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Youth justice program is seeking adults for key panel
Accountability board will decide offenders' fate
Location is also needed
By Gloria I. Wang
A program for Saratoga teen offenders that would call on community members to hand out individualized correctional plans is beginning to take shape.
The Restorative Justice Program, heading into its fifth year in Santa Clara County, has helped reduce repeated offenses by bringing juvenile offenders before a neighborhood justice board.
The program targets locals 17 years old and younger who have been cited for low-level crimes such as drug and alcohol abuse or property damage.
In July, the county's probation department began laying the groundwork for the new system in Los Gatos, Saratoga and Cupertino, hoping to divert more youths from typical isolated dealings with a probation officer.
"It's going back to the old way where the village was raising the kid," says Heidi Pham, the program coordinator for the three West Valley cities.
Now Pham is looking for members of the community to step forward to get a local Neighborhood Accountability Board up and running.
When the positions are filled, the board will meet with the offender and determine what kind of reparation must be done for a specific crime.
Since the board is made up entirely of local adults, Pham is searching for 10 Saratogans willing to meet roughly one evening a month for approximately 3 1/2 hours. Board members undergo 12 hours of training before their first meeting and are paid a small monthly stipend once meetings begin.
Pham is also on the lookout for a Saratoga locale for the board's regular meetings. At other locations around the county, neighborhood panels meet at churches and community centers. Cupertino's board, already up and running, meets at the Good Samaritan United Methodist Church.
The program avoids schools because privacy and confidentiality are a key tenet of the program.
"Right now the people of Saratoga don't have a voice [in the justice process] and we'd like the community to be involved and help its own kids," Pham says.
The Santa Clara County Juvenile Probation Department started the program in 1997 as an experiment in Gilroy and two San Jose communities. Later, it expanded into Mountain View, Milpitas and other San Jose areas. Based on the positive feedback received from participants and backing from the county board of supervisors, the department now has a commitment to put the program into every ZIP code in the county.
Al Garcia, a supervising probation officer who handles restorative justice cases throughout the county, says Santa Clara is one of only a handful of counties throughout the state that have implemented the new system. Nationally, Garcia says, local probation departments in Florida and Minnesota have also put this alternative justice track into place.
Rafael De La Cruz, a local restorative justice coordinator, says the program "looks at crime through a different lens." Instead of seeing the offense as a crime against the justice system or the state, the crime is taken as having injured a community, victim or even the offender themself. Crime is therefore personalized, De La Cruz says, and more serious because damage is inflicted on relationships.
"These are good kids who've been cited for a low-level offense," De La Cruz says of the offenders, who usually don't need the punitive measures from the traditional justice system.
Typically, a teenager is cited for a crime and the citation goes through the probation department and assessed. Then, a probation officer meets with the offender and parents and determines whether or not the case is suitable for the Neighborhood Accountability Board.
If the case is appropriate--and if the youth acknowledges his or her guilt--the officer then refers the offender to the board. The victim in the crime receives a letter asking for input, such as the effect of the crime and appropriate reparations. The victim is also invited to sit in on the board meeting.
Board members review cases individually before they meet the youth. At the meeting, board members spend about one hour with each offender, first discussing the person--likes and dislikes, personality, family and friends--then talking about the crime and the appropriate steps to take.
The board negotiates a contract in which the offender agrees to take certain measures, such as writing letters of apology, performing community service, paying an amount of restitution or enrolling in self-help classes. Once the teen has completed the terms of the contract, the board gives the offender a certificate of completion.
If there is no second offense, and the youth remains clean for two years or until his or her 18th birthday, an offender can petition the county to seal his or her record.
According to De La Cruz, a two-year study of 902 restorative justice youth found that fewer than 12 percent of the teenagers who had gone through the program were repeat offenders.
"It provides immediate intervention measures for youth," De La Cruz says.
Pham says she finds that most of the citations for Saratoga residents are related to drug and alcohol abuse. In the past few months, she has made several presentations to local organizations such as the Los Gatos-based Community Against Substance Abuse.
CASA Chairwoman Kim Winkelman, who works to prevent drug abuse among local teens, says restorative justice is "another creative and effective way to continue to aid what society calls 'at-risk' youth. ... We, as a community, want to give them the very best opportunities that we can.
Winkelman says she started hearing good things about restorative justice more than a year ago. She became involved when she learned that Pham needed to find board members--the coordinator is also on a search of Los Gatans to form a neighborhood board there.
Saratoga residents or business owners interested in serving on the Neighborhood Accountability Board should contact Pham at 408.529.4253.
Oakley Brooks contributed to this report.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
