Confessions of a Failed “HOPE‐er”

• Published date: 01 November 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12255
• Author: Vincent Schiraldi
• Date: 01 November 2016

COMMENTARY

HOPE COLLECTION

Confessions of a Failed “HOPE-er”

Vincent Schiraldi

Harvard Kennedy School

From 2010 to 2014, I was commissioner of the New York City Department of Pro-

bation (DOP). During my tenure there, the department initiated several reforms,

including decentralizing and relocating staff supervising half of our clients to com-

munity settings; reducing probation violations by nearly half; increasing early discharges

from probation fivefold; increasing the utilization of banked caseloads for low-risk clients;

legislatively reducing probation terms; and launching a system-wide effort to train DOP

staff on evidence-based practices with the help of the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the

National Institute of Corrections, all while enjoying remarkably low (4%) felony rearrest

rates 1 year postcompletion of probation. During this time, we were also unsuccessful at

launching a Hawaii’s Opportunity Probationand Enforcement (HOPE)–style program in-

volving swift-and-certain sanctions for probation violations. The remainder of this policy

essay describes why I think that was a good thing, and why I thought so even before reading

the recent evaluations of HOPE in this issue (Hamilton, Campbell, van Wormer, Kigerl,

and Posey, 2016; Lattimore, MacKenzie, Dawes, and Tueller, 2016; O’Connell, Brent, and

Visher, 2016) in which five of six replication sites evidenced largely null effects—or no sta-

tistically significant difference—in rearrests between those who received HOPE probation

and those who did not.

Background

New York City is undergoing a remarkable criminal justice revolution that has been only

partially documented but that is important to understanding the context in which DOP’s

reforms were undertaken and in which HOPE failed to launch.

The well-documented part of the New York City crime story is, of course, the

remarkable decline in crime, which Franklin Zimring (2011: introduction) described as

“the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the

developed world.” Homicides, for example, topped 2,200 at their peak in 1990, falling

Direct correspondence to Vincent Schiraldi, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, Harvard

Kennedy School, 79 JFK St., Rm. 442, Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: Vincent_Schiraldi@hks.harvard.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12255 C2016 American Society of Criminology 1143

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 4