Cronyism at the OJJDP

More federal news. Well, maybe it’s not news, exactly–Youth Today reported on it back in January, with an update in early March, and I’ve sat on it for a little while without commenting. Which shouldn’t reflect on the quality of the story, since it’s such a good scoop, but rather on my scattered brain.

Youth Today editor Patrick Boyle, who broke the story, has done something only top-notch investigative reporters do: earn the attention of government watchdog Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the January issue of Youth Today, Boyle ran a long story with the headline “For Juvenile Justice, a Panel of One” (links to this and other stories on the paper’s site are available only to subscribers; if you’re interested in reading it, consider coughing up the $30 annual subscription or sign up for free ten-day temporary access).

The story exposed rampant cronyism on the part of J. Robert Flores, a Bush appointee who has headed the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a Justice Department agency, since 2002. Last spring, Boyle reported, the OJJDP posted a request for proposals that was surprisingly broad and that made a generous amount of money available to prospective grantees. “After years of seeing almost all of its discretionary funds eaten up by congressional earmarks, the agency now had millions of dollars to award through competitive bidding, thanks to the slashing of nearly all earmarks in fiscal 2007,” Boyle wrote.

Juvenile justice organizations flocked, but their enthusiasm was misplaced. “A dozen organizations won grants without competitive bidding,” Boyle noted. The scoring system to assess bids for competitive grants was problematic (managed by agency staff, lacking in peer review, rushed), and anyway, it was disregarded. None of the six top-scoring organizations were awarded grants; twenty-one bids that scored 90 or higher (out of 100) were similarly denied. Meanwhile, Flores handed the bulk of the cash to lower-scoring organizations he deemed his favorites.

Word has gotten out among organizations that scored high but didn’t win; some of them are furious and want OJJDP or Congress to explain the process. “We all play by the rules,” said Earl Dunlap, CEO of the National Partnership for Juvenile Services, whose losing bid ranked second out of 129. “The rules for Flores are pretty much whatever he decides when he gets out of bed in the morning.”

Flores, Boyle wrote, “has repeatedly pushed to get agency money to organizations that fit his priorities, which include faith-based programs and those that combat child sexual victimization.” Thus the low-scoring Best Friends Foundation (79.5), headed by the wife of right-wing moral crusader (and gambling addict!) Bill Bennett, won more than $1 million for its abstinence-only/anti-drug curriculum. Enough Is Enough, which combats sexual predation online–admittedly a worthy cause, but not quite in line with the historical mission of the OJJDP–took $750,000. The faith-based Victory Outreach Special Services got a windfall of $1.2 million but had to turn down the grant because, Boyle noted, “it doesn’t have the organizational capacity to carry it out.” Meanwhile, well-known, well-reputed, high-scoring organizations that do have the capacity to serve honest-to-goodness juvenile justice needs–like Dunlap’s National Partnership for Juvenile Services and Barry Krisberg’s National Council on Crime and Delinquency, among many others–got a big bag of bubkes.

When Minnesota Democratic Representative Tim Walz got word of this scandal, he requested an investigation into possible violation of the OJJDP bidding process. (Winona State University, whose National Child Protection Training Center ranked fourth but received no grant money, is in his district.) As Boyle reported in a follow-up article, Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ably stepped in on March 13. In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Waxman requested documents relating to “grantmaking policies and practices” in the OJJDP, including a list of applicants for Fiscal Year 2007, records and notes on the evaluation process, official decision memos and all communications to or from Flores regarding the 2007 grants. Mukasey and Flores have until April 4 to hand over the paperwork. Hearings, presumably, will follow.

“We should not be surprised, in this final year of the George W. Bush presidency, that the reputation of the Justice Department has reached a low point,” Scott Horton recently wrote in a startling essay in Harper’s. Horton was writing primarily about the US Attorneys scandal but also about the transformation of the civil rights division into a vote-suppression goon squad, the Rovian witch-burning of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (who was released from jail last week pending appeal), and the challenge of trimming back a dangerously expanded executive branch.

Boyle’s exposé adds further evidence to back up Horton’s argument about how thoroughly politicized the Justice Department has become in the Bush era, and how damaging this has been for American justice. Waxman’s hearings will, hopefully, shed some light on Flores’s conduct and restore some accountability to the OJJDP grantmaking process. But we’ll need more than hearings to restore credibility to the Justice Department. The country desperately needs a political tidal wave to crash down on Washington in November and capsize the current ship of state, flushing out detritus like Flores and so much else. It will be the task of the next administration to put the pieces back together and reset the course.

Leahy on JJDPA: “It Should Be Reauthorized”

Ah, good. We’re one step closer toward reauthorizing the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA). Senate Judiciary Committee chairman has announced that hearings will be scheduled following Easter recess, and he’s officially on board. “It should be reauthorized,” Leahy indicated. “One of the things I learned when I was a prosecutor is if you ignore problems of juveniles you’ll have much, much greater problems later on.”

This news comes courtesy of WPTZ, the local NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh, New York, which also reaches residents in Leahy’s home state of Vermont. The video, accompanied by an adapted transcript, makes an implicit argument for smart, sensible (i.e., un-adultified) treatment of juvenile offenders by way of Paul Winauski, a Montpelier resident who was arrested at 16 for assaulting a homeless man. Rather than send him into the adult prison system, though, the judge in his case agreed to refer him to juvenile court. On the juvenile side, Winauski was given therapy and treatment for substance abuse; now, ten years later, he’s married and holding down a full-time management job.

If you read the article and/or watch the video, you’ll hear from Liz Ryan, a leading national advocate who directs the Campaign for Youth Justice and has been at the forefront of pushing for JJDPA reauthorization. You’ll also hear from Leahy, who says that “we ought to be doing more” to help troubled teens turn their lives around. “Let’s get them alternatives, let’s work with them,” he says. “Let’s make sure they don’t become criminals.” This spring, with Leahy’s leadership, federal lawmakers will have a great opportunity to do just that, by strengthening the core requirements of the JJDPA.

For background on the JJDPA and more info on what’s at stake, check out the Act4JJ website and read these posts on the Juvienation backlog:

Catching Up With the JJDPA Reauthorization Campaign

JJDPA Reauthorization: Draft Bill Coming Soon

JJDPA Testimony

JJDPA Hearings Today

Senate Judiciary Committee to Review JJDPA

New JJDPA Testimony Posted

Reauthorizing JJDPA

Mishi Faruqee on Closing NY Youth Prisons

This week’s guest on Radio Civil Liberties–a weekly broadcast produced by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which airs live every Saturday at 11 a.m. on WBBF AM 1120 in Buffalo–was Mishi Faruqee, director of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York. (Listen to the streaming audio here.)

“Right now we have a juvenile justice system that is broken,” she began. “We have a system where 80 percent of the people who are released from youth facilities are rearrested within three years. We have a system where over 85 percent of the young people who are incarcerated in our facilities are African-American or Latino, which is way out of proportion of young people of color’s representation in the state youth population. And the other thing that is very distressing…is the huge amount of money that we’re spending on incarcerating young people, with very little return on that money.”

As you can imagine, the conversation addressed community-based alternatives to incarceration–family counseling, educational advocacy, emphasis on job-skills training–that are available and proven to reduce crime with better success and at lower cost than prisons. And, as you can imagine, Faruqee makes a compelling case for shutting down the half-dozen empty and underused youth prison facilities upstate. “The Senate is trying to keep open three facilities: one that is completely empty, that has no kids in it right now; one that has two children in it, the Brace Youth Facility; and another that has ten children in it,” she explained. “The thing that I want to emphasize the most is just how wasteful the Senate plan is,” she said. For those who have a stake in this debate or who are just chiming in, this interview is incredibly informative, not to be missed.

Faruqee, meanwhile, will be missed. Earlier this week she announced that in May, after seven years with the Juvenile Justice Project, she’ll be leaving to join the New York office of the Children’s Defense Fund, where she’ll head up the Youth Justice Programs. Different hat, similar mission: with Faruqee on their side, New York’s troubled youth have had, and will continue to have, a powerful and forceful advocate.

Congratulations, Mishi, and best of luck!

Violence Up at Baltimore Youth Prison

Violence involving inmates at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center has spiked in recent months, according to data released this week by the state’s juvenile justice monitor. As the Baltimore Sun reports, “In the first three months of the year, there have been 155 youth-on-youth assaults and 28 youth-on-staff assaults at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center–up nearly 40 percent from the same period last year. Use of physical restraints is up 68 percent this year compared with this time last year.”

The news came as little shock to State Senator Bobby Zirkin, a Baltimore County Democrat, who described the prison as “a very poorly configured monstrosity.” “It’s almost hard to know where to begin, there are so many problems there,” Zirkin told the paper.

Justice Dept. Unveils New JJ Blog

The National Institute of Corrections (NIC), an agency within the US Justice Department’s Federal Bureau of Prisons, has set up a new blog, Juvenile Justice Connection, to “facilitate the exchange of information among juvenile justice professionals,” according to the press announcement. “Juvenile Justice Connection will feature news from NIC, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and other Federal, state, and local sources, including information about professional training opportunities and juvenile justice-related research.”

The blog, so far at least, amounts to brief PR announcements for various government initiatives. The real strength of this site, I think, will be directing people to the forums section, which has been around for a few years but which I just discovered when I started reading the blog. The forum section is well designed and is doing its job well: bringing corrections professionals into contact and collaboration and discussion. Look, for example, at this recent exchange, lifted at random (even though it’s a public forum, I stripped names and email and phone numbers, just because):

First person says:

Hello everyone! Our department is currently in the process of reviewing the Use of Force policy and we would like to review the policies of other facilities while we work through this process. We would appreciate it if any of you are able to forward your policies concerning use of force in an adult facility. Thanks!

Next person replies:

If you can send me your private email I will send you ours. Our new Use of Force Policy has just been approved. Any questions call me.

Third person weighs in:

Send me your email address and I will send our policy to you.

It goes on from there. If the first person follows up, she’ll have half a dozen Use of Force policies to draw on as she revamps her department’s own. (A word of advice for person number one: the Use of Force policy for your juvenile facility should not be a Xerox copy of a Use of Force policy for an adult facility. Juvenile inmates are not adult prisoners!)

Check out the site here and on the Juvienation blogroll to the right.

Readers Respond to Billy Wolfe Article

Ever since I posted on Dan Barry’s article about Billy Wolfe on Monday, I’ve been getting an impressive and sustained amount of traffic to the site, which has been accompanied by a noticeable uptick in comments. Check out the comments here and add one of your own; there’s a lively discussion going on among Juvienation readers, a few of whom are from Fayetteville. I’d also direct readers who remain interested in the story to check out the letters page from yesterday’s New York Times, which includes an outpouring of responses to Barry’s article. I’ve pasted a few below; read the rest here.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

To the Editor:

Your article ponders why Billy Wolfe is a victim: is it his learning disability, his physical appearance, his attitude? No. The truth is that there is nothing about Billy, or any bullied victim, that justifies or legitimizes deliberate, repeated physical violence. Bullying is learned early and practiced often in schoolyards across America.

Everyone involved suffers: bullied kids, like Billy, who feel unsafe and alone; bystanders who learn the code of silence; and even the bullies, who may enjoy that momentary feeling of power, but who long term also pay a huge price, if the primary way they know how to connect with another person is with cruel words and their fists.

Starting early, parents and schools, in partnership, need to make it a priority to quit blaming the victim, and to teach lessons of empathy, every day. It’s the only way to make school safe for every child.

Hang in there, Billy. It’s not your fault.

Carrie Manley
Palo Alto, Calif., March 24, 2008

•

To the Editor:

The fortunate thing for Billy Wolfe is that he has supportive parents who are showing him acceptable ways of fighting back. The tragedy is that there are far too many kids in similar situations who, for one reason or another, can’t turn to their parents.

As a former teacher in the New York City school system, I know how reluctant school officials often are to take definitive action in such circumstances. Yet, when a victim explodes or acts out in unacceptable ways, these same officials are shocked and indignant.

Why can’t the bullies who make Billy’s life miserable every day be suspended from school until they learn that intimidating and tormenting their peers will not be tolerated?

Kathleen Crisci
New York, March 24, 2008

•

To the Editor:

My heart goes out to Billy Wolfe. Not only has he been victimized by the bullies and the administrators who failed to resolve the problems but also by his parents. What kind of parents would repeatedly send their child to the horror that his school has become for him?

The large file on the repeated assaults they have collected is cold comfort to the child they have abandoned to bullies and incompetent school officials. Children deserve better from their parents.

Barbara Lukes
Marietta, Ga., March 24, 2008

•

To the Editor:

As the mother of a gay son who was mercilessly bullied throughout his school years, I feel for Billy Wolfe. He is lucky, though, to have the advocacy of his parents.

While the reasons for singling out Billy are not clear, it’s gay kids who are disproportionately targets of bullies, and this minority does not have unequivocal family support. Often it comes down to abuse at school, abuse on the playground and then disgrace at home, which is why these kids have a 30 percent higher suicide rate.

Marlene Fanta Shyer
New York, March 24, 2008

The writer is the co-author of a memoir about her gay son.

•

To the Editor:

Your article evoked painful memories. I responded to bullying as an adolescent by working out with weights and taking karate lessons. I continue to exercise regularly, and am probably healthier as a result. Nevertheless, what I experienced when I was Billy Wolfe’s age left emotional wounds I continue to feel.

John Engelman
Wilmington, Del., March 25, 2008

NYT: Shut ‘em Down

Editorial in today’s New York Times:

New Day, Line by Budget Line

Moving beyond the steamy executive headlines, the New York Statehouse had better show taxpayers something more promising than business as usual as it tackles the deficit-threatened state budget. One quick test, buried in the fine print, would strike a blow for both juvenile justice and budget savings by shutting six of the state’s 31 residential detention centers for juveniles.

Studies show such centers — which warehouse largely nonviolent offenders far from their families — are counterproductive and prohibitively costly. Center alumni have higher rates of recidivism compared with those placed in alternative programs in their home communities.

What should be a budgetary no-brainer, however, is already being undermined by the Senate Republicans. In an obvious move to protect upstate jobs for local constituents, they are insisting on keeping open three of the expendable and virtually unused centers. One of the centers the Senate would spare would be staffed even though there are no youths residing there in its 24 slots. Each empty bed costs taxpayers more than $140,000 annually to maintain. A second has 25 beds and three residents, while the third has 11 children for its 25 beds.

The millions that would be wasted in this proposed shell game present a small but revealing indicator of whether Gov. David Paterson can live up to his inaugural promise to end the turf struggles and get something better from government.

There are far larger budget fights looming, dollarwise. But here is a worthy chance for Governor Paterson to show business as usual will not always trump justice and economic sense in a supposedly chastened Albany.

NYT Metro on “Ghost Jails”

Don’t miss this strong piece from the New York Times Metro section on the struggle over the proposed plan to close the “ghost jails” in upstate New York.

Abortion Battle in Arizona

In Arizona, teenage girls are getting caught in the crossfire of the abortion wars. The State Senate voted 18-12 yesterday in favor of a bill that would add additional barriers to teenagers seeking abortions in the state without the consent of a parent or guardian. Currently, a girl must be found “mature and capable of giving informed consent” by a judge before being allowed to have the procedure. The new bill would require the judge to further conclude that there is “clear and convincing evidence” of the girl’s maturity based on “her experience level, perspective and judgment.”

Paula Aboud, a Democratic Representative from Tucson, argued that the new law will complicate the legal process, making it more difficult for judges to determine if a girl is mature enough to handle an abortion. “The extra steps required by this bill do nothing more than attempt to make it as difficult as possible for a minor to seek a bypass,” Aboud said.

The bill now heads to Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano’s desk. Perhaps offering a clue of how she’ll respond, in 2006 she vetoed a legislative change to the same law that would have required a girl seeking an abortion without parental consent to consult with a physician beforehand. “Requiring consultation with a physician, as opposed to other medically trained personnel, would impose an unduly burdensome cost,” the governor wrote at that time.

Vegas Girls

The focus in Nevada on juvenile sex offenders (see yesterday’s post below) might be a tad misplaced. Sex, yes; juveniles, yes. But the offenders–in Las Vegas, at least–are more likely to be adults than teens.

As this AP report notes, Las Vegas has become a hub for underage prostitutes. No shock there, I suppose, but that doesn’t blunt the impact of the statistics or make the problem any less urgent. More than 400 minors were found working as prostitutes in the city in May 2007, according to a new report by the nonprofit Shared Hope International. Almost 1,500 minors have faced prostitution-related charges in the area since 1994; 157 juveniles were brought in on such charges last year, up slightly from 153 in 2006.

“These kids don’t really belong in juvenile justice but don’t fit anywhere else in the system,” Family Court Judge William Voy (who is expected to hand down his ruling on juvenile sex offenders in Nevada today) told the AP. “They’re out there being victimized but also committing a delinquent act, prostitution. There is no alternative but the detention center.”

I’m not sure about that; I think there are alternatives, in fact, or should be. If these teen girls are forced by their pimps to commit delinquent acts–if, indeed, they’re victims of the trafficking trade, as Voy accurately terms them–then detention isn’t the place for them.

Shared Hope International, the brainchild of right-wing former Congresswoman Linda Smith, seems at a glance to have found a good alternative–or at least suggests that alternative models are out there. The organization offers “rescue” interventions for victims of the trade (whatever that means) and a nine-month program that includes, among other things, job-skills training for girls who want to turn their lives around and claim their independence. (I haven’t done enough research on the organization to know if I support it; I’m commenting here only on what’s available online, which is fairly skimpy.)

Locking these girls up in detention centers is a good way to ensure that if and when they get out, they’ll have only a limited set of “job skills” to draw on, the same “skills” that got them locked up in the first place. Breaking that cycle should be the first order of business, not punishing them for acts they committed under duress. If the state of Nevada doesn’t have a sensible program for these girls, it should build one.