Our Children This Month, September 2022

Rethinking Juvenile Justice for Troubled Youth: Restorative Justice

In 2019, according to the Board of State & Community Corrections, 31,540 Fresno County youth were arrested and funneled into the criminal justice system to wind up with criminal records that will follow them to their extreme detriment for the rest of their lives. Given the severe impact from even relatively minor offenses, we have to ask ourselves if there is a better way to handle youthful offenders that views their mistake as a learning opportunity and holds them directly accountable to the victim and repairing the harm done to the greatest extent possible. Fortunately, the answer to this question is a resounding YES! We do know how to achieve this with an evidence-based solution already existing in Fresno County. This approach, which successfully redirects troubled youth known as Restorative Justice (RJ), has been languishing in the shadows here on a small scale for many years—starved by a lack of political support and funding.