Released, Yes. Rehabilitated, Not So Much.

"The tasks of . . . providing children in the District's care the kind of quality rehabilitation services they need will require much more than yet another cabinet-level agency. Oak Hill must be replaced, as youth rehabilitation experts have recommended and as the council has agreed. Community-based facilities must be found for youths deserving of less secure confinement. And the overall quality of youth services needs upgrading."

-- Post editorial, Jan. 22, 2005

I was a member of The Post's editorial board when that editorial was published.

In 1994, while wearing my editorial writer's hat, I visited the city's Receiving Home for Children -- a detention facility. I found 58 youths packed into a building with a rated capacity of 38; an 11-year-old joy rider housed with street-level drug dealers; five teens obliged to sleep on cots in a 13-by-21-foot former utility room.

Some of the judges who had sent children to the Receiving Home had never seen the place.

A Post editorial prompted Superior Court Judge George Mitchell to make an unannounced visit. "This place where you are keeping these children," Mitchell told D.C. officials in his courtroom after his return, "is appalling and is unfit to house animals of a lower level." He ordered the Receiving Home closed.

I saw similarly depressing conditions at the now-closed Cedar Knoll detention facility for juveniles.

All of which is to say I am painfully familiar with the poor state of the city's juvenile facilities before Vincent Schiraldi was appointed director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services in 2005.

Since Schiraldi's arrival, the city has gone a long way toward addressing some of the key requirements in the "Jerry M. consent decree," which governs the treatment of youths incarcerated in the District.

Oak Hill is not the hellhole it once was. And a new facility is being built to detain youth offenders -- although its rated capacity of 60 falls far short of what will be needed.

But today's DYRS is, as the consent decree demands, more "results-focused, purpose-driven" and has action plans on paper.

So why, a reader might ask, does this column continue to focus on this single D.C. agency?