Maryland’s juvenile services system is under fresh scrutiny. So now is Secretary Vincent Schiraldi.

Before taking on the challenge of addressing youth crime during the 2024 legislative session, Maryland lawmakers listened at town halls and to briefings from prosecutors, defense attorneys, police, medical personnel and impacted families. So did Maryland Department of Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi, Gov. Wes Moore’s controversial, reform-focused cabinet pick.

Schiraldi, chosen by Moore to helm an understaffed and financially mismanaged agency as firearm possession and car theft charges among Maryland youth increased, is heralded by many juvenile justice advocates as an expert in his field and an exciting pick to head the department responsible for tamping down youth crime.

But his rehabilitative philosophy has rattled Republican lawmakers, law enforcement, state prosecutors and members of the public who believe the state’s juvenile justice system lacks oversight and accountability for children who commit crimes.

Before coming to Maryland, Schiraldi founded the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco and the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute, which focuses on reducing the use of incarceration in the U.S. He then served as director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services in Washington, D.C., for five years before taking a post in New York City.

Near the end of his tenure in Washington, a 2010 investigation by the district’s inspector general found Schiraldi responsible for the escape of a boy who was living at a secure residential facility operated by the agency he headed. It also found that he delayed reporting the missing resident to law enforcement for two hours.

According the inspector general’s report, in May 2008, one of three residents from the city’s Oak Hill Youth Center escaped from a cookout at Schiraldi’s Northwest Washington home with agency staff. The report found Schiraldi violated agency policy by taking the children off campus without a court order and by waiving a mandate that they be restrained. Ultimately, one went to the basement and escaped. Police arrested him nearly a month later on a drug charge. The report said Schiraldi accepted responsibility for the escape.

The inspector general’s report was released Jan. 28, 2010. Schiraldi began serving as New York City’s probation commissioner the next month. He held that position for about four years, then was an adviser to the New York mayor’s criminal justice office before heading the city’s corrections department for about eight months. When Democrat Eric Adams took office in 2022, he picked a new commissioner.

Maryland state Sen. Antonio Hayes is a Baltimore Democrat who chairs the Senate’s Executive Nominations Committee. He served as the committee’s vice chair during Schiraldi’s confirmation process last year. Hayes told The Baltimore Sun that the incident involving the Oak Hill Youth Center resident did not come up during questioning and was not discussed during Schiraldi’s confirmation hearings.

David Schuhlein, a spokesman for Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, confirmed that Ferguson, who also sits on the Executive Nominations Committee, was unaware of the incident during Schiraldi’s confirmation hearings.

Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey, a representative of the upper Eastern Shore, said that he also was unaware of the escaped resident during the hearings. He and the rest of the Senate’s Minority Caucus voted to oppose Schiraldi’s appointment based on other concerns, including the nominee’s philosophical ideology regarding rehabilitation.

“From a Republican Caucus standpoint, we had concerns immediately when he was up [for confirmation],” Hershey said. “To hear these other stories, I would just say that’s unfortunate given his responsibility to care for juveniles.”

The governor’s office declined to comment. Schiraldi gave an interview earlier this month to The Sun for this article. However, juvenile services department spokesman Eric Solomon declined to comment about the inspector general’s report, published Jan. 23 by WBFF-TV in Baltimore, or make Schiraldi available for questions about it.

“I love this job. I love the potential to both help young people turn their lives around and improve safety,” Schiraldi told The Sun in early January. “I can feel that people are crying out for that.”

At a news conference earlier this month, Moore remained firm in his support for Schiraldi, who he met when both worked in New York. Moore was the CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit focused on fighting poverty.

“When we entered office last year, there was a measured brokenness in the Department of Juvenile Services,” Moore said. “We still have a lot of work to do, but if there’s anyone who is up to the job, it’s our secretary of juvenile services, Vinny Schiraldi.”

Others, however, still balk at appointment of Schiraldi, whose annual salary is $223,686.

As certain crimes among youth have increased, some Marylanders have called for his resignation. Republican lawmakers have publicly wrung their hands over his focus on rehabilitation, saying that it may come at the expense of accountability.

“I wouldn’t want his job. [The Department of Juvenile Services] is gonna get blamed for everything,” said Keith Wallington, the director of advocacy at the Justice Policy Institute, during a phone interview earlier this month.

After his confirmation last February, Schiraldi said he was “surprised” at how much the state and the agency had “disinvested” in community programming and collaboration with stakeholders in the legal system. Schiraldi also was shocked by the agency’s financial history, reporting the department had either cut from its budget or returned to the state at the end of the fiscal year approximately $134 million over the past decade, “much of which really should have gone to bolstering up the continuum of care for a group of kids that’s in need of services, supports and opportunities,” he said.

Schiraldi has said the agency has re-focused priorities into assisting kids who are most at risk of becoming “victims or perpetrators” of gun violence. He said the department is pumping resources into violence interruption programming like the Thrive Academy, which focuses on providing kids “very, very serious services, support and opportunities to nudge them away from gun violence and toward a more productive life.”

“But before that,” Schiraldi told The Sun, “the department had nothing specifically targeting kids engaged in gun violence.”

Solomon, the juvenile services department spokesman, said the Thrive Academy has received $2.6 million between state, federal and private funding. According to the governor’s budget proposal, it could get another $4.4 million in fiscal year 2025.

The agency also has started Dialectical Behavior Therapy programs for kids at certain facilities. According to Sheppard Pratt, that is a treatment that teaches patients the skills to allow them to experience tough feelings without acting on them.

Meanwhile, the secretary has been the target of rampant criticism among Marylanders and some lawmakers for the rise in vehicle- and firearm-related crimes among minors.

A January report issued by the Maryland Youth Justice Coalition demonstrated a significant downward trend in juvenile crime across the country between 1997 and 2019. Complaints against Maryland children, alone, dropped by 55% between 2010 and 2019.

However, certain crimes have been on the rise since the coronavirus pandemic. The Maryland Youth Justice Coalition’s report said that car thefts are up 65%, carjackings 85% and firearms offenses a staggering 200% among Maryland kids from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2023 — despite overall youth crime rates remaining low.

Schiraldi acknowledges that some Marylanders don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods. He faced the impact youth crime has on communities during a South Baltimore town hall in late December, when he traded barbs with a representative from the office of Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates over statistics, agency responsibility and interpretations of Maryland law. Toward the end of the meeting, some audience members called for his resignation.

Chalking it up to “a bad night,” Schiraldi told The Sun that his agency has “a fairly good working relationship” with local police and prosecutors. But the tense back-and-forth between Schiraldi and Cate Rosenblatt, the juvenile deputy division chief in the Baltimore prosecutor’s office, demonstrated miscommunication between the offices, stoking frustration among some lawmakers.

“The finger pointing is exhausting,” said House Judiciary Committee Chair Luke Clippinger, a Democrat. “It’s not any one part of the process.”

Asked about his working relationship with Schiraldi, Bates said he is “optimistic about the partnership’s future.”

“We are both laser-focused on ensuring better outcomes for our young people and while I wholeheartedly support his efforts to rehabilitate our youth, that must begin with accountability,” Bates said in a statement to The Sun.

The lack of coordination between the Department of Juvenile Services, local prosecutors and local law enforcement was the Senate president’s primary frustration. In an interview with The Sun in early December, Ferguson, a Democrat, urged Moore to create an oversight system to facilitate easier communication between agencies that kids interact with, which the governor did via executive order last week.

Schiraldi called the criticism of the general lack of communication between his and other agencies “absolutely accurate, and something that we’ve identified and are working to improve.”