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A
Critic Joins the System
By
Bill Alexander
After
20 years of slugging it out with police, prosecutors and bureaucrats,
juvenile justice reformer Vincent Schiraldi has joined their
ranks.
If
you're going to meaningfully fix juvenile justice in America,
you've got to go inside," says Schiraldi, 46, after being
nominated by Washington Mayor Anthony Williams (D) last month
to head the city's troubled juvenile justice system.
The
married father of two teenagers has been trying to improve
juvenile justice for more than a decade. A graduate of the
State University of New York at Binghamton, Schiraldi went
to work in 1980 for the New York State Division for Youth
as a live-in house parent at a group home for delinquent boys.
It was there, he says, that he first witnessed institutional
"cynicism" among youth workers in the form of negative
case management styles and overzealous security. "Books
were considered contraband and confiscated," he recalls.
Disillusioned,
he quit. He soon got approval from Jerome Williams, founder
of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA),
to open a regional office in San Francisco.
In
1985, he and Dan Macallair co-founded the nonprofit Center
on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), which later absorbed
the NCIA office Schiraldi had opened. CJCJ focused primarily
on reducing juvenile incarceration through technical assistance
and model programs in cities such as Washington.
The
Justice Policy Institute' (JPI) was born in 1997 as a policy
development and research arm of CJCJ. Five years later, JPI
split off on its own. Schiraldi ran JPI in Washington, while
Macallair ran CJCJ in California.
JPI's
focus has included commissioning studies and serving as a
quotable think tank, with a stated goal of "ending society's
reliance on incarceration." As executive director,* Schiraldi
has criticized and offered alternatives to such practices
as disproportionate minority confinement, lengthy jail stays
and trying children as adults.
"It's
a miracle they would hire me," Schiraldi says. "I've
never run a large bureaucracy." Mindful of his image
as a bureaucrat-hating dragon slayer, he says he never considered
the agencies he battled over the years to be "complete
enemies."
Priding
himself on being a "community worker," Schiraldi
says he will bring a sense of "urgency and alarm"
to blow out the "institutional lethargy and indifference"
that hobbles juvenile justice agencies nationwide.
Vinny's
View
Alarm
is the right word for the Washington juvenile justice system
and its Oak Hill juvenile jail - so plagued with mismanagement
and allegations of inmate abuse that the agency was nearly
placed under court receivership last year. A special arbiter
has been appointed to deal with the class-action lawsuit against
the city over conditions at Oak Hill. Some 400 youngsters
come under the agency's domain.
Schiraldi
will be the first director of the city's new Department ,
of Youth Rehabilitation Services, which replaces the agency
that oversaw Oak Hill. If confirmed by the city council, Schiraldi
will earn $140,000 a year, and leap from overseeing a $1 million
budget and seven staffers at JPI to a $6 1'million budget
and a staff of 592 with the city.
"A
couple of zeros may be added [to the budget], but it's still
the same brain making the same decisions on how to reduce
recidivism and improve resident treatment," he says.
Macallair,
whose CJCJ maintains offices in San Francisco and Oakland,
Calif., says Schiraldi "brings a passion for fixing the
system to his job that separates him from someone with a conventional
outlook."
That
outlook began taking shape 30 years ago. Back in 1970s Brooklyn,
N.Y., the adolescent Schiraldi and his homeboys kept busy
with pranks and brushes with the law that included drinking
on the street and minor vandalism.
"But
the Italian and Polish police didn't arrest us, unless we
were doing something really bad," recalls Schiraldi.
"They talked to us, then shooed us away."
He
says police rarely exhibit such concern and helpfulness when
dealing with minority youth. In Washington, he notes, "96
percent [of the juveniles in detention] are African-American
and 1 percent to 4 percent are Latino. The excellence of the
[D.C.] juvenile system kicks into gear when white kid is arrested.
They rarely incarcerated, and they are given the attention
they deserve.
Schiraldi:
Vows to erase the "institutional lethargy and indifference"
that typifies juvenile justice system.
"He's
way, way out of the box," says Bart Lubow, director of
the Annie E. Casey Foundation Program for High Risk Youth
at Their Families. "Vinny has spent his career battling
broken systems. I applaud the District for the boldness in
selecting him."
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