In the broader scheme of things, the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is a fairly obscure agency. By law its core missions are to decrease the disproportional numbers of minority children incarcerated, prevent teenage delinquency, and act to remove children from adult jails, where they are at high risk for both sexual assault and suicide. But the agency also doles out more than a quarter of a billion dollars in federal grant money every year-with little congressional oversight or attention from the public. But instead of the money being spent for what Congress intended it, the agency’s funding more recently flowed to programs with political, social or religious connections to the White House. The agency’s new priorities include encouraging teenage abstinence and promoting golf to inner city kids.
The favoritism and politicization in the awarding of grants by OJJDP would ordinarily be unremarkable compared to such higher profile examples of what congressional critics describe as cronyism by the Bush administration– except for the staggering human consequences. To fund his new priorities, J. Robert Flores, the administrator of OJJDP has cut funding for the training of corrections officers to prevent the physical and sexual abuse of incarcerated children. He has cut funds for a program to counsel rape victims that had been praised by President Bush. He has cut funds to prevent the incarceration of mentally ill or mentally retarded children. And he has cut funding for programs to prevent the suicide of gay and lesbian children.
Flores’ tenure as head of Justice’s OJJDP and the favorism and cronyism which at least a half dozen subordinates and superiors have alleged was the subject of a recent Nightline broadcast which I helped report with ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross and reporters Anna Schecter and Maddy Sauer. Tomorrow morning, Flores will be questioned under oath about all of this before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
And my colleague Anna has a story out this afternoon disclosing that Flores is also the subject of an investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General:
The DOJ Inspector General has launched an investigation into fancy trips around the world taken by J. Robert Flores, the Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which always included golf and/or tennis…
“Flores would golf during the day while on official travel around the country on tax payer funds,” said Scott Peterson, a former staff member at OJJDP who traveled with Flores on various occasions.
An OIG investigator questioned one staff member about Flores’ travel and about an ex-Colonel in the Honduran army hired by Flores who at one time ran for president of Honduras.
The staffer said the Human Resources Department [of DOJ] was concerned that giving access to the DOJ computer system to a non-US citizen and a former Honduran Colonel could be dangerous for security reasons.
Fonseca, whose Honduran military career spanned three decades, was contracted to work on faith-based and gang issues…
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