Vincent Schiraldi

A federal monitor issued a stinging report this week decrying the “pervasive level of disorder and chaos” across New York City’s jails and documenting alarming use of force by guards on the youngest people in detention. Violence among teenagers on Rikers Island spiked at the end of 2020, reaching its highest level in five years and far exceeding violence among all other age groups.

Vincent Schiraldi will temporarily leave his position as co-director of the Columbia University Justice Lab to be New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections (DOC), which oversees the city’s 10 jail facilities, eight of which reside on the infamous and soon-to-be-shuttered Rikers Island.

Probation and parole started out in the 1800s as rehabilitation efforts that tempered punishment with mercy. With the advent of the War on Drugs in the 1970s, rehabilitation and mercy became dirty words, and community supervision morphed into community corrections, emulating its big brother the prison as one more punitive response to poverty.

After three years on the job, the Milwaukee County official who oversees juvenile justice finds his system at a crossroads. The Wisconsin state legislature passed a bill last March closing two youth prisons after a criminal probe and multiple lawsuits alleged abuse and neglect of youth, alarming lawmakers.

It’s time to close this nation’s youth prisons. They don’t serve their purpose: keeping our neighborhoods safe and helping young people turn their lives around. They fail to fulfill this core mission despite costing $150,000 per youth per year.

A 500-page report presented at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday recommended sweeping changes to the county’s probation department, including a complete restructuring of the department to separately handle adult and juvenile cases.

In the first of three presidential debates, Donald Trump reminded viewers about the unfortunate comments Hillary Clinton made in 1996 about a rising tide of violent youth. Clinton’s comment, made at an event in New Hampshire: “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’ – radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more pre-teenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.

She didn’t provide the kind of neatly-wrapped, unequivocal stuff of memes. But Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason, facing unemployment in a few months, essentially threw Justice Department support behind the movement to eliminate large juvenile justice facilities in the United States.

The Los Angeles County Probation Department has cycled through six probation chiefs in a decade. This time, juvenile-justice advocates hope the county will attract someone with a desire and capacity to oversee reform of the nation’s largest juvenile-justice system.