Jose Luis Perla has been working at San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department for over twenty-six years. Mr. Perla is originally from El Salvador, Central America where he completed two years of college work at El Salvador National University, until the university was closed in June 1978 due to an ongoing civil war. In October 1979 he came to San Francisco, California and continued his education by taking business classes at Heald College during the day while also taking night courses at City College of San Francisco.

Mr. Perla has gained a lot of experience in criminal justice and in the information technology industry throughout his career at the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department. He started working at JPD in 1979 as a Data Entry Control Clerk and in 1987 he became the Data Control Supervisor. He then moved up to Management Information System Specialist (MIS) and completed levels one, two and three in this position and eventually became the MIS Administrator Supervisor. In 1996 Mr. Perla accomplished an enormous goal by graduating from San Francisco State University with a BS in Business Administration with a concentration in Management Information System.

Currently, Mr. Perla holds the position of Director of Information Technology where he is responsible for providing juvenile justice professionals, policymakers, researchers, and the public with the most detailed information available on the activities of the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department Juvenile Justice Information System. He is responsible for project management and information systems development and maintenance. Mr. Perla is the departmental representative regarding all statistics, information and data such as the juvenile court statistics, court-generated research data, and multi-record administrative data. He uses this data to prepare important reports such as the Juvenile Probation Commission Report, mandate reports to the Board of Corrections, special reports for grant-funded projects and the much-anticipated Juvenile Probation Annual Report. Overall, Mr. Perla has become essential in the development of IT strategies that will support and improve the departments mission, goals, objectives and strategic plan.