Each year during the holiday season, I remind the community to donate to the Longmont Community Justice Partnership (LCJP). This year, I decided to write about what it is like for young adults who end up in juvenile detention, because their community doesn’t have an LCJP, or as I have put it, a buffer between young adults and at-risk teens and the criminal justice system.
Most of us can remember what it was like right after the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. I wanted to do something, to give back for the good of the country. I knew the Army didn’t want me back, and I’d been retired from Civil Service almost 10 years. Then, an article appeared in the Grand Junction Sentinel featuring the AmeriCorps program operated out of Mesa State (now Mesa University). The article featured a member who was 69 at the time. Since I was 60, I thought I’d give it a try.
(Note: That program was unique and different in many ways from the Boulder County program, which was aimed at young adults who were mostly college students.)
After a brief interview with the director, an associate professor at Mesa State, 39 were selected for a variety of positions. About half were college students and the rest of us ranged in age from 50s to 79, the oldest AmeriCorps worker in the state. I was assigned to be a writing mentor at the Fruita alternative school about two miles from our house.
While there, I developed a writing program that allowed students to write articles for a proposed school newspaper. The students named the paper “Dragon Breath News” to the dismay of school district management. Our results soon quelled any criticism. Those students, previously uninterested in school, became interested in reading and writing. All were immersed in the paper’s first edition, because they had written it. One girl even invented a “Dear Abby” column that became a big hit. She became excited to write when I told her she could create both letters to “Abby” and Abby’s answers.
After spring break, I was assigned to repeat my writing program at the Juvenile Detention Center in Grand Junction. The kids, “juvies,” age 11-17 and I met in a small glassed-in computer room where they could write on anything and then had to read it to their fellow students. That’s when I heard their heartbreaking stories and realized there had been no buffer, like LCJP, before they had been thrust into the criminal justice system. Unlike in LCJP, they had not been given a second chance. Most wrote about the loss of freedom and how they had learned to value what school should have meant to them.
Others wrote beautiful poetry from their souls. For example, one 15-year-old girl wrote about losing a scholarship to a prominent university because she had been hooked on meth. As her own personal assignment, she keyed Kipling’s poem “If” to remind her peers not to follow the crowd, to keep their heads.
Those kids could only watch TV news and read local newspapers. As a result, their writing was based on better sources and content than what at-risk students at the Fruita school had used. Their newspaper was titled “Inside Edition” by the warden.
I repeated this story to young adults in the 25 conferences I attended as a volunteer for LCJP. Community members let me know the story had had an impact on turning offenders around from potential offenses.
The Longmont Community Justice Partnership was invented here. It is unique in the country and has been replicated many times. LCJP is run by a small staff of six and several hundred citizen volunteers, all made possible by your donations.
Bill and Joan Ellis are longtime donors. For more information see LCJP.org.
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