Why Juvenile Justice Reform?...Why Now?

As a social worker for the past 24 years I have watched as we have over built the strong arm of our law in response to drugs and violence in our cities. I can understand the fear that drove us here. I have looked in the eyes of children and adults who feel they need a drug as much or more than they need love, opportunity and hope. I have sat with children armed with guns. I have spoken to children on the run, fearful that the lack of place and meaning they feel at home somehow makes all the risks they take on the street worthwhile. This should scare us. We are losing these children and all their potential worth.

In the past we viewed parenting as if on a continuum between leniency and punishment. What we have learned is that neither end of that range offers the reality of what children need. To thrive in this culture of infinite choices and risks we must all develop complex internal realities capable of seeing vision, following dreams, developing patience and perseverance and making difficult decisions. This requires a sophisticated parenting that finds a lovely balance between support and inspiration on one hand and safety and accountability on the other.

Neither leniency nor punishment has proven to produce good outcomes.

And yet as a society we consistently deliver punishment as a response to our child development issues. We have over built our institutions of control and we have underdeveloped our public skill to hold children accountable in the context of relationships that demonstrate hope and support for their future.

It is important also that we see our current policy and practice through a historical lens. Our children certainly do. Data shows that African American, American Indian and Latino children are in our criminal justice system at the most disproportionate rates and receiving our most limited and restrictive sanctions. These are children who have to reconcile a painful, unsafe and often even violent history in our country and have the least faith in our hope for their future. We consistently give them our strongest arm and weakest support. This picture should not make sense to us; it is a recipe for disaster.

The solution is within our reach and our JDAI/DMC work can show us the way:
We need to engage all our children currently in the system in a wake up call to ensure they know they have a calling and a purpose as gifted, free, healthy, contributing members of our community.

We need to be certain our criteria for bringing children into the system or for sanctioning those already in are completely objective.

We need to examine every decision point in our juvenile justice system for bias that puts children of color at disadvantage.

We need to consciously and aggressively seek the voice and genius of those segments of our community who fear our system most, our African American, American Indian, Hmong, Latino and recent immigrant communities for they must be true partners in shaping a system they experience as just.

We must seek true cultural diversity at our policy tables as it is the variety of cultural perspectives and life experience in American that will bring unique world views to the table that will inform our responses to the challenges we find most baffling.

We need to prepare and orient these segments of the community to be full partners at the table.

We need to balance the role of law enforcement in our communities with a probation system that is not driven to sanction but rather driven by child development and family development approaches to their work. We can put high level social work supervision in our probation offices.

We need to inspire our partners in community based organizations to build “with” the communities they serve not “for” them.

We need to draw on the practices of restorative justice in our families, at all levels of the system and within our schools to find constructive responses to challenging behavior.

We need our JDAI/DMC work to be contagious. Let’s do the difficult work to reflect on the decisions point within our reach that are adding to the problem not constructing the solution. Then we can hold this progress up as examples for families, schools, business and all other segments of our community to inspire their own self reflection and action.