AUDASE

Jerome G. Miller, Who Reshaped Juvenile Justice, Dies at 83

By SAM ROBERTS NY TIMES

Jerome G. Miller, who inspired a revolution in America’s juvenile justice system by virtually emptying Massachusetts’s reformatories in the early 1970s, died on Aug. 7 at his home in Woodstock, Va. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by his wife, the former Charlene Coleman, his only immediate survivor.

“Single-handedly,” Robert D. Behn, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote in 1976, Dr. Miller “changed the political question from ‘What do we do with these bad kids’ to ‘What do we do with these bad institutions?’ By focusing public attention on evils of the institutions, he elicited from the public the only logical conclusion: The institutions must be closed.”

In an interview on Thursday, Dr. Behn reaffirmed those sentiments. “He basically changed the nature of the conversation,” he said.

By unconventional, innovative, unproven, and sometimes impractical and politically volatile means, Dr. Miller, as Massachusetts’s youth services commissioner, dispersed virtually all of the state’s delinquents from prisonlike custody. They were sent to community drug treatment and job training programs, therapeutic group homes, military schools, the care of college student volunteers and full-time paid local residents, foster parents, and the Outward Bound program. He even had some of them paroled back to their parents.

“Despite the lack of careful planning, the absence of evidence to guide the reforms and the dearth of data about the needs and circumstances of the youth in custody,” a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation concluded in 2013, “Massachusetts reformers still realized impressive outcome improvements, reducing criminality, saving taxpayers money and minimizing harm and disruption to young people’s lives.”

Dr. Miller pursued his agenda as a state commissioner for children in Pennsylvania and Illinois, as a court-appointed receiver for the child-welfare system in the District of Columbia and as a judicial monitor for prisons in Florida.

In 1977, with Herbert J. Hoelter, he founded the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Baltimore, which provides services for people with developmental disabilities and seeks alternatives to incarceration and institutionalization. He worked there full time until a few months ago. Through the center, he also opened the Augustus Institute in Alexandria, Va., which treats sex offenders.

Nearly a half-century after Dr. Miller imposed his changes, no consensus has emerged on how to cope with adolescent criminals. But his legacy in government, coupled with his continued public advocacy, federal financial incentives to states, the rising costs of incarceration compared with alternatives, subsiding public fears about teenage superpredators and new research about the mutability of adolescent brains, has prompted other states to follow the precedent of deinstitutionalization he set decades ago.

“Massachusetts was successful in serving as a beacon to reformers elsewhere in the states and overseas,” Andrew Rutherford, emeritus professor of law and criminal policy at the University of Southampton in England, said in an email. “It gave huge confidence to proponents of deinstitutionalization.”

In 1992, Dr. Miller sounded an early warning that black men were disproportionally enmeshed in the criminal justice system. He found that 42 percent of black men ages 18 to 35 in Washington were in prison, on probation, on parole, being sought by the police or free on bond awaiting trial.

“In effect,” he said at the time, “the social safety net has been replaced by a dragnet.”

Jerome Gilbert Miller was born in Wahpeton, N.D., just south of Fargo, on Dec. 8, 1931, to George Miller, a high school music teacher, and the former Beatrice Butts.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1954 from Maryknoll College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Glen Ellyn, Ill., he spent a year as a novitiate in Massachusetts. Deciding not to become a missionary, he went on to receive a master’s in social work at Loyola University in Chicago.

He enlisted in the Air Force’s medical service corps, where he established a clinic to determine whether Strategic Air Command personnel handling nuclear weapons were emotionally stable. He took a three-year hiatus to earn a doctorate in social work at the Catholic University of America and later taught at Ohio State University.

In 1969, on the recommendation of a state panel, Gov. Francis W. Sargent of Massachusetts, a Republican, appointed Dr. Miller state commissioner of youth services.

At first, Dr. Miller figured the system could be reformed, but he gave up that idea in the summer of 1970. That was when he arrived unannounced at the Institute for Juvenile Guidance in Bridgewater with the governor’s wife, just as two inmates trying to escape were “dragged down, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and beaten,” he recalled in his 1991 memoir, “Last One Over the Wall.”

Within two weeks, he emptied Bridgewater. Not long afterward, he was informed that two boys at the Lyman School, which dated to the 19th century, had been caged in a basement by a supervisor who drove off with the keys. Dr. Miller decided then and there that the entire system was not worth saving.

Recidivism was running as high as 80 percent. Brutality was notorious, with troublesome youths forced to drink from toilet bowls or beaten on their soles with wooden paddles. Costs were escalating — already $10,000 annually for every inmate, or “enough to send a child to Harvard with a $100-a-week allowance, a summer vacation in Europe and once-a-week psychotherapy,” Dr. Miller said in 1972.

“As I looked around the department at the superintendents, directors of education, chaplains, planners and others in leadership roles, I saw that most would be there long after I left,” he recalled in the memoir. “They could outwait and outlast me. I’d made a mistake in concentrating on making the institutions more humane. The idea of closing them seemed less risky.”

Three months after he emptied Bridgewater, Dr. Miller transferred Lyman’s inmates to what was described as a “conference” at the University of Massachusetts, where student volunteers steered them to group homes and foster care.

From 1968 to 1972, the year before he left as commissioner, the number of young people in state custody remained about the same, around 2,400. But the number confined in correctional institutions plunged to 132, or fewer than 6 percent, from 833, or 34 percent.

To sidestep a backlash from public employee unions and local politicians, Dr. Miller told the guards at Lyman: “You can have the institutions; we are taking the kids.”

Termination notices were not sent to workers whose jobs had been rendered superfluous until the end of 1974 — two years after the last reform school was emptied.