Students volunteer to assist juvenile offenders through class
Published: June 11, 2005
Teens who get into scrapes with the law can earn a second chance through the Carlsbad Juvenile Justice Panel.
Kids arrested in the city for minor offenses can keep their records clean by fulfilling a contract that includes community service and other projects.
The process is challenging and not for everyone, but the rewards are great, said volunteers who help create the contracts.
“I have never, ever been there where somebody came back and you couldn’t just see a huge change in attitude, a kind of lighter personality,” said Susan Gutierrez, a historian at the Georgina Cole Library who has volunteered with the program since it began in 1989.
Panel members are teen and adult volunteers led by coordinator Linda Ledesma with the Carlsbad Police Department. They set up a contract with parents and their children who have been arrested for misdemeanors such as shoplifting, fighting, vandalism or possession of alcohol and certain types of drugs.
The contract can last up to three months and always includes community service, as well as an essay and regular contact with Ledesma. At the end of the contract, the teens go before a panel to discuss what they learned.
In most cases, said panel volunteer Yesenia Valenzuela, an 18-year-old senior at Carlsbad High School, the teens are “able to understand the root of their mistakes and accept responsibility and grow from that.”
The program teaches responsibility, agreed 16-year-old junior Emily Lonas, who also volunteers with the panel.
“It lets kids have a second chance to take things more seriously,” she said.
The students who volunteer are part of an advanced communications class at the high school. They participate in a variety of service projects throughout the year and can serve up to four times a semester on the panel.
Adult volunteers are asked to serve at least four times a year, but many serve more often.
Al Nyman, a retired San Diego County Sheriff’s lieutenant, is always ready to help with the program when Ledesma calls, he said.
He worked a number of years at the Vista Detention Center and believes if some of the inmates had been given a second chance as juveniles, they might have steered clear of other crimes.
The Juvenile Justice Panel is successful in that aim, as the recidivism rate is less than 3 percent, Ledesma said.
Many times, the experience has the added benefit of opening lines of communication between parents and children, Gutierrez said. The juveniles’ parents are required to attend the panel meetings and can be surprised by what they hear.
“Sometimes, when you start talking to them (teens), you find out what they were arrested for was a minor part of what’s going on in their life, and maybe they need some other kind of intervention,” Gutierrez said.
“It’s not just, ‘You did a bad thing, and now you have to pick up trash.’ It’s about, ‘How can we help them see what’s going on in their life so they don’t do stuff like this again?’ ”
Gutierrez said the teens are often surprised and moved when they realize members of the community are there to support them.
“Every generation thinks they reinvented the wheel, and it’s not true,” Gutierrez said. “That’s why it’s good to have a community panel, because we’ve all gone through that growing up period in our lives.”
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