change the system. But I think more taxpayers should be concerned because we’re putting this much money. In many states, it costs 35 to 40,000 dollars a year to house someone. And if that person isn’t unsafe, and the main person they were harming is themselves, most people locked up are not violent. They’re there for substance use issues and mental health issues. 

So, where are we putting this money, right? And what else could we be doing with this money instead? Could we be investing it in kiddos so that they don’t get to this point, where they are engaged in this kind of behavior? I mean, there are a lot of–the biggest problems that the system doesn’t work right, but why the system works, I think there’s sort of a variety of reasons and one of the big ones to me is, is we just don’t know what the system supposed to do. That’s why we’re not sure, you know how to get it to work better is because we don’t all agree on what we should be doing with the system. 

Sam Butler: I feel like I see a lot of stuff that, oh, it needs to be reformed. It needs to be changed. It needs to be fixed. But there isn’t, like you said, ever really a specific, like cause. There are only the changes that need to be made. And I think, kind of how you explained it, we don’t really know how it works. It’s a great explanation as to why there is very little change. 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, I would couple that with like, one thing we do know is it causes a lot of harm. People who enter a prison are actually more likely to develop substance use issues than people with substance use issues who don’t go into prison. 

Sam Butler: Right. 

Jacoba Rock: Right. That tells us that the system is actually it’s not just not doing anything… 

Sam Butler: It’s making it worse. 

Jacoba Rock: Right. And that’s true of many social service systems is that we have a concern that we’re actually causing harm. So, one solution thrown out there is abolition. Right. Just stop, just stop intervening in people’s lives. They may not have great lives, but we’re only making it worse. Right. I don’t know that that’s the total solution. I’m interested in something called de-implementation, where we study practices and processes that are causing harm or are ineffective and inefficient. And we just remove those practices and policies, stop doing those things. Right. And I always argue, like, it’s easy to fund something that will actually not cost anything. Take it easy, I mean, you don’t have to fund a new program, just stop doing things that cause people harm. 

Sam Butler: Do you have any specific examples of what you would de-implement? 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, I think one that a lot of people get behind, including people from more punitive ideologies, is the use of isolation, which exacerbates people’s mental health issues. I’ve worked with clients who have spent years, including during their youth, completely isolated without any contact with anyone. For one of my clients, I was the first human being besides a guard he had seen in like eight or nine years. 

Sam Butler: Wow. 

Jacoba Rock: And even with the guards, he didn’t have much interaction, except through a slot kind of thing. He was very mentally ill, and he hadn’t been when he had gone in. And so, clearly, that’s–I think there’s strong evidence there that we’re doing something that’s actually causing more harm. There are other ways to manage those spaces that make them more safe.

So, I talked with a prison superintendent recently, someone responsible for the prison, who said the same thing to me. He’s like, we’ve got to stop isolating people. You know, I just don’t know how to do it. I don’t have the resources yet to keep people safe without isolating, but we’ve still got to have that goal. We have that shared goal of stopping isolation. Another common example is the DARE program. I don’t know if you had DARE when you were young.

Sam Butler: No, I have seen like the sticker. But it was never in my–they do in school, right? 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, so when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, DARE was popular nationally. I think it’s still used nationally, but maybe not quite as popular as it was then. It was basically this sort of just say no idea, teach young people to just say no to drugs and alcohol. That was the focus was on substance use. Well, come to find out, a lot of us, myself included, didn’t know much about drugs until they started telling us about them. And then I was like, really fascinated, like, oh, that sounds interesting. Let’s go try that out. 

So some research came out in the 90s and early 2000s basically said exactly what I’ve been talking about, that not only does DARE not work. It actually increases some risk. And that’s been another common example of life. What should we de-implement? Okay, we should stop doing things that actually increase the risk for young people. 

Sam Butler: And that’s just like parallels right into the prison system, like you said, that it actually makes it worse. 

Jacoba Rock: Yeah, substance use is one of, if not the strongest contributor to the size of our incarceration, mass incarceration. One of the biggest issues is not only substance use, but also our disparate treatment of substance use. If we look back on the kind of war on drugs and the ways that we tried to manage substance use and co-occurring substance use and mental health, we sent away thousands and thousands of people. Disparate black men were sent to prison for nothing violent, but for years and years away from their families, well, now they’re not raising their kids, right? And we know what that does to a kiddo, to not have parents or to have an incarcerated parent.

So we just sort of fueled these intergenerational issues. And again, not to keep anyone safe. For most people engaged in substance use, the person they’re harming is themselves. So yeah, not an evidence-based or ethical response, but as a result, we have a huge problem. 

Sam Butler: And one last question before you wrap it up. We’ve covered a lot of hard topics.

How do you yourself kind of–you’re always the helping person. How do you help yourself get through some of these things?

Jacoba Rock: It’s a great question, one that we love in social work. If you get a social work degree, we actually teach you about self-care and community care, and the idea that we should be working together. And I have a rough day, so you help take care of me, and then you have a rough day, and I help take care of you because it’s really the only way to make this sustainable.

I think we started having more real conversations about like, what do I really need? Because I’m personally not the healthiest person either. And in today’s kind of world, how do you do it all? Going back to one of your original comments, like you can’t, right? Like I’m a parent, but I also work full-time. I mean, my family has means, and a lot of families don’t, right? So like, how do you do this and still take care of yourself? Self-care is not the only answer. Like I can take good care of myself, but it’s hard to make it. So, we really need to create change in these systems in order for people to get healthier. 

Sam Butler: What do you think social work looks like in 10 years? 

Jacoba Rock: You know, there is this social work scholar who runs–Dr. Laura Nissen, who runs a website that is focused on Social Work Futures, or what she calls, and we call futures thinking, anticipating the future and what needs will exist. And I think about this a lot as an educator, like, I don’t want to prepare students to only solve the problems that are currently existing, right? We may have completely different problems in the next 10 years.

10 years ago, we didn’t know about this COVID-19 pandemic that has completely affected mental health, families, and the education system. So, I mean, we have to prepare students for that. So, we engage students in some activities, thinking about, will there be multiple planets you can live on? And do we need to be prepared to help people adjust to moving to another planet? Or what about cloning? Or genetic counseling, kind of starts to get into this, but like, how do we help people manage the additional information we’re going to know about our genetic risk and our genetic future.

So, yeah, we need to be looking ahead to science and technology and how it’s affecting our lives, and the kind of mental health and systemic implications of that, and how we’ll be as a field, be able to address that. But you know, we’re in demand right now. There are a lot of problems in the world. And my guess is there will also be a lot of problems in 10 years, so try to anticipate those problems and prepare for them. 

Sam Butler: That is really interesting that it takes that futuristic of an idea and then the problems that go along with all of those that are soon to be in fruition, I think. 

Jacoba Rock: You have to think about it without getting too depressed. It’s a little scary, isn’t it? To think about, you know, in 10 years and not knowing all that we know now, and what could happen in the next 10 years. But it’s also really, really important. And those of us who are parents or have families, like we have reminders every day of how important it is to invest in what’s coming up. 

Sam Butler: I think that wraps it up. Thank you for joining me. 

Jacoba Rock: Thanks for having me. 

Sam Butler: Unless you have anything else that you want to share. 

Jacoba Rock: I can’t think of anything. Thank you so much. 

Sam Butler: Yeah, thank you for being here.