Vincent Schiraldi: Mass Supervision and Criminal Justice Reform

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gist — Vincent Schiraldi: Mass Supervision and Criminal Justice Reform
Date: July 17, 2026
Host: Bob Garfield (subbing for Mike Pesca at intro), Mike Pesca
Guest: Vincent Schiraldi, Secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services
Episode Theme: A critical examination of mass supervision in the criminal justice system — specifically, probation and parole — and a candid look at challenges in reforming entrenched institutions like Rikers Island.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features a deep-dive conversation with Vincent Schiraldi, a veteran criminal justice reformer, about his new book Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom. The discussion explores why attempts at meaningful reform in jails—especially notorious ones like Rikers Island—continuously fall short, and critiques the overlooked, punitive nature of America’s vast probation and parole systems. Schiraldi presents ideas for a rational, evidence-based path to correctional reform, advocating a reduction in mass supervision in favor of investing in communities and restorative services.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The “Rikers Problem” and Limits of Reform

• Rikers’ Infamy Explained

  • [11:13] Pesca asks: Is Rikers “the worst” because of its actual conditions or due to media focus in NYC?
  • Schiraldi: “I think both of those things are true. I think that it gets a level of scrutiny that other jails should get but don't. And it's a terrible jail… It was the most heartbreaking seven months of my career.” ([11:38])

• Why Real Change Is So Elusive

  • Reform is stymied by public indifference—unless people are personally involved, jail conditions simply aren't a priority.
  • Entrenched labor contracts (like unlimited sick leave) render the system “ungovernable.”
  • Schiraldi: “A lot of laws were passed, a lot of contracts were signed that essentially kind of gave away the ability to run that place to the staff in ways that are just crazy and make it ungovernable… I supported a receivership… to allow a reasonable re-examination.” ([12:33])

• Political Will and Leadership Blind Spots

  • The idea of receivership is politically toxic—mayors don’t want to admit failure.
  • Schiraldi: “By the time you become mayor... or commissioner… you think you know what to do… you have an unreasonable belief in your own abilities.” ([14:31])
  • Self-reflection: Schiraldi candidly admits falling into the same trap (“I was that, yeah. And when I went in, I thought I could do it.” ([14:58]))

• Neighborhood Jails Plan and Systemic Bottlenecks

  • Relocation is hampered less by crime spikes than by inefficiency and slow case movement—people languish in jail, clogging the system.
  • Schiraldi: "...If you could get the cases to move as quickly as they were moving a few years ago, we could fit the people in Rikers island in the four jails that are being built right now. ...It's not locking people up for public safety reasons. It's locking people up for inefficiency reasons.” ([17:58])

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Public Apathy and Politicians’ Disinterest

• Probation & Parole—The “Forgotten” System
  • Elected officials and even reform advocates ignore supervision; it doesn’t generate the public passion of prison reform or school improvement.
  • Schiraldi: “Unless your kid or your brother or your husband or your daughter is part of one of these systems, it's not grabbing you every day like inflation, gas prices, unemployment.” ([12:33])
  • “Mike, what is your favorite probation movie? …Right. ...what's your favorite probation movie? It doesn't capture our imagination. So it's just kind of sitting there supervising 4 million people, depriving them of their liberty and breaking their chops.” ([28:52])
  • When Bloomberg, as mayor, hired Schiraldi for probation, his reaction was tepid: “...so what do you think about probation?” ([21:17])

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How Probation & Parole Work—and Why They Fail

• Definitions & Origins

  • Probation: Community supervision as an alternative to jail, usually assigned at sentencing.
  • Parole: Early release from jail/prison, with supervision, tied to good behavior or program participation.
  • Both started as well-intentioned reforms in the 1800s; now both are engines of mass supervision.
  • Schiraldi: “Probation was up front… Parole was sort of at the back end to shorten lengths of stay.” ([30:44])

• Systemic Flaws

  • Supervision tends to be punitive and often sets people up to fail for “ticky-tack” violations (missed appointments, curfews, etc.).
  • $2.8 billion is spent annually incarcerating people for technical violations—funds that could go to housing, treatment, job support.

• Suggested Reforms

  • “Make it smaller, make it less punitive.”

  • Shift resources from bureaucracy to direct support for at-risk populations.

  • Experiment with removing people convicted of low-level offenses from supervision entirely—redirecting resources into the community.

  • Schiraldi: “...Should anything be left or should we just take the whole thing and push that into the community? ...Things need to be tried and measured because this dog won't hunt. It's been around for a long time and it hasn't proved it's worth.” ([31:57])

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Do Strict Sentencing and Incarceration Reduce Crime?

• The Nuanced Relationship

  • “I’m not a person who says that incarceration has no deterrent or incapacitative effect. Of course it does… [but] My bet is sending Plaxico Burress to prison ...was a waste of state money. Now, it did send a message, so I think there are ways to skin this cat without throwing the baby out with the bathwater… which is why we have so few people locked up.” ([24:05])
  • Mass incarceration has some impact, but at enormous societal cost, especially on communities of color.

• New York as a Case Study

  • Uniquely, New York decarcerated (from over 20,000 to ~5,400 in jail) while homicide rates plunged (2200 to under 300 murders pre-pandemic).
  • The key: “Invest in the alternatives”—community-based programs, supports, diversion.
  • “I think New York is a good example of a place that said lets use this apparatus more parsimoniously, not throw everybody into it… and invest in some alternatives that are going to help people not get rearrested.” ([41:00])

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Why the System Stagnates:
  • “...It doesn't capture our imagination. So it's just kind of sitting there supervising 4 million people, depriving them of their liberty and breaking their chops.” (Schiraldi, [28:52])
• On Leadership Delusions:
  • “I've never met a mayor that didn't have that. And I've never met a head of a big department that didn't have that. …We think. [Pause] Wait, you were, you were that? I was that, yeah.” (Schiraldi & Pesca, [14:56–15:00])
• On Punitive Paradigms:
  • “It is both of those problems, plus I think some level of unfixability in that it’s not cared about enough by people—not even advocates, not even researchers—to be fixed…” (Schiraldi, [28:52])
• On Sentencing, Age, and Opportunity:
  • “If we can get you to pass the age of 25 having not committed a felony, the chances of you committing one from that point forward are very, very low.” (Pesca paraphrasing Schiraldi, [43:50])
  • “A homeless shelter is the place you go to fail when you come out of prison.” (Schiraldi, [43:50])

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Useful Timestamps for Navigation

• [11:13]–[18:46] — Rikers Island: why reform fails, political and systemic obstacles.
• [20:32]–[23:11] — Political apathy and the invisible problem of probation/parole.
• [28:02]–[34:32] — Probation and parole defined, why they don't work, and possibilities for reform.
• [36:38]–[45:26] — Incarceration, decarceration, and what the research shows about crime reduction.
• [42:14]–[43:50] — The importance of age, services, and the path out of the cycle.

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Conclusion: Takeaways & Tone

The episode’s hallmark is Schiraldi’s candor—he merges hard-won experience with humility, even self-critique, to expose why American mass supervision persists. Both host and guest navigate stats, history, and real policy alternatives with nuance and humor, but don’t shy away from diagnosing a system that is both punitive and, at times, beyond the reach of reform through ordinary politics alone.

This is essential listening for those curious about the nuts and bolts of criminal justice reform, the reasons for persistent inaction, and what a better, more humane system might look like.

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Further Reading

• Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom by Vincent Schiraldi

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[46:24] Mike Pesca: “Great to talk to you, Mike. Thanks for having me on.”
[46:33] End of content.

Transcript

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It's Friday, July 17, 2026. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Bob Garfield, author of the Bully Pulpit blog on Substack and co host with Mike Volo of Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm also Mike Pesca's beard. I mean, it's more complicated than just that, but that's the gist of it on the show. Today, we are airing a full episode with prison reformer Vincent Scaraldi, whom I've never met, but with whom I personally have a great deal in common. Not only have we spent many years on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. and been railroaded out of high positions, we've both had our lives marred by cartoon characters. Me, obviously, by Garfield the cat and Scaraldi by Vince Guaraldi, composer of the Peanuts theme. We have both spent our entire adult lives pretending to be amused when someone believes they're cracking an original joke. Good one. On the other hand, Scaraldi is former Commissioner of New York City's Department of Correction and then Secretary of Juvenile Services of Maryland. All I do is talk out loud. Today we replay Mike's conversation with Scaraldi about his book Mass Supervision, about his book Mass Probation, Parole and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom, about a rational path to true corrections reform. Up next, Vincent Scaraldi,

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He is the founder of the center on Juvenile and Criminal justice and he's written a new book, Mass Supervision, Probation, Parole and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom. I've wanted to talk to him for a while. Vincent Charaldi, welcome to the gist.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Thanks for having me on, Mike.

[Mike Pesca]

I want to get into the book and I want to get into global questions, but I just, I need to talk to you about Rikers. You were once in charge of Rikers. My question is, as a New Yorker, I see all the horrors chronicled. It is the most notorious jail in America. It's Is it notorious because it is among the Worst jails in America or because it is notorious and in the media capital of America?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

I think both of those things are true. I think that it gets a level of scrutiny that other jails should get but don't. And it's a terrible jail. I mean, I've been to some decently run jails. They're not a great place to be. No matter what right. You're still deprived of your liberty, but there's programming going on. They're clean, staff are respectful. That just wasn't true at Rikers. And it was. It was the most heartbreaking seven months of my career.

[Mike Pesca]

So the jail is notorious. It's paid attention to. People in the mostly liberal city of New York want to do something about it. You, as the boss of the jail, wanted to do something about it. Your bosses, like the former mayor Bill de Blasio, wanted to do something about it, and something has not been done. What does that tell you either about Rikers or some of the problems, problems with justice and criminal justice reform in America?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

I think that for the most part, most people don't really care about what goes on in these systems at any kind of deep level. I think that's true of probation and parole. I think that's true of Rikers Island. Unless your kid or your brother or your husband or your daughter is part of one of these systems, it's not grabbing you every day like inflation, gas prices, unemployment. Those things really touch people in a very visceral way, this stuff. I don't think people like that. Their city's jail is a. Is a horror show, but it's not what's keeping them awake at night for a lot of people. And as a result, I think a lot of laws were passed, a lot of contracts were signed that essentially kind of gave away the ability to run that place to the staff in ways that are just crazy and make it ungovernable. You know, unlimited sick leave being an example. Many days when a third of my staff wasn't available and I had living units with nobody on them, no correctional officers, and people were getting stabbed and people were. And so I, you know, one of the things I supported when I was corrections commissioner, I told the administration we should support a receivership because the receivership would allow sort of a reasonable re examination of some of those contracts and some of those laws that would allow the place to be governed. Right now, it is ungovernable in my view. And I. I think the calls for receivership are well founded.

[Mike Pesca]

That's politically anathema to A mayor. Because the mayor will say, the mayor, whoever the mayor is, even if the mayor is former and de Blasio was one, it will mark a major part of what's under the mayor's purview as a failure. We couldn't do it. We threw up our hands. So did you run into that as a problem?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yeah. And I, I don't think it's just politics. Right. By the time you become mayor of New York City or commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, you think you know what to do. Right. You're a believer in yourself. You can't do this stuff unless to some degree you have an unreasonable belief in your own abilities. And I've never met a mayor that didn't have that. And I've never met a head of a big department that didn't have that. We think.

[Mike Pesca]

Wait, you were, you were that?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

I was that, yeah. And when I went in, I thought I could do it.

[Mike Pesca]

Oh, so you're self critiquing here?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Absolutely. And so, and, and so was the mayor. And so, you know, I, when I did the math though, and I talked to some colleagues, they're like, Vinnie, you just can't get there from here. If your staff can look you in the eye when you say, Mike, I need you to go over to that living unit and be a correctional officer in that living unit. And Mike, you can say, oh no, my heart hurts, I'm going to call an ambulance and leave work right now. Which literally happened. Well, then you can't govern that place and something extraordinary needs to happen. And in this case, I believe a receivership needs to happen. But it's hard, you know, it's really hard to convince, you know, high achieving elected official that that's the way to go. And I think the new mayor and the new commissioner wanted to see what they could do.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

And I think that the evidence is not good on what they've been able to do. And I think receivership is. Time has come.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, not to make this too New York centric, but everyone knows about Rikers. There is a plan. And it's depends on the neighborhood jails being able to take the, the number of people who were at Rikers defused through the neighborhoods. Because let's be realistic, even though you advocate for decarceration, that that hasn't happened yet, it's not going to happen to the degree where you're not going to get thousands of people, 5,000 people or so, who need to be put in these neighborhood jails. Then you run into the neighborhoods, not wanting that. But we also don't have the number. We haven't gotten the numbers that low as crime has spiked, in your estimation, is that plan, let's get the neighborhood jails housing this number of people. Does that only seem like a plan? But it is really impossible when you think about the numbers and you think about the community objections.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

I mean, so there's a lot to unpack in that question. Let's start with the community objections that was dealt with. They. They have at this problem called process called ulurp, Uniform land use, something.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

And at some point, the legislature, the city council has to vote on whether they accept these four sites. And they have done that. So that's done. Right. Doesn't mean the communities don't still object. It just means that their objections can't stop the jails if the mayor wants to go forward. Now, as far as the population's concerned, really one of the big issues there isn't crime increasing. Yes. It. It's gone up. It's also gone back down again. It's really cases moving too slowly through the system. I mean, I had some people there for five years waiting to get their cases resolved. And when we crunched the data, the people that stayed the longest had the most problems. Because it's a jail, it's not meant to keep people there more than a few weeks.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

So if you could get the case

[Mike Pesca]

and it's used as a mental health facility, but it's not supposed to be.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Absolutely. And if you could get the cases to move as quickly as they were moving a few years ago, we could fit the people in Rikers island in the four jails that are being built right now. So it's not, you know, it's portrayed as, oh, set them all free. It's like, no, just get the wheels of justice to turn more quickly and you'd be able to fit people. And it's not. It's not locking people up for public safety reasons. It's pot rocking people up for inefficiency reasons. Get them to wherever they're going to go next. If that means they're going to go out on probation, get that to happen. If that means they're going to state prison, get that to happen. But stop this sort of waiting thing that we as city taxpayers pay for. And that destroys the running of a smooth jail.

[Mike Pesca]

Why is it so slow?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

You know, courts move slow because of a million reasons.

[Mike Pesca]

I know, but you're comparing it to how it was moving. Right. Courts used to move faster and there was an up. Uptick in crime, a significant one, 30% with murders. Then the latest statistics show it's down about 10%. So there is some more crime, although that's maybe not all the crime clogging. The courts. Just wanted to lay that out there.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yeah. I mean, you know, court systems are inefficient for a million different reasons, part of which is the people who get to decide how quickly things move and the people who have to run the jail are different people. So, you know, for me as commissioner and for the current commissioner, I'm sure people sitting around and waiting is a big problem. It's kind of not a problem for the prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges. Now, that doesn't mean they are not decent people. And they couldn't try. But it needs to be a priority. I'm not sure it's a priority for this mayor. It definitely was a priority for Mayor de Blasio.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. And again, I want to take it outside of New York City in a second, but everyone listening to this who isn't in New York City can say, oh, yeah, I know what the equivalent is in my town or city. If you look at institutions, long entrenched institutions, that there needs to just be some reform. If I find, if politicians really prioritize that and sell that, look at what Bloomberg and Lightfoot and other mayors did with failing schools. They were able to break up the failing schools. There were still unions involved. There were still some community objections. But when the political will is there, it happened. And I think this comes back to what you were talking about with the jails, that no one feels it as acutely as they do kids and schools. It's kind of someone else's problem, an abstract problem. Oh, that. I hear that sad, but, you know, I'm not going to let it be priority one through ten for me.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yeah, I agree.

[Mike Pesca]

Okay, let's get to. Let's get to supervision, parole, and probation. Mayor Bloomberg hires you to run the division, and he's very personable at first, and he cares about your background and he's asking questions. And then it comes to the actual job. Okay, probation, the department of probation. And he has. He just, what A look comes over his face like, oh, God, we got to talk about probation.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yeah, it was pretty hysterical, really. I mean, he was so much more enthusiastic about what high school and college I went to, which are all New York City schools and New York State schools, what neighborhood I grew up in. He was getting grief for hiring people from all over the country. And finally he's got a New Yorker that he thinks he's going to get to hire.

[Mike Pesca]

So, yeah, guy with an actual accent, not a slight Boston accent like he has.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

And I'm not making this up. I really grew up in Greenpoint, right. I really went to Regis High School every year, went to SUNY Binghamton. So he's pretty happy about that. And then it's kind of like, so what do you think about probation? It's like that kind of thing, like, and. And he's a decent guy, and he really cared about all these issues in public safety. But I just don't think a lot of politicians give this much thought and know what to do about it. And that's part of the reason I think change is. Is needs to happen and is a little scary. But. Yeah. So then I said, well, you know, I don't know if you were. If you were. If I came to you with $80 million, which was the budget of the department, and 30,000 troubled and troubling souls and said, do whatever you want to fix this problem, I'm pretty sure what you wouldn't do is run out and hire a thousand civil service protected, disinterested bureaucrats to have him pissing a cup once a week and tell them to go forth and send no more. And he said, no, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do that. And so I said, well, I haven't been in your department, so I'm not critiquing your particular place, but I bet that's what you got right now. And it was three deputy mayors in the room. He looked over at all three of them. They shrugged and said, yeah, it's pretty much what we got right now. And then, you know, a brawl broke out in the room. We started spitballing. We should privatize it. We should, you know, do this, we should do that. And I was like, okay, I can work here. Because. Because it was an honest debate and discussion, and people weren't defensive. They were. They were leaning into this conversation. But I don't think that conversation happens enough about this. This thing that, you know, has in its control twice as many people as are locked up in all of our prisons and jails combined probation and parole.

[Mike Pesca]

New York has very tough gun laws, and not just on the books. They're enforced in a very tough way. There are some innovative diversion programs that individual DA's, like the Brooklyn DA endorsed. But there is a near certainty that if you are arrested or even patted down and there's a gun in your possession, you're going to do jail time. Now, on the one hand, this leads to incarceration, but on the other hand, New York, with its strictest gun laws in the country, also had murder rates below the national average. And as you know, if you look at the decline in murder rates, it was amazing. I've come to the conclusion that New York is very strict. Opponents would call them draconian gun laws absolutely had an effect on saving lives and, and decreasing homicide. Do you think that they were worth it? Or maybe you think that the conclusion I came to isn't even justified?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

You know, I think that if you have laws that are going to incarcerate people ranging from Bernie Getz to Plaxico Burris, you know, that's a serious gun, mandatory sentence.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, right.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Like if the guy wins the MVP on a Super bowl winning team and goes to prison behind his first defense gun.

[Mike Pesca]

His first. After shooting himself. Himself in his own leg.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yes, right in the leg. Right. So that's a very, very serious gun crime. And I'm, I'm not a person who says that incarceration has no deterrent or incapacitative effect. Of course it does. Should we have more in like, even if you have a strong law and there's some, you know, exceptions that prosecutors and courts can use, I still think you buy a lot of deterrent effect. And my bet is sending Plaxical Burris to prison for those couple of years that he did was a waste of state money. Now, it did send a message. So I think there's ways to skin this cat without throwing a baby out with the bath water. And I think frankly, New York is probably a better example of doing that than any other place, which is why we have so few people locked up.

[Bob Garfield]

We'll be back with more from Vincent Scaraldi after the break.

[Mike Pesca]

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[Bob Garfield]

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[Vincent Schiraldi]

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[Vincent Schiraldi]

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[Mike Pesca]

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[Bob Garfield]

We're back with Vincent Scaraldi talking about his book Mass Supervision, Probation, Parole and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom. Here we go.

[Mike Pesca]

Vincent Giraldi is the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. He also ran the Department of Corrections in New York City, and we talked a lot about his time there yesterday. Today we pivot to his book and the broader issues brought up in Mass Supervision, Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom. The book has a lot of history. It talks about figures like Zebulon Brockway. And how could I not cite Zebulon Brockway, an early reformer in Elmira, New York? But I began by asking Mr. Schiraldi, is the problem with probation and parole that it doesn't deliver on the promise of keeping the supervised out of trouble? Or is the problem that it defines trouble so narrowly it's unfair to those inside the system.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

It is both of those problems, plus I think some level of unfixability in that it's not cared about enough by people, not even advocates, not even researchers, to be fixed. So it has the problem I talked about before, which is that unless your kid's in it, or your brother or your husband or you, you don't really care about it. But also advocates don't really care about it, funders don't care about it, media doesn't care about it. Mike, what is your favorite probation movie? Well, right. If I ask you what your favorite prison movie is, you're gonna say Shawshank, you're gonna say Cool Hand Luke. But what's your favorite probation movie? It doesn't capture our imagination. So it's just kind of sitting there supervising 4 million people, depriving them of their liberty and breaking their chops.

[Mike Pesca]

What is the difference between probation and parole? Just lay that out for us. And what are the differences in the problems and the solutions of each?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Sure. So both of them were started in the 1800s. Both of them were a reaction to worsening prisons, which were relatively new then. Right. The penitentiaries and probation and parole and juvenile justice were all kind of invented during the 1800s. And when they invented penitentiaries, they saw the abuses. This guy, John Augustus, a bootmaker in Boston, started bailing people out so they wouldn't go to the Boston House of Correction as an alternative to going into the House of Correction. So probation was up front. I'm going to evaluate. You go to the judge, say, I want to take this guy out of the system and supervise him in the community and help him turn his life around. Parole was invented in the US Context by a guy named Zebulon Brockway.

[Mike Pesca]

Zebulon, right.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Don't these guys have great names? John Augustus? No, no. Vinny Schiraldi's.

[Mike Pesca]

And Mike, I think Zebulon Brockway is the 19th century equivalent of Vinny Schiraldi. Like, if you get it through the Brockway translator, that's what it says about. Yeah.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

And so anyway, he says, you know, people are just sitting and they. They do their time and just get out, whether they've participate programs, whether they behave well or they behave poorly. So there's no incentive. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create what they called indeterminate sentences. So you don't just get a year or three years, you get one to three, and you get out at one. If you behave well, you get out of three. If you don't behave well. And then I'll put a bunch of programs in here so people can be released. And when they get released, I'll supervise them on parole. And so that's, that's parole was sort of at the back end to shorten lengths of stay.

[Mike Pesca]

Having read the book, I know that there are many planks of reform, but if you were to sell this to a curious, but as you've demonstrated largely ignorant public, what are the two or three big bullet points or the elevator pitch for the mass supervision problem?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

So I, I put, I equivocate in this and. Which is not usual for me. And I really kind of take two pets. One is make it smaller, make it less punitive. Stop locking people up for ticky tack fouls like missing appointments or staying out past curfew, things like that. And then with the millions and millions and millions of dollars, it's $2.8 billion we spend every year locking people up for non criminal technical violations. Take that money, put it into communities so we can buy housing, so we can buy drug treatment, so we can help people find jobs, so we can help people finish their educations. So my equivocation is, should anything be left or should we just take the whole thing and push that into the community? And I say, I think it's worth trying for some populations, if you commit a misdemeanor, let's say, maybe we should just stop putting people on probation and fund communities to help them turn their lives around. So I think that's a reasonable disagreement. Some people are going to say, oh, you're an abolitionist, you're crazy. But I think things need to be tried and measured because this dog won't hunt. It's been around for a long time and it hasn't proved it's worth.

[Mike Pesca]

So if you don't violate people for these ticky tack fouls, as you've called them, do you just then not have a rule against, say, drug use while someone's on probation or associating with felons? Or do you have a regime where they get five chances instead of one or two if they violate?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

So my predecessor at New York City probation was a guy named Marty Horn. And Marty proposed abolishing parole. He said basically, we shouldn't care about all these silly rules that don't attach themselves to any evidence that a person is or is not doing good.

[Mike Pesca]

There is no correlation between drug use and alcohol use and someone on probation revolution. Violating, you're saying?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Well, re. Violating. Yes.

[Mike Pesca]

Oh, yeah, sorry.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yeah, right. Committing a crime of course there is, but it doesn't matter until you commit the crime. So punish the crime. Don't punish that other behavior. Because while, yes, people who use drugs are more likely to commit crimes, there's a whole bunch of people who use drugs who never commit crimes. There's a whole bunch of people who drink alcohol never commit crimes. So what Marty said is basically, and

[Mike Pesca]

by the way, to interrupt, a year ago, some of those crimes they would commit were using drugs, which are now in most places, decriminalized. Just.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yes, that's exactly right. So now, I mean, what Marty's saying is, with the millions and millions, hundreds of millions, literally, New York would save. Just give these guys a voucher, Mike. You come out, you got a couple of thousand dollars. Spend it on drug treatment. I'm not going to give you $1,000. I'm going to give you a voucher. Spend it on jobs, spend it on housing. That'll buy more safety than hiring some bureaucrat to make you go back to prison because you skipped an appointment or stayed out past curse. Mm.

[Mike Pesca]

I want to ask, and I've heard you speak on the overall question of decarceration. I've heard you on decarceration podcasts even, I think just mentioned that word or that idea in our conversation. In the book, you said that you were into the idea of combating our incarceration problem and statistics since the 1980s. Is that right?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Correct.

[Mike Pesca]

So in the 1980s, our rate of incarceration from, you know, somewhere, to take a point, in the mid-1980s to the early 90s, it doubled from about 133 to about 300, more than double to 350 some odd individuals. Now it's somewhere up near 600. But as I look at the statistics, as I look at the crime statistics and the incarceration statistics, you know, I don't come to the conclusion that if there is crime, our goal should be a rate of zero. It should be commensurate with crime and with the effort to reduce crime. And just looking at the statistics, I see a lot of evidence that there was a correlation between incarcerating more people who committed more crime and the effort to bring down crime, especially in the late 1990s. Do you see that correlation or do you think there's another way to look at it, which is you acknowledge that putting more people in jail does have the effect, if done right, of bring down crime. You just don't think the costs are worth it.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Somewhere in between, most of the research that gets put out about the connection between incarceration and crime shows disappointing results, but not no results. And it depends on which piece of research you're looking at. So, yeah, there is some depressing effect by locking lots and lots of people up. That has enormous collateral consequences. It probably makes the individuals who get incarcerated worse. And that is balanced by the incapacitative effects of locking so many people up. That said, there's a different. There's a better way to do this. While the whole country continued to increase mass incarceration from around the early 70s all the way to 2008, that's what the country did. New York started. New York City started to substantially reduce incarceration in the early 90s under. In the waning years of Mayor Jenkins Dinkins, through Mayor Giuliani, through Mayor Bloomberg, through Mayor de Blasio, until the pandemic. So, like 1992 up to. Up to 2019, New York City's jail population dropped from 22,000 to 5,400. And the number of people who were sent into prison dropped similarly, and crime plummeted in New York City during that time. Time, just. Just the homicide numbers alone went from around 2200 to under 300 right before the pandemic. Stunning declines. And so the answer for me isn't is does incarceration have some depressing effect? The answer is, could it be done a different way where you don't hobble a whole generation of young black men in order to get the crime reduction you want? And I think New York City says the answer is yes.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. And New York State statistics correlate with that. Of course, the city statistics, if you take the prison and jail populations, the state, especially under Cuomo, started having many fewer prisoners in their facilities as well. But the way I look at that, and I've studied these statistics pretty carefully, is that I do remember at the time there was a. Even a greater call for decarceration. And had it gone too hard and too fast, you might not have had that decrease in crime. What I think is, and you tell me, but there's really strong evidence that past a certain age, 30, 35, the capacity, willingness, brain chemistry involved in, or just the networks of people you associate with change. And you're so much more likely, right, you're so much more likely not to commit a crime if you're in your 40s. So in the beginning of that experiment, when New York City and New York State were decarcerating and letting more people out of jail, it was, I don't want to use an insulting phrase Low hanging fruit, easy cases. There was the ability to allow out all these people in their 40s that statistics would show are not going to offend again. And so that made the murder rates seem much lower. They were much lower. But also it made the incarceration rates, it gave it the ability to be low without having decarceration have the effect of increasing the murder rates. I mean, is that what happened with the ages of the population?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

What a great conversation. Let me just start by saying that like this is the most elaborate and detailed interview I think I've ever experienced. So I think, yes, I think what you're saying is true, but we have to look at what happened in other places to see. All right, well, you know, I mean, like Texas and New York aren't the same place, but like the brains of kids in Texas were, were also aging and they were also had a ton of low hanging fruit, probably more than we had because they were more willing to use incarceration for lower level stuff. And when you look at it that way, I think what you see in New York is not that you can just stop incarcerating people and throw them all out into the community and hope things work out. New York did a bunch of stuff. I mean, you look at the Fortune Society, the Center for Court Innovation, Vera Institute of Justice, the Osborne association, on and on. New York was in investing in things that help people would otherwise be either in jail or on probation. Because while incarceration was dropping in New York, probation was dropping from 82,000 people. Now it's under 10,000 people on probation. And again, all that time crime was declining up until the pandemic. So you know, I think New York is a good example of a place that said let's use this apparatus more parsimoniously, not throw everybody into it like some states, like Texas I mentioned, but others do. And let's invest in some alternatives that are going to help people not get rearrested.

[Mike Pesca]

And to go back to one of the assertions I made, the correlation between crime and likelihood of crime and age is really strong, isn't it?

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. There's a strong age crime curve. Again, I don't think that means, you know, I worry that that, that means, okay, let's lock all the 20 year olds up. There are lots of things you can do with a 20 year old to help them not reoffend. You look at the common justice only in Brooklyn only focuses on people who have committed violent offenses or between the ages of 16 and 2025 who are facing A year or more in either jail or prison and works with their victims and them to divert them from incarceration and really wrap services around them so they don't reoffend. Their, their outcomes are fantastic. So you know, to go back to your example, Mike, as there was low, a lot of low hanging fruit in the 90s, there's not much low hanging fruit in.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

So to the degree you're thinking we should reduce the jail population further, let's say by accelerating cases like we talked about earlier, what you want to do is you want to put more and more robust services, supports and opportunities in place. So when people come out, they're not homeless. Right. When people come out, they got supports, they can get a job, they got mental health services. You at a state prison in New York, tons of people, people get paroled to homeless shelters. A homeless shelter is the place you go to fail when you come out of prison. You just got to figure out a way to capture those savings and put them into community programs. Because you cannot just send people back home with no supports.

[Mike Pesca]

Now you have said that and I think this is true. But I want to ask about your implicate the implications of you have said if we can get you to pass the age of 25 having not committed a felony, the chances of you committing one from that point forward are very, very low. So that's something that we societally should be invested in. But you've also endorsed sentencing procedures which would make it less likely for person who has committed a felony to receive serious prison or jail time. And you've also endorsed, I think, the decriminalization of a lot of, a lot of actions that are considered felonies. Is your way to get the 25 year old past the age of felony. Just to define felony down.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

That's one of the ways. Yeah, I mean California did that with six different felonies and they had a massive reduction in the number of people in prison, a massive reduction number of people on probation and parole. And crime went down. And they put hundreds of millions of dollars into mental health services, victim services and other community programs to help people turn their lives around. We're in a society that has invested very, very heavily in prisons. Most other societies have had less crime and less incarceration. New York happens to be one of those societies in the United States. In fact, we would be a mediocre European country if we were a standalone country. That true?

[Mike Pesca]

That's true. In terms of incarceration, that hypothetical mediocre country wouldn't have a Second Amendment gun culture and the wide availability of guns in within its borders.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

That's right. And that second Amendment exists in New York City just like it exists in South Carolina. And you're positing, oh, it's only because of our mandatory sentencing gun law that we have less crime. I reject that notion. But while saying that that didn't have nothing to do with it either. I don't think we know exactly how much it has to do with it. But I don't think it did at all. I don't think it did none of it.

[Mike Pesca]

Vincent Charaldi is currently Secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. He served in high positions for New York City as head of the Department of Probation and Commissioner of the Department of Correction. He's been a researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School, co founder of the Columbia University Justice Lab. His new book is Mass Supervision, Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Freedom and Safety. Great to talk to you.

[Vincent Schiraldi]

Great to talk to you, Mike. Thanks for having me on.

[Mike Pesca]

That's it for today's show. The Gist of is produced by Cory Wara. Jeff Craig does How To Ben Astaire is our booking coordinator. Kathleen Sykes does the Gist list. And Michelle Pesca is extraordinary in her role as coo. Uproot Peru. Thanks for listening. Yeah, Maxing is so maxing right now, bro. Get ready for spicy chicken maxing because Carl's Jr. Is saving you big with a 5.99 maxed out double stack double stack Double stack Double stack spicy chicken sandwich. Seriously, just 5.99 double stack spicy chicken. This is unreal value in the bromosphere. The new spicy chicken Max Wallet friendly Max Tasty only at Carl's Jr available for a limited time at participating restaurants.

[Bob Garfield]

Tax on included.

[Mike Pesca]

Not valid for use within a combo or in combination with any other offered discount.