Teen Courts: A Promising Prevention Strategy?
WAMU Public Radio, Washington, DC
July 30, 2001
Listen to the Interview
Read the Transcript provided by the Urban Institute
… how does the Teen Court program work? Is it effective? … [A]re youth and parents satisfied with the experience? A look at these questions and more as we continue our Urban Institute series on America’s cities with a look at Teen Courts and joining us in our Washington studio from the Urban Institute is Jeff Butts, who is a Senior Research Associate. Jeff Butts, welcome.
… JEFF BUTTS: [O]ne of the reasons these programs are so well received by prosecutors and judges and law enforcement officers is that they also ensure a certain minimum of response to every case. In the normal juvenile justice system which handles a lot of cases and it deals with a wide range of problems, some youth get virtually no sanction at all. Your typical 13-year-old with the first shoplifting case in many cities may actually just get a letter sent to the home, telling the parents that the young person has been arrested and that they should take extra care to supervise their behavior. Well, if a young person is bent on breaking the law and increasing their activities that way, that letter may not accomplish much. In Teen Court, it’s a way for every young person to be brought before at least someone inside a court system—inside a courtroom that looks formal, and they get something, either that written apology letter, restitution, community service. So at the very first instance—at the very first time we see that kid willing to break the law, they have some way of accounting for that and that’s unusual and important.
… (continued) …
KOJO NNAMDI: Jeff Butts, talk a little bit more about the effectiveness of these programs. Everybody who we have had on this broadcast so far has essentially said, well, this is a good thing. What do you say to the skeptics who say, well, you have not yet concluded this evaluation, so I’m not sold on it yet. It does seem like a slap on the wrist.
JEFF BUTTS: Well that is the big policy question. Does it work? What is the long-term effect? The slap in the wrist criticism, I think, can be dismissed if you go watch it and you go see a program, how it functions that often they are getting a more severe sanction than they would in the normal system. Asking a 15-year-old to write a five-page essay on the effects of shoplifting on society, for example, can have quite an effect. The long-term effects though, we still have many unanswered questions, and that’s why evaluation is still important. As I mentioned before, unpacking the effects of which components of the programs are more effective. But across the country, you see what are reported as recidivism rates, that the probability of a youth being rearrested after leaving court in the order of five percent, ten percent, and these are very promising, but not dispositive. You can’t say that that’s proof of effect, because we don’t know if that’s an outcome of the kind of kids that come into the program — if they would have had those low chances of rearrest anyway, but if a program can improve on the chances of success once they leave the program, that’s what we’re after.
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