OJJDP scandal: The Bush friends & family plan "for-profit" organization.

Here is an excerpt article of the OJJDP scandal by Ed Brayton

From Science Blogs:

While still at the DOJ, Peterson had recommended that funds be withheld related to an earlier grant awarded to Best Friends because the group had not complied with federal regulations that it report how it was spending taxpayer money. When faced with a possible cut-off of their funding, the group did belatedly comply and provided the information.

And then there was the matter of Best Friends having earlier backed out of a congressionally mandated study on abstinence programs even after it had agreed to participate...

Meanwhile, others in the juvenile justice arena continue to question why Flores would ignore the advice of his own staffers and award grants to lower-ranked organizations.

"Under Flores, his office has abandoned its core mission in favor of peripheral issues with ineffective programs," William Treanor, executive director of the American Youth Work Center, told ABCNews.com.

"The office has abdicated respect and leadership in the juvenile justice field," he said. The newspaper published by Treanor's organization, Youth Today, first reported the controversy over Flores' grant awards.

Although OJJDP administrators have some discretion under the law to award grants to whomever they want, Flores is still required to get approval for the awards from his superior.

But because of Best Friends' lower ranking, 53rd out of 104 grant applicants considered, his superiors might have overruled him, if they knew of the group's poor standing, according to Justice Department officials involved in the process.

To make sure that a grant to Best Friends was approved, officials say, Flores simply created an entirely whole new category which the organization's grant proposal would be considered.

The category, Flores wrote in a memo to then-Assistant Attorney General Regina Schofield, who oversaw the awarding of Justice Department contracts and grants was for grantees "utilizing school based outreach efforts directed at preventing high-risk activity (out-of-wedlock pregnancy)."

Flores went on to write Schofield regarding Best Friend's proposal: "This application has the highest score that met the criteria under the administrator's priority area."

What Flores left out of the memo was that Best Friends had the highest score because by manipulating the categories, Best Friends was the only organization that qualified at all in that particular category.