Jacqui: If you can take your seats, we re going to get started. I m Jacqui Greene from the New York State Division of
Criminal Justice Services. I d like to welcome you all here this afternoon, and introduce you to our moderator today.
Liz Glazer is going to moderate this last in our symposium series for us today. Liz is the chair of the New York State
Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, which is a federally mandated board, that is responsible for the planning and
implementation of our federal juvenile justice plan, and Liz is going to be our host for this afternoon, Liz.
Liz: Good afternoon everybody. So welcome to the fifth and final session of the symposium series on Cost Effective Juvenile
Justice Reform. Over the past few months, the series has hosted speakers from across the country, chiraldiwho have showed us
that juvenile justice doesn t have to be a fractured and punitive system in which we have four out of five kids who reoffend.
But that rather can be humane and effective way to ensure public safety and it can rehabilitate children,
and it can accomplish these goals at a lower cost than our current system. Those previous symposiums are available
online, not all of them, but a number of them, at the DCJS website, which is www.criminal justice.state.ny.us .
Today, we re joined by two nationally known experts who are going to continue this conversation. Shay Bilchik on the
far end of the table and Vinnie Schiraldi sitting right here, who are going to discuss their ground breaking work in
how forward looking models of juvenile justice are effective at both reducing crime and are also cost effective, more
cost effective than the punitive model. Shay Bilchik is the Founder and Director of the Center for Juvenile Justice
Reform at Georgetown University. The center supports public agency leaders in the juvenile justice and related
systems of care on key components of strong juvenile justice reform. He previously served as the President and CEO of
the Child Welfare League of America and before that was a truly legendary head of the Department of Justice s Office
of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Vinnie Schiraldi is the Director of the District of Columbia s
Department of Youth and Rehabilitative Services, it s the department that administers detention, commitment and
aftercare services for youth held under its care, in its facilities residing in the D.C. community, and Vinnie is also
a giant in the field. So just one note about how we re going to proceed, first we re going to begin with an interview
that will be conducted by Dr. Alan Chartock of Northeast Public Radio. Dr. Chartock is also the President and CEO of
Northeast Public Radio, and this interview will be aired at a later time on WAMC. After the interview is complete,
we re going to take a short break, and then we ll have an opportunity to hear some in depth presentations from both Mr.
Bilchik and Mr. Schiraldi. Dr. Chartock. Dr. Alan Chartock: Thank you. First question, are you going to give me time.
Yeah, so can you tell me when, 2 minutes from the (cut off time). I hear a hum, is that a problem, should we. I don t
mind the hum in here, but if you hear the hum on the radio we re going to get complaints. Why don t you say something,
see what happens. Mr. Schiraldi: Testing, 1, 2, 3. Does that work? Folks in the back, can you hear me if I talk like
this? Dr. Chartock: well you know, as long as I was a professor, I always had a rule, which I told the students,
which is if there s a seat in front of you, be in it. I also told them that a yawn was a sign of repressed rage.
Mr. Schiraldi: Why don t I turn this off and use that. Dr. Chartock: I ll go stand there, don t worry about it. You can
use this. Mr. Bilchik: What was it a sign of, Larry, when they put their watches to their ears and shook it to see if
it was working? Dr. Chartock: Let s close this. Okay, now is this, this is now not working, right. Or it is working?
Good. Okay, and here we go. ON AIR: This is Alan Chartock, of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. I m here as part of a
symposium series, focused on reforms in the juvenile justice system. This series is entitled Enhancing Community
Safety through Cost Effective Juvenile Justice Reform and it highlights promising national models of addressing crime
committed by children. The symposiums are sponsored by the Division of Criminal Justice Services, DCJS, in partnership
with the Office of Children and Family Services, OCFS, the Division of Probation and Correctional Alternatives, DPCA,
Senator Velmenatte Montgomery and Assemblyman William Scarborough. This series is being supported by a generous grant
from the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington D.C. Today I m talking with a couple of guys who have been around the
block a few times in the juvenile justice world. Shay Bilchik is the Founder and Director of the Center for Juvenile
Justice at Georgetown University s Public Policy Institute, and Vincent Vinnie Schiraldi, is the Director of the
District of Columbia s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. They ve come to talk about their perspectives on
how the juvenile justice system is working for us as a society. What s right with it? What s wrong? Changes they ve
seen and would like to see, and more importantly, how we would go about making those changes. I say more importantly
because this is the fifth and final session in the Juvenile Justice Reform Series, and we ve heard from a lot of
experts from all over the country and they ve talked about some great ideas, but when all s said and done, if nothing
changes, nothing changes. Today s topic is how to make change. We need to know if the case for change has been made.
If there are ways of responding to juvenile misbehavior and delinquency that have been shown to produce better results
than we are used to getting? The kids do better, and the public is safer and money is saved too. Why can t these
reforms just be put into place right now for all of that? So, what gets in the way of making change for the better?
And most importantly, other strategies that help make change happen. To start with, I m going to ask both of you
distinguished gentlemen, in a nutshell, where you re coming from, what got you into the field of juvenile justice,
what kind of work have you done, and what do you do now? Chay Bilchik, can you get us started? Mr. Bilchik: Sure,
sure. I came to this work actually, Larry, by doing early work in the State Attorney s Office in Miami, Florida. And
when you re a prosecutor and you start in a DA s office, you generally tend to go through a series of assignments. The
Traffic Court, the Family Juvenile Court, and then on to Felony Prosecutions, which is for most prosecutors the
nirvana of that pathway, because you ve gotten through all the stuff that you ve got to get through to get to the
things you really need to be doing to be a big time lawyer. I took a detour along the way, and my path basically
taught me the place where I d enjoyed and felt most rewarded in the work was in the family court, when I had a chance
to work with the younger offenders, and think about the things we could do developmentally that could change their
future course. A lot of that was informed by the fact that I was an intern at the Public Defender s Office in Central
Florida, and represented prisoners in the Florida State Prison, so I could see that eventual destination in the adult
criminal justice system. And also the work that I did eventually as a felony prosecutor in the court in Miami. So in
my decision point, I decided to go back into the Family Court and the DA s office. And that is what really set my path
and my future work. I went back there to help impact policy, to understand that we needed to do more around prevention
and early intervention, and to make a difference early on in kids lives. And I was lucky enough to carry that out, not
only in Miami for 16 years, but then at the U.S. Department of Justice and the work we did at OJJDP, and then
eventually at the Child Welfare League of America, through the lens of child welfare, being to explore what happens in
child welfare that may actually exacerbate the pathway that kids take into the juvenile justice system. Dr. Chartock:
So for those people that are listening on the radio, do you have an operating hypothesis? In other words, is there a
sense that if we were better, if we were less incarcerative with our kids and more progressive in our thinking, that
we would have a better outcome? Mr. Bilchik: I think my mantra, similar to what you just said, is that we need in the
legal profession and the justice system, to ascribe to the medical model, which is to do no harm. And that with a lot
of kids, we end up doing more harm through our interventions than we do good. It doesn t mean that interventions aren t
necessary, it means that the tools that have generally been available to us in the juvenile justice system can more
heavy handed than are needed. And that system needs to partner with other systems, the educational system, the mental
health system, the substance abuse treatment system, the child welfare system, the housing department and holistically
looking at what we need to do to alter the pathway of that person. Dr. Chartock: And when that s done, is there hard
evidence that things get better? Mr. Bilchik: I think there actually is hard evidence that, not necessarily around the
particular design, but there s hard evidence that when we reach kids earlier, we are able to be more effective and
cost effective in pulling them back from penetration more deeply into the juvenile justice system. And I think that s
the lesson learned of what I didn t know 20 years ago when I d argue from the gut for doing this differently. And
certainly, some of my positions were misguided at that time as being too heavy handed as well, but now we have the
research around what more effective practice looks like, and how our system can act more appropriately and more
effectively, in preventing and intervening with juvenile crime. Dr. Chartock: Okay but before we go to Vinnie, you
just opened up another road I want to go down for a moment. You said that in the old days, you had a maybe a more
heavy handed approach. Could you put a face that on what that was? Mr. Bilchik: Sure, when I look back to 1979, 1980,
81 and as a prosecutor we had tremendous authority in Florida to transfer kids at our own discretion, without any
judicial intervention, into the adult criminal system. I Understand New York had a whole different set of modalities
around that including a different age, presumptive age, of criminal responsibility in the state. But in Florida, the age
was 18, but as a prosecutor, I could transfer in my own discretion, a 16 or 17 year old charged with any felony into
the adult criminal court. There was such a level of frustration with what we thought was an ineffective juvenile
justice system, that we defaulted into a mindset that a lot of the kids that were committing these felonies belonged
in the adult court, because at least there, they could be incapacitated, where as in the juvenile court, a lot of
these kids would go home, would need placement. So we were frustrated. So the reflection back is we know now that
transferring those kids into the adult court, we know now that the presumptive age of criminal responsibility being at
16, like it is in New York, is actually counterproductive in terms of public safety. The kids do better, and as
ineffective as we think the juvenile system might be, at its worst, it is still better than transferring a young
person into the criminal court, unless and this is my prosecutor side coming back, unless it is the most serious
violent type of offending where there s some chronicity. Dr. Chartock: Can I just ask why? Mr. Bilchik: Why what?
Dr. Cahrtock: Why is it better to keep them in a different kind of facility, a juvenile facility? Mr. Bilchik: I think
what happens is, first of all, we underestimate the fact that the juvenile system is actually doing things to their
benefit. It may not be ideally what we want them to be doing, but it is to their benefit. The adult criminal system,
when you move a kid into that system, one of two things happens. Either they are getting virtually nothing; they re
being put on probation and having minimal involvement of any type of corrective action. Or they re being put into an
adult institution, where at a developmental age during adolescence, it s probably the worst possible contagion factor
you can imagine. Developmentally for that young person, to be in a facility with a lot of other really hard core
offenders, more hard core probably than they are, and the life lesson, the pathway they are following is to enhance
criminality. So the kids who get out of those adult institutions as opposed to similar kids who are in juvenile
institutions, tend to offend more frequently, sooner, and for more serious offenses, than their counterparts with
similar criminal backgrounds and similar presenting offenses, who are treated in the juvenile system.
Dr. Chartock: Okay, one more thing, because I really do want to get to Vinnie, but this morning as I opened up the New York
P.O.S.T., a newspaper who I don t like to announce the name of, and the New York Daily News, they both had pictures of
a young juvenile offender in handcuffs, who was responsible, they are suggesting, for a murder, walking, doing the
perp walk. And that got me to thinking about the role of the media in this, because public opinion, I m sure, when
they see somebody like this, is to throw away the key. How does one deal, from your standpoint, with media sending
this constant message about, which is antithetical I think in many ways, to what you re suggesting? Mr. Bilchik: It is
a big challenge, by the way this question is the perfect segway into Vinnie because of his background around a lot of
this work, but I think it s one of our main challenges in terms of how we work with the media in a proactive way to
send a lot of the messages we should be sending about the good work that we re doing and the successes. So that, it
isn t the headline itself or the photograph that forms public opinion, in fact in my comments later today, Alan, I
will touch on what I believe are the four precepts around effective system reform, which is political will, the second
one is public perception. And we need to help shape that public perception more accurately as to the good work that s
being done, and the need to invest and make it even better work. Dr. Chartock: Good luck. I hope that you meet Rupert
Murdock, and that he s responsive to that. Let me go to Vinnie Schiraldi. Vinnie, how do you and Shay interact in
terms of your jobs? Mr. Schiraldi: Shay runs a think tank essentially at Georgetown, and I ve taught in some of the
sessions that he s had, helped advise on the formulation of the think tank. But Shay and I go back to his days at the
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and one of the things that Shay funded that my organization did
during that time, was to, speaking of changing the frame with which young people are viewed, was we did a book on
people who went through juvenile court when they were kids and then turned their lives around and were doing excellent
things. Because you have to think about confidentiality protections I really strongly believe in them, but one of the
downsides of them is, we only know about the juvenile justice systems failures that way, because people have the right
not to announce that they were delinquent when they were a kid. And fortunately, we found 25 people who were willing
to come out of the juvenile delinquency closet on themselves and allow us to have this discussion. One of them was
Senator Alan Simpson, he actually just spoke to the kids at my facility last week, and it was just a fascinating
conversation to see this Senator from Wyoming talking to these inner-city kids from Washington D.C. about how he was a
screw up when he was a kid, and that s not the word he used, by the way, he used that other word. And it was really
moving to see it, and Senator Simpson now is sort of leading a charge amongst former juvenile delinquents to abolish
life without the possibility of parole for current juvenile delinquents, and his message was, if the juvenile justice
system treated me as harshly as it treats young people today, I never would have been a U.S. Senator. I d have been a
sort of ongoing thug, because I never would have been able to go to law school, I wouldn t have been able to go to
college, my stuff would have been public, I mean, he was on federal probation for a gun charge. It wasn t like he just
swiped some candy from the grocery store. So it was really interesting for the kids to see him talk that way, and I
think it s an interesting message for all the rest of us, our juvenile justice system today treats people more
harshly, in a way that me and my generation weren t, and maybe a lot of us in this room, you know who you are, you don t
have to raise your hands or anything like that, wouldn t be sitting in the same positions you are today, if things
were the same way they were today. Dr. Chartock: And how did you get into all this? Mr. Schiraldi: So, you know, I
grew up in Brooklyn, a lot of my friends used to get in trouble. I m not going to out myself on any of that, right.
And it was a Polish, Irish, Italian neighborhood, Greenpoint Brooklyn. Polish, Irish and Italian cops used to roll up
on us, so that meant, by and large, they weren t going to take us down to Spofford, unless we did something really
bad, unlike the African American kids in Bed-Stuy, or the Puerto Rican kids in Williamsburg, the two neighboring
neighborhoods, who were going a lot more frequently than we were, and we knew it. Because Polish, Irish and Italian
cops were rolling up on them and they were taking them in. So we learned a lot of lessons early on. One of the lessons
I learned was that one of my friends actually did do something bad enough to go to Spofford, two things always seemed
to be true. They came back worse and we all looked up to them more. So I don t know what society, as a kid, was trying
to achieve with that, but it didn t seem like it was achieving any of the goals that it was trying to achieve. Because
those kids were getting meaner and nastier, and had much more street cred than they did when they got locked up originally.
Dr. Chartock: So how did you avoid it? Mr. Schiraldi: You know, I had good parents, I had a lot of
opportunities that a lot of my friends didn t, I had a tick more money than everybody else did, so I was able to go, I
went to SUNY Binghamton for college, none of my friends went away to college, they just couldn t afford it. That
helped a lot. Dr. Chartock: They went away somewhere else. Mr. Schiraldi: Yeah, some of them did, some of them didn t.
You know. But then, you know, at Binghamton I was able to work at the Binghamton Urban Homes when Peter Adleman was
running to Division for Youth, a job that Joyce Burrell now has. It was the greatest job I ever had, he working with
these young people, I know a lot of people are afraid of this system, because all they know is what they read in the
New York P.O.S.T., right, about the kids. Dr. Chartock: I like it Mr. Schiraldi: Yeah, I can spell. Dr. Chartock: You re
a good man and a fast learner. Mr. Schiraldi: That s right. And I would say to people, listen in on this, if you re
thinking of working with these young people, you should do it, because you can make a big difference. It really
makes a big difference when good people come into these systems to try to help the young people in them. And I know Joyce
could use good people, I know a lot of programs could use good people. I think too many young people shy away from it.
How many people are becoming Peace Corp. volunteers and going to foreign countries to help people. There s plenty of
people that need help right here. There s serious challenges and our best and brightest should do that, they don t
need to go somewhere. I m not speaking against the Peace Corp, but people really, there s a lot of stuff you can do
right here in New York State to help these young people out. You don t have to get on a plane to do any of that stuff.
Dr. Chartock: Can I ask you guys a question. Is there anything different about doing criminal justice in Washington
D.C. from doing it in a State or New York State specifically, that you can see? Mr. Schiraldi: D.C. s kind of a weird,
warped little sort of jurisdiction, I mean, the Judges are all federal, the Defense Attorneys are federal, on the juvenile
side, the Probation Department s federal. If the kid gets tried as an adult, it s a federal prosecutor that makes that
decision; he goes before a Federal Judge. If he goes to prison, he goes to a federal prison. So, my agency and the
Attorney General s Office that prosecutes the juveniles, are the only two locally controlled agencies. So when the
Mayor bangs on the table, he s only banging on the table for like a third of the whole system. And unlike states, the
rest of the system isn t run by the Governor and the Assembly, it s run by the feds who, they re kind of busy with a
whole bunch of other stuff, so they don t really pay a lot of attention, and that, you know Shay and I have talked a
lot about how, if you believe in the power of Government to improve things, and I know that there s an open question
there, right, that the complete absence of scrutiny of the federalized parts of our system really, I think,
complicates things dramatically and makes reform a lot harder to achieve, that s sort of my thought.
Dr. Chartock: Do you guys ever disagree on anything? Mr. Schiraldi: Yeah, I think I m better looking than he is. Mr. Bilchik: We
share a lot of the same values. Mr. Chartock: Let me go back to the Washington thing, it s always seemed to me that people
who are faced with incarceration would rather do it in a federal facility than a state facility. Is that true when you
come to juvenile justice too? Mr. Schiraldi: There s one federal facility in literally Northern North Dakota, you go
to Fargo and drive north, which I didn t know you could do actually without getting to Canada. That s the only federal
facility for juveniles in the country. Dr. Chartock: Well actually, I guess I wasn t clear enough. My question really
was is it because the feds are running juvenile justice in Washington D.C., does that give you guys a leg up in your
programs, after all your hear as change agents, as experts, but I m trying to look for a variable that may give you a
little bit of an advantage in that it s a federal rather than a state run system. Mr. Schiraldi: The facilities are
all state run and we re under a concent decree for 24 years, so that was, in some respects, unfortunately the one part of
the system that the locals ran and we did a very lousy job of it, so we don t have a great argument for taking over
the rest of the system because we ve been so bad at running the part of the system that we had for so many years. Now,
I would argue that s dramatically improved of late, and that in some respects, the system we have now stacks up
against federal facilities that they have for kids, but that has not been true for a really long time, so it s a real
mixed bag. Juvenile justice is just so small, but it just hasn t gotten that much attention from the federal side of
the aisle and locals have botched it for a great many years. Dr. Chartock: Shay, are things better now? Mr. Bilchik: Is that a national question you re asking.
Dr. Chartock: No, I m asking in Washington, because you re here as the experts who are going to come and
tell all of the criminal justice people how to make it better in New York State. Mr. Bilchik: My lens is national,
Alan, so I can look at what s happened in D.C., but I can also look at what s happened
around the Country, and my answer would be yes, things are better. Things need to get substantially better than they
are, but they are certainly better than where we were even five or ten years ago, and I think part of that gets to the
understanding of what we now know about the research about more effective programs, and it s not just about the issue
of juvenile vs. adults, or incarceration vs. non-incarceration, there actually are so many more evidence based
programs that are out there now that have been proven to be effective and there s more of an ability to reproduce them
with fidelity into the model, so we have greater assurance about the outcomes that we re going to get. So I think in
some ways, juvenile justice ten years ago was not that data driven, or evidence or research based in what it was
doing. And I think the leadership in juvenile justice nationally, and a growing number of Directors of Juvenile
Services, whether it be the Corrections Department or the Probation Department, whether it be the Judiciary, many of
the lawyers involved in the system, are more fascicled with what these approaches are. So that gives you the platform.
Then, what I think I see happen is that a number of jurisdictions are taking that knowledge and looking at how they
can implement system reform around that knowledge. So right here in New York, I think you re seeing the beginning of
that, and some really good progress in understanding that kind of shift of what the footprint of juvenile justice
should look like in a state or in a local community, which is in part less reliant upon institutional care for kids
that truly are not the most violent and chronic offenders, and more community based services where that cotangent
factor, where that impact on the developmental arch that our young people are experiencing, is better served.
It doesn t mean that you aren t holding young people accountable, it doesn t mean that the kids who are the most serious
offenders aren t being put into locked facilities, but it means that we are being more analytical about who they are,
stronger with our assessment process, which again is taking hold in New York, and then making determinations along
that continuum of options where those young people fit, so we have them getting better outcomes. Now Vinnie s going to
disagree with me on this one. Dr. Chartock: Good, go ahead, Vinnie, your turn to disagree. Mr. Schiraldi: No, well I
guess I have a different take on it. I mean I think there s, the juvenile justice system in America is still steeped
in bad practice, I think by and large we re an institution based system, the 80 s and the 90 s were people were
frenetically incarcerating young people and adults all around the country, and I think we still have a hangover from
that. It doesn t really mean I disagree with Shay, so if you look at the data on what s happened to institutionalized
populations, going back to our 1977, we started to increase the number of kids we put in juvenile institutions and
adults we put in prison, and the population of those facilities went up every single year until, for juveniles, 2002.
And that s unlike the rest of the history of the country. Going back to when we first started having these facilities
in the 1800 s, it was a pretty flat curve. It stayed at a very flat curve until 1977, then it went up every year until
2002, and now it s starting to come back down, so it depends on where your lens is. If your lens is from 2002 to
present, many more states are reducing the number of kids they put in these harsh, nasty institutions. Many more
states are experimenting with community based programs, some of those are evidence based programs, I like evidence
based programs. Dr. Chartock: For those of us who are listening, evidence based programs are what?
Mr. Schiraldi: It s very jargon-y, listen to the names of them, since you re an academic, you can appreciate how to a name.
Dr. Chartock: Don t tell me, tell them. Mr. Schiraldi: They re all academics, right? Mutil-Systemic Therapy, Multi-Dimensional
Treatment Foster Care and Functional Family Therapy, so they definitely need some work on the naming thing. There
really terrific programs, they re focused on working with young people either in their own homes, where most of the
problems occur, or if not in the multi-dimensional treatment foster care, in a foster care setting as opposed to a big
institution, and with the main purpose being to get the kid back home in a way that helps them make it when they get out in
the community. And the research shows that they re much more cost effective, and that the kids get re-arrested at much
lower rates, and there s a bunch of positive outcomes, they go to school more frequently, they don t get pregnant as
much, they take less drugs, you know, things like that. And those are really good things, I think that my concern about them is
that we need to applaud them, say great, thats a great part of the continuum of care, but we still need to keep
looking for more programs like that, cause those are very academically based, the people that run them tend to have a
lot of letters after their names, and frankly, they tend to be run by people who are white folks from the suburbs,
dealing with the problems of African American and Latino kids in the inner cities, there are a tremendous number of
good ideas that the folks in those very same neighborhoods are coming up with, but they don t have academia
surrounding them and doing mutil-vari analysis, random assignment studies, and so I think that a challenge for our
field is to use the good programs the data says work, while continuing to explore other more indigenous, home grown
programs, because I think we re just touched the tip of the iceburg. Mr. Bilchik: I want to add something to that,
and that is that I think behind Vinnie s point is that if we don t grow those and learn about those alternative
programs, those additional programs, we tend to try to force the ones that we do have and target them in populations
that perhaps are not going to be effective for. And so we take what we have on our plate and we say well we don t
have another one, but maybe this kid will do okay with this particular program , and so knowing who the target
population is where that program has been successful, it s important that we be restrained in only applying it for
that population. The other thing I want to add is that in doing all of this, it s important that we re not just
implementing those evidence based programs, and that we re doing this work in a different way. It s important that we re
keeping track of the data, that we re looking at the recidivism rates. So it s one thing to say there s a better
way to do this and we should use less institutional care and more community based care with these programs and wrap
around services, but we need to then track the data that we actually are seeing reductions in recidivism, and other
outcomes like Vinnie mentioned around kids staying connected to school, or getting the kind of better mental health
services they need to be living a healthier lifestyle and I think those two pieces haven t always been connected. When
we are able to connect them in jurisdictions, we really celebrate that. So a lot of people now talk about some of the
successes in the State of Missouri around their reinvention of their footprint of juvenile justice. Moving away from
the large congregate facilities that are warehousing 200, 300, 400 kids and creating smaller facilities near the
community where the child lives so they can connect them to community based supports. That s proven to be incredibly
effective along with their implementation of different therapeutic interventions. They now have the data to show those
reductions in recidivism that support those reforms. So when I m in a state and they re talking about doing this kind
of reinvention of their system, I m reminding them, you better be tracking your arrests, your convictions, your
recidivism rates, to be able to show that you re really having this connection between what you re doing and the
outcomes you re indicating that you re going to deliver. Dr. Chartock: Now, Freud, if I m not wrong about this, said
that character was basically established by the time a kid was 4 or 5 years old, and Vinnie made reference to going
back into the home and offering support services, and there are a lot of people listening right now, as opposed to the
professionals who are sitting here listening to us, who are going to say isn t it hopeless, I mean, if a kid is
impossibly corrupted in terms of their character, we are all privileged to have known about Officer Krupke, and the
kids got a social disease, the question is about will people A) will it work, and you say it does and B) will there be
the political will to take chances with it? Now Shay said to Vinnie before, Vinnie you re working with this every day,
how do you built political will, how do you built it with the press, I don t think the press is particularly receptive
to this, maybe public radio listeners are, but I don t know about anybody else. Mr. Schiraldi: I m depraved because I m deprived?
So boy you asked a whole bunch of questions in that one. Dr. Chartock: I did, I m sorry, but you guys are
really smart. Mr. Schiraldi: No, we are, that s true. I think that the thing that I think we need to be careful not to
get caught, especially when we re having a conversation with regular folks, not just a room full of experts, in this
room, I m sitting at. Dr. Chartock: I actually don t care about the people in the room. I just care about the people
listening. Mr. Schiraldi: I think that we should think about our nephews, not our sons and our daughters, cause too
many people have rose colored glasses when it comes to the behavior of their own kids, but think about your nephew or
your niece, cause you usually have a little more objective like, like that kids a knucklehead and needs a boot in the
behind, I think we should sort of use that as the litmus test for what should happen to the young people that come
into the system. And I don t think that our litmus test, I think it s the New York POST that s the litmus test, we re
all afraid of these guys wearing the north face jackets, standing on the street corner, and boy I d really like to
wipe them off that street corner, but not if one of them was your nephew, if one of them was your nephew, you ve got
to ask yourself, I don t know how much it costs to put a kid in an OCFS facility, but it costs about $150,000 a year
to put them in one of mine, right. So if my nephew did what these kids did, would I put him in my station wagon, get
my suitcase full of $150,000, if I had that, I could do anything I wanted with that $150,000, drive it up to this
institution, hand it to the warden and say here, take good care of my nephew cause this is the best thing I could
think of to do to both hold him accountable and turn his life around, right. Nobody would do that, except in rare
occasions, where even with your nephew you d say, he s got to be held in secure care, because he s a danger to himself
or others. That s why I used a nephew as an example. Dr. Chartock: I m going to send a copy of this to your nephew.
Mr. Schiraldi: And I think that that s a good start to a standard, because for much of what we re doing like, New York
closed 13 facilities in the last couple of years, right. Much to their credit, and downsized a few others, so we are
literally talking about suitcases full of money for kids, cause when you actually close a facility, you take ten kids
out of a facility, you don t save anything, right. But you close a whole facility, you got a suitcase full of money
times however many kids you ve got there, and now they re going back to their own neighborhoods, and you can take them
to that neighborhood and say why don t you have him do a youth development program in this neighborhood where he
helps rebuilt this community so that he, or she, feels good about themselves, learns some skills, is around the kind
of positive adults that we know that if we hooked them up with, generally, not always, but generally they re going to
thrive under and if you ve got a good public information officer, like I know Joyce does, you can even get good
pictures of that. Because everybody loves a kid who used to be a bad guy, who s now planting trees and rehabbing a
park, so you can do good and look good at the same time, you really can. Dr. Chartock: Have you had success building
political will and the press and especially with the press in Washington. Mr. Schiraldi: Absolutely, both
I ve had both sides of that, because my feeling is you need to stack up a bunch of political will, because if you re going up
against the status quo, you d better be wearing all your pads, because people are going to come at you. The status quo
exists for a reason, it s not just an accident, like we re having this conversation like well this makes so much
sense, why isn t everybody doing it? Because the status quo exists for a reason, a lot of people making overtime in
correctional facilities, right, and so they don t want them closed, whether it s a good idea or a bad idea, because
they have house payments to make. Dr. Chartock: Well we ve seen that here in New York State. Mr. Schiraldi: So you d
better be ready for that when it comes and one of the ways you get ready is you stack up a bunch of good articles,
because you know the bad ones are going to come, cause as soon as you start dipping into people s mortgages, they re
going to leak stuff about you, and they re going to run to their elected officials to try to fight you.
Dr. Chartock: Like what kind of stuff will they leak. Mr. Schiraldi: I had a fight in my facility the other day, before I hear about
it I get a call from a reporter, and I envision my staff like saying okay wait a minute, you guys break that fight up,
I ve got to go run and make a call. Man, that s literally what s happening because we are cutting into overtime, we re
disciplining people who are thugs with the kids, we ve fired some people, we ve upped the educational level you need
to work at the facilities, so now you actually have to have college credits to work there, and a lot of folks are mad
about that, because they signed up 20 years ago to be a prison guard for smaller prisoners, and now I m coming after
them on that and they re coming back after me. Dr. Chartock: So how do you do it, I m sure everybody in the room
wants to know, do you call the Washington Post and say boy have I got a story for you ? Mr. Schiraldi: yup, I ve got
a good public information officer, just like Joyce does, you have them come in, you show the good stuff knowing that
at some point, they re going to have to write the bad article about you, but you spend enough time with them so when
they write the bad article about you, they don t come out you with the tooth and the hammer and thong. That s one way,
you also spend a lot of time with your elected officials, I mean my over-side chairs played basketball with my kids
five times, he s helped paint the facility, the Mayor has been up there, run a triathlon, we had the kids out to
perform Shakespeare in the community, both my over-side chairs, several members of the council, and the Mayor were
there, we won the football championship. When we won the football championship, I brought the whole football team to
the city council and I bought them all leather jackets with the little letter O for Oak Hill, and they got those presented
by the chairman of the council, I mean you ve got to do that work, because at some point somebody s going to, one of
my kids is going to do something bad, and even if they do it bad less frequently, they re still going to do bad stuff,
I got the 770 most troubled kids in the District of Columbia, someone is going to screw up once in a while and that
Chairman is going to hear that, and he needs to say yeah, that s right, but I know all this other good stuff s going on too,
so I m going to cut Vinnie a break. Dr. Chartock: Now Shay Bilchik, when you hear this very good proposal for how to
deal with political will and the press, you said before that you have a national footprint for your institution at
Georgetown. Do you find other people doing what he s doing? Mr. Bilchik: Every successful system reform that I can
site to in juvenile justice, or in child welfare, in behavior health, used the same type of paradigm that was very
smart about how they messaged on the work they were doing, they were very smart in an anticipatory way, reaching out
to their oversight body in the State Legislature, in Vinnie s instance in the Council, to the Governor at the state
level, in Vinnie s instance to the Mayor, and brought a lot of people around the work before the first incidents
happened, that eventually will happen when you are a reformer, whether it be in any of these systems, something will
go wrong, so Vinnie kind of piling up these articles is really smart, the other thing that I see happening is that you
don t do this by going in for a year or two and saying success, we declare victory, we re done. Vinnie, you re in your
fifth year? In his fifth year, I mean we see so much turnover in the Directors positions in Child Welfare, in Juvenile
Justice and we need to see this kind of stability so that really, really at that five year mark, I think you ve got to
a point where you have a clear understanding with your political leadership, they ve got the backbone behind
supporting the work and you ve institutionalized the work enough that you can say someone else could probably carry
this on, but I have to tell you that a lot of the reform work that I ve seen, those leaders were there 10 years, 15
years, 20 years. People talk about the Missouri change that happened like learning about it in the last three years,
like it happened in the last five years. It took 20 years to institutionalize reforms that took place in Missouri, so
we have to have a clear idea of what we re trying to do, we have to have a clear plan of how we re going to get there,
understand it is unfolding in an inertive way in terms of accomplishing our goals, watch our data and our measurements
every step along the way, and send clear communication messages about what we re doing and how we re doing it so
people will understand it better and have our backside. So the answer to that is, yes Alan. Mr. Schiraldi: And we were
real honest with our leaders in D.C. about what it was going to take. We told them some of this stuff is going to get
worse before it gets better. So for example, Shay has mentioned the Missouri model several times. What we did was
several of the people that were the architects of the Missouri model retired right around when I got this job, so we
worked with several foundations, including Public Welfare, who funded this activity, and the Jet Foundation, which is
now defunct, to bring them on, to provide us with training and consultation. And I said to my oversight Chair, this is
going to get worse before it gets better. Because what my staff are doing right now is, they re beating the
kids up and they re sticking them in rooms. And so that s I mean, they ve been doing it for a lot of years, so that s
the way they control behavior, it s a very sort of fear and intimidation model we have going now, and the Missouri
model is very, everybody in the Missouri models job is to help turn the kids life around, so in my facility, when I
got there, I had all these correctionals officers, guards, their job wasn t to help the kids, their job was security,
I had a bunch of cooks to cook, I had a bunch of maintenance people to maintain the facility, and there were a couple
of mental health people and counselors, and their job was to help turn the kids lives around, so now, with Missouri,
I ve trained everybody in my facility, some of the best people are cooks, and the maintenance guy came up with an
incredible idea to take the kids out of the facility and cut lawns for senior citizens, we haven t had one negative
incident there, right. So now I ve got this bunch of guards, and some of them were good at it right away, they felt
really good about working with the kids this different way, they liked it, they jumped on board, I would call that
maybe 10%, another 10% hated my guts and wanted to see me run over by a bus as fast as I possibly could, and then
there was another 80% that were swimming around the middle, not knowing which way to go, because as Shay said, there
were so many different department heads over the years, and frankly, we all give a good speech in the first five
minutes, right. And maybe you bought into the speech that directors number 4, 7, and 12 gave during your 20 year
period and then you felt like a chump afterwards, because all the rest of your guys were rolling their eyes and saying
this isn t going to work and you bought it and now you feel stupid, so now director number whatever comes in and you re
not going to buy it so quick and so we trained those folks, we rehabbed the units, we put coaches on the units to
help them, and some of them still were really no good at it, partly because they just didn t have the ability, and
partly because they just didn t agree. Because so many years they had been locking the kids up and beating them up,
they thought that was the best way to do it, and so it s not easy, it s definitely not easy, I don t think it takes 25
years, I think in 5 years it s much, much better than it was 5 years ago, but I think that it s really sort of an
interesting challenge as a manager to try to get a whole culture to change from one that was extremely correctional,
to one that s rehabilitative. Dr. Chartock: So what did you do when you found somebody who couldn t make a change?
Mr. Schiraldi: There s a sort of interesting sort of dichotomy in the way we worked with folks, we praised them, we did so
much more like awards, and everything to really try to give them a chance, and then if they were no good at it, we
either fired them or I ve got a couple guys that are doing laundry that are never going to be anywhere near a kid,
cause they shouldn t be anywhere near a kid. Dr. Chartock: What s the breakthrough series collaborative models, is
that you ve been talking about? Mr. Bilchik: It s really a different approach in terms of instituting change, I ll
actually be describing this a little bit in my presentation later, but it builds system reform, Alan, starting with
small experiments of change, and then grows them as you see successful outcomes with those tests that you ve been
running. So if Vinnie s in his facility seeing he s got some issues around educational programming for certain
category of young person, there might be two workers that say, let s try something different. Let s do the next three
kids who come in with those educational issues, let s trying something different. And they try it, they test it, they
measure it, if it works, they spread it to the next 20 kids who come in. So the breakthrough is not being immobilized
by needing to transform your whole system to make the change, the series is a series of tests, and the collaborative
is that it generally is instituted across a number of sites where they learn from each other and it changes their
testing. Dr. Chartock: Can I ask you guys what the role of race is in treating juveniles? Mr. Schiraldi: I think it s
a very complicated issue, but I ll sum it up before I get complicated by saying that, there s just no way that America s
juvenile justice system would be the way it is today if it was full of white middle class kids, there s just no way.
I mean I think of the sort of small incidents that occur in my white middle class high school that I send my own kids
to, it s the things that get people in an uproar, that would be the least problem that we had in our juvenile justice
agency. The kind of conditions the kids in my system were in, that, I mean literally, they used to take their shirts
off at night and stuff them around the toilet bowls so that rats and cockroaches wouldn t crawl up on them at night.
It had deteriorated that bad. Rooms near the boiler room, boiling hot, the rooms far away from the boiler were
freezing cold. And I had to worry that my staff were going to put kids with asthma or who were on psychotropic drugs
in the hot rooms where they could die out of the combination of the heat and the drugs they were on. And I never went
to sleep during that period of time until we closed that facility, believing that my staff was adequately going to ever
figure out which were the ones that were on those drugs. It was that kind of life threatening stuff and I don t think
we would ever let that happen to middle class kids, and the middle class kids tend to be whiter than poor kids.
Mr. Bilchik: if I can try to also answer your question, Alan, building on Vinnie s answer, I think that the initial
statement that we need to make is that in the vast majority of our juvenile justice systems across the country, there
is a disproportionate representation of children of color, whether they be African American, whether it be by
ethnicity, Latino population, Native American population, that is present in these systems, and that is contributed to
by a variety of societal factors, that may be driving some kids into the system either through surveillance, as Vinnie
was mentioning, because we patrol their neighborhoods more frequently, but also by higher offending rates, because
there are those societal issues, living in poverty, being exposed to dysfunctional schools, a variety of things that
from an ecological model, kind of propel them into the juvenile justice system, there are also though, decisions that
are made from arrest, to intake, to detention, to sentencing, to the type of facility that they may be going into in
terms of what we consider to be adequate, that is impacted by workers throughout the system, and those decisions sometimes
are impacted by either explicit or implicit bias in that decision making process. Sometimes it is not necessarily
explicit, but it may be institutional or structural bias in the way we make our decisions that lead to the over
representation of those kids of color in the system. So an example, you have a young person who s African American who s
arrested in a disadvantaged community, through that hyper-surveillance. They are taken down for screening and intake
and review for detention, they re on the bubble of whether they re going to be detained or not. If there s a parent
available to make the release, they will be released, they call the parent, the parent is living in that disadvantaged
community, in a job that if they leave work on an emergency, they might get fired, if they leave work, they re taking
three buses to get down to that center, there s no way they can abide by the two hour requirement to come down and get
your kid, or three hour requirement, it may take them six hours, waiting to get off of work, and then three buses,
three hours later. That young person gets detained. That is in a sense a structural bias to how we have set up our
review system and what we need to do to offset it. It s not an explicit bias of those workers saying oh, African
American kid, let s detain them but they re not, as a system, we re not doing the things we need to do to build the
alternatives for those disadvantaged kids, now that would happen to a white disadvantaged kid as well, but
unfortunately, in these disadvantaged communities, the dominant population is usually of color. Dr. Chartock: We are
talking with two men who know a great deal about juvenile justice. Shay Bilchik is the Founder and Director of the
Center for Juvenile Justice at Georgetown University s Public Policy Institute and Vincent Schiraldi is Director of
the District of Columbia s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Shay, I thought I heard you say that the money
that you could save by sending the kids at $150,000, you could then take that $150,000 and use it to set up
an alternative system which might treat them better with better outcomes, you know your being set up of course, because
right now, all states have billions of dollars of deficit issues and nobody is getting an extra $150,000 where they
can grab it. So I m wondering whether both of you, in terms of the national footprint, or the District of Columbia,
can you give us any incite into how this is effecting juvenile justice. Mr. Bilchik: I wanted to piggy back which was
Vinnie s answer about the $150,000, I think, by pointing to the notion around political will, so yes, it is an
absolutely horrific fiscal environment, but yet every day in the State Budget Offices and the Office of National Budget
and the Legislative Committees and the Governor s Office, decisions are being made where to spend the money
that is available. So if a political leader says this is important to me, and give me a plan, it may not be the full
100% treatment, give me a plan of how I reinvest some of this saved money as far as how we are reconstructing our
system in this state or this community, and I will reinvest it. And that is a token or a sign of that political
leadership. So I know that there s a strong effort in New York to begin closing some of the larger facilities and
reinvesting those funds in local communities, it may not be dollar for dollar, because it may not be possible in the
fiscal environment. However, if I go a couple of states over into Ohio, which may have even, although a smaller
budget, a more horrific fiscal environment than even New York has right now, that Governor said to their Director of
Juvenile Services tell me the plan that helps me use this reinvestment strategy and I ll see what I can do to set
aside some money to help you invest in those front end programs . Because what they were doing in Ohio was to say
we re going to close a couple of our large facilities and we will invest that money in local programming to keep kids out
of the system. So in an environment where they re generally spending about $140 million on juvenile justice, the Ohio
Department of Youth Services was able to reinvest about $14 million into local community programming that was really
outside the scope of what they were legally responsible for, and decided to partner with their six largest counties to
develop these kind of evidence based programs, stronger assessments of kids, with the design being to keep the front
door as narrow as possible in terms of who would come into the system. So, Alan, I would challenge that, that even in
this difficult fiscal environment, on the margin, choices are made as to how we will spend our money, and to be smart
about long term reductions in juvenile crime, ultimately long term reductions in those juveniles entering the criminal
justice system, some of those decisions are being made and need to be made around investing in the type of approach
that we re talking about. Dr. Chartock: Now Vinnie, you ve had a lot of success, but as you move forward, you still
have things that you need to get done. And you still have to go with your hand out. Are you finding this is a tough
time to go with your hand out? Mr. Schiraldi: Yeah, I mean, I always say, we had a ton of stuff to do when I got
there, and we ve got about a half ton left to do right now. But I do want to sort of dovetail on what Shay said, I
think the handout thing is, in our field, is in some respects the opposite, I mean, New York s a good example, we don t
have to look at any other state, we can just look right here. New York closed 13 facilities and downsized 3 other
facilities. The state, OCFS, took some of that money and put it into Alternatives to Incarceration, meanwhile New York
City, which pays either the complete amount to put a kid in, half of the amount, to put a kid in OCFS, or the full
amount to put a kid in a residential program, started sending many fewer kids to the states system and just using that
money to fund evidence-based programs and to create a new, hopefully one day, evidence-based program of its own. So,
that s happening right here in the State of New York. And the population in the Office of Children and Family Services
has declined by 40% I think over the last three years, It s gone from about 1,000 to about 600 and I think people are
now putting their heads together about How can we do this more? How can we do this better? carefully picking which
kids do and don t need to be confined, and really being good stewards of money. And so the fiscal issue, in some
respect, when you re rich, it s easy to be fat and sloppy, but when you re poor, you ve got to figure out what you re
going to eat that night, right, and so New York s figuring out what it s going to eat in terms of to really torture
that metaphor, but you know, it s really taking a look at do we really need to incarcerate these kids, are there
better ways to do it, and oh by the way, that saves us money too while also addressing public safety issues.
Dr. Chartock: So are you saying that this is, in times of lean, this is a good opportunity. Mr. Schiraldi: 29 States have
reduced the number of kids they have in secure confinement in the last several years, I think that s a combination of
people, there s a lot of politics behind why we lock kids up, and I m sorry if I m shocking you when I say that,
I know you might be. And so when you have a lot of money, it s easy to politicize the incarceration of young people,
when you have less money, you might be a little more interested in what actually works for the bottom line and not as
willing to lock young people up just so you can have something to say at the next election. Dr. Chartock: But every
politician still has to worry about being Willie Hortonized. Mr. Schiraldi: Right, but they ve also got to pay the
budget too, so. Mr. Bilchik: Well that s where the data comes in, you know. You do what Vinnie s saying, but you have
to show the data that it isn t just about the reduction of your population, you have to show that you ve also seen no
increase in arrest rates and in fact, your impact on recidivism is positive, so you ve got to be able to do that or
else it is not the full story about the work that s underway. And the jurisdictions have done well in not only
accomplishing the first stages of this work, but the second, and third and fourth stage are the ones that can
produce the data on the outcomes that they re getting. Dr. Chartock: So, if Willie Horton had happened during that
time, or a Willie Horton had happened, and you were able to take out, professor, a huge sheet of paper saying here,
look, the larger picture is much more encouraging than one Willie Horton would anybody have listened to you?
Mr. Schiraldi: Now see that s an interesting question, because you have to put that into the context of the time. If you
look at the public s concern about crime when Willie Horton happened, it was through the roof. If you look at it now,
it s nowhere near as high, look at the last presidential election; we didn t even have a conversation Dr. Chartock: Why is that? about criminal
justice. Mr. Schiraldi: The media was very fixated on it, there was less to cover, there
was no wars to cover, there were no big, you know. The media really can pump this up. If you look at the media
coverage around in the 80 s and 90 s for example, there was a 476% increase in coverage of homicides on the ABC, NBC
and CBS evening news just during the 1990 s, and that s not including O.J., if you put O.J. in, it s a 700% increase,
right. During that same decade, there was a 32% decline in homicides, so while most people don t take out the uniform
crime reports and say oh, what s going on in homicides this year? . They watch the evening news, if it s five times
as frequently on the evening news, they think it s gone up. So that created an atmosphere in which the public was
extremely frightened, politicians did public opinion polls and surveys and they found that people were highlighting
this as a major issue, and they passed three strikes laws and they made it easier to try more kids as adults. And that s
sort of the thumbnail sketch of the 1990 s on this issue. For a whole variety of reasons having to do, I think, with
the economy, with several wars, with a lot of other things to focus on, it s just been less coverage, and the fact
that crime s gone down during that period of time, there s been a lot less coverage of the crime issue, it s not as
salient, it doesn t get brought up as much anymore in campaigns, so that actually frees a lot of people up to do sort
of much more thoughtful work with the juvenile justice system than they would have been able to do. So my answer on
the Willie Horton question is, if Willie Horton showed up today, right, I think it would be much less salient. Trust
me, every elected official, who s a Governor, who s running for office, has somebody who s come out of prison, who s
done a bad thing, right? So it s not that Willie Horton doesn t exist today, it s nobody s capitalizing on it, because
their focus groups and polling doesn t tell them to capitalize on it. They re going after same sex marriage.
Dr. Chartock: Shay, do you want to add to that? Mr. Bilchik: No, I think Vinnie had a good answer, I think the tougher
question that no one really has an answer for in any scientific way, is why did the crime rate go down? So we saw some
issues around the nation s economy getting better, we saw an infusion of dollars into the system in a variety of ways,
not just into more incapacitation but into more early intervention and prevention programs, it was the flow of
resources that built this body of programs that we have now, that may have contributed to it as well.
Dr. Chartock: Okay, so people listening on the radio right now, they want to know, they ve heard the arguments in the sort of macro
terms, what about real stories. Do either of you, Vinnie, you probably have more because you re you know, closer to it
right now, but are there stories that will make people wipe their eyes? Mr. Schiraldi: You know, I mean, I ve got a
troubled, troubled kid named Larry who I m going to talk a little about today, I m going to sort of end my
presentation with him, but you know, he came into us, he was so, so difficult at the facility, we were constantly
breaking up fights that he started, he was running around climbing the roof, you know, just causing us fits. And you
know the staff, there was some real consideration about shipping him to a harder facility, but the staff really, they
really hunkered down with the kid. We got him out, we got him into programs, he screwed up again, we brought him back
into the facility, you know, they don t always land on the first bounce. And now he s in college, he s got a
scholarship; he s got a 3.2 in his first year. And I think far too frequently, because these kids have been so
stereotyped, we stopped thinking of them as human beings, and I think that s a real mistake. It doesn t mean we can
just hug them all and just say go forth and sin no more and they re all going to be just fine, that s nonsense too,
but these kids are real, they have real hopes and real fears, real dreams, just like the victims have real hopes and
fears and dreams. And I think we forget that at our peril. Mr. Bilchik: I want to add, not as an individual anecdote,
because I know them and I could share them, but I think more importantly, for the listening audience, Alan, there s an
opportunity right now in the mainstream media, with two movies that are just out. One called Blind side, which is the
story about a homeless young African American older boy who is homeless, his mother is a drug addict, his father has
never been on the scene, and it s about a white middle class family who comes into that young man s life, and serves
as the lifeline. Now this is a person who could have had a much different path. So my message to people on that movie
is, its the story about what can happen if we rally around a young person and make sure they simply don t get
themselves into the system and then go deeper and deeper into the system, that in communities and families rallying
around their most vulnerable kids to be able to make a different in their lives, that s a heartwarming story, that s a
story that people look at and if you shed a tear reading a hallmark card, you ll probably shed a tear at that movie.
The other movie is the movie Precious, which is the story about an African American, 17 year old girl, who is
probably living the greatest nightmare we could ever imagine for a young person in our country, where she is
physically abused, sexually abused, and I won t tell the total plot line, and there is no happy ending to that movie,
it is an ending that reflects the possibilities if our systems work well. If we are operating on a premise of how do
we, in an ecological model, wrap things around even the worst situations to somehow incrementally improve them, that I
walk out of that movie saying there s something there that says government can work with community and even in the
worst circumstances making some incremental gain for our young people . So for me, the success stories are varied,
Alan, some of them may be the most joyous end game, that we see, which is Blind Side, who this kid ends up being a
number one draft choice in the NFL, that's a true story or Precious, where we have to look at how did we
somehow manage to come into that young woman s life and do a little bit better by them, and what more could we have done if we were
more effective earlier in time with more and more reinvestment strategies. Dr. Chartock: Well unfortunately we re out of time, and I
can t believe it. I could listen to you guys all day long. We ve been talking to Shay Bilchik from the Center for
Juvenile Justice at Georgetown University s Public Policy Institute and Vincent Schiraldi from the D.C. Department of
Youth Rehabilitation Services. They re taking part in a symposium on Juvenile Justice sponsored by the Division of
Criminal Justice Services, DCJS, in partnership with the Office of Children and Family Services, OCFS, The Division of
Probation and Correctional Alternatives, DPCA, Senator Velmenatte Montgomery and Assemblyman William Scarborough. This
series is being supported with a generous grant from the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C. This is the
fifth and final session in a series, you can watch videos and access materials from earlier sessions on the DCJS
website www.criminaljustice.ny.gov Interviews from each symposium are available at www.wamc.org click on
programming and go to the speakers corner. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Mr. Bilchik and Mr. Schiraldi:
Thank you. Dr. Chartock: So now I think you re going to take a break and be right back. 2:20.