Youth Today Exchange

1994–2000
Accomplishments

Many juvenile justice advocates were nervous when this former juvenile prosecutor was named to head the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). But to many staffers there, Shay Bilchik’s tenure is the Golden Era: The Clinton White House was more aligned than its immediate predecessors with its progressive approaches, Congress gave the office more money than it ever had, and the system for awarding grants did not inspire an uproar from the field and hearings on Capitol Hill.

Still, Shay Bilchik stood to the right of the agency’s other Democratically appointed administrators on such issues as trying youths in adult courts. And the agency faced pressure to crack down even more on juvenile offenders after a series of high school shootings shocked the nation.

Background

Bilchik spent 16 years in the state’s attorney office in Dade County (Miami), Fla., including serving as head of the juvenile division. The state attorney for Dade County was Janet Reno. During that time, the state eliminated age restrictions for juveniles to be prosecuted as adults for certain crimes, such as murder.

How He Got the Job

After Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, he drafted Reno to be his attorney general. Reno brought Bilchik to Washington to be associate deputy attorney general. Bilchik recalls:

“My original intent was to work on children- and youth-related issues. It was a pretty broad agenda. …

“I spent about a year working on substantive issues, but also helping to vet candidates for political appointments in the Department of Justice [DOJ].”

That included vetting candidates to be OJJDP administrator. Meanwhile, OJJDP veteran John Wilson served as acting administrator for more than a year and a half, and is widely credited with vastly improving the operation of the office. Wilson estimates that during gaps in OJJDP administrators, he served in the top role for a total of four years – meaning he ran the agency longer than did most of the presidentially appointed administrators.

Mark Soler, then president of the Youth Law Center, emerged as the top candidate to be administrator. Recalls Wilson:

“He was going to be the nominee. … We felt that Mark was highly qualified.”

There was one issue of potentially significant disagreement: Soler was strongly against the transfer of youths to adult courts, which Reno and Bilchik supported. Soler recalls:

“On the first day I met Shay at the Justice Department … we were walking up the stairs and I said, ‘Shay, I’m really looking forward to working with you, but we have to have a serious talk about transfer, because it really isn’t working.’ He said, ‘I’m looking forward to talking about that.’ ”

Then a Washington Post listing of upcoming Clinton administration appointees included Soler at OJJDP, even though he had not been announced. That didn’t sit well with Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee subcommittee that oversaw OJJDP. Soler recalls:

“Sen. Kohl or somebody on his staff read that in The Post and recalled that James Bell from our staff had testified against a bill that Kohl had introduced, which would make it a federal offense for a juvenile to commit a crime with a handgun.” For various reasons,  “We opposed it.”

As Soler recalls, Bell’s testimony had been fairly recent. The legislation had passed. But Kohl:

“…  was very upset that we had opposed his legislation. He contacted the A.G. [attorney general] and said, ‘I’m not going to let Soler go through.’ ”

Efforts to resolve the matter, including Soler talking with Kohl, were for naught. The process then turned in a manner that brings to mind Dick Cheney vetting candidates to be the vice presidential nominee for George W. Bush, then becoming the nominee himself. Bilchik recalls:

“Reno turned to me and said, ‘Is this something you’d want to do?’ … I wasn’t thinking directly about OJJDP before I came to Washington. I learned the importance of the office and the position” while at DOJ.

His Mission

It would be hard to have a breezier confirmation hearing than Bilchik’s; the transcript runs barely over 14 pages, including prepared statements submitted for the record.

While the previous nominee, Robert Sweet of the first Bush administration, was grilled by senators who said they didn’t think his experience qualified him for the job, and while Reagan nominee Alfred Regnery was quizzed about a bumper sticker, at this hearing the subcommittee chairman, Kohl, told the nominee:

“You are going to be a lot of fun and a good guy to work with.”

Less enthused were liberal juvenile justice advocates looking for a return to the tone of the first three administrators  – Milton Luger, John Rector and Ira Schwartz, who saw themselves as youth advocates out to reform a brutal detention system. Now, the public and political mood was reminiscent of the early 1980s under President Reagan, when rising juvenile crime fueled a movement to crack down on offenders. Kohl urged Bilchik to confront “the scourge of juvenile crime,” and Bilchik lamented the “unparalleled crisis.”

This is how significantly the mood had changed for juvenile justice: When Rector said in the 1970s that “the juvenile justice system all over the country is in a state of collapse,” it was a call to get youths out of detention, because “half the kids in custody … haven’t committed crimes.”

But when Kohl now told the newest OJJDP administrator that “the juvenile justice system is broken and it needs to be fixed,” it was primarily a call to lock up more offenders. He noted his introduction of a bill:

“… which would guarantee that 10 percent of the prison funding in the crime bill is used for the construction and operation of secure juvenile facilities.”

Bilchik said he’d be “glad to work with you on it,” and later said:

“We have not been able to deliver sanctions, appropriate sanctions, because of a lack of resources and facilities.” Juveniles get released early because of overcrowding “and then they go back out on the street with the message that there is not much of a price to pay for our serious conduct, and they laugh about it.”

Bilchik stressed that prevention and diversion services “should be equally important” as punishing offenders. He also emphasized the need for OJJDP to collaborate with states and local agencies in sharing information about evidence-based practices to deal not only with offenders, but to head off trouble through “what we do very early in the child’s life.”

But while the “I-feel-your-pain” Clinton administration boosted government social services to help people in need, the White House and its attorney general had more of a tough-on-crime approach than did many traditional juvenile justice advocates and providers. Vinnie Schiraldi, then director of the Washington-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, later told Youth Today:

“He’s as good as we could have gotten out of the Clinton administration.”

Relationship with Staff

Bilchik says his first challenge was staff morale. For 12 years, the administrations of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush proposed budgets that gave the office no money or a fraction of what it once had. Bilchik recalls of his new employees:

“They felt there had been a denigration about what they offered to the administration and what they could do for the field. … The main the main [issue] was the lack of support from the executive branch for the office. … You can have great leaders, but if nothing’s going your way and the budget’s stagnant, then your morale’s going to go down.”

“I think that was the main challenge I was facing.”

Relationships with Justice

The attention given to OJJDP had started to change before Bilchik arrived, through the work of Wilson and with early support from the attorney general’s office. Wilson recalls that when Bilchik was vetting candidates for the OJJDP post, he got a one-hour meeting with Bilchik to discuss a juvenile justice strategy he had crafted with Buddy Howell of OJJDP’s research division:

“I went over a nine o’clock. We never got out of our chairs until noon.”

Laurie Robinson, who was then assistant attorney general (as she is now), speaks about the value of Reno’s interest in juvenile justice:

“When the attorney general is interested, a lot of people pay attention. At Justice, there was this cachet that had never been there before. Nobody had really cared about OJJDP. It gave it [OJJDP] a great deal more weight and importance.”

While Reno did not exactly reverse the Reagan and Bush administrations’ focus on punishing serious offenders, she did swing the pendulum back more toward prevention. Robinson says Reno often sat in on meetings involving juvenile justice, and:

“She used to say, ‘I really like the fact that prevention is part of the name of OJJDP.’ ”

The field saw Bilchik’s professional relationship with Reno as a big plus. While some past OJJDP administrators rarely got beyond the assistant attorneys general above them, Robbie Callaway of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America says:

“Shay could talk to Janet Reno.”

Clinton was interested as well. Says Bilchik:

“We were called to the White House all the time to provide input on youth violence issues.”

White House budget proposals for OJJDP went up significantly from the Reagan and Bush administrations, and Congress sometimes added  more. OJJDP’s appropriation grew from $88 million in fiscal 1993 to $269 million in fiscal 2000. Added with other funds that it administered, like the Juvenile Accountability Block Grants, Blichik says that:

“We saw a seven-fold increase in our funding from the day I walked in to when we left.”

Juvenile Crime Gets Hotter

If OJJDP staffers wanted the White House and Congress to pay more attention to their work, they got their wish – perhaps more than they wanted. Behind the funding boost was a near-panic about juvenile crime, which intensified with a series of school shootings in such places as Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and, ultimately, the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo. (1999).

In addition, reports warning about a wave of juvenile “superpredators” were getting lots of attention in the news media and in Congress. Robinson recalls the juvenile justice policy discussions in Washington during that period:

“It got very caught up in the whole discussion about predatory hordes of juvenile criminal villains. It was something that elected officials and other people got very caught up in.”

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) was up for reauthorization during these years, and members of Congress jammed the bill with amendments to toughen penalties on juvenile offenders – the result being that passage of the bill was repeatedly postponed. Lawmakers also made many suggestions for anti-crime and delinquency diversion programs. Says Bilchik:

“I remember it being a stressful time. Calls from the Hill, calls from the White House. What are you going to do about this?

“I had numerous meetings with constituents” of specific members of Congress. “They’d say, ‘I’ve got an idea. We should do X or Y.’ We’d talk to them. … Sometimes a member of Congress would contact the attorney general’s office: ‘We’ve got to do X.’ ”

The White House felt pressure to respond to juvenile crime concerns as well. Says Robinson:

“There were plenty of people from the White House and parts of the Justice Department who wanted to jump on that bandwagon. Let’s adopt even more mandatory sentences. Let’s be the first to call for dropping the age for mandatory transfer into adult court for lots of new crimes. Let’s be tougher than the next ones.

“There were  people who said we need to look like we’re not soft on crime.”

The challenge for OJJDP was to respond to events with new programming and funding while not getting thrown off from its longer-term priorities. They key, Bilchik says, was listening to ideas from members of Congress, but also “making sure members of Congress knew what we were doing” about juvenile violence already.

The Research Shift

Ask juvenile justice advocates about this era, and the biggest complaint of many is the loss of OJJDP’s research division. The odd thing is, it didn’t actually happen.

Research had always been a core function of OJJDP under the act, which authorizes the administrator to:

“… conduct, encourage, and coordinate research and evaluation into any aspect of juvenile delinquency, particularly with regard to new programs and methods which seek to strengthen and preserve families or which show promise of making a contribution toward the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency.”

Robinson believed the research and evaluation function should not be run by the same agency that gives out money to the programs being evaluated:

“You have a program office evaluating its own work. I think this is a big mistake. It weakens the credibility of the evaluation and that research. Having the drug court people evaluate the drug court program is not a good thing. Janet Reno strongly agreed with me on this.”

Another problem was that while OJJDP might be evaluating a certain approach, another office within Justice might be doing the same thing:

“We had two different grants looking at the transfer of children to adult courts. Neither one [agency] knew about the other. They’d both given out grants. We looked like we didn’t know what we were doing.”

Robinson pushed to have juvenile justice research done by the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice, which does other department research. Many people on OJJDP’s staff and in the juvenile justice field were furious. Without dedicated funds and staff at OJJDP, they said, the Justice Department would do very little research on juvenile justice.

Bilchik fought back, in some admittedly heated arguments. He emphasized that the research that OJJDP funded was conducted externally and often peer reviewed before release. Arguments about duplication of projects were a matter of failed internal coordination, he said – a problem that was outweighed by the loss of focus and expertise that would be caused by moving the research function to the National Institute of Justice.

OJJDP kept its research division – although it would whither away in the next administration.

Awarding Grants

During this time, the Justice Department supported some concepts that the traditional juvenile justice field found unduly harsh and counterproductive – such as transferring some youth offenders to adult courts. On the other hand, OJJDP initiated several prevention programs, including more after-school initiatives and truancy reduction efforts, and tripled Title V prevention funding. Perhaps most important for those administering the agency’s grants was this: complaints about how those grants were awarded ceased.

The grants process at OJJDP has been a headache for at least four of OJJDP’s eight administrators, some of whom were accused of choosing grantees for reasons of political philosophy or personal favoritism.

Bilchik and Wilson, however, were close to religious about the process of awarding grants through competitive bidding, and using outside panels of experts to review and rank the bids. Wilson explains:

“We followed the peer review regulation rigorously. If we were going to use geographical distribution or some reason to favor one type of proposal over another, we put it into the announcements.” As for the peer review rankings, “We always followed them unless we had a documented reason to divert from them.

“We were bending over backward to do it the right way.”

At the same time, however, Congress was doing some micromanaging of OJJDP’s grants.

Congressional earmarking of OJJDP’s budget had begun to shoot up just before Bilchik took office, taking up 74 percent of the agency’s  discretionary funding in fiscal 1993 and bouncing around thereafter, to a low of 14 percent in 1996. But earmarks shot up again to 74 percent in fiscal 2000, in the wake of the Columbine shooting.

Bilchik says the earmarks didn’t bother him, because congressional appropriations grew by more than enough to make up for them:

“Earmarks never cut into my ability to keep growing the office. …

“This is the message I sent to staffers on the Hill about earmarks: As long as you allow me to look at the work that’s done [by the proposed grantees], and if the emperor has no clothes” – that is, if the program had little merit from OJJDP’s point of view – he could decline to fund the program.

When that happened:

“They [members of Congress] said, OK, can we work something out for a program purpose that would be worthwhile” for that organization? “Or is this an area of work that another constituent could be selected for?”

Some say Reno and Bilchik should have done more to curtail the earmarks. Says Schwartz:

“He never mobilized the resources that should have been mobilized to eliminate those. He simply went along with them. It minimized the impact that the office had.”

Relationships with States

OJJDP’s relationships with state agencies and providers has always been somewhat sensitive. Bilchik says that is inherent in the way system is set up:

“You’ve got a formula grants program, with certain statutory requirements and a monitoring function to make sure those requirements are being met, or holding back the money. It’s ripe for conflict. That was one of the main issues we were dealing with: How do [we] make that relationship work?”

Thus a key issue for each administrator has been how hard to press states about complying with the JJDPA in order to get their formula funds. Bilchik leaned toward taking into account financial and political restrictions in the states. His new Formula Grants Consolidated Regulations gave the states more flexibility in complying with the act, a move that some advocates saw as too soft.

Overall, his relationship with both state agencies and juvenile justice advocates was good. One reason is that those constituents appear to have felt listened to, even if they disagreed with some OJJDP policies. Bilchik and his staff made a point of meeting with state juvenile justice specialists and advocacy organizations:

“We wanted them to see that our priorities were being shaped by what we were hearing from them.”

The End

The Bilchik era lasted until the end of the Clinton administration. His tenure of about six years stood then as the longest of any OJJDP administrator. The next administrator, J. Robert Flores, lasted slightly longer.

Soler, reflecting on some of his differences with the criminal justice policies of the Clinton administration, says:

“I think Shay lasted a lot longer than I would have.”

Tags | Bilchik Era