Will Lewis and Zyion Houston-Sconiers entered the juvenile justice system as teens on opposite sides of the country. They were both raised in poverty, lacked a stable family life, and joined gangs in search of companionship. 

After they put their youth cases behind them and aged out of the juvenile system they found themselves back in trouble with the law. In Tacoma, Washington, cops caught Houston-Sconiers with a gun in a backpack, and near Atlanta, Lewis was arrested in an alleyway where a robbery took place. 

Recidivism — defined as a “relapse into criminal behavior” — has long been used as a primary indicator of a juvenile system’s success. However, experts argue that measuring when a system fails and youth reoffend should not be the only way to know how well it is working.

Juvenile recidivism is measured differently from state to state, making it difficult to compare jurisdictions, said Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

“Personally, I have tried my damnedest to not use the word recidivism,” Sickmund said. “One, people can’t understand it right. Two, people can’t spell it right. Three, nobody really knows, ‘What do you mean by that?’” 

Sickmund said some jurisdictions measure whether a youth is arrested, others whether they’re found guilty of a crime, and others whether they are committed to a secure facility. All of these methods of determining recidivism yield vastly different results, she said.

In 2019, the federal government reauthorized the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018. In it, lawmakers now require the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), for the first time, to establish a national standard for measuring recidivism. 

But as things stand now, by OJJDP’s own admission: “National recidivism rates for juveniles do not exist.” The best they have is data from 2006, attributed to Sickmund, which shows 12-month rearrest rates to be 55%, reconviction rates to 33%, and recommitment rates to be 12%.

Sickmund said that for adults, recidivism data usually focuses on how many adults return to prison after they’re released. However, she says that metric won’t work for juveniles, because kids have much more varied types of contact with the system — they may, for example, go through a diversion program, initiatives that offer youth alternatives to formal processing in the juvenile system, or be put on probation. 

Additionally, Sickmund said there is oftentimes no reliable way to link adult and juvenile offenses. The two court systems are distinct and rarely share records. 

Houston-Sconiers’ and Lewis’ later offenses are the type which most recidivism statistics won’t capture. 

Lewis was 18 when he was arrested in the alleyway. At the time he was awaiting decisions on college applications after completing a rehabilitative second chance program offered to him by his juvenile judge, Steven Teske. 

As Lewis tells it, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — and Teske believed him. Teske, who was not involved in Lewis’ adult case, said that after reading the police’s incident report, he found Lewis’ story “really quite believable.”  

Police charged Lewis for committing a burglary, which is a felony. Lewis took a plea deal, which resulted in a short stint in prison. 

“We don’t give up,” said Teske. “He was now in the adult system and we were supportive of him.”

Because of Lewis’ future plans to get into the aviation industry, Teske said they knew he could not have a felony on his record. So the judge intervened. 

“I appointed [Lewis] an attorney specially to file a motion to expunge that offense and went to the district attorney and she agreed,” Teske said. “In fact, I actually helped out the defense attorney because he was doing pro bono. I prepared the consent order, gave it to him. He took it to the D.A. (district attorney) who signed it. Took it to the judge who signed it to remove that felony from his record.”

Now, Lewis’ record is clear of his adult crime. In May, 2020, he graduated from Middle Georgia State University with a master’s degree in cybersecurity and he aspires to get his Ph.D. by the time he’s 30. 

Houston-Sconiers didn’t have the same luck. Since he was released from prison early after his juvenile crime as the result of a relatively high profile Washington State Supreme Court case, he said he felt like he had a target on his back. Police officers across the community recognized him and, he said, on multiple occasions stopped and searched him — sometimes violently. 

“When I first got out, it was a movie, man. I enjoyed it. Life was treating me good. But once that movie was over, life was real, it got very real for me,” Houston-Sconiers said.  “When I didn’t know what else to do, what was natural to me came.”

One day in November 2018, Houston-Sconiers was wandering his Tacoma neighborhood on foot, looking for a ride home. He had just been released from the hospital, where he had been diagnosed with bronchitis and prescribed medication. 

According to Houston-Sconiers, who studied official reports related to his case in detail in an effort to mitigate his sentence, police officers were watching the area he was walking. When Houston-Sconiers got into his friend’s vehicle, he said the police followed him. Three officers pulled them over for running a stop light, searched the car, and found a backpack with drugs he maintains were not his and a gun he admits was his own. They arrested and charged Houston-Sconiers for both. 

“When you think about it, when did you ever get pulled over by three officers for a traffic stop?” Houston-Sconiers said. “They knew what they were doing.”

Thanks to Washington State’s three-strike system, designed to crack down on repeat offenders, Houston-Sconiers was facing life in prison without the possibility of parole for getting caught with a gun in his friend’s car. He said it’s a dangerous part of town, and the gun helps him feel safer. 

Like Judge Teske with Lewis, Washington State Sen. Darneille sympathized with Houston-Sconiers’ side of the story, and did some, as she calls, “extraordinary interventions” to help him. After Darneille vouched for Houston-Sconiers before his prosecutor and judge, his sentence was reduced from life to 11 years. He’s one year into it now. 

“I wish that we could make these kinds of interventions on every person’s case,” Darneille said. “[People] can become ill, can die in this system. Losing relationships, losing educational opportunities, losing self-esteem, losing hope is common throughout our system.”

Beyond the technical problems it presents, Sickmund and other advocates — like Sean Goode, the director of a diversion program near Seattle — argue against using recidivism as a metric because it ignores the positive things a person does. 

“I think recidivism is a horrible data point,” Goode  said. He prefers not to focus solely on whether a young person becomes involved with the criminal justice system again, but “what are they engaging in as an alternative [to criminal behavior], and I think that is super substantive — and probably the most difficult thing to measure.”

Each morning, when Houston-Sconiers awakes in his cell, he reads aloud his concrete plans for the future: to be an author and semi-truck owner and operator by 2024. 

“I wanna be a millionaire,” he said. “And I want my kids to be billionaires. That’s how I know I’ve succeeded — if my kids do more in life than me.” 

Zyion’s wife, Arrogrance Wood-Houston, has no doubt in his ability to achieve his ambitious goals. 

“Everything that you hear, I promise you it’s gonna come to life,” she said. 

Today Lewis travels the country, telling his motivational story to judges, kids, and other audiences, hoping to inspire kids like him to turn their lives around and adults in the justice system to empower them to do so.  

Lewis also wants to transform his hometown of Riverdale, Georgia. When he was a kid, he said, the “poverty was extreme — rats, roaches. It was real tough.” He wants to spark interest in IT and aviation among his community’s youth, providing certification training that can allow them to make $20 an hour out of high school.

Both 25-year-olds are married, raising children, and have firm convictions to improve their communities. None of those things register in measures of recidivism. 

“You’re measuring success by measuring failure,” Sickmund said. 

Source art courtesy of Arrogrance Wood-Houston

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One group of volunteers was concerned about the homeless, so they donated clothes and shoes. Another provided blankets and towels for an animal shelter. And a third gave art supplies to an organization committed to brightening the lives of kids with cancer. 

Each group spent five weeks finding a cause they cared about, planning a fundraising event, and getting to know each other along the way. The groups were composed of kids at schools in Compton, California, and the police officers and firefighters that serve their communities. 

Kids in the city — which has a poverty rate nearly double that of the rest of the country — are used to getting things, according to Jeffrey Harris, director of school and community partnerships at Compton Unified School District.

Donations of backpacks and other things regularly flow into the school. But as they worked on their projects alongside first responders, Harris said he heard a powerful sentiment emerge from the kids: “We’re always getting so much but now we’re giving.”

As police and protesters clashed across the country this summer following the controversial death of George Floyd, Adam Fine, a developmental psychologist focused on juvenile justice at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, studied these kids from Compton to glean new insights about children’s perception of police.

Fine’s study, published in June, had a few major conclusions: racial differences in the perceptions of police legitimacy begin in childhood and these perceptions may be improved by programs that allow police and children to interact in non-confrontational settings. 

He and his colleagues found that at the age of 7, children had relatively high perceptions of police legitimacy. But by the age of 14, they had declined — much more so for Black and Latino children, than for those who are white. Compton is 98% Black or Hispanic, and Fine’s findings match Harris’ personal experience with the kids in his school district.

“It’s triggering for some young people just to see an officer in their uniform,” Harris said. 

Through surveys given before and after they completed their service project with the police, Fine’s team found that the program significantly improved the kids’ perceptions of police legitimacy. 

Perception of the police has been a focus of Fine’s research for years. It’s important, he said, because there is ample evidence that shows it is correlated with criminal activity. The idea is, the more a community trusts and respects its police force, the safer it will be. 

“What we know across the country is that police departments do not represent the communities that they serve: racially, ethnically, gender disparities,” Fine said. 

Additionally, he pointed out that police departments across the country are having a hard time recruiting. Perhaps, he hypothesizes, community perceptions of the police could be connected to these issues. 

Throughout its history, 170,000 kids have gone through the program at the center of Fine’s study, the Team Kid’s Challenge. Founded in 2001, Team Kids is a non-profit organization which delivers the flagship Team Kids Challenge in four states across the country, including two in Tempe, Arizona. It’s spreading slowly but surely.

This, Fine said, contrasts sharply with the country’s most famous police-in-schools program: D.A.R.E. Despite a number of studies showing its lackluster — or sometimes counterproductive — impact on kids’ drug use, it has spread rapidly, reaching 52 countries and 75% of the schools in the U.S. —200 million kids have gone through it.

D.A.R.E. has cops deliver a one way message: as Harris put it, “Do drugs and you’re gonna deal with me.” 

“[Team Kids] is completely the opposite of that,” he said. “The authority figures are coming in in their uniforms and literally saying to the kids, ‘We want to help you…you’re trying to do something good. And you tell us how we can support you and work with you to do this.’” 

Some of Fine’s colleagues are currently studying the impact Team Kids has on the police officers who participate. 

“You’re bridging the gap between teachers and students and families and community and first responders,” one anonymous officer told them. “And you’re making it all one mission to help something else.”

The results of the study are encouraging, but Fine was careful to emphasize its limitations: It did not measure how long this boost-in-perception lasts and it did not determine for which kids it was not effective. Further work is required to determine these details, just as, Fine said, work is required to repair policing problems. 

He clarifies that programs like Team Kids Challenge, dedicated to improving public perception of police are most effective after the police address the roots of these perception issues. 

“This distrust of the police doesn’t come from thin air,” Fine said. “To me, step one is actually that police departments need to enhance tactics…the police behavior itself needs to change.”

Harris agrees, acknowledging that recent events have further challenged the relationship between people and police. 

“Whatever positive feelings there were about law enforcement in general — at least within our community — they’re just gone,” Harris said. “Now, the fear, the anger, I think is at an all time high.”

Programs like Team Kids, Harris said, are “part of the solution, it’s a start. And you gotta start somewhere.” 

His hope is that as a result of kids and cops working together to do good for the community, police may start to see the kids differently. 

“If you can see a 10-year-old as the sweet precious person that he or she is, if they’re Black or brown or low-income or whatever community they’re in, maybe you can see that in a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old,” Harris said. 

Maybe, he hopes, “instead of [a police officer] approaching the 16-year-old as a possible suspect,” they’ll think to themselves, “oh, that looks like that kid that I worked with in Team Kids.”

Fine said he is encouraged by the national conversation on policing, but recognizes it needs to result in effective action. 

“There’s so much work to be done,” he said.

Harris shares his sentiment.  

“Ask me a year from now if I’m optimistic,” he said. “Right now I’m just hopeful.”

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Iziah Reedy was waiting for a court date for possessing a gun and a stolen car — instead he got a phone call inviting him to a half-day workshop that would have him meet inspiring mentors and see his charges dropped. 

“This is impossible,” Reedy said he remembers thinking at the time. “I thought I was definitely getting set up.” 

Reedy,16 at the time of the 2016 incident, had been pulled over by a cop in front of his little sister’s school in the perpetually cloudy Seattle-suburb, Federal Way, Washington. She was sick, so he went to deliver her soup in a stolen vehicle. 

When he saw the cop approaching his driver’s side window, Reedy said he thought his fate was sealed, the trajectory of his life determined. 

“I already saw my life going down the drain,” he said. “[It was] gonna pertain to me being out in the streets, even if it involved me being in and out of jail.”

Iziah’s phone call came from Choose 180, a Seattle-area organization committed to creating better futures for kids who come in contact with the juvenile justice system. 

The organization was launched in 2011 with the King County prosecuting attorney, with an explicit goal to address racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. Its workshop program takes the place of formal charges being filed, sparing kids the consequences of a blemished criminal record. In 2019, the program diverted nearly 400 young people away from the formal justice system. 

According to Goode, of the kids they serve, 68% are “Black or brown.” According to government data, King County — renamed in the ‘80s to honor Martin Luther King Jr. — is just 15% Black and Hispanic. 

“We’re working with young people who are coming to a program that is centered in their experience, not centered in white dominant culture,” he said.  

Young people up to the age of 24 who commit misdemeanors, outside of sexual and domestic offenses, can go to a half-day Choose 180 workshop and settle their case before the court gets involved. Choose 180 is an offramp on the road to juvenile incarceration that allows kids to bypass most of the traditional justice system — one which Choose 180’s executive director Sean Goode feels is too focused on kids’ past, not their potential. 

“The premise [judges and prosecutors] operate out of is that accountability needs to be to what somebody’s done,” Goode said. “And not to what somebody can be.”

Today, at 20 years old, Iziah is a barber with his own clients. Sometimes he cuts Goode’s hair. 

For Goode, his program is not just an offramp, but a launching pad, providing opportunities for a better, more fulfilling future. 

“We don’t create solutions for young people, we create possibilities with young people,” Goode said. 

Adam Fine, a professor in Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, is one of many researchers analyzing data collected from the Crossroads study — an ongoing operation launched in 2011 that seeks to understand the effects of various consequences kids receive after becoming involved in the juvenile justice system. 

They looked at three groups of kids who had engaged in similar illegal behavior. One had no interaction with the justice system — their crimes went undetected or otherwise ignored. Another group had their cases handled “informally”, i.e. lenient probation or diversion programs like Choose 180. And the final group received the most severe consequences, like incarceration in a detention facility or an ankle monitor and strict probation requirements. 

Fine and his colleagues found that after 6 months, the “no-contact” group’s illegal behavior remained unchanged, while the lenient group’s decreased — and the strict group’s increased.  

University of Washington psychologist Sarah Walker recently published a study that echoed Fine’s findings: holding kids in detention prior to their trial made them significantly more likely to reoffend in the future. The reason for this, she and others hypothesize, is because in detention, kids meet and befriend others involved in criminal activity. 

“It reinforces an identity for the youth that they’re a bad kid,” she said. 

Choose 180 aims to do the opposite. According to their 2019 Annual Report, 87% of their workshop participants do not reoffend.

Goode said he thinks of Choose 180 as an emergency room. 

“We’re triaging [young people], helping them get well enough and then referring them out to primary care and specialty practitioners to help them sustain their commitment to change,” he said. 

The diagnoses are unique to the kids’ individual needs. Choose180 helps kids with mental health problems set appointments with behavioral specialists and others get jobs at local businesses. Goode remembers one young person who was committing crimes to make money to help his parents pay for his brother’s baseball league. Choose180 helped pay the bill.

Goode’s parents suffered from mental health problems and his brother went to juvenile prison for murder. Most of the staff at Choose 180 has, like Goode, overcome extraordinary hardships. 

This, he said, gives them “the ability to connect on a real level and say, ‘I get it.’ Not just I get it because you said it but I get it because I lived it.”

The program has received national attention for its success and Goode said he spends a lot of time traveling and talking about their approach. Currently, he and his colleagues are in communication with advocates in Utah looking to implement a similar program. 

When Iziah Reedy attended the Choose 180 workshop, he said he heard from people who had “way harder life experiences” than he had, and “overcame [them] and they’re doing great today,” which humbled and inspired him. He said he no longer felt his life must be “going down the drain.” 

After Reedy was caught with a gun in the stolen vehicle, he was expelled. Choose 180 helped him get back in school, graduate, and even helped pay for his tuition for barber school. He’s since served on a government council for juvenile justice, participated in a program for young leaders in his community, and spoken to other kids in his similar situation — inspiring some, he said, to pursue cutting hair like he did. 

Before Choose 180, Reedy said the streets were  all he knew. They simply showed him he could use the ingenuity and motivation he learned there to succeed in business. 

“Cutting hair was similar to me being in the streets,” he said. “It was just more professional and it was more legal.”

Reedy’s road to personal reform has been windy, though. He said at one point after high school, things got slow at the barber shop and he temporarily turned back to a mainstay of his former life-on-the-streets behavior: shoplifting for extra cash.

While on a vacation with friends in Phoenix, he was arrested in a shopping mall for stealing shoes. He said he spent a couple days in jail and the ensuing months flying back and forth from Seattle to Phoenix to attend to the case, which was constantly complicated by shifting prosecutors and plea deals. 

He said he felt he was “getting juggled around like a toy” by the justice system and realized that its problems lay deeper than just law enforcement. In King County, he was sent to a seminar after getting caught with a gun, in Phoenix, he was sent to jail for getting caught with stolen sneakers. 

“We shouldn’t have to spin the wheel” he said, comparing the court system to a gambling game. Despite his frustrations, he said he’s back on track, reinvigorated by a new addition to his family. 

Earlier this year, Reedy became a father when his girlfriend had a baby girl, Anuhea, a Hawaiian name they gave in tribute to his mother’s family. Reedy’s father wasn’t around when he was a kid. Now, he said his number one goal in life is to be a great dad. 

Beyond that, his priorities are simple: “enjoying life and owning my own business.”

This is the kind of future the staff at Choose 180 sees in the young people they seek to help — even when they don’t see it themselves. 

“We’re not fixated on behavior change,” Goode said. “We’re fixated on helping young people heal and become more of who they are.” 

Source photo courtesy of Iziah Reedy

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Unlike the adult courthouse that stands beside it, the Clayton County Juvenile Court building has no grand columns or dominating facade, but rather a wall of windows and a lobby its creator likens to a Hilton Hotel.

The design of the non-traditional juvenile courthouse in Jonesboro, Georgia,  was spearheaded by Judge Steven C. Teske. He and the architects he worked with designed the space to reduce anxiety, comfort the traumatized and encourage collaboration between youth, justice officials and community leaders. The building reflects the judge’s commitment to restorative justice principles: he focuses on making human connections with young offenders in an effort to address the root causes of their behavior rather than merely punishing them. 

“You want to be encouraging,” Teske said. “The only way you’re going to help people change their behavior is through positive relationships.”

The building, officially called the Clayton County Youth Development & Justice Center, was constructed in 2012 to house the jurisdiction’s forward-thinking system, which has become a national model for juvenile justice reform. 

Teske has served as a juvenile judge since 1999. He inherited a system that was unorganized and overwhelmed with complaints from schools. In 2003, as a part of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, Clayton County –– the sixth largest of Georgia’s 159 counties ––  invited community members and parents into the courthouse along with the youth to find solutions to the problems plaguing their lives and giving rise to their behavior. According to the county’s annual juvenile court report, since these innovative programs were enacted, detentions have declined by 70%.

According to Margaret J. King, director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis think tank, traditional courthouse architecture –– like that of the Harold R. Banke Justice Center next door to Teske’s building –– evokes a specific feeling to the public. 

“Courthouses are intended to be imposing, to inspire awe, and when they are typically classical and overscaled, calculated to make us feel small and insignificant in order to communicate their authority and power,” she said. “They radiate the majesty and gravity of the law.” 

This is just the type of building Teske did not want to build. One of his central directives to the designers of the facility, he said, was, “I don’t want a traditional courthouse.”

For Teske, the physical differences between the juvenile court building and the adult one next to it mirror the philosophical differences in the courts’ goals. He said his system is not intended to dominate the people involved with it, but to invite them in to solve problems cooperatively.

“In the adult system it’s very simple: they’re being punished for a crime,” Teske said. “In the juvenile system, it doesn’t work that way. The kid’s brain is still under neurological construction.”

Architect Melissa M. Farling, an adviser for The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, emphasizes the role design can play in justice systems which aim to be “cooperative and collaborative.” The design of physical spaces, she said, “impacts our physiology –– I mean everything: emotional, psychological, neurological.”

In recent decades, researchers have accumulated a mountain of evidence supporting the central idea guiding the design of Teske’s courthouse: spaces influence people’s bodies and minds.

In one classic 1984 study, researchers split up patients recovering from surgery into two otherwise identical rooms with entirely different views out their windows: one a blank brick wall, the other a sunlit scene featuring leafy green foliage. Patients in the latter room, on average, recovered a full day earlier than the other group and required fewer strong narcotics to ease their pain.  

“People who come into [the facility] are traumatized,” Teske said. “And when they are intimidated, they tend to shut down. And when they shut down, they don’t talk. And we got to get them to talk about what their issues are.”

The juvenile justice building’s lobby is flooded with sunlight and filled with art from school children of all ages in the community. Large windows offer views of a courtyard with trees outside. 

According to environmental psychologist Sally Augustin, these design features reduce stress, boost mood and encourage broad thinking. This type of thinking, she said, is critical to “problem solving and getting along with others.” 

Augustin said the design of a place has an especially pronounced effect on people’s minds in high stress or high stakes situations. In these cases, like when a child is appearing at juvenile court, she said, people “look for clues in their world” to orient themselves and make sense of the situation. 

At Teske’s facility, interview rooms where young people meet with probation officers and other officials are housed in private spaces on the first floor. This way, the adults come to the child, which Augustin said can offer them a sense of comfort and ownership of the place. This, she said, indicates to the young people in the courthouse that they can work with the system cooperatively.  

Augustin said this feature can impact the power dynamic between the young person and justice worker who sees them. The adult will always have the power and authority, she said, but “things get equalized, to a certain extent” when the young person is allowed to claim their territory before the meeting begins. 

Tucked away at the top of the building is Teske’s domain, the courtroom. It is the least accessible part of the facility, because, he said “it is the least frequented place” there. He doesn’t want to judge young people involved in the juvenile justice system, he wants to talk with them. 

Since starting his dialogue-based reforms, Teske has seen less and less activity on the top floor –– exactly the goal of his columnless, conversation-oriented system and building. 

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