Spring 2014 Symposium

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A CLOSER LOOK: Examining “Close to Home” and New York’s Transformation of Youth Justice

Pinkerton Symposium on Youth Justice

Sponsored by the Pinkerton Foundation and the Pinkerton Fellowship Initiative at John Jay College in Collaboration with the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation of New York City

John Jay College of Criminal Justice
524 West 59th Street
New York, NY
2nd Floor Dining Hall

May 5, 2014
8:30 a.m. — 12:00 p.m.

New York’s Close to Home (C2H) initiative is a potentially important step forward for youth justice reform, but how well is it working? How significant is it in the context of other reform efforts around the country? Is C2H simply about relocating residential services for youth, or does it have broader and more important policy implications? At the 4th Pinkerton Symposium on Youth Justice, speakers and audience members will examine the C2H initiative and discuss a new report about the initiative to be released at the symposium and published by John Jay College’s Research & Evaluation Center. The report was funded by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Pinkerton Foundation.

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CLOSE TO HOME

icon_home1New York’s Close to Home initiative is an effort to “realign” the services and supports available for justice-involved young people as well as the residential facilities on which the youth justice system relies to meet its public safety obligations. Ideally, all services and sanctions should be as close as possible to each youth’s home and family. Keeping youth close to their own communities enables families to remain involved in the social and emotional development of their children and to forge stronger connections with educational and treatment supports. Close to Home also allows youths to remain attached to school during and after placement and for the school credits they earn during placement to count towards their academic progress. The Close to Home framework holds great promise, but how well are the new practices being implemented? Will they actually lead to better outcomes for youth and greater cost-effectiveness for the public? These important questions have yet to be answered.

AGENDA

8:30 —   9:00
Registration and Light Breakfast

9:00 —   9:05
Welcoming Comments and Introductory Statements

9:05 —   9:15
Opening Presentation: Youth Justice and the Problem of Confinement
— Elizabeth Glazer

9:15 —   9:30
What’s Different? — Review of Recent City Trends
— Jennifer Fratello

9:30 —  9:50
Release and Summary of New John Jay Report
— Evan Elkin

9:50 — 10:00   Break

10:00 — 10:50
Respondent Panel #1  with Audience Participation
— Carla Barrett, Jeffrey Butts, Lila Kazemian, Karin Martin

10:50 — 11:00    Break

11:00 — 11:50
Respondent Panel #2 with Audience Participation
—Ana Bermúdez, Gladys Carrión, Mishi Faruqee, Jeremy Kohomban, Vinny Schiraldi

11:50    Final Comments and Adjournment

FEATURED SPEAKERS

head_Barrett_bwCarla Barrett is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her book, Courting Kids: Inside an Experimental Youth Court (2013) is based on extensive research on how youth are tried as adults in New York and the need for more humane policies and rehabilitation programs for youth. Her research interests include the over-criminalization of urban youth, the consequences of criminal justice legislation on young people, and the efficacy of Alternative to Incarceration (ATI) programs. Carla is a graduate of Evergreen State College in Washington. She holds a Masters from the New School for Social Research and she earned the Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
head_Bermudez_bwAna Bermúdez is Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. Before being appointed Commissioner by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014, she served as Deputy Commissioner of Probation and as director for juvenile justice programs at New York’s Children’s Aid Society. Previously, she worked at CASES (the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services), including four years as co-director of Community Prep High School, a transitional school for court-involved students.  Ana began her legal career with the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society (Bronx Office). She graduated from Brown University and earned a law degree from Yale University.
head_jbutts_bwJeffrey A. Butts is director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). Previously, he was a research fellow with Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, director of the Program on Youth Justice at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and senior research associate at the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh. Since 1990, Jeff managed more than $16 million of research projects and worked with policymakers and justice practitioners in 28 states. He began his justice career as a drug and alcohol counselor with the juvenile court in Eugene, Oregon where he graduated from the University of Oregon. He earned the Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.
head_Carrion_bwGladys Carrión is New York City’s Commissioner for the Administration for Children’s Services. Previously, she served as Commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS). Under her leadership, OCFS shut down more than a dozen of the State’s most problematic juvenile confinement facilities, rerouting youthful offenders into less costly and more effective therapeutic programs located closer to home. Commissioner Carrión’s career on behalf of low-income youth and families in New York began at Bronx Legal Services. She also served as Commissioner of New York City’s Community Development Agency under Mayor David Dinkins. Gladys is a graduate of Fordham University and New York University School of Law.
head_elkin_bwEvan Elkin is a consultant with a number of clients, including the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and he serves as a treatment fellow with Reclaiming Futures, a non-profit organization that disseminates best-practice treatment strategies to juvenile courts throughout the U.S. Previously, he was director of planning and government innovation and a member of the senior management team for the Vera Institute of Justice, overseeing work in the areas of child welfare and justice and developing Vera’s acclaimed Adolescent Portable Therapy program. Evan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and he holds a masters in clinical psychology from New York University.
head_Faruqee_bw-240x300Mishi Faruqee is the Juvenile Justice Policy Strategist at the national ACLU. Prior to joining the ACLU, Mishi worked at the Correctional Association of New York for 10 years, first as the Director of the Women in Prison Project and later as the Director of the Juvenile Justice Project. She also served as the Director of Youth Justice Programs at the Children’s Defense Fund-NY and as Special Assistant to the Commissioner at the New York City Department of Probation, where she helped staff an inter-agency planning group for the Close to Home Initiative. Mishi received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and holds graduate degrees from Oxford University and the New School for Social Research.
head_Fratello_bwJennifer Fratello is the Director of Research in Vera’s Center on Youth Justice. She manages a portfolio of applied research that involves working with government partners on a variety of reform initiatives, including efforts to promote data-driven decision-making throughout the juvenile justice system in New York City, and research focusing on institutions that pull young people into the justice system, such as stop and frisk policing, school discipline, and status offender policies. She is working with several jurisdictions across the country to study the role of race in prosecutorial decision-making. Prior to joining Vera, she worked as an evaluator of programs for delinquent youth in Philadelphia. Jennifer has a BA from The College of New Jersey and an MA in criminal justice from Temple University.
head_glazer_bwElizabeth Glazer is Director of the New York City Office of Criminal Justice. Previously, she was chief advisor to Governor Cuomo on criminal justice and homeland security policy, serving as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety. She has also served as Chair of the New York State Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, Special Counsel to the New York State Attorney General, and she held a variety of leadership positions in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and at the New York City Departments of Juvenile Justice and Investigation. Liz graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and she received the J.D. from Columbia Law School.
????????Lila Kazemian is a faculty member at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center. She joined the Department of Sociology at John Jay in 2006 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Her research focuses on life-course and criminal careers, desistance from crime, prisoner reentry, and comparative criminology. Lila earned the Ph.D. at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, in England.
head_Kohomban_bwJeremy Christopher Kohomban is the President and CEO of The Children’s Village, The Institute’s Center for Child Welfare Research at the Children’s Village Institute, and the President of Harlem Dowling.  Children’s Village and Harlem Dowling provide a broad continuum of programs including evidence-based supports for families, shelters for homeless youth and immigrant children, alternatives to incarceration, non-secure detention, adoption and foster care services, alternative schools, affordable housing, and specialized services for nearly 20,000 children and families annually. Jeremy graduated from Teacher’s College in Kansas, holds a Masters from Long Island University in New York, and a Ph.D. from the School for Leadership in Virginia.
head_Martin_bwKarin Martin is a member of the faculty in the Department of Public Management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Previously, she was a post-doctoral scholar in the psychology Department at UCLA where she was also a Fellow with the Consortium for Policing Equity. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Research on Social Change at UC Berkeley, a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Fellow, and a National Science Foundation-funded Fellow. Her area of expertise is crime policy with an emphasis on institutional interpretations of criminal behavior and the role of “extra-legal” factors (i.e. race, gender, education, income, etc.) throughout the justice system. Karin is a graduate of Stanford University and she earned the MPP and Ph.D. in public policy at the University of Calfornia, Berkeley.
schiraldi_head_bwVinny Schiraldi is Senior Advisor to the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in New York City. Previously, he was Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation and led the Department’s efforts to reinvent the City’s approach to youth justice. Before moving back to his hometown of New York, he served as Washington, DC’s first-ever Director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, where he also launched major reforms, and he founded two nonprofit organizations during his career: the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice in California and the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Vinny graduated from Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY and he earned a Masters in Social Work from New York University.