Cleveland Mitchell, left, and Darren White.

Youth offenders can have their day in court—out of court again.

When Cleveland Mitchell first learned in 2011 that Oakland’s McCullum Youth Court was losing funding and on the verge of closing its doors, he could hardly contain his disappointment. Having been involved with the court for years, first in 2005 as a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent and then throughout high school as a volunteer staff member, Mitchell had personally witnessed the nonprofit diversion program help hundreds of kids in Alameda County. In 2012, when the youth court officially shut down, Mitchell was totally dismayed and flabbergasted that one of Oakland’s most prominent youth diversion programs could have been allowed to deteriorate.

“I couldn’t believe it was over,” Mitchell says. “I thought it was something that deserved to be more praised and more wanted than it was.”

Named after the late renowned Alameda County Superior Court Justice Donald P. McCullum, the McCullum Youth Court was a restorative justice program for youth offenders, almost entirely operated by young people as well. It was designed to offer consequences that were firm but non-punitive to Alameda County teens who were caught committing a crime and willing to take responsibility for it. There are similar youth courts in Castro Valley, the Tri-Valley area, Hayward, and various school districts throughout the East Bay, but this was the only one available to all qualifying Oakland youth. Any juveniles who successfully completed the program were rewarded with a clean record, and court staff members say recidivism rates for the area’s youth courts like the McCullum Court are much lower than the state average. Additionally, they save millions in taxpayer dollars over the years by funneling kids away from more costly juvenile detention and/or probation.

The youth court’s actual demise involved a public meltdown only two years removed from its the court’s 20th anniversary, and wasn’t exactly befitting of Judge McCullum’s good name. After the program lost $400,000 in federal grant money, roughly 60 percent of its annual funding, it was forced to burn up $100,000 in reserve cash, which put the program in danger of folding and caused concern about what would happen to the roughly 400 juveniles whose cases were then being handled by the youth court. The youth court’s executive director at the time, David Wallace, and the head of the board of directors, Leonard Marquez, each publicly accused the other of negligence and blamed the other for the lack of funding. When the court ran out of money and officially closed in May 2012, it just kind of fizzled out of existence—many of its websites, including its Twitter and Facebook pages, remain intact, as if the court’s staff simply forgot to post status updates for the last couple of years.

But there was one man in Oakland who wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to the youth court: its deputy director, Darren White, who managed to stay out of the public fray during the court’s public meltdown and was named acting executive director after Wallace resigned. White, a former youth football coach who started working for McCullum Youth Court in 2005, was tasked only with mop-up duty: He was just expected to wrap up the court’s open cases, officiate the program’s termination, and call it a day. But instead, White immediately began working behind the scenes to see if he could find a new financial backer and keep the youth court alive.

“I’ll be honest. I could have just folded up shop and tried to go find another job. But this program is a passion of mine. This is a program that needs to be here, and I just felt too strongly about it to not fight for it,” White says. “I reached out to my network, and I fought to get meetings with anyone who was willing to have a meeting with me.”

White says he was “blessed” to find a new source of financing after just two months of shopping around the city: Centerforce, an Oakland-based nonprofit that provides family services for incarnated men and women in California with the hopes of lowering recidivism rates. Centerforce is mostly geared toward adults, but its directors still saw value in the youth court and made room for the program to be under Centerforce’s umbrella. Centerforce’s newly appointed director, Larry Hill, has even fallen in love with the program and decided to make time to sit in the audience and watch every session after curiosity brought him there once. “There are many young people with unstable home situations who don’t have the kind of direction that they might otherwise have if they were in a more stable environment,” Hill says. “If we can provide an opportunity for them to learn from their mistakes and make them right, it’s the epitome of a win-win situation.”

And with that, Oakland’s youth court was back. It’s now known as Centerforce Youth Court, not McCullum, but the fundamentals of the program remain the same, as does the program’s potential to change hundreds of lives in the Bay Area. In August, Centerforce Youth Court will celebrate its two-year anniversary, thanks largely to White’s behind-the-scenes work.

With the exception of a lone adult volunteer judge (usually an attorney or prominent businessperson—someone with working legal knowledge), the court is entirely run by youth who serve as the lawyers, clerks, jurors, bailiffs, and stenographers. And the program is only open to first-time misdemeanor offenders who admit to having committed the crime; guilt or innocence isn’t decided.

But the jurors are expected to pepper each defendant with pointed questions about his or her crime, about the small- and big-picture reasons for committing it, and about how the defendant would do things differently in the future. This was one of the most intensive parts of the program for Mitchell, who blushes and looks down at the floor as he recalls feeling flustered on the McCullum Youth Court stand almost 10 years ago.

“I’m up there like, ‘Oh, my god!’ My palms are sweating. I’m nervous. I don’t even know if I’m saying [my confession] right,” he says, able to laugh about it now. “And the questioning was even worse. You have that sense of wanting to answer the question politically correctly, so you don’t get in trouble, but you want to be genuine, too. It’s your peers out there judging you, so you know they’re gonna be able to tell if you’re lying or being fake.”

Standard consequences for defendants include performing mandatory community service, having to write apology letters, or taking diversionary classes, where the youth are given presentations from ex-inmates, police, and other figures associated with the justice system. Many kids who go through the program are also often required to perform jury duty for future youth court sessions, giving them an opportunity to see the justice system on both sides of the aisle. Mitchell stayed in contact with many of the peers he got to know throughout his experience, and he says all of the people he’s kept in touch with are “doing well in life.”

“It was good to have the experience, but I never want to go through it again,” says one 17-year-old boy who went through the program as a juvenile offender and is in the process of fulfilling his requirements. “It showed me that there were people who actually care. In a sense, me screwing up helped me get my life together.”

Mitchell was only 13 when he was arrested, after he and a friend vandalized a woman’s car by jumping up and down on its hood during a traffic altercation. Mitchell left the scene while his friend stayed there and continued to argue with the woman, who, unbeknown to Mitchell, had called Berkeley police. Shortly thereafter Mitchell was spotted, recognized, handcuffed, and taken to a downtown holding cell in the back of a cop car—or given, “the full treatment,” as he puts it. Because he was a first-time offender, he was giving the opportunity to go through McCullum and was ultimately given 40 hours of community service, three jury sessions, and assigned to take youth empowerment courses.

“A lot of kids don’t really get that until later—that’s the nature of adolescence—you haven’t really lived long enough to understand the long-term consequences of your actions,” Hill says. “It really does give a lot of the kids a second chance, and they see that. You can see the light go on in their heads.”

Had he gone through a traditional justice system, Mitchell likely would have ended up on probation or being put on house arrest. Now 22 years old and ready to enter the job market with a clean record and a college degree, he knows now how much having a “criminal past” would have hindered him throughout his youth.

“My life would be completely different if I never went through McCullum Youth Court,” Mitchell says. “At the time, I was dealing with some anger issues, doing things like [my crime]. And I feel that if I didn’t get caught, it just would have snowballed.”

Recidivism statistics for juveniles are guarded by district attorneys and not generally released to the public, but one 2002 study of youth courts in Alaska, Arizona, Maryland, and Missouri, showed those programs had a recidivism rate of 6 to 9 percent, and youth court staff say recidivism rates below 10 percent are typical for the area’s youth courts. By contrast, 62 percent of juveniles arrested in 2005 in California were rearrested within a year, and 76 percent had been rearrested within two years. Further, it costs California, on average, almost $45,000 in public funds to keep a single juvenile detained for a year, meaning the Bay Area’s youth courts have saved taxpayers millions during their years of existence.

“A restorative justice model also helps the victims gets closure, because in a traditional justice system, the victim or victim’s family only knows if the defendant gets five, 10 years, or whatever. But nothing is done to make them whole again,” White says. “That’s what restorative justice is all about—we try and connect with the victims, work with them, and make sure that we try to help them be restored.”

In order to be an attorney, bailiff, or clerk in the court, kids have to complete a 12-week law program and then pass a mock bar exam, followed by on-the-job shadow training until they’re ready to handle cases themselves, while jurors go through less intensive training but are still shown the ropes of the legal system. It’s important to do this, because the state recognizes youth court litigation as official juvenile court proceedings, meaning their verdicts are legally binding.

“It’s cool; you get experience being an attorney and learning the rules,” says Douglas, a 16-year-old youth court volunteer who serves as a prosecutor/attorney and wants to become a lawyer one day. “In the beginning, I was shy. Doing this developed my public speaking skills, and I’ve become a better thinker.”

Many of the kids who go through the program as defendants come back to volunteer their time. Other participants are high school students who are interested in becoming lawyers or judges one day, White says. As an extra incentive, Centerforce offers letters of recommendation, in addition to assisting youth volunteers with the college application process.

“When you take a young person who makes a mistake and you work with that young person, you give them an opportunity to see what they did was wrong and go back into the community and right that wrong,” White says. “It’s a powerful thing to see a kid turn his or herself around and see that what they did isn’t who they are; they just made a mistake and they can change.”

For Mitchell personally, the process had a direct impact on the course of his life. He felt so inspired by the program that, after completing his mandatory jury duty, community service, and classes, he vowed to return to the program as a volunteer. After serving as a youth court lawyer while attending Berkeley High School, Mitchell moved to Portland, Ore., so he could attend college preparatory school his senior year. Now, the 22-year-old Vallejo resident works for the city of Berkeley as a facilitator for two local youth courts, which work directly with high schools and middle schools, and he’s also serving as a mentor for kids in local youth athletic programs. In May, Mitchell graduated from Holy Names University and is looking forward to finding full-time work.

“I want to give back because all my life, people having been giving to me,” Mitchell says. “All my life, I’ve had various mentors—my mom, my dad, coaches—who, if it hadn’t been for them, I doubt I’d be sitting here talking to you right now. And I can honestly say that the youth court was a big part of that.”

Centerforce Youth Court offers services from Hayward to Berkeley. It works with schools, the police, or district attorney, and it also takes parent referrals. The youth court also actively seek volunteers for the court and law-training program, which teaches kids the basics of criminal law and then gives them hands-on experience in the form of being able to serve a role on the youth court (most typically as lawyers, jurors, bailiffs, or stenographers).

For more information on Centerforce Youth Court, visit www.Centerforce.org/Programs/Centerforce-Youth-Court/or contact Darren White at 510-834-3457, ext. 301.

This article appears in the July 2014 issue of Alameda Magazine
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