Vincent N. Schiraldi brings more than 24 years of working with troubled youth and juvenile justice systems to the District of Columbia.  As Director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS), Mr. Schiraldi oversees the agency’s $58 million dollar budget and has begun transforming the department by creating one of the nation’s best continuums of care that is strength based and community and family focused.

Prior to his appointment, Mr. Schiraldi founded the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), in 2002, where he served as the Executive Director.  The JPI conducts research on the impact of mass incarceration and the overrepresentation of people of color behind bars, and has worked collaboratively on criminal and juvenile justice campaigns in Alabama, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and Texas.

The JPI grew out of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), a private, non-profit criminal/juvenile justice agency dedicated to reducing society’s reliance on imprisonment as a solution to social problems, which Mr. Schiraldi founded in 1991.  As Executive Director, Mr. Schiraldi supervised all phases of agency operations.  Successful projects included juvenile justice programming, continuum of care programming, an alternative sentencing program, the supervised citation release program and a supportive living program.

Mr. Schiraldi also worked with the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, both in New York City and San Francisco for nine years.  Among its successful programs was the Parole Assistance Project, which developed social service plans for 156 California Department of Corrections parolees.

A recognized expert in the field of juvenile justice, Mr. Schiraldi has provided research findings and commentaries that have been covered on the Today Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post, evening newscasts for ABC, CBS and NBC, National Public Radio, CNN and the BBC to name a few. He has also published numerous papers and articles on the topic, and has spoken before a variety of academic and governmental audiences.  He served as an advisor on the Washington, DC, Blue Ribbon Commission on Youth Safety and Juvenile Justice Reform in 2001, and has been a member or advisor to the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management, the California Commission on the Status of African American Men, and was the founding Chair of San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission in 1990.

Mr. Schiraldi received his Masters in Social Work from New York University and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Psychology from Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY.