Vermont’s juvenile justice teaches kids community can help
Jun 30, 2009
From Julia Steiny's column at projo.com.
This is the third of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.
With a mere 28 beds, Vermont’s only locked facility for juveniles, Woodside, is mainly for crisis stabilization. One wing is for short-term care, the other for treating young men with aggressive behaviors. The facility itself is locked, but the kids’ bedrooms are not. They get treatment, not punishment. And meanwhile, home-based workers get their families and communities ready to take the kid back.
Living in a prison can’t possibly teach a kid how to live in a community. And living in a community must be the goal for any and all offenders, except those condemned to life imprisonment. Copious research collected in recent years shows that prisons make kids far more likely to stay involved with criminal activity than they were before prison.
So Vermont’s juvenile justice strategy is to work on restoring kids’ bonds to their communities in ways that prisons could never do. After all, most kids’ crimes are stupid pranks and acts of greedy thoughtlessness. Kids typically have no thought for the people from whom they steal or the owners of property they vandalize. Vermont’s system forces them to think about what they did, and who was affected by it.
