Jerome G. Miller

Jerome G. Miller
Jerome Gilbert Miller (December 8, 1931 – August 7, 2015) was an American social worker, academic and public sector corrections administrator, who was an authority on the reform of juvenile and adult corrections systems. He was a prominent advocate for alternatives to incarceration for offenders as well as for the de-institutionalization of individuals with developmental disabilities. His career involved university teaching, administration of juvenile justice services for three states, clinical work with offenders and advocacy for systemic change in public sector correctional services. Miller's work first drew national attention for his leadership in closing several juvenile reformatories in Massachusetts in the early 1970s. Miller went on to emerge as a prominent national advocate, administrator and educator working for systemic change in public sector corrections and disability service delivery systems. He was the co-founder of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives.
Early years
Jerome Gilbert Miller was born on December 8, 1931, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. His parents were George Miller, a high school music teacher, and the former Beatrice Butts. He earned academic degrees from Maryknoll Seminary, Glen Ellyn, Il (B.A., 1954), Loyola University Chicago (M.S.W., 1957) and The Catholic University of America (D.S.W., 1965). After his undergraduate studies, he spent a year in a Maryknoll novitiate in Bedford, Massachusetts. Miller's doctoral studies concentrated in psychiatric social work, and he was qualified as a licensed clinical social worker.
Career
Miller was an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Ohio State University, when in 1969 he was chosen by Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent to serve as the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services (DYS).
Massachusetts experiment
Within three years of leading DYS, Miller had shut down the state's two juvenile reformatories in favor of community based alternatives to incarceration. The first closure involving Lyman School for Boys in 1971, caught many juvenile justice professionals in the state by surprise. Lyman School was the first reformatory for delinquent adolescent boys to be established in the United States. Anticipating the possible closure of the Massachusetts Industrial School for Boys at Shirley, various forces tried to mobilize against it, but Miller was successful in closing the school in 1972. Highly controversial at the time, and still debated today, the basic deinstitutionalization reforms implemented by Miller in the state's juvenile justice services forty years ago are still in place today.
Alternatives to incarceration
Recognized as a successful reformer capable of taking on entrenched state-level systems overly reliant on institutionalizing children and adolescents, Miller moved to Illinois in 1973 to serve as the director of Children and Family Services and then to Pennsylvania in 1975 to serve as the Commissioner of Children and Youth. From 1989 to 1994 Miller was the jail and prison monitor for Judge Howell W. Melton in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. From 1995 to 1997 Miller served as the court appointed receiver for Washington D.C.'s child welfare system. As a leader and reformer in these jurisdictions, he sought to address and overcome the traumatizing consequences of incarceration, to maximize the use of community resources as alternatives to imprisonment, to lower the disproportionate rates of locking up youth of color, to reduce recidivism by improving offender outcomes and to reduce unsustainable costs associated with escalating levels of incarceration.
National Center for Institutions and Alternatives
In 1977, together with Herbert J. Hoelter, Miller co-founded the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA). The focus of NCIA involves sentencing advocacy, parole release advocacy and developing credible alternatives to incarceration and institutionalization. Miller has written and lectured widely on juvenile and adult corrections and strategies for promoting and implementing systemic reforms that utilize community-based alternatives to replace counterproductive and financially unsustainable institutionalization of offenders and developmentally disabled patients. Miller also served as the founder and clinical director of NCIA's Augustus Institute for Mental Health, named for John Augustus, known as the 'father of probation' for his pioneering efforts to promote offender rehabilitation in the United States.
Miller died on August 7, 2015, in Woodstock, Virginia.
Impact
Jerome Miller's dramatic closure of two juvenile reformatories in Massachusetts in the early 1970s launched a forty-year career as a pioneering administrator, educator and advocate for alternative models for responding to offenders and developmentally disabled persons. Miller's capacity to articulate the need for reform, to envision models for systems transformation and ability to implement institutional change have been widely acknowledged, sometimes condemned and often praised. Reflecting on Miller's impact on juvenile justice reform efforts in the early 1970s, Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, wrote, "The closing of the Massachusetts reform schools stands as the premier event in the history of American juvenile justice reform.... Miller set the course for the 21st century juvenile justice system and secured his place among history's great reformers."
Published works
Books
Last One Over the Wall: The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools. Ohio State University Press, 1991. (winner of the Edward Sagarin Prize of the American Society of Criminology)
Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System. Cambridge University Press, July 1996.
Articles & lectures
American Guluag - Why does the "home of the free" lock up 2 million men, women, boys and girls-most of them people of color? yesmagazine.org, Sept. 30, 2000, Retrieved 24 January 2013
Hobbling a Generation: Young African American Men in Washington, D.C.'s Criminal Justice System - Five Years Later, Crime & Delinquency, July 1998, 44: 355-366
Riding the Crime Wave, Why Words We Use Matter So Much Nieman Reports, Winter 1998, Retrieved 12 March 2013
Alternatives to Incarceration: A Dream Deferred, University of South Dakota, Governmental Research Bureau, 1994, Public Affairs, Issue 103
The Debate on Rehabilitating Criminals: Is It True that Nothing Works? Washington Post, March 1989, prisonpolicy.org
Magnificent Illusion: The Professional Social Worker’s Search for Asylum, Jerome G. Miller, 9th Annual Konopka Lecture, University of Minnesota, May 1986, Retrieved 24 January 2013
Further reading
Juvenile Correctional Reform in Massachusetts, Lloyd Ohlin, Alden Miller and Robert Coates, Center for Criminal Justice, Harvard Law School, 1977
Reinventing Juvenile Justice, (chapter 5: What Works with Juvenile Offenders: The Massachusetts Experiment), Barry Krisberg and James Austin, Sage, 1993, (cl)
The Massachusetts Experience: A Historical Review of Reform in the Department of Youth Services, Edward J. Loughran, Social Justice, 1997, vol. 24, issue 4, p170
Hollie I. West An Impatient Reformer is Admired and Reviled: Jerome G. Miller, Youth Today, February 2001, p. 52., sparkaction.org, Retrieved 24 January 2012
References
External links
With Juvenile Deincarceration, Jerry Miller Was First One Over The Wall Chronicle of Social Change, Retrieved 15 August 2015
Jerome Miller Speaks on Alternatives to Prison C-Span Video Library, Retrieved 4 May 2013
Jerome Miller's blog: institutions/etc,
National Center for Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA)
Closing Massachusetts' Training Schools, Reflections Forty Years Later The Annie Casey Foundation, 2013
See also
National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, website
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative at the Annie W. Casey Foundation
The Massachusetts Juvenile Justice System of the 1990s: Re-Thinking a National Model Boston Bar Association, Retrieved 9 March 2013
1931 births
2015 deaths
People from Wahpeton, North Dakota
Maryknoll Seminary alumni
Loyola University Chicago alumni
Catholic University of America alumni
Ohio State University faculty
American criminologists
Children's rights activists
Penologists
Prison reformers
American social workers
Catholics from North Dakota