Fenty Defends City Agency for Delinquent Youth

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty yesterday offered a spirited defense of the city agency responsible for delinquent youth, days after a 17-year-old under the agency's supervision was charged with shooting four Ballou High School students last month.

The youth, Deidrick Johnson, is also charged in another drive-by shooting in Southeast Washington in which five people were injured, another example to judges and prosecutors who have complained that the agency is lax in its oversight. Johnson had not been seen by his caseworker in 11 months.

Fenty, however, said that the Department of Youth Rehabilitative Services has significantly improved the conditions under which youth are held and has provided opportunities for them to change their lives.

"Although there is a lot of work to be done, there have been a lot of changes," Fenty (D) said. "In the long term, the way to solve this problem is to make sure young people have positive things to do. We're moving in the right direction."

Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, was brought in three years ago to clean up an agency in distress. When he arrived, Schiraldi said, youth held at Oak Hill, the detention center in Laurel, had roaches crawling on them as they slept in rooms that were boiling hot or freezing.

Just as problematic, Schiraldi said, was that youths who committed the most serious crimes were routinely released sooner than those convicted of lesser crimes. Abuse and neglect of detained youth was the norm, he said. "There was an enormous amount of work to be done," Schiraldi said yesterday.

There still is. Youth still run away from group homes, and some of them end up dead or, like Johnson, locked up for shooting people. Schiraldi said the number of youths under his care who later were killed dropped from eight in 2005 to seven in 2006 and five in 2007. Still, the killings remain a sign to some that the youths should have been held longer.

Schiraldi said that even one death is too many, and that he has instituted measures to insure that those assigned to him receive proper care. The agency has reduced caseloads to 25 per caseworker, down from 35 to 45 a year earlier, he said.

Many critics have been rankled by Schiraldi's insistence on having more youths work through their problems outside of confinement. Schiraldi has reduced the number of youths in confinement from a high of 253 in early 2005 to an average of 176 in November 2007.