As former commissioner of NYC probation and correction, I consider proposals within Mayor Adams’ administration to use probation officers as crowd control police during ICE protests to be part of a disastrous string of ideas involving the city’s once highly respected Probation Department.
I immediately forwarded news of this outlandish suggestion to three prior probation commissioners who served under four different mayors. Their responses were: “Dear freaking God,” “It’s disgusting” and “Speechless…”
Dalvanie Powell, president of the United Probation Officers Association put it best, “Pulling probation officers into high-risk assignments completely outside our scope of work is dangerous, reckless, and insulting…it’s a crisis waiting to happen.”
Probation was established in 1841 by Boston cobbler John Augustus, a reformed alcoholic whose efforts sought to reduce unnecessary incarceration. He and his temperance movement colleagues volunteered as the world’s first probation officers, seeking to “raise the fallen (and) reform the criminal.”
Probation was an unapologetically hopeful, rehabilitative project until the 1970s when criminal justice systems took a hard turn to the right. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” as part of his “Southern Strategy” to peel off reliable Democratic votes from southern states alarmed by civil rights and anti-war activism.
Nixon aide John Ehrlichman noted, “[Nixon] had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people…We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, we could…arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This marked the launch of what would later become known as mass incarceration, a policy under which the U.S. prison population grew eightfold from 1972 to 2008.
Around the same time, sociologist Robert Martinson, penned a report declaring that “nothing works” when it comes to rehabilitating people in prison. Despite some dubious math, which Martinson himself would later recant and call “crap”, his report became one of the most cited criminological studies in history. He was particularly harsh about probation, calling it “a standing joke.”
Probation departments suddenly came under pressure to get tough. Probation officers donned flak jackets, started doing ride-alongs with police, and launched “community corrections” — jail-like conditions in the community — to mirror their big cousin, the prison. Imprisonment for probation violations like staying out past curfew or drug use mushroomed, with one in four people incarcerated not for new offenses, but for non-criminal rule violations.
In 2003, NYC probation joined the punitive fray, permitting staff to be armed. In the seven years between then and when I started as commissioner, several staff committed suicide with their service weapons in the pressure-cooker environment of probation; none had used their weapons in the line of duty.
Probation practices began softening in the new century. More than 100 community supervision executives from around the country signed onto a statement calling for “probation and parole to be substantially downsized, less punitive, and more hopeful, equitable and restorative.” Community supervision populations dropped by more than a quarter vs. their 2007 peak. When I ran NYC Probation there were 30,000 adults and juveniles under supervision; now there are around 11,000.
Unfortunately, in 2023, Mayor Adams appointed Juanita Holmes — a throwback to the more punitive era — as probation commissioner, one of a string of Adams’ ill-considered public safety appointments. Her job amounted to Holmes “failing upward,” after she publicly tangled with her previous boss, former NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell.
The 36-year NYPD veteran with no probation experience immediately brought in a law enforcement approach, mandating that all staff carry weapons, and cloaking social work-oriented staff in police uniforms. When ordered to carry weapons, several well-respected assistant commissioners resigned.
In under three years, she’s turned a highly respected department from one that prized rehabilitation to one whose motto may as well be “trail ‘em, nail ‘em, and jail ‘em.” Like so many exclusively “tough on crime” approaches, this one has failed to deliver on public safety; reoffending by people on probation increased 19% during Holmes’ tenure.
Now city leaders are toying with deploying a staff untrained in law enforcement practices to control crowds during First Amendment right to assembly. With a new mayor likely in January, Holmes’ tenure cannot end soon enough.
Schiraldi was probation commissioner under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and authored “Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom.”
