Do not turn NYC’s probation officers into cops

As a former Probation and correction commissioner of New York, I consider the proposals within the administration of the mayor Adams to use probation agents such as the crowd control police during ice demonstrations to be part of a disastrous series of ideas involving the formerly respected probation service of the city.

I immediately transmitted a news of this bizarre suggestion to three previous probation commissioners who served under four different mayors. Their answers were: “Expensive God”, “It’s disgusting” and “speechless …”

Dalvanie Powell, President of the United Probation Offices Association said the best: “Pulling the probation agents in high -risk assignments completely outside our workfield is dangerous, reckless and insulting … It is a crisis that awaits to occur.”

Probation was established in 1841 by Boston Cobbler John Augustus, a reformed alcoholic whose efforts aimed to reduce unnecessary imprisonment. He and his colleagues in the temperance movement volunteered as the first probation agents in the world, seeking to “raise the reform (and) reform of the criminal”.

Probation was a rehabilitation project which shamelessly hoped until the 1970s, when the criminal justice systems took a difficult turn to the right. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a “war against drugs” as part of his “southern strategy” to take off from reliable democratic votes from southern states alarmed by civil rights and anti-war activism.

Nixon helps John Ehrlichman noted: “[Nixon] Had two enemies: the anti-war and black left … We knew that we could not make illegal to be either against war or blacks, but bringing the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with the heroine, we could … stop their leaders, make a descent, break their meetings and vilile them night after night. Did we know that we are lying on drugs? Of course, we did it.

This marked the launch of what would later become known as mass incarceration, a policy under which the American prison population has multiplied by eight from 1972 to 2008.

Above the same time, sociologist Robert Martinson wrote a report declaring that “nothing works” with regard to the rehabilitation of people in prison. Despite some dubious mathematics, which Martinson himself would retract and later call “shit”, his relationship has become one of the most cited criminological studies in history. He was particularly hard about probation, calling him “a standing joke”.

Probation services suddenly suffered pressure to become difficult. Probation agents have put on leaf jackets, began to conduct the police and launched “community corrections” – prison conditions in the community – to reflect their cousin Grand, prison. Implisonment for violations of probation like staying outside the curfew or drug use, with one in four people imprisoned not for new offenses, but for violations of non-criminal rules.

In 2003, NYC Probation joined the punitive melee, allowing staff weapons. During the seven years of that moment and when I started as a commissioner, several members of the staff committed suicide with their service weapons in the pressure environment of pressure pressure; None had used their weapons in the exercise of his functions.

Probation practices began to soften during the new century. More than 100 community supervision leaders across the country have signed a statement calling for “probation and parole to be considerably reduced, less punitive and more optimistic, fair and restorative”. Community supervision populations have dropped more than a quarter compared to their 2007 peak. When I ran to New York, there were 30,000 adults and juveniles under supervision; Now there are about 11,000.

Unfortunately, in 2023, the mayor Adams appointed Juanita Holmes – a more punitive era – as a probation commissioner, one of the not considered public security appointments in Adams. Her work was equivalent to Holmes “failed upwards”, after she publicly tangled with her previous boss, the former commissioner of the NYPD, Keechant Sewell.

The 36 -year -old NYPD veteran without probation experience immediately brought an approach to applying the law, forcing that all staff members carry weapons and staff focused on social work uniforms. When they are ordered to carry weapons, several respected assistant commissioners have resigned.

In less than three years, it has become a very respected department of the one who has prevented rehabilitation to the one whose motto can also be “trails”, nails and prisons “. As so many exclusively “difficult to crime” approaches, it has failed to offer public security; Recidivism of probation people increased by 19% during Holmes’ mandate.

From now on, city leaders are playing the deployment of non -trained personnel in law enforcement practices to control the crowds during the right of the first amendment to the Assembly. With a new mayor probably in January, Holmes’ mandate cannot end early enough.

Schiraldi was a probation commissioner under the mayor Mike Bloomberg and is the author of “Mass supervision: Probation, Conditional Liberation and Illusion of Security and Liberty”.