An inmate uses a phone in the visitation area of the Central Detention Facility in Washington. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Making predictions is risky business, but here’s what is in store for our city in the new year:

In the District, there will be at least 100 homicides, 300 sex-abuse offenses, 2,000 assaults with a dangerous weapon, 2,000 robberies and 2,900 burglaries. These are low-ball projections based on comparisons of crime figures for 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) says that Washington is “safer and stronger.” Overall crime is down.

But the projected numbers, which are lower than the results of 2014-16, tell another story: Community-shattering violence remains too high, and it isn’t going away. Neither is the plague of repeat violent offenders being allowed to return to the streets to rape, rob and kill, all because of a fractured D.C. criminal-justice system.

Forecasting reforms in the city’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, the second-chance law for youthful offenders, is an even more treacherous undertaking. That its application needs investigating is, however, not at issue.

As The Post reported this year in the in-depth series Second-Chance City, since 2010, 121 defendants previously sentenced under the Youth Rehabilitation Act have been charged with murder — 1 in 5 of all suspects charged with murder during that period. What’s more, a quarter of the killings occurred when the suspects were on probation, often in lieu of any prison sentence. And that’s not counting the more than 200 sentenced for multiple violent or weapons offenses, and at least 136 convicted of armed robbery.

There’s cause to be skeptical about forthcoming changes in the law, however.

Bowser, stirred by The Post’s series, which showed how the application of the lenient law for youthful offenders has jeopardized public safety, has called for the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) to study the measure and produce reforms for consideration next year.

She turned to a weak link in the criminal-justice system for help.

The CJCC consists of the heads of nine local and federal law enforcement and offender supervision agencies, the chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court and D.C. political leaders. They preside over a system in which the city writes the criminal laws, D.C. police make arrests, congressionally funded courts and prosecutors handle the cases, and local offenders serve time in federal prison and are federally supervised during their release.

Since 2003, the CJCC has received $21 million from Congress to help resolve major D.C. public safety issues that cut across agency lines.

As I noted in a recent blog post , Bowser chairs the CJCC but has never attended a meeting, instead sending Kevin Donahue, her deputy for public safety.

Here’s the problem: The CJCC was asleep at the switch, and it missed problems with the Youth Rehabilitation Act until they surfaced in The Post’s series.

Moreover, a major CJCC participant, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, appears to be a large part of the repeat violent offender problem.

The court agency, with an annual federally funded budget of $182 million and nearly 800 employees, is responsible for supervising about 17,000 offenders traversing through the criminal justice system.

The Post reported this week that about 150 times a year, the agency loses track of offenders it classifies as high risk. Several hundred additional offenders classified as lower risk also go missing, and scores turn up as suspects in new crimes.

In August 2015, nearly half of the suspects that D.C. police were charging in killings were offenders under court agency supervision or were free pending trial. Offenders under CSOSA’s supervision were charged with nearly 1,500 crimes of violence in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, The Post reported.

And the agency acts as a world unto itself.

Created two decades ago by Congress, the court agency makes its own rules and doesn’t have to report to Bowser or the D.C. Council or the Justice Department. So to whom does it report?

That story is told in The Post’s series: Donahue wanted to get the court agency to share more information with the police. Not sure who was in charge of probation and parole, he asked Director Nancy Ware, “Who is your boss?” Ware answered: “I report to the president of the United States.”

Indeed, Ware holds a six-year presidential appointment. The court agency is under congressional oversight, but lawmakers on Capitol Hill, The Post learned, have not called a hearing on it in nearly four years.

Year after year, a bipartisan Congress has rubber-stamped the court agency budgets passed along through the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

The Criminal Justice Coordinating Council that Bowser wants to handle Youth Rehabilitation Act reforms is co-chaired by the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency director.

Not only the Youth Rehabilitation Act but also the split local-federal criminal-justice system created by Congress need repairing.

There are two options: Congress should turn over the D.C. courts, along with the federal offender incarceration and supervision systems, to the District of Columbia and provide sufficient resources to do the job — my preference. Or Congress should undertake the reforms: After all, Congress created this unwieldy and unaccountable system.

Something, however, must be done, and in 2017. The D.C. criminal-justice system, as it now functions, endangers public safety.

kingc@washpost.com