Jerry McElroy, executive director of the Criminal Justice Agency talks about running New York City’s pretrial services agency.
You started your career as a professor, but then made your way to what is now the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). Can you describe why you made that transition?
Yes, I started my career as a teacher at Fordham, New York University, and John Jay College. One day, a colleague of mine was contacted by the New York State Office of Crime Control Planning (now called DCJS) and invited to join the agency. He didn’t want the job, but he recommended me for it. I went to talk to a couple of the agency’s leaders, and it seemed like a good fit. I thought it would be interesting because my academic background was largely about theories of crime causation, not criminal justice operations. It would give me an opportunity to learn something about the system. Sure enough, over the course of my first six months, I learned more about the criminal justice system than I had during all of the years prior to that.
How was the agency structured when you started there in 1969?
The New York State Office of Crime Control Planning was a criminal justice planning agency operating under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) at the U.S. Department of Justice that set out to develop a plan for how grants, once approved by the Feds, would be dispersed for special projects within local units of government. There were only about eight people at the agency when I started working there. It was an exciting time because we were trying to create something from scratch. By the time I left, we had local planning units statewide and upwards of 100 staff.
What events spurred the creation of the agency?
A key factor was the federal decision to start sending money into the states for system-level change. It was the late 1960s, a period of significant upheaval in the United States, and there was a lot of money going into offensive military equipment for the state, but not much into bigger-picture thinking about the criminal justice system and its operations. New sources of funding allowed jurisdictions to put some thought into it. It became pretty clear that it is not a “system” at all, but rather a network or group of agencies that relate to each other in some ways, but not in others.
Given that context, how did you establish the agency’s funding priorities?
Right away, we made a few hard and fast rules, including that we weren’t going to award grants for law enforcement equipment. That wasn’t greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm from police agencies, but we thought it was important to stick to. Instead, we tried to put an emphasis on community corrections, diversion, and other efforts to humanize correctional institutions. For example, I was there during the Attica Rebellion, which was an unmitigated disaster. Our approach there was simple – to provide money for food, clothing, and other basic needs to address some of the complaints from inmates. The development of county-based pretrial services agencies was another fairly substantial investment towards this end. We also had to make tough decisions about geographic priorities. New York City seemed deserving of a large share of the funding, but we wanted to make sure it was for the right reasons – not political ones. That was also an unpopular decision among smaller jurisdictions. Everyone wanted more money allocated to their jurisdiction, even New York City. All in all, I think we handled the political pressure pretty well. People say: you win some, you lose some. But I really believe we won far more than we lost.
Were there some guiding principles in those early days that helped you to define the mission of the agency?
When the agency started, the leadership – by and large – had the right values. The primary priority was to do no harm. There was considerable potential at that time to do a fair amount of harm, so we wanted to avoid that. What that meant for people like me – a step below those at the top – was the mandate to try to translate those values into programmatic themes and specific initiatives. It was a very comfortable and inspiring value context to work within.
How have you worked to create that positive value context in your current position at the Criminal Justice Agency (CJA)?
By the time I got to CJA [New York City’s pre-trial service agency] in 1989, the agency had pretrial interview operations citywide and a pretty good information system. We were already starting to become part of the system through a regular presence in local criminal courts. Therefore my role has been to keep this history alive by emphasizing it with new staff coming into the agency. It’s important to show where we come from – a commitment to justice. Today, I think we help the system operate more effectively and efficiently, but that’s not why the agency was created and it’s not our primary mission today. We’re about giving everyone who comes into the system an opportunity to be considered for release on recognizance (ROR). That’s an important value that I think should drive the work of everyone in the agency.
Have you led the agency down new paths that were unexpected but ultimately positive?
Yes, our supervised release program is a good example of that. We didn’t originally propose to offer supervised release services in New York City because we were concerned that if we offered criminal court arraignment judges a supervised release option, it would be used in large part for people who should have been ROR’d. But about ten years ago, we were able to revisit our risk assessment system – which had previously only provided low and high risk determinations – and fine-tune it to more effectively distinguish between low, moderate, and high risk defendants. With this more nuanced assessment tool, we felt comfortable designing a supervised release option for the medium risk population. Of course, developing these tools costs money. We’ve only piloted the program in Queens so far – the borough where we recommend ROR the most, but where those defendants are released the least frequent. We’re hoping for additional funding to expand the model to other boroughs.
What role do you think independent non-profits, like CJA, play in promoting criminal justice reform?
The answer to that question is very often a comparison between independent non-profits with what is alleged to be the official state or city bureaucracy. Bureaucracies change slowly and with difficulty – you can’t hire and fire the right people, etc. I think there’s something to that line of discussion, but I also think it’s exaggerated. The biggest advantage non-profits have is, when they begin, they are not part of the official system, so they don’t have a particular set of responsibilities they need to protect. Instead, they’re usually beginning because they have a new idea they’re trying to introduce into the system and they’re able to work very hard at making that happen. Non-profits also tend to have an internal capacity to gather and use data to reflect on their own experiences, or have ties with an organization that is able to serve that function for them. How are we doing and how might we be doing better? Who are the groups that could be effectively served but we’re missing? Why are we missing them? Those questions are crucial to the ongoing success of non-profits and ultimately crucial to incremental reform of the system.
How was that groundwork laid at CJA?
There was a conscious effort in 1977 to spin off the Vera Institute’s pretrial project into a separate entity (now CJA), as opposed to folding it into the Department of Probation. One motivation was the hope that it would avoid some of the bureaucratic traps of government. Also, the hope was that the pretrial agency might have a better opportunity to flourish if it wasn’t competing with the other priorities of the probation department. The other important piece was our information system. We’ve used CJA’s data system internally to review our own programs, but also to undertake some pretty serious research on a variety of issues that are of consequence to the city and the state. We are essentially on retainer from the criminal justice coordinator’s office to provide various data sets and provide data for other non-profits, such as alternative to incarceration programs. My predecessors recognized early on that our data system would be the agency’s primary corporate asset (and it still is). By forming CJA as a separate agency with a separate board, we have been able to protect our data system against potentially inappropriate use for political purposes.
How does the local political climate affect the work that CJA does?
We’re in a great place right now, since John Feinblatt became the Criminal Justice Coordinator and Michele Sviridoff his deputy, because they really understand CJA’s value to the work they do. With the prior administration, I don’t recall being specifically inhibited by them, but they didn’t ever see CJA as an organization that could help them get a better handle on various policy options. And interagency collaboration can be challenging for a host of other reasons. Many years ago, the City convened a multi-agency planning committee to collaborate in the design and implementation of an integrated criminal justice information system. Although I believe individual agencies got some benefit from the experience, the desired result was not achieved. Today the technology makes the creation of an integrated data-sharing system achievable.
How has the budget crisis impacted your work?
I shouldn’t complain too vigorously – we did reasonably well in the recent budget wars. But it’s going to be challenging to secure enough money to continue the operation of the system we already have, let alone make new incremental reforms. And some programmatic changes (and their corresponding costs) are largely beyond our control. For example, when the city decided to convert to e-arraignment in two boroughs, that required huge changes on our end because we’re one of the first agencies that feeds information into the system. As a consequence, costs begin to rise and our systems unit required more staffing. Not only do the changes require a lot of work, but an e-arraignment system is also incredibly time sensitive and necessitates constant oversight. The last thing you can tolerate is the system going down, so when it does go down, you need people who know exactly what to do to get it back up as quickly as possible. That creates both a training challenge, as well as a staffing and scheduling problem of how to turn our technology unit into an around-the-clock shop.
Can you describe an experience or opportunity that you think was particularly impactful in shaping your career?
There are lots of opportunities that influenced my career, but I can give one specific example. I had maintained regular contact with Herb Sturz throughout my career, the founding director of the Vera Institute. At one point, Herb was being considered for the role of director of LEAA. I remember him asking me to lunch to talk about my perceptions of the agency. After our meeting, I told him I wanted to jot down some notes from our discussion. I wound up writing him an 18-page letter about LEAA – an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. Herb obviously liked the letter and said: if I take this job, would you be interested in coming to Washington? I said it would depend on the job. As it turned out, Herb decided not to take the position, but had a backup proposal: you wouldn’t be interested in coming to Vera would you? That led me to Vera for 11 years, where I was the director of research, then associate director. For me, it was a wonderful place to work – full of smart and creative people who had their heads in the right place and had the right values. I still serve on their Institutional Review Board.
What do you think is the role of academia in bringing about change within the criminal justice system?
It seems to me that the people who tend to become reform leaders – actually moving systems to change and attempting to translate the goals and values of change into practice – are not academics. And that’s understandable. The academy doesn’t really train you to do that kind of work (advanced degrees in public administration may be an exception). But if you look at major change leaders in the criminal justice field, many of them have academic backgrounds, but then moved out of the academy. The critical piece is, although these reform leaders are not academics, they have respect for the academic world and an intellectual curiosity that attunes them to how the academic world can guide them. They make use of what the latest research is showing and are helpful to researchers in providing data that will help further develop the knowledge base. That relationship is crucial.
What single piece of advice would you give to your successor?
Specific to our current pretrial work, I would encourage my successor to continue to push for incremental change, like the expansion our supervised release program in Queens. But more broadly, I would hope my successor would try to keep an eye on how CJA’s resources can best be utilized to look carefully at the entire ball of wax. How can a series of incremental adjustments change the entire pretrial system? It might also help if the new director has some real knowledge of computer systems. Currently, I’m the member of the executive staff with the least knowledge in the operations of the system we use.