Rethinking Juvenile Justice

On a Wednesday evening inside a courtroom in Oakland’s Wiley Manuel
Courthouse, the defendant squirms as if he isn’t sure what to say. But
then again, he’s trying to explain why he bit the victim.

“I stepped in to clarify,” he says. “But she grabs my right sleeve,
and hits me over my right ear. We are tugging back and forth, and she
is swinging at me. She hits the back of my head six or seven times, so
I bit her hand and that ended the dispute.”

Prosecuting Attorney Naimah Jennings asks the defendant, “Did you
have a history of tensions with the victim?”

“No,” the defendant says, adding that they were mere
acquaintances.

“If you didn’t have issues with each other,” Jennings continues,
“why all the sudden would she become violent?”

When the defendant doesn’t answer, Jennings continues.

“When you stepped in,” she asks, “did you say anything derogatory to
her?”

“No.”

“Why, out of the blue, did you bite her?” Jennings asks, her volume
increasing.

Visibly flustered, the defendant reiterates that his action was in
self-defense. “I bit her until she let go,” he says. “I didn’t want to
cause damage.”

“No further questions, your honor,” the prosecutor says. She then
walks swiftly and triumphantly back to her seat and sets her pages of
notes down in a neat pile. And after a brief break, the jury reaches
its verdict. The defendant must perform twenty hours of community
service and attend a mandatory “Healthy Boundaries” workshop designed
to encourage positive behavior among youth who have committed offenses
against other youth. He also must agree to serve as a juror
himself.

It looks like a standard courtroom session. A judge sits on the
bench. The defendant sits alongside a well-dressed attorney at a table
with a pitcher of water. The bailiff maintains order while a clerk
below the judge takes notes. However, most everyone involved —
the attorneys, jurors, defendant, and victim — are minors.

This is McCullum Youth Court, a diversionary program for first-time
offenders that offers an alternative to the traditional juvenile
justice system. For fifteen years, the program has sought to stop
offenders from pursuing a path of crime that could have been avoided
with proper intervention.

When a youth under the age of eighteen has committed a minor,
first-time offense, such as battery, bringing a toy gun to school, or
getting caught with marijuana, police departments in Alameda County can
help the offender avoid a criminal record by sending him directly to
McCullum Youth Court. Instead of undergoing a traditional trial, the
offender goes before a jury of past youth offenders. The bailiffs,
clerks, prosecutors, and defense attorneys are all youths, too.

The idea is to hold offenders accountable by having them face the
judgment of their peers. And participants eventually also serve as jury
members. The program’s philosophy holds that when wayward adolescents
take on the responsibility of judging others who have made mistakes
similar to their own, they gain a sense of self-worth while
reevaluating the consequences of their own actions.

McCullum Youth Court is one of two innovative East Bay alternatives
to a juvenile justice system that has been proven to fail first-time
offenders. The other program, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth,
seeks to change society’s notions of juvenile justice by looking
closely at the needs of victims.

Both programs reject conventional concepts of punishment. And there
are good reasons to reject the current system; sending arrested youth
through the courts to county and state incarceration facilities is
expensive, time-consuming, and likely to lead to future incarceration.
Some 65 percent of youth who go through juvenile hall in Alameda County
end up returning there, said Deborah Swanson, the county’s deputy
director of probation. And according to a 2004 California Performance
Review report, California had the highest rate of reoffending juveniles
of any state in the country. In fact, 91 percent of the “graduates”
from California’s youth incarceration system are rearrested within
three years.

The costs of this failure are impossible to ignore. Gail Bereola,
the presiding judge of the Alameda juvenile court, said it costs $383
per day to keep a juvenile offender in juvenile hall and $165 per day
of detention in Alameda County’s correctional facility, Camp Wilmont
Sweeney. With the standard stay at Camp Sweeney lasting nine months,
the county’s typical financial burden for a single youth sentenced
there is roughly $44,550. Meanwhile, she added, the state Division of
Juvenile Justice charges Alameda County slightly under $21,000 per
month per youth in its care.

The most frustrating part for Bereola, who convened a 2007
countywide task force into alternative approaches in juvenile justice,
is knowing that much of this money is wasted. Youths enter court
discouraged and unmotivated. “They are trying to understand who they
are, and they are often dealing with broken homes,” she said. At that
point, they no longer see any connection between their crime and the
legal consequences. They just grow numb to the punishment.

In short, getting swept up in the juvenile justice system is often
poisonous for the very youths it is intended to rehabilitate. Even
among people who administer the current system, there is agreement that
the process often fails to help offenders understand the consequences
of their crimes. “It’s important to be held accountable and have some
consequences, but instead of having a kind of interaction that holds
you responsible, there is often little or no interaction,” said Matthew
Golde, assistant district attorney for the county’s juvenile justice
division.

The people leading two of Alameda County’s major alternative
juvenile justice programs are united by a desire to end these
vicious cycles.

It is easy to criticize the system, but much harder to change it. In
1992, teacher Rachelle Distefano became the first director of the Law
Academy at McClymonds High School. Her school within a school typically
attracted students who weren’t academically successful. Distefano
managed to engage them by putting on mock trials and taking them to
speak at city council meetings. But the students wanted more. “‘We want
to do something real,'” she recalled them saying. And after hearing
about a San Francisco youth court being run out of the police
department, students said they wanted to run a similar courtroom in
West Oakland. It would be a real court that would dispense real justice
for real juvenile offenders. Distefano’s students were motivated, and
so was she.

So along with attorney and soon-to-be judge Brenda Harbin-Forte, and
Deputy District Attorney Jon Thurston, Distefano wrote up a proposal
for a youth court at McClymonds’ Law Academy. The goal was to prove to
the community that students could participate in and ultimately run a
legal diversion program.

Some members of the community opposed the initiative. They seemed to
fear that it would function as another arm of the police, Thurston
said. To others, Harbin-Forte recalled, the very idea of youth
sentencing youth was absurd. But the program’s backers endured,
establishing McCullum Youth Court as a nonprofit organization that
would not be at the mercy of government budgets — like its San
Francisco predecessor, which didn’t last. If they were going to go
forward with this, Distefano decided, McCullum was going to
survive.

The eager students set up shop in the youth services division of the
Oakland Police Department. Before they knew it, they were acting as
attorneys for real offenders. “Everyone loved it,” remembered Verleana
Green, one of the first students to participate. “Plus, it gave these
offenders a serious wake-up call.” More than a decade later, she is now
a practicing attorney.

Distefano’s students were proving themselves in the community, while
first-time offenders were being held accountable for their crimes yet
avoiding juvenile hall. “They were making a meaningful difference in
the lives of others,” Distefano said.

Fifteen years later, McCullum Youth Court serves around 450 youth
offenders a year. It relies upon a mixed bag of private and public
funding but lacks financial security. It has expanded rapidly over the
last decade and a half, but recently weathered staff reductions.

So does it work? Not until 2009, with funding support from the
federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention under the
Department of Justice, did the organization devote resources toward a
comprehensive study of its efforts. A recent internal study indicated
that 98 percent of youth successfully complete the program without
offending again during a five-month period following their initial
arrest. And a 2002 UC Berkeley study indicated that only 17.8 percent
of youth court participants reoffend in a twelve- to eighteen-month
period following the first arrest. Meanwhile, a study of a similar
program in Lane County, Oregon revealed that, after three years, 81
percent of participants had kept their records clean while only a
little more than 60 percent had avoided arrest in a comparable group of
offenders who didn’t go through the program. Other national studies
show similarly high rates of success.

Without program-specific data, perhaps the best way to measure
McCullum Youth Court’s achievements is to observe it in progress. Twice
a month for several hours a night, the court’s staff of adolescents
holds more than twenty cases in four different courtrooms — one
of which is designed exclusively for middle school students. Associate
Executive Director Sean Duren calls it “game night.”

The young attorneys have prepared for weeks, reviewing cases and
writing opening and closing statements. The offenders arrive nervously
with their parents. Although some clearly have rehearsed their
confessions of guilt, the judging eyes of their peers are a new
experience. Meanwhile, the jurors, most of who were on trial as
offenders only two weeks ago, generally look like they’d rather be
somewhere else.

Volunteer adult attorneys act as judges. But first they must be
trained by the minimum-wage youth court staff, who are nearly two
decades younger than they are. The courtroom is filled with tension and
excitement.

On a recent Wednesday night, one courtroom held an offender
who was caught with a BB gun at school and then panicked at the
principal’s office and fled while under arrest. Another student got
drunk and gave a police officer a fake name. A third girl vandalized a
school bathroom with a gang-related tag. A fourth youth got caught by
the police with a bag of marijuana.

In interviews after court, most offenders expressed gratitude and
relief. “I just feel like it’s a second chance,” said the student who
fled from school grounds after bringing a BB gun to campus. His father
seemed equally grateful. “It avoids my son being labeled,” he said.
“That could have really affected his self-esteem — creating a
stigma around him if he had to go to juvenile hall. Also, it builds up
anxiety, and he is not going to do anything like that again.” The
father then gave his son a stern look, and his son nodded in
agreement.

The boy caught with marijuana admitted during his trial that he
needed to make some changes in his life. He said that since his arrest
he has reduced his pot smoking to “only” a few times a week. In closing
arguments, youth court prosecutor Jimonte Johnson said the offender has
a serious problem and needs substantial intervention. The jury
sentenced him to attend a drug-abuse class.

By 8:30 p.m. — after three and a half hours of orientation and
then trial upon trial — much had changed. Offenders typically
expressed shame, and left having committed themselves to a specific
plan to right their wrongs. The adolescent attorneys left the room
enjoying a kind of performance high, with the volunteer adult judges
offering endless praise and encouraging them to go to law school. And
the jurors themselves seemed changed, too. For most, the apathy
appeared gone. After seeing up to three cases, these youths likely have
a better grasp on the consequences of crime, and with luck become
motivated not to end up back in the hot seat.

At age fourteen, Pairoj Sansri was hanging out with the wrong crowd
— people who reinforced his apathetic, frustrated attitude. His
father was often absent from his life, and his mother was struggling to
raise Pairoj and his siblings by herself. His first year at Oakland’s
Skyline High School in 2005 was rocky. He said he was “drinking alcohol
and smoking weed” and receiving Ds and Fs. He felt frustrated by his
situation at home and at school. “I couldn’t stay focused,” he recalled
recently. And no one was holding Pairoj accountable for his
behavior.

Just months after starting high school, Pairoj took an airsoft gun
to school to show a friend. He had bought it that weekend at the
Berkeley Flea Market. “I just wanted to let my friend see it,” he
explained. “But when I pulled it out and gave it to him, the teacher
saw it and grabbed it from him quickly.” Within moments, a security
guard was on the scene and called the Oakland Police Department. Pairoj
was arrested.

From there, it seemed like Pairoj and his family were on a downward
spiral. “I didn’t know what I was going through,” he said. The process
was overwhelming and confusing. Making matters worse was the
disappointment he felt from his father, who did not live with him at
the time. “He doesn’t like guns, and it made him really mad that I had
brought it to his house,” Pairoj said. He was suspended for thirty days
and spent a month in an alternative placement center — forced, he
said, to do elementary-level school work.

Soon after Pairoj’s suspension, he was transferred to Merritt High
School — a small, alternative public school for students who have
gotten in trouble. At Merritt, Pairoj joined an unstable community of
about a hundred students and six staff members. Months of depression
followed.

“I hated being at that school,” he recalled. “That part was really
depressing.” Classmates would skip school for months at a time but were
never punished. Pairoj felt himself slipping. Surrounded by students
who seemed to have lost all sense of direction and were constantly
misbehaving, Pairoj felt as if he was being conditioned to give up. He
desperately needed a solution.

His first glimmer of hope came when he met his McCullum case manager
Kayode Powell. Since Pairoj immediately admitted to committing his
offense, his case managers concluded that he was a good candidate to go
through youth court.

So Pairoj faced a trial run by his peers. And although he felt
intimidated and afraid of the outcome, he now believes it was the most
useful punishment he could have received. He was ordered to do many
hours of community service, attend classes, and serve as a juror
several times. He was again facing consequences, but this time, they
felt reasonable and thought-out.

“My father was skeptical at first,” Pairoj said. “He thought I
should have done it the hard way.” But the appeal of a clean criminal
record ultimately attracted Pairoj and his family to youth court. And
upon completion, Pairoj’s record remained untainted — but his
goals in life had changed.

For the first time in years, he felt motivated. He was genuinely
impressed by his peers and their performances in the courtroom.
“Initially, I was surprised by it, especially in terms of how far
everyone could rise,” he said. Most of the paid attorneys had been in
Pairoj’s shoes only a few years earlier. “When they say ‘youth-run,’ it
is youth-run,” he said. “But what is most surprising is how far you can
go.”

Pairoj took that lesson to heart. From juror to volunteer attorney
to paid bailiff to peer advisor, the climb for Pairoj to a position of
importance and authority was at times scary, but ultimately exciting.
Now, at age seventeen, Pairoj chairs the program’s youth board and is
the youngest of the program’s ten scholars. “I honestly don’t know
where I would be, but I probably would have gotten into a lot of
trouble,” he said, considering his life without McCullum. Just a few
years ago, he was facing punishment from the law. Now he is a paid peer
advisor with real responsibility.

In the movement known as restorative justice, equal attention is
given to all the parties affected by criminal acts — the victim,
family, and community. It holds offenders accountable for crimes while
simultaneously helping to restore the lives of the victim and the
offender. Sujatha Baliga, the justice coordinator of Restorative
Justice for Oakland Youth, said it is all about “victim-identified
victim’s needs.”

In the traditional American criminal justice system, crimes are
treated as offenses against the state, and the state decides the
appropriate punishment. But in restorative justice, crimes are seen as
offenses against people, and the victim and the offender together
decide the appropriate consequences. Through such a process, supporters
believe, offenders can develop empathy for their victims while victims
can ensure firsthand that criminals are held accountable. The
philosophy is that offenders will understand their wrongdoing much
better if they face their victims and not just judges. Meanwhile,
victims have an opportunity to move past the trauma of the crime. “It
seems like some big theory of justice, but it’s not,” Baliga said.

She believes that the legal system often misses the point. A stolen
car may be a minor inconvenience, where a swiped handbag is devastating
and psychologically traumatizing. The legal system would consider the
value of the stolen goods, but restorative justice would consider
actual harm to the victim. The woman who lost a handbag would be given
proper attention and the robber would not be dismissed simply because
the theft is deemed “minor.”

Restorative justice is based upon ideologies present in many
indigenous cultures throughout the world. Notably, the Maori people of
New Zealand protested the placement of their children into youth jails
in the 1980s because it directly conflicted with their traditions of
group healing within families. In 1989, after much debate, the New
Zealand government followed the ways of its indigenous people and
implemented a countrywide system called Family Group Conferences. Its
success has been astonishing. Two decades later, New Zealand has
virtually shut down its youth incarceration facility —
maintaining fewer than 75 beds where it once had space for more than
1,000.

Half a world away from New Zealand’s success, Baliga is piloting
projects designed to replicate that country’s success. Although the
Express was not allowed to sit in on any of the conferences
because of their sensitivity, Baliga described in detail the
complicated, labor-intensive process that restores the lives of victims
and offenders, pre-adjudication. After separate private meetings with
the victim and offender, the two parties are brought together for one
intense gathering with their families. The victim shares personal
feelings directly with the offender, who must then make amends through
apology and reconciliation. Ultimately, the offender must propose his
own solution, which requires the approval of the victim.

It is an arduous, time-consuming, and emotional process for all
involved. But if successful — and Baliga said the first few pilot
cases have truly exceeded her expectations — everyone leaves the
situation satisfied.

Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, which was founded in 2005,
aims to fundamentally change juvenile justice by integrating these
philosophies in every step of the process, from pre-adjudication
programs to post-incarceration. Executive Director Fania Davis is
leading what she calls Circles of Support and Accountability that use
similar methods to help reintegrate incarcerated youth back in to
society and ensure that they don’t return there. In the long run, Davis
said, they hope restorative justice is the default method throughout
the system, so that the courtroom would be used only for arrested youth
who claim innocence. “It’s about shifting the focus from systems to
community,” Davis said. “What is really going to make our community
safer is not longer prison sentences.”

Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth has launched several pilot
projects this year — taking on only a handful of cases as their
guinea pigs. In its latest and most important grant application,
however, the program is asking for $2,711,254 so that it can help
hundreds of youth in schools and in pre- and post-adjudication
cases.

Dante Green stole a bicycle when he was fourteen years old. It was a
relatively small crime, but the West Berkeley native had committed an
act of petty theft and was caught in the act. “It was juvenile; it was
adolescent,” he said. “I just wanted to have fun.”

His act of fun opened the door to a world Dante knew little about.
He entered the juvenile justice system, starting with a court date, a
sentence of community service, and a lot of probation rules that he was
conditioned to defy. And over a span of four years after his first
offense, Dante was in and out of court ten times.

Raised by his great-grandmother with no father or mother present in
his life, and surrounded by peers who reinforced his bad behavior, it
was only natural that Dante disobeyed probation rules and missed court
dates. “I was defying it because I was young and I didn’t want to deal
with it,” he said. “I come from a low-income, impoverished area. I was
a product of my environment.”

And for his great-grandmother, Leavy Perkins, it was exhausting. “By
junior high, oh boy, he was getting in a lot of trouble with those
boys,” she said. “It was hard to go to court. I hated it.”

Dante saw little connection between his theft and his punishments
— a nightly curfew, regular visits to a probation officer, hours
of community service. He was familiar enough with the process to know
that any petty crime would result in the same meaningless consequences.
So his list of violations grew longer and longer. “It kind of became a
way of life,” he said.

On top of routinely violating probation, Dante would very often cut
class. A typical high school day involved waking up late, taking the
bus to school, roaming the halls aimlessly, cutting out at lunch, and
lying to his great-grandmother about his whereabouts. After going in
and out of court so many times, he felt like nothing mattered. “I would
just lay down and wait for the next day,” he said. “It is kind of sad
when you think about it.”

About a year after he stole the bike, the Berkeley High School
sophomore made another bad decision. He and a friend stole a laptop
computer from a teacher. His friend lied about his own involvement, so
Dante took the fall. The system again put him right back where he
started.

Soon after the laptop incident, Dante stole a single dollar from
that same friend, and his friend reported it. That third theft was the
clincher for Dante’s probation officer. The court sent Dante to the
correctional facilities of Camp Sweeney to take classes and earn his
GED.

That day of sentencing was one of the few times that Dante actually
had a meaningful experience in court — and not because he was
scared of the consequences or regretted his violations. From his seat
in court, he saw his deeply disappointed great-grandmother in the
audience. “I saw her crying, and I couldn’t do anything about it,” he
said. “And she is usually such a strong woman. I wanted to embrace her,
but I couldn’t. … She just walked out.”

That frustration was followed by months of apathy in detention.
Dante said Camp Sweeney wasn’t that bad. But he was away from home and
confined to camp grounds — nine months of programs, classes, and
separation from his great-grandmother. “It wasn’t hell,” he said. “But
of course I wanted to leave; I wanted to be with my family.”

However, Dante did relatively well while he was detained. He
followed all the rules and regulations, and successfully participated
in his classes and programs. That made him a perfect candidate for
Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth’s very first Circle of Support
and Accountability. The Camp Sweeney staff agreed to let Dante leave on
weekends to work with Fania Davis and mediator and facilitator Jack
Dison. For Dante, it seemed at first like just another program to get
through, but he said Dison seemed genuine in their first meeting, and
Dante agreed to participate.

“Usually,” Dante said, “you get the regular — an ex-con comes
in to scare you and that’s it.” The Circle of Support and
Accountability seemed a bit different, but once he actually started, he
realized that it was really like nothing he had ever expected. “They
are genuine people who provide love and care,” he said.

Every week, starting in December 2008, Dante had the support of a
small group of several staff members and relatives convened solely for
him, to help him in his transition out of incarceration while also
holding him accountable and making sure he was taking the necessary
steps to move his life forward. Along with discussing his original
crime, the meetings also helped him make real life goals, and they
expected weekly reports about his progress. With a group of people
listening and discussing his situation exclusively, it was the most
positive attention Dante had ever received.

In one crucial meeting, the staff also brought in a surrogate victim
to act as the owner of the computer that Dante had stolen, since the
actual victim could not be reached. This, Dison noted, is an important
part of the process, because it helps the offender understand the
extent of the harm he inflicted on his victim.

If Dante set goals for himself in a meeting, the following week he
would have to explain his progress. Instead of an earlier curfew, he
was developing life skills and objectives. Instead of more frequent
probation meetings, he was talking to people who would volunteer their
time to listen to him every Friday evening.

Today, the meetings happen every other week in his West Berkeley
home, and he hopes they will continue for a very long time. “He has
changed quite a bit,” Perkins said of her great-grandson. “He is more
humble now.”

On a recent Friday night, the meeting felt joyful — like a
gathering of friends as they all greeted each other with hugs. Perkins
even served a freshly baked cake. When it was his turn to share, Dante
announced to the group that he had just gotten hired for a full-time
paid position as an intern for a San Francisco consulting firm. But the
excitement was quickly clouded by a serious discussion of the
difficulties of going to school and working full-time.

After years of being truant in high school, Dante — in his
first semester out of detention — earned a 3.75 grade point
average from Berkeley City College in the spring. He now has ambitions
of earning a degree in political science and transferring to UC
Berkeley. Planning to take online classes next semester, Dante said in
the meeting that he never thought it would be difficult to work and go
to school at the same time. He was excited, too, about earning real
money. But after a long debate about education and work, the group
together decided that they would make a final decision about the issue
next week before Dante starts his new job.

Despite the challenging meeting, Dante’s current dilemmas are good
ones. He is off of the roller coaster of the failing juvenile justice
system, and on a path to do right for himself. To compensate his
victim, Dante is required to pay the court $350 for the computer he
stole. Last week, he paid back half and he is on track to pay it all
off by the end of August.