Jason Ziedenberg, a familiar face to many in juvenile justice research and advocacy, will serve as director of research and policy for Justice Policy Institute (JPI), an organization he helped start up in 2002.
Ziedenberg, who was the executive director of JPI from 2005 until 2008, has been consulting for several organizations (including JPI) after leaving a job as director of juvenile justice for M+R Strategic Services.
Before that, Ziedenberg led research and evaluation for D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS), at a time when the city was undergoing a reform effort aimed at downsizing secure incarceration space and increasing community-based program presence.
He now joins a staff led by the man he worked for at DYRS: Marc Schindler, spent four years as chief of staff and one as interim director at the agency. Schindler left to become a partner at Venture Philanthropy Partners, and replaced Tracy Velazquez as JPI’s executive director last year.
Ziedenberg and Schindler also share a mentor in common: the always quotable Vinnie Schiraldi, current head of adult and juvenile probation for New York City.
In 2002 Schiraldi, then the head of the D.C. office for the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, founded JPI in 2002 after he and Dan Macallair could not work out a way to share the top spot of the organization. Macallair is still the executive director of CJCJ.
Ziedenberg, also at CJCJ, left to join Schiraldi’s new startup. He ascended to executive director when Schiraldi left to become the head of DYRS. One of Schiraldi’s first hires was Schindler, who at the time was a staff attorney at the Youth Law Center.
John Kelly is the editor-in-chief of The Imprint