Building hope in juvenile justice

After months of haranguing by Colbert King, of the Washington Post, of Vincent Schiraldi, the Director of the Washington D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, James Forman, a former public defender and current Georgetown Law School professor, and Reid Weingarten, a lawyer and Forman's partner in the See Forever Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating and rehabilitating young people of diverse backgrounds, including those who have dropped out and criminally offended, answer in a most stellar way.

New Hope at Oak Hill: Building a Juvenile Justice System D.C. Can Be Proud Of

"For the past two decades, the District's juvenile justice system has been a source of shame. Rats and roaches infested Oak Hill, the facility that housed adolescent offenders, and a court-appointed monitor found snakes in hallways and in residents' beds. Youths assaulted staff, and staff assaulted youths. Drugs, alcohol and weapons were easy to find. Escapes were common.

Post editorials chronicled the dysfunction over the years. In 1988, The Post chastised the District for ignoring long-standing problems and creating "a detention system that is little more than a warehouse that rehabilitates no one." In 2004, columnist Colbert I. King identified the same problems, including fights, drug abuse, rats and roaches, and broken windows. King wrote that "the District government -- through Oak Hill -- is aiding and abetting the hardening of young offenders by enmeshing them in a dysfunctional juvenile justice system that makes them, as one expert said, 'more apt to commit crime.'

This is the system that D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services Director Vincent Schiraldi inherited in 2005. Understanding this history is essential to a fair evaluation of the department today. Schiraldi and the city face a monumental challenge -- namely, turning around a broken bureaucracy and creating a juvenile system that protects the community and rehabilitates teens...

...First, find what works and bring it to the District. Because the D.C. juvenile justice system has failed for so long, many of us accept inadequacy as inevitable. But reform efforts elsewhere tell a different story. Schiraldi has modeled his approach on that of Missouri, where, working with kids from tough neighborhoods in St. Louis and Kansas City, officials have created a system that treats young offenders like future citizens, not incorrigible inmates. Instead of large detention facilities, Missouri uses small, dormitory-style settings in communities, with an emphasis on therapy, schooling and rehabilitation.

Missouri officials know that public safety comes first. But they also know that rehabilitation is one of the best means of protecting the public. By teaching juvenile offenders to address their past misdeeds, to read and to imagine a future, the Missouri system prepares them to become productive, law-abiding citizens. This approach works. Last year, Missouri's juvenile recidivism rate was 8 percent, while the rate in Texas -- which has a more punitive approach -- was over 50 percent.

Missouri, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has said, has "the most successful statewide juvenile justice program in the nation." Wouldn't it be nice if the District could make such a boast one day, too?"

You really need to read the entire article to get a flavor for these two very dedicated men and their efforts to help D.C. youth. It is so refreshing to see compassionate and results-focussed people come out of the woodwork to constructively criticize and work to improve the wrong-headed approaches to matters of governance that we all face that have dominated the public discussion for far too long.

Forman and Weingarten are clearly two of those people. And after reading King's columns with much concern, as much about King's approach as about the juvenile justice system that he rightly wants to address and improve, it is so nice to read folks who have a better idea of what better directions for that system look like.

We all would do better to heed the advice of people who have made systems and situations work rather than the masses of folks who are rightly frustrated when systems like juvenile justice don't work, but who have few really good ideas to make them work better.

As someone who works with such young people, I have much confidence that Forman and Weingarten are on a better track, and one that the rest of us would do well by learning from and following their better example and lead.