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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Literacy is one of the biggest predictors of whether or not a young person will return to the juvenile justice system once they are released. 

But since many juvenile detention centers have small-to-nonexistent libraries, it often falls to nonprofits to fill the gaps in the system with book donations and literacy programming.

Dieter Cantu got his GED at 16 –– the same year he was sentenced to 10 years of combined detention and parole in Texas. In the following four years, Cantu, an eager reader, was shuffled between three juvenile detention facilities, one of which had only a sparsely-stocked bookshelf for a library.

“There was maybe a dictionary, Harry Potter, I think there was some Dr. Seuss or something like that,” Cantu said. “It wasn’t interesting for me and it wasn’t going to help me to become productive once I returned back to society.”

After Cantu’s release, he started the Books to Incarcerated Youth Project in 2017 with the goal of delivering hundreds of books to halfway homes and detention centers across Texas, and later other states as well.

Without books, life in a juvenile detention center is reduced to months upon months of staring at the wall, Cantu said, which often results in bored kids making trouble.

“I don’t think … people who make these rules understand that that’s why kids a lot of times act out, because they’re not occupied mentally or physically,” he said.

But some kids need a little extra “boost” when it comes to reading, said Karlan Sick, the first president of the board of Literacy for Incarcerated Teens in New York.

A total of 85% of juvenile offenders have issues with reading, according to the Literacy Project Foundation. Since the 1990s, researchers have consistently linked reading problems to involvement in the juvenile justice system and identified literacy as a key ingredient for incarcerated kids’ future success. 

Sick, who was a librarian in the Bronx for over 20 years, founded her nonprofit after seeing the shortage of books in New York’s juvenile detention centers. She was inspired while doing her favorite thing about her job –– giving book presentations at high schools.

“At the end of a presentation, I could say, ‘Go to your local library and borrow [these books],’” Sick said. “Well, I learned there were high schools in the detention centers and, of course, they could not go to the local public library.”

So, at the suggestion of a detention center librarian, Sick created Literacy for Incarcerated Teens to supplement under-funded detention center libraries with books and magazines. Since retiring, Sick has devoted her time to running the volunteer-based organization, bringing author talks, writing workshops and cultural programming into detention centers across New York.

While literacy skills can help teens fill out job applications and succeed after their release, reading helps them in other ways, too, Sick said.

“I think it gives them ideas that the world maybe is larger than just their block, that they can do something with their lives,” she said.

While Sick’s nonprofit collects mostly “fun” fiction and nonfiction books for incarcerated youth, Cantu prefers that people donate more educational materials, such as books on African American and Latino issues, psychology and self-help, career and test prep, and texts on social movements. 

During his time in detention, Cantu got around the library dilemma by getting books from his older brother, who was in adult prison and able to buy them. From these books, Cantu taught himself sign language, learned about history and read Eldridge Cleaver’s account of his experience in the Black Panther Party.

Educational books can help kids succeed once they leave the system, teaching life skills and building mental resilience –– just as they did for Cantu, he said.

“[Reading] took me out of the space of what was going on at that present moment,” Cantu said. “If there was a riot, if there was extortion or even sexual abuse … a lot of times I could take my mind out of that by saying, ‘Hey, I got a test I have to do.’”

This preparation paid off. After release, Cantu went on to get degrees in culinary arts, public administration and business at several different universities. Today, he organizes book drives through his fraternity brothers in chapters across different cities and states. 

While becoming more literate can help kids who are already incarcerated, some researchers say reading problems can also funnel kids into detention. One study by researchers Christine Christle and Mitchell Yell suggests the juvenile justice system has become a “default system” for kids who struggle with reading.

Experts say the type of books in detention center libraries can determine whether or not kids engage with them.

Jeanie Austin helped build a book collection in an Illinois juvenile facility and is currently writing a book on library services for incarcerated people. They said in an email interview that librarians should work with incarcerated youth to determine what kinds of books the youth want to see in their libraries.

Austin said detention center libraries can intervene in the school-to-prison pipeline through building book collections that tell a more “truthful story” about the world than is taught in schools –– including information about Black and Latino cultures, queer and transgender people of color, and the experiences of sex workers. 

“In short, there need to be both fiction and non-fiction materials that include the type of complex power dynamics and situations that youth in detention might have already experienced,” they said.

In a 2010 paper about encouraging literacy in incarcerated youth, Stephanie Guerra, an author who teaches in Seattle University’s College of Education, notes the street literature genre was especially requested by kids in detention centers and might help them build reading habits. She calls street literature “reading materials in which readers can ‘see’ themselves.”

Sick, the librarian from the Bronx, said she found that book talks by African American authors often resonate with the teens she works with, since many of them are Black or brown themselves. But kids in detention centers enjoy all different types of books –– just like non-incarcerated kids do, Sick said.

“The kids react just the way teenagers would anywhere,” she said. “The teens are happy. And they like to have a distraction.”

Austin said, while they don’t consider the existence of juvenile detention natural to begin with, library services within detention centers can still be vastly helpful to kids.

“A social and political system that creates and maintains the practice of locking up youth cannot be liberatory, but youth inside can and do take steps toward their own liberation, joy and meaning making,” Austin said.

Source photo courtesy of Dieter Cantu

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