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 Decarceration in the United States involves government policies and community campaigns aimed at reducing the number of people held in custody or custodial supervision. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate ...

for offenders as well as for the

de-institutionalization Deinstitutionalisation (or deinstitutionalization) is the process of replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with a mental disorder or developmental disability. In the late ...

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 Wahpeton ( ) is a city in Richland County, in southeast North Dakota along the Bois de Sioux River at its confluence with the Otter Tail River, which forms the Red River of the North. Wahpeton is the county seat of Richland County. The populat ...

. 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 Loyola University Chicago (Loyola or LUC) is a private Jesuit research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1870 by the Society of Jesus, Loyola is one of the largest Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Cathol ...

(M.S.W., 1957) and

The Catholic University of America The Catholic University of America (CUA) is a private university, private Catholic church, Roman Catholic research university in Washington, D.C. It is a pontifical university of the Catholic Church in the United States and the only institution ...

(D.S.W., 1965). After his undergraduate studies, he spent a year in a

Maryknoll Maryknoll is a name shared by a number of related Catholic organizations, including the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers (also known as the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America or the Maryknoll Society), the Maryknoll Sisters, and the Mary ...

novitiate The novitiate, also called the noviciate, is the period of training and preparation that a Christian ''novice'' (or ''prospective'') monastic, apostolic, or member of a religious order undergoes prior to taking vows in order to discern whether ...

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 The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

, when in 1969 he was chosen by Massachusetts Governor

Francis Sargent Francis Williams Sargent (July 29, 1915 – October 22, 1998) was an American politician who served as the 64th governor of Massachusetts from 1969 to 1975. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 63rd Lieutenant Govern ...

to serve as the Commissioner of the

Massachusetts Department of Youth Services The Massachusetts Department of Youth Services (DYS) is a state agency of Massachusetts. Its Administrative Office is headquartered in 600 Washington Street Boston. The agency operates the state's juvenile justice services. The DYS regions are the ...

(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 The Lyman School for Boys was established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts about 1886 and was closed in 1971. It was the first reform school, or training school in the United States, replacing the State Reform School for Boys near the same si ...

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 The United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida (in case citations, M.D. Fla.) is a federal court in the Eleventh Circuit (except for patent claims and claims against the U.S. government under the Tucker Act, which are appea ...

. 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 John Augustus (1785-June 21, 1859) was a Boston boot maker who is called the "Father of Probation" in the United States because of his pioneering efforts to campaign for more lenient sentences for convicted criminals based on their backgrounds. L ...

, 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 The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice is a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the United States' reliance on incarceration. It was established in 1985 by Jerome G. Miller as the San Francisco branch of the Nation ...

, 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."The Closing of the Massachusetts Reform Schools and the Legacy of Jerome Miller
''Youth Today'', December 2011, Retrieved 24 January 2013

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 *

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

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