Vincent Schiraldi

Schiraldi grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Binghamton University and his MSW from New York University. He reformed the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in 1991, and served as its director until 2002, when he founded the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). He then served as the director of the JPI until 2005, when he became the director of the District of Columbia's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. As director of the Department, he argued that juveniles should not be punished as harshly, and that incentives are a better way to reduce juvenile misbehavior. In 2010, he became Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, a position he held until 2014, when he became a senior advisor to mayor Bill de Blasio in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. From March 2014 to September 2015, he was senior adviser to Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. He was a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government from 2015 until he joined Columbia's faculty in October 2017. In 2021, he was appointed Commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections.

Vincent N. Schiraldi (born January 3, 1959) is an American juvenile justice policy reformer and expert. He has been a senior research scientist at the Columbia University School of Social Work since October 2017. He is known for advocating for trying suspects under the age of 21 in juvenile court, and for programs that supervise older inmates and erase their records if they find a job. His advocacy for more lenient treatment of youth offenders has been controversial: youth advocates have praised his reforms for providing outlets for juveniles, while some law enforcement officers have questioned whether his policies have been too lenient.