The head of the District’s juvenile detention center has resigned, sources told The Washington Examiner, making Sean Hamilton the third top official to flee the city’s troubled juvenile justice agency since Mayor Adrian Fenty fired interim Director Marc Schindler in July.
The rapid changes at the top of the Department of Youth Rehabilitative Services have come as new interim Director Robert Hildum has pushed to keep more young criminal offenders behind bars. The day Fenty announced Hildum’s appointment in July, the agency’s second in command, Deputy Director David Brown, and confinement chief David Muhammad announced their resignations. Hamilton is now following their lead, a year after he took the job as New Beginnings’ superintendent.
A DYRS spokesman did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.
All three agency leaders were part of former DYRS Director Vinnie Schiraldi’s reform effort, which focused on keeping youth out of detention centers and in residential treatment facilities. That system fell under heavy criticism over the past year, as about a dozen DYRS wards were charged with murder and at least a half-dozen others were slain. The criticism eventually forced Fenty to fire Schindler, who replaced Schiraldi in January.
Before becoming the superintendent at the 60-bed New Beginnings, which opened in May 2009, Hamilton was a deputy superintendent there and at New Beginnings’ predecessor, Oak Hill. New Beginnings was opened, in part, because Oak Hill was not meeting the demands of court-ordered sanctions against the city that required the District to treat juvenile criminals more humanely.
With Hamilton’s departure, youth advocates are concerned an agency once on the path to righting itself from court decrees is now heading backward.
“All these people were part of the reform effort, and now that they’re leaving, we have no real idea of who the replacements will be,” said Daniel Okonkwo, head of D.C. Lawyers for Youth. “Hildum, and the leadership choices he makes, may not roll back all of the reforms, but they’ll certainly move the agency in a direction it had not been going.”
But others say good riddance to the top DYRS officials.
“You have an agency that over the past year has produced murderers and murder victims at an astonishing rate,” said police union chief Kris Baumann. “Given this record, the fact that criminal apologists are still arguing for leniency for violent offenders is beyond belief.”
