Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

The following excerpt comes from “JJ Today”, the juvenile justice blog of Youth Today.

***Day number 809 without a nominee from the Obama Administration to serve as administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. When the administration decides on an appointee, according to David Baumann of Main Justice, it could result in a quick movement from nominee to administrator.

According to Baumann’s March 30 article, Senate leadership from both parties made a gentlemen’s agreement at the beginning of the 112th Congress that, among other things, would mean certain presidential nominees would “no longer have to be confirmed.”

Legislation offered last week by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) would permanently exempt about 200 nominees from Senate confirmation. A breakdown of the exempted nominees is listed in this article from Canada Views (not sure why Canada cares about this, but we’re glad they do).

Among the slots to which this would apply: OJJDP administrator.

Among some of the old guard of juvenile advocates – many of whom fought for OJJDP to exist, survive and matter – there is a sense that removing the confirmation requirement from the OJJDP will downgrade the entire federal role in juvenile justice. There are two sides to this coin:

Confirmed: Requiring Senate confirmation elevates the level of the OJJDP as a whole. It is an agency that Republican administrations have targeted for elimination in the past. All of the confirmed people at divisions of the Office of Justice Programs answer to the confirmed person that heads OJP (right now, it’s Laurie Robinson), and she, of course, answers to Attorney General Eric Holder. But because OJJDP is Senate-confirmed, there is some expectation that the person will have authority over what statements the agency makes and how it spends its discretionary money.

The primary downside is the confirmation process itself, and how brutal it has become. It took the Bush administration two years to get an OJJDP administrator confirmed and, as mentioned, we are now past the 800-day mark with the Obama administration without so much as a nominee.

Not confirmed: It would be much easier to get somebody into the slot early in an administration without requiring  Senate confirmation. The downside is that less prominent candidates would be attracted to a political slot with a lower profile, where they would almost certainly be a worker bee for the Senate-confirmed OJP appointee. On the other hand, if the White House wanted someone dynamic in the slot, it could put them in without the political theater that sometimes accompanies these appointments.

For example: let’s say folks at the administration and Justice wanted Vincent Schiraldi to lead OJJDP. He is a person who had a lot of support from the field, but more than one Beltway veteran told us that Schiraldi would have had a tough go of it during the confirmation process because he had a Washington Post columnist crusading against reforms of the system during his last two years heady the agency in Washington, D.C.

Did Schiraldi do a great job reforming D.C.? It would be fair to debate his legacy. But his experience there, and his time leading the Justice Policy Institute, certainly renders him a qualified candidate to lead OJJDP. In that hypothetical case, the nominee could have been put to work sooner without Senate confirmation.

Thoughts on changing this process?  Does the Senate confirmation of the OJJDP Administrator help or harm juvenile justice nationally?