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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Every Wednesday night, several dozen people fill the county board of commissioners chambers in Laramie, Wyoming.

It’s been that way since early 2015, when Albany County, a rural area of less than 40,000 residents, became a hub for juvenile justice reform in Wyoming.

In a state that has struggled with juvenile drug abuse for years, a newly-elected county attorney has teamed with law enforcement, advocates, social workers and other community members to transform the experience of youths in the justice system. 

The county’s use of its “single point of entry” team is the result of reforms that the county and state have undergone over the past decade.

And not only do community members feel that their work has produced better outcomes for juveniles, but the recidivism rates have dropped significantly.

In 2009, Wyoming state legislation gave each county attorney the exclusive power to determine which juvenile offenders in their district would be placed in diversion programs.

When Peggy Trent took office as county attorney in 2015, she viewed the statute as an opportunity to upgrade the county’s juvenile justice program.

“I noticed that (Albany County was) seeing a high rate of crime in the 18-25 age range, which indicated to me that we were doing something wrong with the youth that would cause them to end up in that high crime rate,” Trent said.

Trent had previously worked in Franklin County, Ohio, where she said she got much of the inspiration for the program that she brought to Wyoming.

“I had an opportunity to watch reforms that were being implemented,” Trent said. “I observed how they were treating juvenile delinquency differently in Franklin County and how the juvenile diversion program was utilized in that community.”

Instead of making her own decisions on which juveniles got incarcerated and who is given diversion, Trent established the team of people from all parts of the community. While many counties in Wyoming have adopted groups of three or four people to complete this process, Albany County’s unit usually consists of at least 20 people, and depending on the week, can reach more than 40.  

School district employees, counselors, law enforcement and school resource officers, advocates for youth and people from nonprofits and agencies who provide services for the juveniles meet every Wednesday.

“We take a child’s event, walk through the ‘decision tree matrix’ looking for factors of intervention, and we talk around the room about what would be the best location and services to be provided to that child,” Trent said.

That matrix is based off of a Juvenile Detention Risk Assessment form, which is filled out by law enforcement officers after a juvenile is given a citation. The form, produced by the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police in 2010, analyzes multiple risk factors in each child’s citation through a point system. State law requires this form to be filled out and reviewed before a child is incarcerated.

“More weight is given to some crimes than others, such as a sex offense being more points than a theft,” Laramie Police Chief Dale Stalder said. “It also takes into account prior history. How many offenses or police contacts has that juvenile had with the criminal justice system in the last year, two years or five years? Then, you come up with a total point value on the assessment, and the officer presents it to the county attorney.”

Stalder, who has been with the department for more than 40 years, said that the single point of entry team has been “valuable” to the community’s youth.

“The system looks at each individual and tailors diversion to them and their family members,” Stalder said. 

For example, some youth are asked to help families at risk and people in need in their community. Those charged with traffic citations take safe driving classes. 

“(Trent) can set the conditions of the diversions, and if the individual successfully completes that diversion, the offense will go away,” Stalder said.

Of the 102 youths that participated in diversion programs in 2019, 97% did not commit another offense. That number was down from the year before, when there were zero cases of recidivism among the 132 individuals who participated in diversion programs.

The county received the 2017 Neal D. Madson Award for its innovative work with juvenile offenders, which was awarded by the Wyoming Governor’s Advisory Council on Juvenile Justice and Volunteers of America Northern Rockies.

Stalder’s view of the system was echoed by Albany County Sheriff Dave O’Malley, who has over 40 years of law enforcement experience in the community.

“It has improved our relationship with not only the kids but the parents, as well,” O’Malley said. “Although it’s not perfect and I don’t know if it ever will be, it’s a lot better than the old days when we literally arrested and incarcerated kids for anything that wasn’t a status offense.”

Juvenile drug abuse has been a lingering problem in Wyoming and surrounding states for over a decade. According to data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the state had the highest arrest rate in the nation for juvenile drug abuse in 2018, after it was ranked second to South Dakota in 2016 and 2017. The combination of the opioid crisis and Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana across Wyoming’s southern border, O’Malley said, have created a problem that spans generations.

“It’s really tough to impact the child when they’re getting support in the behavior from parents,” O’Malley said. “I think our biggest obstacle in true diversion is that we have kids getting in trouble because they’re doing the same thing that their parents are doing. Some get their drugs from their parents.”

The county’s diversion programs have had around a 90% completion rate since being introduced.

“There is a dialogue that never existed before,” O’Malley said. “We’re sitting down in a room with all of the key players in the game, and we don’t always get along in those meetings, but we’ve always come to a consensus and are able to move forward with things.”

If the single point of entry team determines that diversion is the best option, the youth enters a program through Big Brothers Big Sisters of Wyoming, a nonprofit that develops individual plans to help each young offender.

 “We run afterschool programs, juvenile justice programs and our core traditional mentoring programs,” Steve Hamaker, CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Wyoming, said. “We think of it as a continuum of care that gives us the ability to serve kids from preschool all the way through high school.”

The length and intensity of a child’s program is determined by the nature of their offense. Hamaker said that most of his organization’s diversion programs are focused on school performance, community engagement and mental health.

“Instead of cleaning up highways and scrubbing toilets, they’re finding ways to contribute back to and connect with the community that they live in,” Hamaker said.

Identifying at-risk youths “earlier and earlier” in their lives is key so that they can be provided services before there is any police interaction, Hamaker said.

“It boils down to prevention versus intervention, and everybody has a different definition of when that starts,” Hamaker said. “I see a shift happening, and the more we invest in prevention, the less we have to spend on intervention.”

Albany County’s fight for juvenile justice reform has been aided by the University of Wyoming’s presence in Laramie. The county has worked with the psychology department, criminal justice department and others in the university community to help guide its reforms.

While several other counties have picked up on parts of Albany’s program, its size and reach remain unique.

”The difference here is the number of people that are providing input,” Hamaker said. “The county attorney is listening to the recommendations of the rest of the community. We have so much experience and knowledge at the table, that the more we can get there, the better our decisions will be.”

Source photo courtesy of Teresa Marie Hooper

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