Vincent Schiraldi, Secretary of Juvenile Services, State of Maryland
Wednesday, February 15
This event was recorded and the video will be posted here soon.
Use of probation and parole has declined since its peak in 2007 but still intrudes into the lives of 3.9 million Americans—a scale deemed mass supervision. Originally intended as an alternative to incarceration and a means of rehabilitation for people convicted of crimes, supervision often functions instead as a trip wire for further criminal legal system contact, keeping people entangled in the system or setting them up for failure. As he argues in a recently published with Evangeline Lopoo and Timothy Ittner, as well as other recent writing and his upcoming book entitled Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom (due out from the New Press this fall) our guest speaker Vincent Schiraldi will join us to discuss research showing that probation and parole generally fail to provide either diversion from incarceration or rehabilitation. We’ll explore how case studies from California and New York City show that it is possible and practicable to reduce the scope of mass supervision through sentencing reform, case diversion, and department policy change, without increasing crime. We’ll discuss whether, and what it would take, to reach the abolition of supervision systems in their entirety and how this could be achieved through concrete, actionable steps.
Speakers:
Vincent Schiraldi is a national leader in criminal/juvenile justice and mass incarceration reform, a field he has worked in for more than four decades. He is joining the Moore-Miller administration from Columbia University, where he served as Senior Research Scientist at the Columbia School of Social Work and co-Director of the Columbia Justice Lab, working to reduce the footprint and negative impact of community corrections, eliminate youth prisons, and create a developmentally appropriate response to offending by young adults. Mr. Schiraldi went to Columbia from the Harvard Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice where he was a Senior Researcher. Mr. Schiraldi also has extensive government experience in criminal and juvenile justice. As Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Correction, he attempted to close Riker’s Island and end the practice of solitary confinement. Mr. Schiraldi also served as director of juvenile corrections in Washington DC, as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, and as Senior Policy Adviser to the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. He also pioneered efforts at community-based alternatives to incarceration in NYC and Washington DC as founder and executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and Justice Policy Institute, respectively. Schiraldi has lectured at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Harvard Law School, NYU School of Social Work, San Francisco University, and the Georgetown University Center for Juvenile Justice Reform. Schiraldi received a Master’s in Social Work from New York University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Binghamton University.
Moderator:
Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, is the moderator of the Myths of Public Safety speaker series. Prior to joining PCJ, Katy spent four years as a legal fellow and then staff attorney at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, a research and policy institute at Harvard Law School.
Organizers:
The Myths of Public Safety speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; Professor of Sociology; and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.