An Outsider’s Perspective on an Inside Job

New York City Commissioner of Probation Vincent N. Schiraldi, who previously ran the juvenile justice system in Washington D.C., describes his journey from gadfly to government insider and the reforms he’s been implementing along the way. ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf, director of communications for the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m with Vinnie Schiraldi, who is the commissioner of the Department of Probation in New York City. VINNIE SCHIRALDI: Good morning Rob. Thanks a lot for having me. WOLF: So you’ve been on the job for 13 months or so and you’re route to this job is kind of an interesting one, and I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about how you began after college working with justice-involved youth and traveled this route from advocate to working in the government. SCHIRALDI: So I was a house parent in a seven-bed home for juvenile delinquent boys run by the State Division for Youth. That’s what the Office for Children and Family Services was called. The best job I ever had, I loved working with young people. And then, you know, I just heard a speech by a really charismatic non-profit leader named Jerome Miller who had deinstitutionalized the whole juvenile justice system for the state of Massachusetts and was running a non-profit that did alternatives to incarceration. And I was hooked as soon as I heard this guy speak because I really, really, really felt that incarceration was doing damage to these kids. And so I chased him out of the classroom when I was getting my master’s at Syracuse University. He hired me on the spot. I went to work with a woman named Marsha Weissman, who lots of folks may know because she was at the Center for Community Alternatives in New York. There I embarked upon a 25 year career in the non-profit world. WOLF: How did you end up running the juvenile justice system in Washington, DC? SCHIRALDI: Well, it was 2004 and I had been running the Justice Policy Institute, which is a major, major critic of over incarceration in general, and specifically of the juvenile justice system in D.C. I was writing op-eds and screaming and yelling about how I wouldn’t kennel my dog in the D.C. juvenile justice system, and miraculously, under enormous amounts of pressure, the mayor of D.C. hired me. Not pressure to hire me, pressure to do something to fix this pathological system. And he really broke the mold and everybody he had hired, or everybody everybody hired before that had decades of experience running youth correctional facilities. And unfortunately, this is a system where decades of experience can often be a minus in my opinion. Because so much of what goes on in these systems is so bad. It’s just systemically bad. It’s not even just chronically bad. And so, to his credit, the mayor said you know what? I’m gonna try a different mold. I’m gonna bring a guy in that really is outside the box. And that was Mayor Williams and then thankfully when Mayor Fenty got elected, he kept me on. WOLF: And so I understand you were the 20th director in 19 years. SCHIRALDI: That’s right. WOLF: But you stayed for five years. How did you manage to stay so much longer than anyone had and how did you—what kinds of changes did you bring about? And how did you do it? SCHIRALDI: I did a couple things. One is that we really did articulate a vision that was very different than what was going on. We said, too many of these kids are locked up. Many of them should be in community service, community programs. We designed a really good set of community programs and then we tackled awful, awful institutional conditions. We told every political leader that as we do this, there is gonna be enormous push-back. The status quo will fight us back. Get ready because if you want to fix this you gotta know, the rubbers gonna hit the road and you’re gonna have to take my back. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t bother hiring me. So I told them coming in, don’t think this is gonna be an easy ride. This system is not gonna be shaken up without fighting back. And I had two votes of no-confidence from my unions within three months. So they – I was right. And then people started leaking stuff to the press and, you know, to their credit, both mayors and the city council, they took my back. They said we believe where this guy is going. I’d invite them up to activities we had there. We started a theatrical group. The kids were doing artwork. The kids were taking guns that the police gave us, that had been disassembled, turning them into artwork, drawing together with victims so that they could learn about, you know, victims of violence. We were doing an enormous amount of creative activity and every time I did it, I made sure the mayor, I made sure city council, I made sure the judges, I made sure the media knew about it. Because I knew I was gonna take my hits so I needed to build up a well of support. WOLF: So what was the biggest lesson you’ve learned from making the transition from advocacy to government? SCHIRALDI: I think the biggest thing I didn’t know is how much implementation and infrastructure matter, right? You can sit back and think of all of the wonderful ideas in the world, but the trick with government isn’t just to come up with good ideas. It’s to have those ideas implemented with some level of fidelity to what they were originally about. And that’s, that’s really tricky. I mean a lot of people don’t realize that if I, today, decide I’m running a new program, it’s going to take a year before I can start that program. I’ve got to write a scope of service. I’ve got to get it approved. A bunch of lawyers got to look at it. I’ve got to get the money, you know? All of this stuff’s got to get together. No actually, even when I have the money, it’s going to take a year. So that’s something I really just, I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know anything about how difficult it was going to be to fix the boilers or procure underwear for the kids in my facility. These things were extraordinarily difficult in the government context. And I, as an advocate, I had sort of always assumed that the bureaucrats that weren’t getting that stuff done were dragging their feet, right? Because it just seems ridiculous that it’s gonna take six months to procure new underwear for the kids so that they don’t have to wear recycled underwear when they come to the facility. That’s a huge indignity and anyone who can’t fix that right away must be a bad person. So here I am, and I’m a good person and I care about this, and I’m trying, and it’s taken me six months. So that was a bit of a humbling lesson. But on the other side, I do think that you don’t want to over learn that lesson. What you don’t want to do is give up. You don’t want to start every reform with deflated expectations. You got to have some rage in you and some fight in you, to believe that the unbelievable is true. So even though it’s going to take you six months, you got to believe you can do it in two months. And you got to fight like hell because if you do, you might get it done in six months, and then you might actually get it done, which nobody did before, right? The kids were always wearing recycled underwear. It took three times as long as it should have, but they got underwear. So that was good. And that’s just one stupid little example, but, although meaningful for kids, but we closed this facility that had been open since the ’60s. You don’t know how many of my staff people came up to me and said, “I never thought we were going to do this.” But three and a half years in, I closed the old – Oak Hill it was called – it was the old facility, which was an awful, awful place, and opened up a really beautiful, well-designed, new facility. That was, I got – I think that’s the proudest moment in my entire career today. We padlocked Oak Hill and moved all those kids to that new place. If you have a nice building and you want a good program, the synergy between the two really matters. WOLF: So let me ask you how you came to New York. What was the situation you were confronting? SCHIRALDI: The things I was confronted with here are very, very different than it was in D.C. because I think Marty did a good job. Marty Horne, who was my predecessor, and Pat Brennan, I think, did a good job. I think, you know, New York’s had some pretty, really terrific probation commissioners: Mike Jacobson, Catherine Abate, you know, a bunch of folks, just tops in the field. So this wasn’t coming into a crippled, bitter place like I did in D.C., which is terrific cause I can build. Now’s the fun part, right? Now you can really sort of take the high level and dream of making it higher, as opposed to having to slog through things like broilers and underwear, right? I think that by and large, people see us as a place that has a lot of decent people in it. So it’s not like they don’t like my staff or don’t like the administration. But I feel like people view our services as generally mediocre. And so in that respect, I do think t...