Restorative Justice Part 2: "There is no Champion”

Youth in Oregon who get court-ordered rehabilitation as an alternative to youth detention might end up at the J Bar J Ranch, which despite its name is less a working ranch than a boarding school with individual counseling aimed at helping troubled young people change themselves. Success takes many forms – high school diplomas, reconnecting with family, setting and meeting personal goals – but first the youth must earn a place at the ranch, which can only take 28 at a time.

New Hampshire's 40-year-old system of diverting many juvenile prosecutions away from courts and incarceration, and into community-based restorative justice programs, has saved public money, lowered youth crime rates, and changed lives. By addressing root causes of lower-level offenses, the programs provide treatment to youth who apologize and atone for their offenses, and who then often perform community service projects to erase their arrest record. But there are many fewer resources now than at the program's start, creating an uneven and inequitable patchwork of available services statewide.

A 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision allows those sentenced to life for crimes committed as juveniles to seek parole. These people make up more than half of lifers in Pennsylvania, which is considering numerous appeals, but now those sentenced when they were slightly older are arguing the impulsivity and immaturity that makes juveniles less culpable are also present in the brains of those in their 20s. They are seeking to ensure the same legal rulings also apply to them and the legal system is trying to reconcile legal definitions of adulthood with evolving brain science.

As North Carolina reevaluates its approach to juvenile justice, the state is looking to examples like Italy, where restorative justice practices such as victim-offender mediation, in which the victim and perpetrator of a crime meet with a mediator to discuss and reconstruct the incident, play a critical role in cases involving youth. The country incarcerates fewer children and young adults on a given day than North Carolina despite its population being roughly six times the size of the state's.

All people between the ages of 14 and 21 in Washington, D.C., who are placed on probation for criminal convictions get assigned a probation officer, social worker, and a "credible messenger" – a mentor, usually with his or her own criminal past, who is paid by the city Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services to help ensure a successful probationary period. The cost is far lower than youth detention and is associated with a much lower rate of re-offending. The work is so intense that the highly trained messengers often need their own counseling to cope with the stress of turning lives around.

Restorative justice healing circles run by Cookman Beloved Community Baptist Church in West Philadelphia have helped resolve hundreds of disputes among youth over the past 15 years using dialogue instead of courts. Bringing together people who were harmed, those who harmed them, and members of the community leads to negotiated agreements that provide justice and reconciliation without leaving young people with a criminal record. Restorative-justice approaches to school discipline in Philadelphia have dropped the numbers of arrests from 1,600 to 384 per year.

When a California law shifted the costs of incarcerating youth from the state to its counties, judges suddenly sent 40% fewer youth to state-run juvenile facilities. That reduction began a long-term trend that combined with a state commitment to evidence-based approaches to rehabilitation instead of punishment, especially for less-serious offenses. The end result is that state juvenile jails have been all but phased out of existence and California, a longtime tough-on-crime state, now has what one advocacy group considers the nation's most humane juvenile justice system.

Choose 180 channels Seattle-area young people into an alternative to court and jail when they commit relatively minor offenses. This "offramp" from the traditional justice system, serving a disproportionately Black and brown clientele, helped 400 clients in 2019, 87% of whom did not commit new offenses. Research shows such diversion programs have a better track record for preventing future crimes. A Choose 180 "sentence" comes in the form of a workshop introducing young people to mentors and giving them a chance at the stability and frame of mind they need to seek more lasting change in their lives.

The 10-year-old Newark Youth Court has heard some 700 cases in which high school students serve as judge, jury, and lawyers in proceedings that avoid school discipline or criminal charges with creative exercises in personal accountability. Taking aim at fights, disruptive behavior, or more serious offenses involving weapons or drugs. the Youth Court seeks to encourage better life choices. Outcomes may exclude punishment altogether, imposing community service (including Youth Court jury duty) or other alternatives to jail, avoiding criminal records that can ruin someone's future.

The number of youth confined in U.S. detention facilities has dropped by nearly half since 1997, saving money and reducing recidivism. A report by the Justice Policy Institute says this has made communities safer, but that reductions are only among those accused of nonviolent crimes and that racial and ethnic disparities have increased. The report calls for changes, such as repealing state laws on mandatory sentences, offering better probation supervision and creating more diversion options.