When Did Making Adults Mad Become A Crime
[Music]
foreign
[Applause]
when did make an adults mad become a
crime
not too long after i assumed the
juvenile court bench in 1999
i had what i call uh an emotional pause
you know when you experience something
or you hear
something that shocks your conscience it
overwhelms your senses seeming like
life has come to a standstill and then
as the surreal begins to transform back
into reality
the questions begin to form like how did
this happen
why did this happen how did we get to
this place in the road
well for me that moment occurred when my
i.t folks handed me some data that
confirmed my
anecdotal fears and that was that my
core was complicit in helping the police
and the school system criminalize
normal teenage behavior now i knew from
day one
you know i saw you know
you know that what looked like an
extraordinary number of kids in front of
me
charged with minor school offenses but
before i went running off to the school
system
in the police to complain i went to my i
t
folks and i said look and can you break
these numbers down for me
can i need to confirm whether or not
what i’m
seeing isn’t indeed reality and they did
and what they handed me shocked me
so much it put me into that emotional
pause
and this is what the data said number
one
that one-third of all the filings
delinquent filings
in my court came from the school system
the school system was by
far the largest feeder of delinquent
cases in my court
the data also showed that since putting
police on campus
that the number of kids arrested
increased by 2 700 percent
but that wasn’t the worst of it the
worst of it was that 92 percent
of those filings involve typical
normal teenage behaviors okay
i mean things that i did when i was a
teenager and i’m sure that most of you
did as well
i mean i disrupted the classroom from
time to time
you know acting like a class clown
wadding up paper throwing across the
classroom thinking i was funny
i got into school fights defending my
sister
a couple friends who were being bullied
and
on a serious note i did something that
caused the police and the fire
department to come out to the school
well that’s a story for another day but
here’s the thing
none of those things landed me in front
of a judge
none did so
what’s important is that
given the fact that the studies show
that
students who are arrested on campus are
twice as likely to drop out of school
and if they appear in court they’re four
times as likely
to drop out of school then it should not
surprise you
that our data revealed that as the
arrests on campus increase
the graduation rates fail and that by
the year 2003
they fell to an all-time low of 58
look how go the overuse of suspensions
expulsions and arrests so go graduation
rates
i mean who would ever think that keeping
kids in school
would increase graduation rates right
you know
you would think that this is not a novel
concept in education but the rest of the
story
is really what happened to the kids who
got kicked out of school or dropped out
you see there’s a simple algorithm in
the world of delinquency
prevention how go graduation rates
so go juvenile crime rates that’s why
education to us
folks in juvenile justice is so
important who would have thought that
the more kids we graduate the fewer kids
committing crimes
now this phenomena years ago came to be
called the school of prison pipeline the
pipeline works like this
zero tolerance policies push kids out of
school
into the streets and then into criminal
activity
now this phenomena was happening
obviously in my county
and my it folks showed me a graph with a
line
that showed graduation rates that were
dropping okay
all right while the juvenile crime rates
were going up
forming an x okay on the graph
now when you get an x on the graph that
strongly
suggests that there is a correlation
between those variables in this case
graduation graduation rates and juvenile
crime rates
but the truth in these numbers is that
our school systems harsh disciplinary
policies was contributing to the
increase in our crime rates
think about that paradox for a moment
let me put it to you another way that i
think my resume better
our school system whose mission it is of
course is to improve the quality of life
of its citizens
was implementing policies that victimize
those citizens
sadly the kids that were affected the
most were kids of color
see at the peak of our zero tolerance
system before we acted to dismantle it
a kid of color was 12 times more likely
to be arrested
on campus than his white peers and for
the same offense
the idea that zero tolerance policies is
racial neutral it’s a myth
it’s a lie but i knew i had to do
something about it
i mean everyone was cry intercepting
right there at the juvenile court
and so what i did is i gathered the
chiefs of police the school
superintendent
uh social services mental health i i
called upon the local chapter of the
naacp to come to the table because they
had to be there because it
was the people uh the the community of
color that was getting
hurt the most and so what we did is we
hammered out agreement took us nine
months that said
these particular delinquent offenses
we’re no longer going to rest kids on
this and we’re going to replace them
with positive interventions
this agreement is called the school
justice partnership
all right and it was the first of its
kind in this country
but within six months of implementing it
the number of school arrests fell
by 54 and today the number of arrests
are down
95 and no school safety hasn’t been
compromised
in fact it’s improved and not only that
but so has the community at large
because the juvenile crime rate has
fallen
80 percent but most importantly is our
felony finance you know the serious ones
that involve guns and
robberies and car thefts and burglaries
well they’re down 64 percent
and why did this happen well i’ll repeat
it again how go graduation rates so go
crime rates
you see when we got rid of those zero
tolerance policies that were pushing
kids out of school
our graduation rates began to climb
and between starting the school justice
partnership to 2011 they increased by 24
percent i say
2011 because that’s when the department
of education changed the
reporting formula for graduation rates
but since 2011
our graduation rates have continued to
climb increasing another 23 percent
and you know who’s benefiting from this
are kids of color
because today uh you know
our kids of color are just as likely as
a white kid to be arrested on campus not
two or three or whatever more times
likely just as likely
we have more kids of color graduating
high school today
and moving onward to a positive future
and not a prison
you know folks i’m convinced that the
most significant factor to prevent and
reduce delinquency
in any community is in how we treat our
kids
it was maslow who said if all you have
is a hammer
then everything looks like a nail and i
have found throughout my 22 years on the
juvenile court bench that
what worked to turn kids around was what
looked soft on crime
not what is considered tough on crime
why is it that america
incarcerates more children than any
other country in the world
what is it about our culture that we see
kids as nails and we go right for the
hammer
and i’m not going to attempt to answer
these questions they’re deep and
complicated
but rest assured we must change our
culture by adopting practices that are
empirically proven to work
even if they look soft on crime we must
pass laws and policies that are smart on
crime
not practices that look tough for the
sake of looking tough
and because they have no impact on crime
look
if reducing school arrests by 95 percent
leads to
decreasing juvenile crime how is that
soft on crime
we need to reframe in this country what
it means to be tough on crime
by measuring what we do by its impact
on crime does it create fewer victims
but i think the good news is that at
least as far as
school systems are concerned the school
justice partnership
is making a a difference because this
model has been replicated
with similar outcomes in jurisdictions
throughout about 41 states
in fact the state of north carolina just
recently passed legislation mandated my
school justice partnership model
so let me explain a little bit more as
to
how this works when it it involves
juveniles you have to understand
teenagers first of all begins with their
brains
the prefrontal lobe cortex which is
right there okay
is what translates emotion into logic it
is what helps us to resolve conflict
without resorting to physical
altercations
but get this it’s not developed till age
this teen brain science is so powerful
that it convinced the united states
supreme court
to abolish the death penalty in life
without the possibility parole for
teenagers you see we cannot hold
teenagers to the same standards as
adults
because they’re neurologically wired to
do stupid things despite the fact
that during the lifespan of a human the
time when our brains are functioning
at its maximum intellectual capacity
which is during the teen years
look i point to mark zuckerberg who by
the age of 20 created facebook
or in the brain of a 16 year old were
the first thoughts of the concept of law
of relativity
albert einstein and i even point to
taylor swift
yes taylor swift who left home at age 14
to go to nashville to start a music
career
but despite their intelligence and their
creativity
the three of them could not purchase
alcohol until age 21
and that’s because of the pre-frontal
cortex
so normal teens are prone to risk-taking
behaviors and making poor decisions
that’s the bottom line
but what about those kids who live in
poverty and struggle almost every day
with
with home and food clothing and other
insecurities
and who witness family violence and
violence in their neighborhoods
these are our children who suffer
adverse childhood experiences or
also known as childhood trauma while the
vast majority of students
in our system that were diverted away
from arrest
and they were placed in restorative
practices and educational workshops
okay there were still the 11 percent
that reoffended
a small number but still 11
and we want to know why so we
asked the parents of these 11 percent if
we could
administer the adverse childhood
experiences survey which measures the
level
of childhood trauma in people and we
found
that among the 11 percent 86
of them suffered from serious childhood
trauma in other words
they needed more than just restorative
practices in educational workshops
they needed clinical help and so we
didn’t want to give up on them
and by 2010 we created a non-profit
that assessed and treated those 11
so they too could graduate from high
school
that system we called the system of care
and it represented
they represented a shift from targeted
reactions to population-based prevention
and intervention in other words it was a
public health approach specifically
employing the epidemiology
model which because there’s two basic
facts
in the epidemiology approach number one
diseases don’t occur by chance
and number two they’re not randomly
distributed now i’m not saying
that disruptive behaviors of delinquent
behaviors are diseases of course they’re
not
but they do behave like diseases
like diseases delinquent behaviors and
disruptive behaviors don’t occur by
chance
they’re not randomly distributed which
means they can be studied to determine
their underlying causation look it was
my father who
who retired from cdc many years ago he
worked in
immunization once said to me he said son
the problem with you people in criminal
justice is that you punish the symptom
instead of treating the cause you see he
explained to me
that delinquent behaviors are a symptom
of something affecting the child
emotionally mentally
environmentally in other ways
he says so long as you respond to the
behaviors which are mere symptoms
you will never reduce recidivism and
this conversation led me to reframe how
we view juvenile delinquency
and how to reconfigure our system to be
smarter
and how to approach our kids who find
themselves in trouble
so in closing i want to share this
anecdotal story
that really captures how we changed our
system
jane is 15 years old she’s sitting in
school in class
and a boy i’ll call him johnny leans
over and says to her what he wants to do
to her sexually
well she gets upset shouts at him
the teacher miss jones admonishes
jane well she didn’t hear what johnny
said
but jane loses it and starts throwing
chairs at her
the sro which is for school resource
officer that is a uniform officer
who’s placed on campus goes running in
there
and has to restrain jane now in the old
days before the partnership
she would have been placed in the back
of patrol car after being handcuffed
and taken down to juvenile intake
likelihood of detainer for aggravated
assault on the teacher
but today we don’t we’ve included a
pause button
we ask why remember the epidemiology
approach
determining causation behavior is the
symptom
what caused the behavior and after about
an hour
by using crisis intervention skills that
he’s been trained in
jane confided in the school resource
officer that
her mother’s living boyfriend willie was
raping her every week
and worse yet she told the mom
and the mom didn’t believe her now you
can understand in jane’s world now
when johnny leaned over and said what he
wanted to do to her sexually given
what’s going on in her life
every week and you can understand why
she lost it with the teacher not that it
was the teacher’s fault but in
jane’s world there was not a single
adult that was helping her all she heard
the teacher
do was just admonish her and that was
enough
to trigger somebody with trauma but
here’s the rest of the story
jane did not go to detention she was
placed in protective custody
initially placed in foster care shortly
after i placed with the maternal
grandparents who did not like willie
and that i knew they could protect her
and guess what else
willie gets arrested and he’s now
in a state penitentiary serving 25 years
for aggravated child molestation
i ask you which system
is truly tough on crime is it mine that
looks soft
or the one that likes to punish the
symptom
really quick where there’s no time to
hit the pause button
and ask why you see folks today
we understand that when kids are hurting
their behavior becomes their language
like jane they’re talking to us adults
don’t you think it’s time that we simply
start listening
thank you