Teen Offenders Spared the Rod

Controversial Strategy In D.C. Favors Home Care, Therapy, Not Time in Cell

Inside Oak Hill's barbed-wire perimeter in Laurel, harsh punishment for the District's juvenile offenders is out. Therapy is in.

The dingy cellblock where the most unruly were sequestered, where they scribbled shout-outs to dead homies and angry threats on the walls, is abandoned. The cellblocks now have carpeting and cushioned furniture.

Striking an officer, smoking marijuana or destroying property no longer gets a young offender thrown into a dark cell to stew. Now, they call a meeting.

It's part of an evolving, controversial effort by the District to deter young delinquents from becoming career criminals by keeping fewer behind bars and surrounding the rest with counselors, drug rehabilitation and social workers at their homes to strengthen broken families.

Vincent Schiraldi is the outspoken architect of change. As director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services since 2005, Schiraldi rejects physical punishment and isolation to teach lessons. Instead, he dispatches his charges to camp in the desert, to rebuild houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and to perform Shakespeare for the mayor.

"You have got to lock up as few as possible," he said. "The ones you do lock up, you have got to treat them in a way that can turn their lives around and not create the self-concept that the next stop is D.C. jail and the federal Bureau of Prisons."

But Schiraldi's stand has provoked an argument about reconciling the needs of damaged youths with the public's need to be protected from them.

Fierce opposition has come from law enforcement and residents in neighborhoods including Shaw, Columbia Heights and Capitol Hill who feel endangered by the young robbers and thieves whom Schiraldi has let out on probation. Critics point to his failures: An average of six youths a year killed in street violence while under his care (about the same as before he arrived) and an embarrassing escape of one youth from Schiraldi's house during a party for staff workers and young inmates.

The head of the local Fraternal Order of Police has accused the city of adopting a "hug and release" policy. Even those who agree with Schiraldi's desire to stanch the disproportionate flow of black boys into the criminal justice system contend that it's better to send some teenagers to the adult system rather than to Schiraldi's care.

"These juveniles are making adult decisions over and over again and should be treated as such and held accountable for their actions," said Chandler Goule, a Capitol Hill staff worker who lives in Northeast Washington and has been robbed three times by teens. "Giving the convicted shorter sentences and placing them at Oak Hill for only a few months will not solve the problem."

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Then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) hired Schiraldi in January 2005. Known as a critic of the juvenile system, Schiraldi was brought in to clean up overcrowding, brutality and low morale. On the brink of receivership, the department had been under court supervision as part of a 23-year-old consent degree to improve living conditions for those committed to its care. A blue-ribbon task force of judges, youth advocates and city leaders provided detailed marching orders: Lock up fewer juveniles, make the facilities nicer and provide family support upon release.