Probably he wasn’t quite as blunt as he said he was, but there is no doubt that the system is now so overloaded that first, second and even sometimes third offences tend to be ignored. The unintended message to the young offenders is that you get three freebies before you are taken seriously.
And so it was that time dollars were used for their most ambitious test yet, to revitalize the District of Columbia’s exhausted youth courts. Washington’s courts are, of course, a small part of an exhausted urban system in the USA. By the end of the Reagan years, nearly 1.2 million Americans were in prison, and the figure was rising so fast that – if you believe these kinds of trends – half the population was due to be inside by the year 2053. The prison population was increasing at the rate of 2,000 a week, at the cost of another $100,000 a week. ‘In five years, the corrections obligation could easily double the current national debt,’ said the Governor of Maryland’s report in 1992.
In the face of all this, Washington’s youth courts can barely keep the lid on an explosive situation. The time dollars proposal to take over some of the youth courts and bring in teenage jurors paid in time dollars was agreed at the start of the year. It went ahead officially from April 23 – Shakespeare’s birthday, I was pleased to note – with a budget of just $200,000 over two years. By the time I arrived three months later, 600 young people had already gone through training as jurors, ready to try non-violent first-time offences like shoplifting, what we Brits would call ‘taking and driving away’, criminal damage, drug possession, truancy.
There were already some success stories, such as the boy who had initially refused to speak because he had seen his brother killed, and trusted no one. And another, accused of slashing his teacher’s tyres because she made him stay after school. What the youth jury discovered was that he had also promised his parents to escort his younger brother and sister home that evening, through the unpleasant gangland which lay along their route. His teacher had refused to listen. Even so the jury was tough with him: they made him pay for the damage, write an apology to the teacher and to his brother and sister – because he had shown them the wrong example.
The court itself was quite unlike anything I expected. There were no police, no warders, no social workers, no officials, no pomp or circumstance. It was hard to quite fit into the category of court at all – yet that is what it was, under licence from the District of Columbia. I walked up with Edgar, into the monstrous concrete of the DC Law School, past the signs which said ‘Kiss and Ride’ – where people could drop their husbands and wives off at the metro – and up to the third floor, past a sign scribbled in red felt pen: ‘Teen Court Room 4800’.
Room 4800 turned out to be a large open-plan office of the kind where people hold Christmas parties and stamp cigarettes and Twiglets into the carpet. The floor was a limp purple, and the metal chairs an unpleasant shade of lime green. One of the Venetian blinds was broken. Gathered around two round tables in the middle of the room were eight young black girls and boys, in a generally upbeat mood. Every one of them was impeccably turned out – though clearly not for the benefit of the court – with sunglasses perched on their heads and beautifully coiffured hair. One of the only two boys had a shiny waistcoat, white shoes and a frighteningly wide mouth like a crocodile. He stayed almost completely silent.
These were the jurors – all of them earning three time dollars for three hours’ jury service that evening. A TV crew from Denmark were fussing around with microphones. Debbie from the Time Dollars office was laughing with the jurors. Youth court organizers were whispering seriously. The defendant – we’ll call him Jimmy, because I had to take the same oath of confidentiality as everyone else – sat at the end of the table. The ‘teen court’ model in the US has been known to cut re-offending to as little as 5 per cent: at first sight, Jimmy did not look a likely candidate for success.
He was between his ‘buddy’, a juror in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt assigned to speak on his behalf, and his mother in sunglasses, big gold earrings and a fearsome purple outfit with more airholes than dress. She was absent-mindedly sipping at a can of Coke. All we needed was the judge. ‘It won’t start without Dr Cahn,’ I had been told. ‘Nothing starts without Dr Cahn.’
‘You’ll all have to look like serious jurors now,’ said the law student observer next to me, hardly older than they were.
Edgar had arrived and finished arranging his papers. Apart from me and the Danish TV crew, he was the only white face in the room – and it was by now a magisterial one. ‘I want to welcome you to the Time Dollars Youth Court,’ he said. Everyone’s eyes turned to him. ‘I am here to help the jury work on a resolution to this case. We are here to try to help young people who get into any kind of trouble.’
And then, an implied warning to Jimmy the defendant to be open: ‘We can only assist if you feel comfortable sharing the issues that you have. The jury has the authority given by the courts of the District of Columbia to choose between a number of consequences they can impose.’
There was no oath to be honest, no truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. But then this was also a court without any of the other usual trappings – flags, microphones, gowns, ushers, silence. Edgar ran instead through the list of possible sentences the court could impose – though sentence is not a word you would hear uttered in this radical court experiment. Jimmy could ‘make amends’, pay back damages, get counselling, be given up to ninety hours’ community service – or be sentenced to sit on a youth court jury. Not what you would call throwing away the key, but it all had to be completed within ninety days.
At the end of the table, Jimmy looked blank and rather dismissive, unsure quite how to sit, barely articulate when he first spoke. He was charged with possession of cannabis, ‘with intent to distribute’ – which meant he was caught with a large quantity of it. This might not be the most serious charge in the world, but Jimmy had already been arraigned in the big court and advised of his rights by a lawyer, before somebody suggested he should be sent here instead.
Inez, the sixteen-year-old jury foreman with carefully moulded hair, read a prepared statement rather stiltedly, asking Jimmy about ‘your goals, your dreams, your hopes’. She clearly didn’t write it herself. The atmosphere was suddenly awkward.
It was Jimmy’s turn to speak, and he barely seemed to be able to say the words. You could see the contempt and the shyness in his eyes that he was even being asked to do so. ‘The police just jumped out at me,’ he said. He denied buying enough cannabis to sell.
But asked about his ambitions, he seemed able to string the words together a little better. He wanted to go to a school of electrical engineering: ‘My goal is to be a success, to make something of myself, to be somebody – not just a statistic aged eighteen,’ he said mechanically. He was in fact eighteen already and had dropped out of school. It was hard to know whether this was articulate or just a cliché he had picked up somewhere.
Now it was his mother’s turn, and – clearly unused to talking to young people – she adopted a haughty tone, blaming Jimmy’s father and anybody else she could think of. She had sent Jimmy to live with his father before the incident, and his father no longer wanted him there, she said: ‘He came between his father and the other two women in his life. Jimmy doesn’t really have a male role model in his life.’ This turned out not to be entirely true. But as we listened to his mother, and her various conflicting explanations about why she sent Jimmy away, a sad picture of him hawked from home to home began to emerge.
‘It’s not true that we smoked marijuana in my house,’ she whined, explaining that she needed financial help from Jimmy’s father to bring him up. ‘And I can’t really speak for Mr T.’ Somehow the phrase conjured up an unpleasant mental picture of Jimmy’s father, like something out of The A-Team. Then, preening herself slightly: ‘I think Jimmy’s father wanted me back, but I didn’t come with the package.’
And