Philadelphia Turns to Grass-Roots Justice to Nip Youth Crime in the Bud

PHILADELPHIA — Anna Smith is a fifth-grade teacher with the soul of a good trial lawyer. She can find the hole in an excuse the way a jeweler spots the flaw in a glittering stone.

One sticky evening last week, Smith sat at the center of a conference room in an East Philadelphia hospital only a short ambulance ride away from some of the city’s meanest streets. On her right sat a machinist and the director of a local anti-poverty program. On her left sat an administrative assistant at an auto company, a young man who counsels crime victims and a cop from the local police station.

Diverse in race, age and experience, these six come together every two weeks to form the Youth Aid Panel for the 25th Police District in Philadelphia. Theirs is one of two dozen such panels the city district attorney’s office has deputized to act as an alternative to court for young, first-time offenders.

Across the table from the group slouched a stony-faced young man who spoke in a voice so faint and emotionless that it amounted to a verbal shrug. His father fidgeted at his side. The boy was 13, and he had been arrested with a bag of marijuana. In school, he already appeared to be majoring in suspension, and it was frighteningly easy to imagine him perfecting his look of studied disdain in courtrooms far into the next century.

Smith asked the boy if he felt he had the power to control the events in his own life. Not yet, he said. She asked him if he cared that he was in trouble. No, he whispered. Smith stared back across the table. “What are you going to do to be different than the brothers inside the jail doing time?” she asked. “What impact are you going to have on the community--positive or negative?”

That’s the question the YAP volunteers usually ask themselves. In even the most troubled communities, the program has found so many people eager to make an impact that it generated 12,000 hours of volunteer participation last year--enough to save the city about $250,000 in court costs. The D.A.’s office culls the panelists from a stack of applicants, trains them in interviewing skills, and then counsels them to follow their instincts in fashioning a course of correction for the young people sent before them.

“Your basic panelist is a mom and dad who raised kids in the neighborhoods,” said Mike Cleary, the Philadelphia-bred assistant district attorney who supervises the program.

Washington these days is thick with politicians pledging to shift power back to the grass roots. But almost all of them envision passing authority from bureaucrats in the nation’s capital to bureaucrats in the state capitals. The Youth Aid Panel initiative, now a decade old, offers a more intriguing experiment--one that attempts to return to ordinary citizens some of the responsibility that government now exercises for rendering society’s judgments about right and wrong.

That same impulse is evident in Florida, which is empowering volunteer boards around the state to implement key decisions on welfare reform. Most important, the community volunteers will work with state officials to determine which welfare recipients qualify for the limited extensions the state can grant to its two-year time limit--and which will be cut off. South Carolina is exploring the same idea.

In some cases, returning such intimate authority to these jury-like citizens’ panels could lead to the sort of favoritism that bred resentment against the old draft boards. But over the long run, these difficult policy judgments could have more legitimacy in the most affected communities if they are seen as rooted in the community itself.

That process already seems at work in Philadelphia. “There’s a lot of mistrust of the [justice] system--it’s too lenient, it’s racist, it’s sexist, whatever,” said Morris Jenkins, a criminal justice professor at Abington College who helps train YAP panelists. “By having the community play an active role, it not only benefits the child, it empowers the community.”

One reason for the program’s success is that Cleary and his boss, Deputy D.A. John Delaney, maintain realistic expectations. Teens who commit seriously violent acts still go before a judge; the YAP program is reserved for those kids who remain closer to the schoolyard than the prison yard--those who might swipe a sweater or break into a car, smuggle a box-cutter into school or pick a fight with a classmate or teacher.

In most cities, teenagers hauled in for those offenses would usually receive no more than a few minutes of a judge’s time, and then a desultory period of probation. Here the panel subjects them to an extended grilling that combines cross-examination and tough-love exhortation. The panels cannot order incarceration, but they present the young offenders with 90-day contracts that might mandate that they provide restitution, undergo counseling in conflict resolution, perform community service or improve their attendance and grades at school.

It is a careful balancing of carrots and sticks. Those who complete the contract get their criminal records expunged; those who don’t are sent back to court. “We need to teach them to think about what the consequences will be to their actions,” Smith said.

John J. DiIulio, a prolific Princeton University criminologist who dismantles police department puffery as enthusiastically as some men take apart car engines, believes that YAP is getting that lesson through. By his calculation, only 20% of those who have gone through the program since 1987 have been rearrested. That’s much lower than the recidivism rate for young offenders processed through the courts.

But the panel members for the 25th District know those successes come through hand-to-hand combat that demands optimism and skepticism in equal measure. When they finished with the 13-year-old last week, they offered him a contract that mandated better school attendance and participation in a community service program where he could also receive tutoring. He gave no indication he would fulfill those obligations, yet one of the panelists volunteered to take him to the community group and also to introduce him to the principal at his new school. The boy might still surrender to the undertow around him, but the volunteers of the 25th District were determined to lay one more lifeline onto the waves.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.