A quick one, since we have already posted extensively today about the nauseating revelations about reported sex abuse in juvenile facilities.
***After a long national search, the Oakland, Calif.-based National Council on Crime and Delinquency has chosen a successor to Barry Krisberg, its president of 14 years. Taking the helm at NCCD will be executive vice president Chris Baird, who has overseen the NCCD office in Madison, Wisc. since 1985. That office is home to NCCD’s Children’s Research Center, which does cool stuff like this.
***Krisberg, meanwhile, moves over to the University of California-Berkeley’s Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. He will be a senior fellow at the center and teach juvenile justice at Cal’s Boalt School of Law. Until recently, the center was led by David Onek. But JJ Today has learned that Onek has left the center, leaving it in the hands of his former deputy director, Andrea Russi. Onek did not return a call asking what his future plans were. Could they include a job with the Obama administration?
***Speaking of NCCD, the National League of Cities has published a Gang Prevention Toolkit, which it developed after working with NCCD on a gang prevention network in 13 California cities. You can access it here.
***There was a huge turnout for the going-away party thrown for Vinny Schiraldi, the outgoing director of D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services who will head home to New York City and run adult and juvenile probation for the Big Apple. Among those in attendance: Casey Foundation leaders Gail Mumford and Bart Lubow, Campaign for Youth Justice boss Liz Ryan, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Georgetown professor Peter Edelman.
The night included lots of warm, campy toasts, a proclamation from Fenty, shots at Washington Post columnist (and Schiraldi critic) Colby King, and some not-so-veiled references to his sailor-esque vernacular. The crowd even sung a rousing ode to Schiraldi that parodied the tune “My Guy.”
The conventional wisdom in D.C. is that Schiraldi’s number two guy, Marc Schindler, will take over DYRS.
***There was one factoid in the sex victimization report that had nothing to do with the subject, but fascinated JJ Today. Of the 252 juvenile facilities that the Bureau of Justice Statistices deemed eligible to include in the survey, 18 had closed by the time administrators were contacted and two others had merged with another facility. That’s almost 10 percent of the eligible facilities. For advocates of less incarceration, it has to be a good sign that so many candidates for a study on large facilities are no longer around.
Happy New Year!
