New Haven’s pioneering Juvenile Review Board, which was organized just this summer to provide an alternative to sending under-15-year-old offenders into the court system, is up and running and already making its contribution to the diminution of violence in the city.
Project Director Kyisha Velazquez (on the left) and case manager Kay Dian Harrison were on hand at Thursday night’s Fair Haven Management Team meeting to provide an update.
About 20 cases have already been referred to the Juvenile Review Board (JRB) by the police department, Velazquez said. The first panels were convened in the first weeks of October. In this, the first phase of the JRB, the criteria are that the offense must be no more grievous than a first-time misdemeanor and the offenders under 15. Those parameters will be enlarged, she said, in the years to come. Of the inaugural cases, the preponderance, she said, have been for fighting.
The way this program of what is called balanced and restorative justice works (click here for a previous story) is that the offending kids and their parents must agree to work through the JRB instead of the police and courts. They must face panels, of volunteers from the community, who review the cases and try to find community service, counseling, home restriction, counseling or other reprimands and “contracts” to satisfy the needs of the victim, the offenders, and the community. If successful, all records of the crime are erased from any record.
“We try to emphasize the positive,” Velazquez said, “and address problems in the home and strengthen competencies.” Their first cases, she said, have come from Newhalville and from Fair Haven. Of the 20 in process, six have been successfully resolved, she said. In one instance, three girls were fighting, and the JRB brought the girls and the parents of the girls together. “It seems small,” Velazquez said, “but the parents were very grateful. Now they know that they don’t have to call the police.”
One of the JRB’s concerns had been getting enough volunteers for the four panels of seven volunteers each to hear the “cases.” But the pool of volunteers quickly swelled, she said, to 60 for a required number of 28, that is seven on four panels that hear the cases at various times of the week. Three members of each of the panels are respectively from the state Department of Children and Family Services, the New Haven police department, and the Board of Education, these three also being volunteers.
Velazquez and her small staff interviewed all 60, and all will be part of the JRB’s work, either as panel members, alternates, or mentors, or providers of anger management or employment training workshops.
The JRB program works hand-in-hand with the Street Outreach Workers program, both being under the funding and supervisory umbrella of New Haven Family Alliance. Velzaquez said both share the strategy of early intervention and altering problematic environments. She reported, on behalf of the Street Outreach Workers, that a truce had been reached between the “gangs” of Newhalville and Dixwell and that a ceremony of burying grudges was enacted through a basketball game about a month ago. That was arranged through the Street Outreach Workers. Another initiative, she reported, was 40 kids, all from different turf-based gangs, were taken out of the local environment, bussed together to New York City for a day of activities together. They visited the Shomburg Center, a library in Harlem dedicated to African-American history and achievement, ate, and socialized together away from contested turf.
The JRB, she said, will be adding case workers as needed. In 2010, funding permitting, sixteen and seventeen year olds will be folded into the program, along with, in the intervening years, of referrals from the schools and directly from parents.
A number of the participants in the Fair Haven management team meeting, including LCI specialist Laurie Lopez Johnson (on the far right), reported on a recent serious rash of tagging – that is defacing properties such as the Amistad School and Chabasso Bakery on James Street with graffiti. Velzquez said that would be an ideal case to be brought to the JRB. “These kids seem like they want to express themselves,” and she was already thinking of some balanced approach to providing perhaps art classes, provided the kids undertstand the gravity and cost of the tagging, and perhaps do the clean-up first.
