Cameron and the Teen Court Program

As long time readers know, I’ve done far too many things in my life. It seems that I have been everywhere and done all the things. I have done so many things that I had nearly forgotten something I did in my senior year of high school. As I recall, I was working for the state senate in the Spring so I wasn’t as involved in the program but in the fall of 2005, I worked with the City of Arvada alternative sentencing program called “Teen Court.”

How it worked

For kids that had been arrested for minor crimes, Teen Court was an alternative sentencing program available through the municipal court of the town I grew up in. It is a national program and court systems at the city and county level participate nationwide. The City of Arvada operated their Teen Court program on Wednesday nights. For me, this meant doing Teen Court and then frequently driving to church right after for mid-week Bible study.

Instead of sentencing these kids (12-19) through the regular court system, they would be sentenced to an “alternative sentencing program.” Teen Court was that program. It was our job to decide what punishment (community service or restitution) that these youthful defendants would pay. Everything was supervised by a real lawyer acting as a judge and the program coordinator. The most fun part was that we got to use the municipal court room in City Hall!

In the program, there would be a “prosecutor,” “defense,” and a jury of 6 teenagers. We would get a case file that usually just had the police report and little else. Sometimes we got cases in advance but often, we wouldn’t see cases until the day they were to be tried. We would read the case reports and then speak to the young people and the parents. Dealing with the kids was hard enough but dealing with worried parents who were just glad that this program was available was the most difficult part.

After the defense had consulted with the defendant, we would consult with the prosecutor and talk about witnesses, evidence, and questions. We tried to be sensitive and accommodate everyone has best we could. I remember one young person who couldn’t really talk in public in front of people and submitted written answers instead, leaving the prosecution to do very little. The answers were read out for the jury.

The prosecution and defense would both make their arguments and call witnesses (if there were any) and then after a brief questioning period, the jury would go away to decide. There was severe limits on what could be decided. Community service was a minimum of 20 hours and could be as much as 500. Restitution (money) could not be more than $1,000 and at a minimum was $50. Anyone, no matter how ardent the defense, was committed to at least 20 hours of community service and $50. The goal was to get as close to the minimum as possible.

Case Files

In the justice system, you really do see all kinds of people. For some of my other compatriots it was probably less shocking but for a sheltered homeschool kid who had never interacted with the legal system in any capacity (at the time), I was braving new territory. I met many interesting people both in the program and the folks that came through the system because of their crime. Some were just punk kids who had made mistakes. Others were tragic stories and I sometimes wonder about some of those kids and what happened to them. It has been almost 20 years since I was in the program.

Over my time, I tended to be handed the difficult cases. I was older than most other people in the program who were all 14 and 15. I could already drive so I could be pulled in at a moments notice, which was quite convenient. But the most difficult cases that required the most special handling usually fell to my hands. I won’t reveal any specific details of any case that I handled but I will say that the crimes ranged from simple shop lifting by a girl who came from a poor background to a serious case of indecent exposure.

Why Teen Court Works

This program became popular back when I was in high school because of the movements around restorative justice. Rather than simply forcing these kids into the system, this program allowed kids to avoid the school to prison pipeline and get out of the system while also giving back to someone they had wronged. I will say that our program was in a mostly white, somewhat wealthy suburb of Denver and most of the programs that I found online tend to be in similar environments. I can’t help but think how such a program might be just as effective and vital in poorer areas with more diversity. I think the program is likely even more necessary in those environments.

The program offered teens like me a chance to hone our rhetorical and critical thinking skills. It also created some interest in law as a profession and for those who had come from more privileged backgrounds, like myself, it was a lesson in class consciousness, although we wouldn’t have really thought about it that way at the time. For the young offenders, it offered them a chance to be truly judged by a jury of their peers and avoid further interaction with the justice system. I have to say that it was a fun program. I think they gave us $20 for each year we had been involved at the end of the program. I had only been involved one year so I only got $20. I was glad I did the program and like I said, this particular chapter in my life had sort of been lost to the sands of memory until someone brought up something that triggered the memory and I reminded myself to write this post and tell the story.