Youth Today Exchange

1987–1989
Accomplishments

Verne L. Speirs arrived at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to quiet things down after the impossible-to-ignore tenure of Alfred Regnery.

He arrived with 14 years of on-the-ground and administrative experience in criminal justice. In many ways, he was a parallel to Ira Schwartz: Both headed OJJDP after the tenures of controversial administrators; both were tasked with quelling controversies; both brought back the more widespread use of systematic procedures for evaluating and awarding grants; and both served short terms at the end of presidential administrations.

How He Got the Job

After Regnery stepped down in early 1997, the Reagan administration looked for someone to run OJJDP in a more quiet way. With the administration now in the seventh of its eight years, the gung-ho drive to remake Washington in its conservative vision had given way to the more practical mission of running what was now the Reagan government.

Since 1985, Speirs had been administrator of the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime, a significant office in a presidential administration that had sought to refocus criminal justice efforts toward  serving victims and punishing lawbreakers. It’s worth remembering that in 1982, the president’s Task Force on Victims of Crime had recommended reevaluating OJJDP with a victim-centric approach in mind.

The chair of that task force was Assistant Attorney General Lois Harrington, who admired Speirs’s work at Justice. James Wootten, who had been Regnery’s deputy at OJJDP, says Harrington was the person who suggested Speirs and gave his nomination political heft at the White House:

“Verne had a champion in Lois Harrington.”

Speirs recalls:

“Judge Harrington approached me about taking over OJJDP. She had a discussion with [Attorney General] Ed Meese.”

Recalls Meese, a California native:

“He had an impeccable résumé. He had been chief probation officer in Sacramento County. I knew of his work. I thought we were very fortunate” to have him available.

Aside from serving as a supervising probation officer in Sacramento, Speirs’s experience included stints with the California Board of corrections, the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning and the Law and Justice Agency for Sacramento County.

Speirs says OJJDP was a good fit for him:

“My experience in writing grants the local level, working in California state corrections and community corrections – it was a very nice fit, because I knew the field. When you talked about intake or courts or services, it was something I was very familiar with. I found it to be a very appealing opportunity.”

For several months he served as administrator of both the victims’ office and OJJDP.

His Mission

The Reagan White House of 1987 had a significantly different mood than it had in the early 1980s, when it sought to change OJJDP’s course from liberal toward conservative. Did anyone talk with Speirs about being a “Reaganite” at OJJDP, or was he told anything about running the office the same or differently than Regnery? Says Speirs:

“No. I was asked, based upon my – very candidly, the reputation I had – to just come in and assume the leadership. Review the office. Make sure we’re serving the field.

“There was nothing where somebody came in and said, ‘By God,  X, Y and Z.’ They said, ‘We need leadership. Make sure the office and the grants and the projects are being well managed and meeting their goals.’ ”

It was reminiscent of when former Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh told Schwartz to “just make it right.” (See the story about the Schwartz Era.)

Speirs’s confirmation hearing may have been the mildest of any for an OJJDP nominee. Speirs recalls:

“It was very straightforward. I remember, I think it was Sen. [Joe] Biden [D-Del.] chairing, [and] his thrust was that juvenile justice is important, the issue of dealing with young people is extremely important. … You need to be advocating for young people and advocating for the system.”

Some in the juvenile justice field were not happy that Speirs’s experience included little, if any, focus on youth issues. But they were, for the most part, happy with the change.

A New Tone

The change at OJJDP was sudden and drastic. Wootten observes:

“He was well thought of as an administrator. He had a personality that was not risk-taking and confrontational. … Post-Al and me, he represented a kind of quiet period for everybody.”

Speirs was an administrator who set about looking at processes:

“My leadership style was to walk in and review the entire organization. … We spent a lot of time initially really looking at everything that was going on in that shop.”

Thus it is remembered as a time of maintenance, not innovation. Says longtime OJJDP staffer John Wilson, who twice served as acting administrator:

“His was a very quiet time. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything significant that happened.”

Adds seasoned staffer Emily Martin:

“Verne did not make any waves. … He just believed in getting along with the staff.”

But Speirs and his staff were focused:

“It was an early office and it was a hard-working office. The young staff there were mission-driven.

“I’d get in the office at 6:30 in the morning,” but he wasn’t even the ffirst one in. Others “hit the office about quarter to 7.”

Dropping Grants

Speirs did drop some of the more controversial grants from the Regnery era. He recalls terminating “a major drug program grant” because “we couldn’t track the money or determine the results.” Perhaps the biggest drop was the Judith Reisman study of the link between pornography and child sex abuse:

“There was a lot of focus on some of the pornography grants. That just seemed to be an area that had a lot of questions about the outcome of the data that was collected. We spent a lot of time trying to make a decision, ‘Was the research design valid?’

“The discussion was whether Juvenile Justice would publish the results. We decided not to publish.”

That decision rankled Reisman for years. In 2006, she referred to the project this way on her own website:

“Our project – to document where pornography was causal in crime – was promptly spiked at the highest government echelons, never to emerge again.”

Speirs says the grants he dropped just didn’t fit the agency’s priorities anymore, but it is also clear that he didn’t want his own tenure hampered by controversies over certain awards given out by his predecessor:

“We needed to move on and look at where we needed to go.”

Wootten, Regnery’s deputy, understood:

“He pulled back from many things” that Regnery started. “I think he decided they were our problems, not his.”

Wilson recalls an interesting postscript after Reisman’s grant was dropped: The researcher mailed out some material related to her work on the project that included images that some considered pornographic:

“We debated whether we had to submit this to the postmaster general” as a possible violation of federal laws prohibiting sending pornography through the mail.

Awarding Grants

Like Schwartz, Speirs reached out to experts in the field to help determine where OJJDP’s money should go:

“One thing we looked at is how do we determine what are the needs of the field and where are the areas that we should really be looking at to consider for grants. We put together a panel – I think it was about 32 practitioners from around the United States. …

“It was across the board, from courts to correctional institutions. We asked some of them to write short white papers on areas of concern or that they felt should be looked at.  We had a three-day meeting with this group; they presented their papers. We used that as a guide to look at where would we invest the dollars or where would we expand a project.”

OJJDP returned to more use of competitive grants, with bids scored by panels of experts or by staff:

“We looked at bringing people to review the RFP” [request for proposals] responses using “experts in the field. You wanted to use that process to direct your funding.”

But the Reagan administration’s continuing focus on evidence of effectiveness remained. Speirs says:

“We went back and looked at strengthening the way the RFPs were sent out, focusing on looking at results in the grant projects. What were the returns on the dollar invested? It was really trying to get some type of a fix on why were we granting the money.”

He acknowledges that this hurt some programs that seemed on the surface to be doing good work:

“There were things that came to my attention that were pretty undefined. They probably had some good-feel-type of approaches. You didn’t  have the evidence. …  We had some proposals where we could not determine what in the world the outcome would be.”

Some organizations, however, had successfully established themselves as almost permanent grantees, because of their clout and the support for their work, at least among most of the staff:

“You had some well-established programs. One was the Boys & Girls Clubs. They had their funding and there was a lot of attention to that funding, and it continued. If you look at the products, the program outlines they put together, it was good money spent.

“The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges had funding for its projects” as well, and that was not going to go away.

Relationships and Issues

One issue that was still ongoing was OJJDP’s role coordinating federal efforts aimed at youth and delinquency. This was a fundamental mission of the office enshrined in the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) when it passed in 1974, and more than 10 years later, getting a handle on the myriad juvenile justice initiatives throughout the federal government remained a difficult task. Speirs says officials engaged in a “mountain of effort” to figure it all out:

“We spent a lot of time trying to map out the money in different agencies that was related to juvenile justice. … We tried to look at where dollars could be coordinated. …

“There was money being spent in Transportation on the issue of crime and graffiti in mass transit. There was a large number of areas where there was crossover.”

Like several administrators, Speirs had a sensitive relationship with one of the job’s core constituents: the State Advisory Groups, made up of practitioners and advocates who advise OJJDP. The areas of conflict typically involve differences over federal justice policy, and the amount of money OJJDP gives state groups to help carry out the requirements of the JJDPA. Speirs recalls:

“The part of the field that I felt had the most strained relations had to do with the state advisory groups. That relationship was quite strained. …

“They wanted more dialogue with some of the administration officials. … It was not any real hostility. There seemed to be  a lot of tension there.”

Congress, on the other hand, presented no problems. Some members requested that OJJDP look at funding certain groups, but Speirs says:

“I don’t remember just an over-burdensome number of letters or calls or people trying to force funding in certain areas.”

The End

Speirs left in January 1989, when the Reagan administration gave way to the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He left like he arrived, happy:

“It was a very rewarding experience.”

Tags | Speirs Era