Youth Court: Civic Engagement and Character Education Through Juvenile Accountability
A Forum — December 3, 2001
Youth Court is a program in which juvenile offenders are questioned, defended and sentenced by their peers. Currently, there are 852 youth courts in place across the United States with 200 courts in development. Youth Courts are the fastest growing crime intervention programs in the nation. They offer ways to engage the community in a partnership with the juvenile justice system to respond to juvenile crimes by increasing the awareness of delinquency issues on a local level and by mobilizing community members and youth to take an active role in addressing the problem.
In most youth courts, young offenders are referred for sentencing, rather than for a decision of guilt or innocence. Sentences commonly include community service (1-200 hours), jury duty (up to 12 times), restitution, and apologies. Additional sentencing options include counseling, educational workshops on substance abuse or safe driving, essay writing, victim-awareness classes, curfew, drug testing, school attendance, and peer discussion groups. For the most part, Youth Courts only accept first-time offenders who have committed relatively minor offenses. Rather than handing down harsh juvenile punishment, Youth Courts offer an appropriate level of guidance and correction. Youth Courts share an important goal with law-related education, including a strong potential to improve the citizenship skills of young people.
There is a wide range of youth court models, including Adult Judge, the most widely used, Youth Judge, Youth Tribunal and Peer Jury Models. In the Youth Judge Model, a youth, who has established a certain level of service as a Youth Court Attorney, serves as the judge in the case. Youth Judge Models account for the smallest number of annual caseloads. Only 14 percent of programs using this model reported more than 100 cases per year, compared with 40 percent of programs using Adult Judge Model and 38 percent of programs using the Peer Jury Model. Youth Courts, which use the Youth Judge and Youth Tribunal Models, were more likely to allow juveniles to plead innocence or guilt and to hold trials.
At today's forum, William C. Pericak, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York in Albany, introduced youth from Colonie Youth Court and Time Dollar Youth Court, who re-enacted the Youth Judge Model. A youth offender was on trial for breaking a car window after being pressured by his peers to do so. After deliberation, the jury of his peers came back with a sentence of 100 hours of community service, peer pressure and anger management classes, a letter of apology to the car owner and payment in the amount of $160.00 for damages.
Following the re-enactment, a panel of youth court experts provided perspectives on the success of the youth court movement. Chief Judge Ernestine Gray serves as the president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which provides leadership on state, national and international juvenile and family law issues. Robert Hirshon serves as the president of the American Bar Association, the largest voluntary professional membership association in the world. Jeffrey A. Butts, director of the Program on Youth Justice at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and lead researcher for the OJJDP Evaluation of Teen Courts, presented preliminary findings from the OJJDP study which involved more than 500 cases from four youth court programs. The study found that teen participants and their parents strongly approved of youth court, both before and after the imposition of sanctions. The final results of the study (to be released in April 2002) will focus on the teens' rate of recidivism, which earlier research suggests is very low among teen court participants. [1] A national perspective of the federal government's role in youth courts was provided by Terrence S. Donahue, acting administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S. Department of Justice. Carolyn Pereira, executive director of the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago provided a local community perspective on the value of youth courts.
Part of the support for Youth Courts comes from the volunteer efforts of concerned citizens and the desire of some community-based organizations and faith-based organizations to do what they can to recapture youth through a series of graduated sanctions. Depending upon the particular Youth Court model, volunteers receive 16-20 hours of pre-service training. During this training, they study the nature of the legal and judicial systems and how they compare to youth court processes. In order for these programs to work, there must be a clear understanding of the way in Youth Court works, what offenses and violations are heard by their court, what roles are played, what dispositional options are available, and the philosophy behind the sentencing.
For more information regarding youth court volunteer training, or to obtain training material visit the National Youth Court Center at www.youthcourt.net.
1. Butts, Jeffrey and Buck, Janeen. Teen Courts: A Focus on Research. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2000.
This information was from an American Youth Policy Forum held on December 3, 2001 on Capitol Hill reported by Banu Dole.
AYPF's events and policy reports are made possible by the support of a consortium of philanthropic foundations: Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, General Electric Fund, William T. Grant Foundation, George Gund Foundation, Walter S. Johnson Foundation, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Charles S. Mott Foundation, Wallace Reader's Digest Funds, and others.