Testimony of Joshua Miller
Research & Advocacy Director, Open City Advocates
Committee On The Judiciary And Public Safety
B25-0537 - Whole of Government Response to Crime Act of 2023
Monday, December 11, 2023
To The Honorable Members of the Council of the District of Columbia,
Good afternoon. My name is Joshua Miller, I am a resident of Ward 4 and Research & Advocacy Director for Open City Advocates, which provides legal representation and holistic advocacy to youth who have been committed to DYRS. I’m here today to provide information regarding provisions in the Whole of Government Response to Crime Act of 2023 that may be useful to this committee’s work.
Emerging Adult Services
The creation of an Emerging Adults Services Director is required by the YRA Strategic Plan, which is reason enough to implement it: coordination around this population is necessary to align our policy and serve those most at risk of victimization and perpetration of harm. Better serving and supporting this population promises to bring a double dividend in justice and public safety. I offer one large and two smaller suggestions:
- Right now, the majority of oversight for those incarcerated both as juveniles and adults is spread across many government agencies and committees for the DC Council. A young person might find themselves housed in a group home, out of state psychiatric treatment facility, the youth jail, the youth prison, the adult jail, or in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and would thereby fall under Committees on Public Safety, Youth Services, Health, or outside of our purview almost completely. While I am proud that DC separates youth and adult correctional issues so completely, for Emerging Adults there is a particular paucity of coordination across these different agencies. Indeed, because of the FBOP role it’s frequently the case that we cannot even adequately track and support our emerging adults after conviction, for instance to support their educational rights or to ensure their voting rights are respected. We would therefore suggest that this Director’s work be colocated with other Council oversight efforts, rather than in the City Administrator’s Office: the Office of Juvenile Justice Facilities Oversight, any possible Corrections or Juvenile Delinquency Services Ombudsman, and the Corrections Information Council.
- We recommend changing the advisory board seats allocated to current emerging adults to “residents impacted by the court system as an emerging adult,” or at least to add this constituency. Current emerging adults have valuable insights but those who the District failed when they were emerging adults years ago are more likely to have the time and systematic insight to provide good advice.
- We also recommend adding an advisory board representative of the Public Defender Service and/or CJA panels on juvenile defense and post-commitment representation explicitly.
Many provisions of this bill require the creation of performance metrics, strategic plans, coordination plans, or other data-sharing. Given the difficulty of legislating these issues in advance, I would like to suggest (as I’ve done in the past) that DC develop a Collective Impact model in collaboration with service-providers, advocates, and engaged community members. This means creating consensus on shared goals, shared measurement systems, and open and continuous communication. That cannot be done unilaterally—it requires engagement and difficult conversations, and some providers and agencies may balk at the threat of greater oversight and transparency. Yet we can’t expect to succeed without ready access to data to track our progress.
In my written testimony, I provide additional recommendations and ideas for Council to implement structured “whole of government” approaches to public safety, but perhaps the most important one is simply to pressure federal government agencies to submit to local coordination and oversight efforts, recognizing that this lack of coordination with the federal government is frequently the root cause of our troubles.
Focused Deterrence and the Whole of Government
I have previously testified in favor of focused deterrence strategies. These strategies require some of the most demanding coordination of any governance activity, as they countenance the interaction of the parts of government devoted to public goods provision like schools, parks, and employment services with the more controversial and adversarial aspects of government focused on policing, prosecution, incarceration, and release.
Focused deterrence strategies have many benefits, including their overall efficacy in increasing public safety and their cost-efficiency, but from our perspective they are particularly valuable because they provide the certainty that we’re not targeting innocent people based on stereotypes about their delinquency based on race and age.
Whole of Government Writ Large
A true whole of government response would require engagement with the prosecutors, community supervision, and corrections. But DC is in the unique position to lack true autonomy when it comes to these agencies because of the interference of the federal government here. Your legislation will thus be necessarily limited in scope, but there are ways that we can empower DC by taking back functions that we currently outsource to federal agencies and thus the authority to direct or even get data. Among these is governance of the Court Social Services which oversees supervised release for young people. It’s worth considering and investigating recent reports about the failures of CSS that have circulated online.
Test, Track, and Trace: Firearms Data Collection
We certainly support efforts to gather and share more data about crime guns used in the District. We are wary of suggesting particular methods but in general being able to identify the sources of crime guns in the District–and building a culture of accountability about the sources of those firearms and subsequently stemming the flow–should be a major priority.
I share here (or will share in written testimony) the US Government Accountability Office’s basic guide to best practices for interagency collaboration. Though often dry, these practices can often make the difference between good and bad governance.