Criminal Justice Magazine
Spring 2000
Vol. 15, Issue 1
The Time Dollar Youth Court: Salvaging Throw-away Juveniles
By Edgar S. Cahn
In Washington, D.C., more than 50 percent of young black males between
the ages of 18 and 24 are now under court jurisdiction-in prison, on
parole, or on probation. The so-called juvenile justice system is the
feeder, the supply line. The journey starts with a juvenile's first
brush with the law and the response he or she gets. Typically, the prosecutor's
office simply "no papers" the case. After all, overburdened
prosecutors have more important things to worry about than a mere first
offense. They have to deal with hardened criminals and recidivists.
But that first "no paper" sends a message that young people
read loud and clear: "You get three freebies before anyone takes
you seriously." And everyone knows that this does not mean three
illegal acts-it means three times getting caught.
This is how the journey begins. By the third arrest, a formal juvenile
proceeding functions more as a rite of passage, a test of manhood (or
womanhood), than a chance for the young offender to elect a different
path in life. Without meaning to, the juvenile justice system is turning
young kids into hardened criminals faster than any gang in town.
When I shared that observation with Chief Judge Hamilton of the D.C.
Superior Court, District of Columbia, his response was immediate and
direct: "What do you want to do about it? And how fast can you
do it?"
Before I knew it, the Time Dollar Institute and the University of the
District of Columbia (UDC) David A. Clarke School of Law were in the
business of planning and launching a youth court. The Time Dollar Institute
was formed in 1995 and has developed a local, tax-exempt currency called
"time dollars" as a way of rewarding people for helping others
and building community. One hour of help equals one time dollar. People
often labeled recipients, clients, and "targets" can now become
contributors by helping others. Earning time dollars makes them genuine
partners in producing health, justice, education, community development,
and social change. The institute has assisted with the establishment
of Time Dollar programs in 30 states and three countries overseas.
For its part, the UDC law school seeks to discharge its ongoing debt
to the District of Columbia community by absorbing critical costs and
by helping shape the youth court as it evolves from a diversion program
to the cornerstone of a genuine community justice system.
The first part of this article provides some illustrations of how powerful
the peer interaction fostered by the Time Dollar Youth Court can be.
The second part summarizes unique features of the court. The third part
lays out lessons, implications, and next steps.
Youth as coproducers of justice
When we undertook to design a youth court after canvassing other models
around the country, we thought we knew the problem we were tackling:
How to turn a youth's first brush with the law into a turning point
that heads him or her down a different path.
I had known of a youth court functioning in Ithaca, New York, in the
early 1960s and had been advocating widespread adoption, ever since.
(See Edgar Cahn and Jean Cahn, What Price Justice: The Civilian Perspective
Revisited, 41 NOTRE DAME LAW. 927, 954 n.37 (1966); Power to the People
or the Profession: The Public Interest in Public Interest Law, 79 YALE
L.J. 1005, 1017 (1970); Antioch School of Law, Catalog, M.A. in Teaching
Clinical Education 13 (Youth Court Planning Project) (1976-1977).)
Youth courts finally began to spread in the 1980s as a result of the
success of the Odessa Teen Court in curbing drug use and the missionary
work of its founder, Natalie Rothstein, in spreading the word. (See
generally American Probation and Parole Association PEER JUSTICE AND
YOUTH EMPOWERMENT: AN IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE FOR TEEN COURT PROCEEDINGS
(1998).)
Although the idea of youth courts began to take hold, they were largely
instituted in suburban and small-town settings. Once we grappled with
implementing the youth court concept in an inner-city context, it became
clear that we were dealing with a qualitatively different set of problems.
Mobilizing peers meant something very different. We were not dealing
with isolated instances of deviant behavior. Studies projecting minority
involvement in the justice system predict that, if current trends continue,
over 90 percent of African American males will be under court jurisdiction
before they reached the age of 30. That makes so-called deviant behavior
look like a dominant culture. When we trained the first group of jurors,
a young man who had spent some time in prison summed up his life choices
and his preferences in words that still haunt me: "I'd rather be
carried by six than judged by 12." Death was less to be feared
than the life he could envision. Our job was to create a different set
of options by creating a new subculture-a place where it was safe to
say to a peer something as simple as: "Don't do something stupid."
We had to teach or, more precisely, we had to give permission to prospective
jurors to confront their peers with the obvious: "You knew when
you got into that car that there was no way that Mercedes belonged to
him." Or to say out loud: "If you hang out at that corner,
you know sooner or later you're going to get busted. And with that crowd,
someone is bound to be carrying some drugs."
Young people think those thoughts. They just do not get reinforcement
or affirmation for saying them. Indeed, those are things that a youth
had better not say if he or she wants peer acceptance in many inner-city
neighborhoods. Creating a youth court means creating a world where young
people are supported and affirmed for saying what they know: "Don't
hurt someone. Don't take something that isn't yours. Don't take that
kind of risk."
In a case involving a boy charged with stealing a car, the defendant
had explained his actions by citing the fact that keys had been left
in the car's ignition. One juror who had served time himself and was
now heavily involved in the church pounced on that excuse: "Just
because you see a car with the key in the ignition doesn't mean some
higher voice is ordering you to jump in and drive it off." The
other jurors tried gamely to suppress a laugh and nodded in agreement.
Coming from an adult, the same words likely would have gone in one ear
and out the other; coming from a peer, with others agreeing, they nearly
brought the defendant to tears.
Another boy found himself before the Time Dollar Youth Court for driving
the family car without a license. His grandmother was seated next to
him, embarrassed and in tears. "The jury hereby sentences you to
either write a letter of apology to your grandmother or give her a great
big hug right now," the jury foreman said. The boy opted for the
hug, as the jury broke into applause.
Being part of the Time Dollar Youth Court makes it permissible to say
those things. It vests those kids with a responsibility to tell it like
it is-to kids whom they have never seen before. That takes more than
teaching. It entails the creation of an environment that supports those
values.
Youth are the "consumers" of juvenile justice. What they
perceive is that they are just as likely to be consumers of injustice.
Consider the following case. A young man appears before a jury of his
peers charged, according to the police report, with having slashed the
tires on his teacher's Lexus automobile because she kept him after school
for failing to hand in his homework. The teenage jury hears the young
man explain that he knows he did wrong, but he lost control because
he had begged the teacher to be permitted to leave for 10 minutes in
order to bring his younger brother and sister safely home across gang
territory from a neighboring school. That was his "job." He
had promised his mother and father that they could count on him. And
being kept in after school put his younger brother and sister in real
physical danger. He was beside himself with rage, shame that he had
let his parents down, and fear for his brother's and sister's safety.
The teen jury returned from its deliberations with a four-part sentence:
1. Get this kid another teacher; a teacher who doesn't understand
what this kid was going through has no business being his teacher.
2. Write a letter of apology to the teacher and make a good faith
payback of at least $30 that you personally earned.
3. Write a letter of apology to your younger brother and sister explaining
to them why, despite the provocation, this was no way to act. They
look up to you; you need to put them straight that acting out this
way is not right.
4. Hang out a minimum of 20 hours at a boys' club over the next month.
You need to be a kid and spend some time just being with your own
age group.
Being a consumer of the juvenile justice system in all likelihood means
that one has been treated with disrespect, written off, and generally
(or specifically) found wanting by society.
We learned quickly there is one thing we do not have to teach these
children: They already know how to care for each other, to reach out
to each other. At one of the very first Time Dollar Youth Court hearings,
when we were just beginning to find out what kids could do for kids,
we watched the foreperson of the jury, herself a single mother who had
been through her own hell, trying to get some answers from a teenager
who had taken someone's car to go joyriding at 2 a.m. The defendant
knew how to stonewall. He sat hunched over, eyes on the floor. We could
barely hear his answers. "Yes. I took the car." "Yes.
It was two in the morning." "Yes. I go to school." The
jury knew that wasn't true. "I do okay." Again, not true.
Juror frustration was building. The young woman serving as foreperson
made a direct personal plea: "We are only trying to do what it
is we can do. The only way we can do anything is if you help us. You
help us. We can help you. With you just sitting there just chilling,
being quiet, you know, it's not going to do nothing."
Finally, the boy's mother broke in: "Basically, Ronald's a good
child. Since he can't speak up, I'll speak up for him so you all can
help him. We're in an area where there's nothing but drugs. Nothing
but killing. No positive role models around there. His oldest brother
has been killed and basically Ronnie has been a troubled child because
his brother died in front of him." She went on to explain that
since then Ronnie did not trust anyone and would not open up to anyone.
The jury went into momentary shock, but not the foreperson. She took
over and everything changed because of what it was taking out of her
to give of herself under the circumstances: "I could understand
exactly why he gets into trouble." Her voice slowed, halted, then
deepened as she choked up: "I seen my own mother get killed. It's
hard growing up, knowing all these things that you know and experiencing
the things that you experience not because it's your choice. It's because
things are going to happen that are meant to happen." Tears streamed
down her face as she added, "We're here to help. But we can't help
you if you don't help us." And then she just lost it. She stopped
being a jury foreperson and just reached out to the defendant. Without
any authorization, she extended a welcome to a program that had helped
her as a single mother get past drugs and find an inner spiritual strength:
"We would be more than happy to have you come there with us if
you want to. I'll talk to you about that after this. Just want to wish
you the best. God bless you."
These are the youth whom so-called experts are now labeling "superpredators."
People don't look these children in the eyes when they meet them. They
walk the other way. But these kids care for each other-even though they
are strangers.
Last summer I met with a group who had been serving as jurors. They
told me they wanted to know what happened to the young people who came
before them, what happened after they pronounced sentence. Then one
of them made an offer: "I'd like to be assigned as a buddy to stick
with one." All the others nodded in agreement. They would, too.
I asked: "Wouldn't you be afraid? After all, you are the ones who
sentenced them." They shook their heads "no." After all,
one explained, "We're jurors," absolutely convinced that that
status protected them. But equally clear in their minds was that their
job was somehow incomplete unless they took personal responsibility
to do whatever they could for the offenders whom they had judged.
We had enlisted these youngsters as "coproducers." For them,
coproduction meant more than imposing a sentence. It meant making a
commitment: No more throw-away kids. That awareness redefined the task,
the design, and the path we have taken.
Special features and present scale
The Time Dollar Youth Court we have created in Washington, D.C., was
from its inception different from most other youth courts in certain
important respects. This youth court does not use a youth prosecutor
or defense counsel because we observed that too often with them the
process became a contest to determine which youth had the "fastest
mouth." We felt it was imperative for the jury to interact directly
with the respondent and the parent-and wanted to make sure that the
hearing was not simply a spectator sport.
An adult presides, but the jury foreperson, a teenager, leads the questioning
and calls upon other jurors to ask questions and follow-up questions.
After two years we decided to make jury duty a mandatory element of
every sentence; there are now juries composed of 100 percent respondents
and former respondents. The shift in role seems to create a shift in
perspective that has powerful attitudinal consequences.
Each hour of jury duty earns one time dollar. The reward is a recycled
computer that jurors can take home with the time dollars they earn.
The message for participants is clear: Helping others creates opportunity
and you have the power to shape your destiny.
We are now developing arrangements with the University of the District
of Columbia to enable jurors to utilize their time dollars in applying
to the university; we want to secure special placement in the university's
Criminal Justice Program and a special financial aid package. Our reasoning
is simple: community service ought to be a road to opportunity. We established
that with veterans of military service. Serving this nation gained access
to special categories of financial aid. Why can't we apply the same
principle to youth who are willing to serve to curb violence in our
neighborhoods?
The Time Dollar Youth Court is now moving to a scale that can begin
to have large-picture impacts. The court handles between seven and 12
hearings each week. That is more than 350 cases a year-a figure roughly
equivalent to one-third the number of first time, nonviolent juvenile
offenders in the District. Our goal is to reach 50 percent within a
year.
The hearings are widely dispersed in the community. One hearing site
is at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law. That
is where the all-respondent jury meets. The law school is also where
the juries composed entirely of former respondents are trained. At least
20 first-year law students discharge a 40-hour community service requirement
by helping to conduct the court's hearings, by monitoring discharge
of jury-imposed obligations, and by serving as buddies and mentors to
the participants.
Outside of the law school, most of the Time Dollar Youth Court jury
pools are at public housing complexes. One is at a charter school for
youth in halfway houses and shelters; another is under development at
the Latin American Youth Agency; and the newest site to be added will
be based at a middle school building secured by the Marshall Heights
Community Development Corporation.
A court-community partnership
The Time Dollar Youth Court is teaching us that juvenile justice is
not something we do to juveniles. It's something that can only be done
with juveniles. The courts cannot do it alone. Juveniles, parents, and
community members must all be enlisted actively as coproducers of justice.
What exactly does this mean?
Coproduction is not just juvenile justice with kids playing at being
jurors. If the outcome is called juvenile justice, then we have to realize
that when we engage young people, we are changing the producers, the
process, and-ultimately-the end product.
Treating youth as assets
The Time Dollar Youth Court can create roles for youths that give them
ways to be valued for what they are now and for what they can contribute,
right now, as youth. It can help adults overcome the fear that so many
have of youth, particularly young black males. It can help counter the
stereotypes of youth provided by the media.
When I sit with a respondent and parent(s) while the jury deliberates,
I often comment: "You know, this community needs you."
The respondent looks up at me with skeptical eyes as if to say: "White
man, what planet are you from? Don't you know what I am?"
I follow up by asking: "Do you know the difference between blue
and green? Or the difference between a giraffe and a dog?"
I can read the answer in the kid's eyes: "Are you crazy? Of course
I know that." But all that comes out is "Yeah."
Then something begins to happen with the follow-up question: "Don't
you think some four- or five-year-olds in Headstart would rather learn
that from you than from me?"
I get a grudging nod of assent. Then I ask the youth: "Do you
have a grandmother or grandfather?"
"Yes."
"Do you know how to hug them?"
"Of course."
"Well, do you know there are seniors in nursing homes here in
the District who haven't been hugged in six months or a year? Do you
think you could visit them and give them a hug?"
Something starts to melt and a light comes into the respondent's eyes
when I say: "I know you have problems and I know that you need
help, but what I'm saying is that you are special, now, just the way
you are. And that you have something right now that others need."
And I know from the look in the kid's eyes that this is perhaps the
first time in a long time that anyone has said something like this to
him.
John McKnight, director of the Community Studies Program at the Center
for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, says
that we should focus on assets, not deficiencies, and that we must build
on strengths, rather than being preoccupied by needs. The Time Dollar
Youth Court provides a way to do that, by including community service
and jury duty as parts of the sentence.
That's not enough. We know that. Young people have serious needs. And
more likely than not, if they are entangled in the juvenile justice
system, they have serious educational deficiencies, serious problems
at home, and serious problems in their neighborhoods. Providing an opportunity
for them to feel of value, to contribute, to define themselves as special
may not be enough, but it is surely a critical missing ingredient.
As the Time Dollar Youth Court develops, we are finding that it provides
a base from which to begin addressing some of those other needs and
some of those systemic issues.
Community service as real work
Community service cannot be "leaf raking"-less than meaningful
tasks such as filing, photocopying, or answering the telephone. We have
to create placements that embed youth in community-based organizations
that value them and offer them a different environment. We are developing
a broad array of placements: with churches, with boys and girls clubs,
in an after-school tutoring program, with the Parks & Recreation
Department supervising basketball for younger kids, with a community-policing
program, or with D.C. Kitchen preparing meals for the homeless. We find
that too many agencies know how to "serve" youth, to deliver
services to them, but very few know how to make constructive use of
youth as assets, as builders, as contributors. The Time Dollar Youth
Court seeks to help shift those agencies from the deficit perspective
to the asset perspective.
More is needed. These young people need a buddy, a mentor-one person
in their lives who believes in them. So we are linking with various
groups that can offer that: church groups, criminal justice students,
a group called Concerned Black Men, and law students doing community
service.
Providing services
These young people do need services from a system or set of systems.
In the past many of those systems have been unresponsive. We need to
create an infrastructure that serves as an advocate to link each child,
one at a time, to create an individual package of services tailored
to him or her and his or her family. The infrastructure is not a top-down
coordinating structure; it is a bottom-up advocacy structure that negotiates
access and follows up on actual delivery, one case at a time. For example,
at the UDC Law School Juvenile Clinic professors, who played critical
roles in the design of the court, are now designing ways in which the
assertion of special education rights can link respondents to an array
of services that can address their educational deficits.
Beyond service delivery to system reform
Many systems designed to deliver needed services to youth are unresponsive.
And there are gaps. So the Time Dollar Youth Court needs to deal with
systemic problems too. Our efforts have uncovered a disturbing phenomenon:
Many of the agencies funded to serve youth and to serve as advocates
for youth feel unable to speak out, afraid that doing so might jeopardize
their funding. They know the problems and the shortcomings. But those
concerns silences them. So our next step is to create a youth grand
jury to provide a voice for youth and a way in which the system itself
can learn about things that are known but never said-or never said in
a way that enables the system to respond.
We think that creating a voice for youth will enable them to engage
in bringing about social change. It was young people who "didn't
know any better" who helped power the civil rights movement. We
need to find a way to harness that same energy as a new force for social
change. We will be staffing our youth grand jury with law students,
a law professor, and a special youth facilitator to try to equip young
people to collect and analyze facts, and to speak to adult decision
makers about what needs to happen to make the system work better for
young people.
A partnership between courts and community
The Time Dollar Youth Court provides an ideal vehicle to create a broader
partnership between the courts and the community. The juvenile justice
system now dumps more and more at-risk youth on the courts. The courts,
even with extensive social service departments, cannot do it alone.
We know that we need to find a way to strengthen families and revitalize
neighborhoods. We can spend our time looking at causes and seeking someone
to blame, or we can try to build upon what we know to create solutions.
The largest study ever undertaken on the causes of crime and delinquency
has yielded new data that help us understand what we must do. Published
in the August 1997 issue of Science, a multimillion-dollar, multiyear
study undertaken in Chicago by the Harvard School of Public Health,
concluded that poverty and joblessness could not account for the differences
in crime they found in largely black neighborhoods. They had classified
343 neighborhoods in Chicago by those characteristics that were thought
to be predictors of crime-poverty, unemployment, race, single-parent
households, etc.-only to find that neighborhoods that looked alike in
terms of those variables had very different levels of violent crime.
Obviously, some other factor was involved. Some 8,872 interviews later,
they had an answer: collective efficacy.
What did that technical term really mean? Look behind the label and
it turned out to be a willingness by residents "to intervene in
the lives of children." More specifically, that meant a willingness
to step in to stop acts like truancy, graffiti painting, and street-corner
"hanging" by teenage gangs. Interestingly enough, the critical
factor was not "external actions" such as police crackdowns.
What emerged was a finding of the "effectiveness of 'informal'
mechanisms by which residents themselves achieve public order. In particular,
we believe that collective expectations for intervening on behalf of
neighborhood children is a crucial dimension of the public life of neighborhoods."
The New York Times provided a capsule summary of those findings:
Some neighborhoods in Chicago are largely black and poor, yet have low
crime rates-so some other explanation is needed for the causes of crime.
. . . The finding is considered significant by experts because it undercuts
a prevalent theory that crime is mainly caused by factors like poverty,
unemployment, single-parent households or racial discrimination.
(Fox Butterfield, Study Links Violence Rate to Cohesion in Community,
NEW YORK TIMES, Aug. 17, 1997, § 1, p. 27.)
The authors of the study explained:
By far the greatest predictor of the violent crime was collective efficacy.
. . a shared vision, a fusion of shared willingness of residents to
intervene and social trust, a sense of engagement and ownership of public
space. . . . In particular we believe that collective expectations for
intervening on behalf of neighborhood children is a crucial dimension
of the public life of neighborhoods.
The Time Dollar Youth Court is not enough. But it can provide a starting
point and a catalyst.
Next steps
In Washington, D.C., the Time Dollar Youth Court has been adopted by
the D.C. Coalition Against Drugs and Violence as the umbrella project
under which a variety of programs and agency efforts can coalesce. The
idea was not to ask agencies to adopt a new project, but rather to rethink
how their present activities could be shaped to maximize the synergy
with the Time Dollar Youth Court. Focusing on enhancing that synergy
is producing a win-win strategy that is markedly different from the
typical convert competition for limited dollars.
The Time Dollar Youth Court already brings youth together with other
youth. It can cross neighborhoods and gang territories. It can also
bring agencies and volunteers and young people together. As a catalyst,
it can begin to create a culture of collective efficacy in which we,
as a society, stop dumping our problems on the courts.
We hope to see the Time Dollar Youth Court emerge as a force that transforms
juvenile justice: a catalyst through which youth can take the lead and
provide an example to the entire community of what it means to say:
"No more throw-away kids."
It will take all of us working together, but the Time Dollar Youth
Court is demonstrating that young people themselves have much to teach
us adults. We ought to listen, and, at the very least, we ought to join
hands and give them the opportunity to show what they can do. It is
awesome. n
Edgar S. Cahn, Ph.D., is president of the Time Dollar institute
and a professor of law at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University
of the District of Columbia; cofounder (with his late wife Jean Camper
Cahn) of the national legal service program in the War on Poverty; cofounder
and co-dean of Antioch School of Law. This article was written with
the assistance of John Dortch, director of the Time Dollar Youth Court.