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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A new initiative in Vermont is helping local officials identify and prevent the root causes behind why teens use and abuse alcohol and drugs. State public health officials got their inspiration from a small Nordic country that has mastered reducing youth substance use: Iceland. 

Iceland had one of the highest rates of youth substance use in Europe in the 1990s, according to survey data collected at the time. 

Local leaders teamed up with scientists to form a plan: rather than rely on the traditional school-based educational efforts to prevent substance use, they proposed a new, bottom-up approach. 

The technique, now dubbed the “Icelandic Model,” advocates for a locally-led effort to decrease adolescents’ use of drugs and alcohol and increase their participation in their community. 

“The important part about the Icelandic model that distinguishes it largely from other prevention approaches, is that the driving vehicle in it is collaboration,” said Alfgeir Kristjansson, senior scientist at Planet Youth, an organization that helps communities around the world implement the Icelandic Model. “Our core assumption is that local people need to be at the steering wheel.”

“Our core assumption is that local people need to be at the steering wheel.”

Alfgeir Kristjansson, senior scientist at Planet Youth

In 2015, Iceland reported some of the lowest rates of youth cigarette, alcohol, and illicit drug use in Europe in a survey of 35 European countries. The effort was so successful in Iceland that experts have since implemented it across the world, now including in Vermont. 

According to the Vermont Department of Health, 62% of Vermonters over the age of 12 drank alcohol in the previous month, well above the average for the Northeast region and the country. Fifteen percent of those drinkers were between the ages of 12 and 17.

To combat this issue, Vermont Afterschool, a nonprofit that provides kids with programming and activities when they’re not in school, brought the Icelandic model to the state in 2019 and launched the Vermont Youth Project, a five-year commitment to build community partnerships designed to help reduce substance use among young people.

Robin Katrick, youth and community health coordinator at Vermont Afterschool, said the group’s long-term goal is to build sustainable programs for kids in the communities that will be around for years to come. 

 “[We’re] really hoping to set up that infrastructure for them to really keep this healthy, built environment going,” she said. 

In October 2019, a Vermont Youth Project survey of teenagers in six rural towns about alcohol and drug use showed that youth were using weed and alcohol at high rates and didn’t perceive either activity to be very harmful or risky, Katrick said. They also had plenty of unstructured time available outside of school. 

Katrick also said the survey revealed that while kids feel that their parents are engaged with them at home, there wasn’t much communication between parents in the community. As a result, kids felt they were more likely to get away with using alcohol or drugs at a friend’s house than their own. 

Since the survey results were published, the towns have worked to implement a variety of programming for youth in their areas. They are working to implement “leisure card” programs — in which kids are given money by local recreation departments to spend exclusively on recreational activities — create youth councils, offer mental health and first aid training, and more. 

Chris Hultquist, executive director of The Mentor Connector and the local leader of Vermont Youth Project’s work in Rutland, Vermont, said the group’s work is focused on diving deep into the underlying causes of youth substance use and other issues in the state’s rural communities. 

“Substance abuse is a symptom. Criminal activity is a symptom. Teen pregnancy is a symptom,” said Hultquist. “In reality, we know that these types of behaviors are from something — certain communities have them and certain communities don’t have them at significant rates. And so because of that right there, it shows us that it’s a symptom, it’s not inherent in the lives of youth.” 

Many of the factors that influence kids’ likelihood to use or abuse drugs and alcohol, overlap strongly with those that influence them to commit crimes, Kristjansson said. He said the United States should look at juvenile delinquency in the same way the Icelandic Model addresses substance use.

“Kids that have ADHD, kids that have had problems in school all their lives, kids that are badly supported from their home, kids that come from environments where there are no opportunities for them for recreational or extracurricular activities,” Kristjansson said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that actually these are the kids that disproportionately are dealt with in the juvenile justice system.”

Hultquist said that once kids are a part of the juvenile justice system, communities have to adopt more expensive strategies that help the youth leave the system. 

But, he said, “if you take a prevention lens and stop that involvement in the first place, we’re gonna save a lot more money.”

By building up rural Vermont communities, Hultquist and others working with Vermont Afterschool are betting that they can prevent kids from ever coming into contact with the juvenile system. If kids are too busy doing activities with their peers in their community, they don’t have time for the other that could get them into trouble. And, Kristjansson said, they are doing so with access to a network of supportive adults working to create change.

“We know that public health work is always local, and nobody likes to be told what to do,” said Kristjansson, who helped the Vermont Youth Project design the survey. “So we cannot assume that we can walk into a community with our fancy Ph.D.s and whatever titles we have, and then open up a manual and then tell everybody what to do.”

Instead, Kristjansson said, the team at Planet Youth lets communities take the lead and design a plan to address youth substance use that works best for them, personalizing a model all their own.

“This work does take in some of the concepts of Iceland, particularly as a data tool in the survey,” said Katrick. “However, we’ve really turned it into a ‘Vermont Model.’”

Source photo courtesy of Ken Lund

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One day in June 1964, Gerald Gault and a friend made a bad decision. They made an obscene phone call to Ora Cook, Gault’s neighbor. Cook called the police and both boys were arrested and taken to a detention facility in Gila County, Arizona.

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, establishing the right of children to attorneys, though children’s advocates say legal representation is still uneven.

The juvenile justice system bewildered Gault and his family, according to Supreme Court testimony. Police made no attempts to notify Gault’s parents of his arrest – they only found out later. As Gault’s case made its way through the court, the judge questioned Gault, never with a lawyer present and sometimes without even his parents, and no transcript or recordings were made. The judge sentenced Gault, who was on probation at the time of his arrest, to six years in juvenile detention. Gault’s parents challenged the ruling. 

Had Gault been older – at the time of his arrest, he was 15 years old – he would have been automatically guaranteed the right to a lawyer, a right afforded all adults when they are arrested under the 14th Amendment. But because Gault was a child – and children were regarded differently than adults in regards to criminal justice – he was not given a lawyer or any of the other rights he would have received had he been 18. 

In re Gault, as the Supreme Court case is known, signified a landmark moment in juvenile justice in the United States: children were officially recognized, for the first time, as having the same legal rights as adults. But over 50 years later, legal experts say the goal of Gault’s case has failed: children across the states are still not provided their right to legal counsel.

A 2017 report from the National Juvenile Defender Center, on the 50th anniversary of the Gault case, found that no state guarantees children access to a lawyer. The children who do get lawyers often don’t get them until after they’ve been interrogated by police, must pay for their own “free” counsel, are encouraged to waive their right to a lawyer, or are denied access to a lawyer after sentencing. 

“Even in the cases in which kids are represented there’s wide disparity with regard to the quality and the resources awarded their representation,” said Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers University. 

According to David Tanenhaus, a professor of history and law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the juvenile system was not designed to have the same formality and procedures as the adult criminal system. Experts recognized that adults and children are fundamentally different – adults require punishment for their crimes, while children and adolescents require rehabilitation – and so they established distinct legal systems. 

“The logic of the original juvenile court is that you should think about what a child needs – so it was more based on needs than thinking about constitutional rights to due process,” Tanenhaus said. 

As a result, the juvenile system was not originally designed to provide youth with a defense attorney. The end result, juvenile defenders say, is a system that is not well-equipped to provide legal help to kids who need it. The rules that had been established to protect kids from the formality and procedures of the adult system failed Gault: he was a youth suddenly facing an adult’s punishment, with no recourse available to defend himself.  

The Gault case determined that children have the same rights to due process as adults, including access to a lawyer, as protected by the 14th Amendment. However, children are still systemically denied this right. 

“Sometimes, children are put in a position where they have to waive their right to counsel or feel that they have to waive the right to counsel,” said Cohen. “In other situations, the quality of counsel they receive is below what the Constitution requires and certainly not what any of us would want if it were our own child who were appearing before the court.”

“the quality of counsel they receive is below what the Constitution requires and certainly not what any of us would want if it were our own child who were appearing before the court.”

Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers University

According to Cohen, there are numerous roadblocks to change. Some are philosophical, like the longstanding belief that justice system involvement is good for children. Others are financial – many public defender offices are grossly underfunded, with juvenile defenders sometimes working enormous caseloads on impossible schedules. 

While Gault did require that youth have access to counsel, it did not require that states establish public defender offices equipped to do so. Because of this, some children — particularly those living in rural areas – are forced to rely on private defense attorneys, according to the 2017 NJDC report.

Instead, overworked public defenders have inadequate time, training or resources to properly handle juvenile cases. This is a problem because cases involving juveniles are a lot more complicated than cases involving adults. 

“It takes a lot longer to represent a child,” said Tim Curry, the legal director at NJDC. “I can’t expect to have one meeting with [a child], go through all these complicated legal situations and expect that to be it.” 

Curry and Cohen agree that another major reason that changes are slow to develop is the structural racism that is baked into the juvenile justice system. Cohen said that while white children offend at the same rate as non-white children, “children of color are disproportionately arrested, disproportionately charged, disproportionately prosecuted and disproportionately incarcerated.”

Since NJDC’s report, some jurisdictions have been working to improve their public defender offices’ counsel to juveniles. Cohen said that while the case moved the juvenile system in the right direction, the standard established by In re Gault remains far from reality. 

“There’s a lot of work that remains to be done,” she said.

Lead photo courtesy of Ernest K. Bennett, Associated Press

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