Jerome G. Miller

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.[3]

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.

In 1977, together with Herbert J. Hoelter, Miller co-founded the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA).[4][5] 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.[6]

• Last One Over the Wall: The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools. Ohio State University Press, 1991. ISBN 0814205348 (winner of the Edward Sagarin Prize of the American Society of Criminology)
• Miller, Jerome G. (1993). African American Males in the Criminal Justice System.
• Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System. Cambridge University Press, July 1996. ISBN 9780521460217

• 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