Judge Luis G. Perez of the Worcester, Massachusetts, Juvenile Court, often must act as parent and friend as well as judge as he decides the fate of troubled youths in the courtroom. Journalist Kristin Helmore looks at Judge Perez's emphasis on correction rather than punishment in dealing with juvenile offenders.




Judge Luis G. Perez likes to tell a story to illustrate the wrong way to handle juvenile offenders. Not long after he became First Justice of the Juvenile Court of Worcester County, Massachusetts, in 1987, a probation officer took him aside to urge particularly tough treatment of a young probationer who had been arrested for disturbing the peace. The boy had been absent from school for about a month, in violation of the terms of his probation. The officer said that the boy was an especially hard case and needed to be frightened into compliance with the law.

Judge Perez took the advice and harangued the young man unmercifully, threatening him with escalating punishments that could culminate in his incarceration until he reached age 21, if he did not mend his evil ways. The boy stood in the dock, his shoulders shaking with sobs. Finally Judge Perez bellowed, "Where do you go when you don't go to school?"

"To the cemetery," the boy whimpered.

To the judge's horror, he found that no one had bothered to discover that the boy's father had died about a month before, and that the devastated youngster had been spending every day at the gravesite, grieving.

Judge Perez learned two important lessons from this incident. First, make sure that every member of his staff of 85 does their homework and learns as much as possible about the lives of the young people whom they serve. Second, treat each juvenile in the court system with kindness, "like a human being."

An Easy Rapport

The courtroom of Judge Luis G. Perez in this second largest city in New England (the population of metropolitan Worcester is about 170,000) is a modest, unpretentious place, and Judge Perez is a modest man. The black-robed judge sits alone on the bench, at the top of a low, three-tiered pyramid of unpainted wood. Below him at floor level are attorneys, prosecutors and probation officers, and two clerks peering into a computer screen.

Nowadays, he speaks in a soft voice, in a relaxed manner. He asks young defendants a lot of personal questions, and is not above mediating between a juvenile and his or her parents on matters pertaining to behavior at home. An easy rapport is evident between the judge and his staff as well. All rise to their feet whenever they address him and they call him "Your Honor," but the atmosphere is collegial rather than hierarchical. Between cases, friendly banter is the norm.

The walls of the courtroom are painted a pale, institutional pink. In the corner behind the judge is an American flag, and next to it, taped to the wall, are large drawings children have made for him containing exhortations against violence, drug use, gangs, and similar ills of modern society. These walls are so thin that the judge occasionally asks a court officer to request quiet in the crowded, noisy waiting room outside.

A Typical Day

Each time Judge Perez walks through the waiting room, he stops briefly to greet one or two of the teenagers whom he has come to know personally after they have run afoul of the law.

Some he greets in his native Spanish, some in fluent English with a distinctly Massachusetts accent. There are several doors leading from this waiting-room, but all of them have had the cheap metal nameplates on them removed, making it hard to find one's way. "Kids do it," says Perez with an easy-going chuckle. "It must be kids. Who else would take all the signs?"

On a typical day, Judge Perez hears as many as 40 cases. On a recent morning, the list includes a 15-year-old girl who has been arrested for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon; a couple of boys who have been driving without a license; a 16-year-old-boy accused of raping a 16-year-old girl; a 15-year-old girl arrested for possession of 10 vials of crack cocaine; and a 15-year-old girl charged with attacking her mother with a knife. One defendant is Vietnamese and one is white. Most, however, are Hispanic. In Worcester, Latinos constitute the largest minority, with about 20,000 people, 80 percent of whom are Puerto Rican. Asians and African-Americans number about 5,000 each.

The rape case is dismissed because the alleged victim refused to appear in court. The youths who drove without a license are ordered to obtain one and report to the judge by a certain date. All the other defendants are put on probation. In Judge Perez's court, this can involve a number of conditions, including house arrest, "stay-away" orders designed to separate enemies, regular school attendance, a 6:00 p.m. curfew, scheduled meetings with probation officers, attendance at one or more of ten special educational programs offered to probationers by the court, and alternative sentencing -- the performance of a specified number of hours of community service. Detention is avoided whenever possible. For Judge Perez, who grew up in conditions similar to many of these youngsters, incarceration of juveniles only compounds the problem.

Helping Kids in Trouble

"When you start locking kids up, there's a much greater risk that you'll be locking up those same kids again and again," says Perez. "By getting tougher on kids and treating them as adults, you're not going to correct the problem. You're going to make it worse. We'll just have a younger population going to jail and an older population staying in jail. When you start putting people in jail, they become worse people, not better people."

Helping kids in trouble to become "better people" is Judge Perez's goal. After all, he identifies strongly with them. He came to Worcester from Puerto Rico in 1960 at age ten, speaking no English. As a result, he was put back in school two grades because of his language difficulties. His father was already retired, and his mother, who had left school in the third grade to help support her family, was a laborer. When he was in high school he saw a friend stabbed to death. "I know what these kids go through," he says. "I could easily have gone the same way."

A Major Impact

One would hardly know it to look at him today. Tall, well-dressed, with wavy, slightly thinning dark hair, a thick dark mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, he could be a businessman or a lawyer. He returns to Puerto Rico whenever he can, and hopes to retire there.

"I've always been involved with my community," says Perez over half a sandwich and soup at Lucky's Cafe, a friendly little diner across the street from the courthouse. Lucky's, where the judge is a regular, is in a converted factory building, as is the juvenile court -- a huge, square brick building where trolley-car switches were once made. "I've always been a person who has tried to make justice available for everybody," he continues, "to open the doors of discrimination to people -- trying to make this world a better place for all of us to live in."

As a student and young attorney he was a leader in various campaigns to improve the lot of minorities, ensuring that the schools implemented bilingual education laws. He also oversaw efforts to reconfigure Worcester's voting districts in a way that better represented the diversity of the population. He had great visions of all he would accomplish, but he never bargained on juvenile court.

"It was a good friend of mine, a priest, who convinced me," he says. "I had been offered the position of Juvenile Court Justice and I had turned it down. So he called me and we had breakfast and he said, "Where else do you think you're going to play such a big role in the future of this city? You want to have a major impact? Have a major impact with our children. They're the future.' Well," says Perez with a grin, "after ten years on the bench I can tell you that he was absolutely right."

Working With the Community

This is a man who loves his work. He may be dealing with a thick web of apparently intractable social problems and a seemingly endless stream of human tragedy, but he retains his relaxed sense of humor because he has seen the effectiveness of his approach: work with the community, from within the community. Apply strict rules for young people at an early age, demand responsibility and accountability from them, and give them the information that will help them make the right decisions for their lives. Put them in settings that will give them a sense of self-worth and accomplishment rather than frustration and aggression.

When he speaks of working within the community, Judge Perez means that his probation officers do not just sit at their desks eight hours a day receiving scheduled visits from clients, as they did under his predecessor. It has been a hard struggle, but he has finally convinced them of the value of being on the street: visiting youngsters in their homes, their schools, their places of work and recreation, their foster homes. The frequent presence of these officers is having a stabilizing effect in the neighborhoods of Worcester, and the task of monitoring probationers' behavior is getting much easier.

"Just recently we placed a full-time probation officer at a school," says Perez. "He has the responsibility to work with parents in a preventive way, instead of waiting until their kids come into the court system. They (probation officers) also educate the students about what type of behavior we expect from them. They're available to the staff at the school in crisis situations. And they have more hands-on supervision of the kids who are on probation and who go to that school."

Then, for the really tough cases, there's the bracelet: an electronic monitoring device worn on the wrist that enables probation officers to keep track of a juvenile's whereabouts at all times. Ten of these bracelets were purchased by the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services at Perez's request. So far, some 200 youngsters under house arrest have used the bracelet, saving the state about $100,000 over the cost of detention.

Art, Not Graffiti

Collaboration such as this with a key social institution is another hallmark of Judge Perez's community-based approach. Traditionally, he says, the courts, the state agencies, the police, the schools, and the city government all operated in isolation from one another, experiencing considerable tension when their various fiefdoms collided. "If we all work together," he adds, "if we sit down at the table and discuss our common problems, we can all work much more effectively." Perez, himself, has worked closely with the police on the issue of gangs, for example, conducting research into the identity and activities of gangs, and devising strategies to minimize gang violence and prevent new gangs from forming.

He also has worked with the police and with local businesses on the problem of graffiti, following a very simple rule: whoever produces graffiti will clean it up. Many hours of community service have been spent cleaning the walls of Worcester as a result. The town is now largely free of graffiti, and a number of the youngsters involved have been awarded scholarships by the Worcester Art Museum, "Because they had the talent," says Judge Perez. "It just had to be channeled in a better way. Now they're going to art classes, but first they did their hours of community service cleaning the walls!"

A Philosophy of Intervention

Correction rather than punishment. Prevention rather than reaction. This is why, for example, Perez did not punish the young Vietnamese boy for driving at 2:00 a.m. through the streets of Worcester without a license. "If I had found him delinquent, he wouldn't have had a chance to get his license until he was 21," the judge explains. "Then what would he do? Here's a young man, he's 16, he can't go to work. We have public transportation, but on most routes it's once an hour. So what does he do? He gets frustrated. He can't get a job. What does he turn to? When the fast money is on the table, how does he say no?"

This is the philosophy of early intervention. At an early age, keep them in line over the small things, give them opportunities to do the right thing, and they won't get in trouble over the big things later on.

Take truancy. Judge Perez will not tolerate it. In Worcester, a police officer has the right to arrest any youngster who is on the street when school is in session. The child is assigned three days of community service, such as cleaning the bathrooms at his or her school. "One aspect of it that I like is that there's a consequence for the child's behavior," says Perez. "For the next three days that child will do community service and get credit for it. All the parties come together in our truancy center upstairs -- the parents, the school personnel, a probation officer -- to talk about why (the child) wasn't in school."

Turning Young Lives Around

Perez is so concerned, in fact, with solving young people's problems at an early age, that he cited the Worcester Department of Education for contempt of court for failing to comply with his order to investigate why a certain teenage girl had been absent for a total of almost three years of school. It turned out that she had been referred to a special education program in the second grade, but had never been placed in the program. "This was someone's responsibility, and they had failed to meet it," he says indignantly. But it was his confrontation with the Education Department that changed the pattern of isolation and lack of cooperation in which each institution had worked in the past.

"As a result of that, we came to an agreement with the public schools that they would make sure that if a child needs special education programs, or needs evaluation, they would immediately take care of it," he adds. "Since then my door started being opened to the school department. I said, `Let's see how we can work together.' We got into truancies, we got into special education, we got into the issue of violence in the schools." This is what Perez means by community in action.

But then there was the issue of weapons in the schools, a seemingly irreconcilable difference in this newfound partnership. The schools of Worcester had a strict rule that any child caught with a weapon in school would be suspended for one year, no exceptions. Perez ruled tht it was unconstitutional to deprive these children of education. The school department ftook the case to the Massachusetts Superior Court -- and Perez's decision was overturned. Then he tried another tack. He agreed with the superintendent of schools to start a special school for problem children such as these right in the courthouse building -- just upstairs from where Perez sits on the bench every day. "We wanted our probation officers to be available for consultation and to work with these kids, before they're on probation," he says. "Most of the troublemakers in the public school population are upstairs, more than 200 of them. It's an alternative school. Small classrooms. It seems to be working. I go upstairs, speak to the kids. I say, `I was like you, but I turned my life around. This is my life today.'"

Issues of Democracy
USIA Electronic Journals, Vol. 1, No. 18, December 1996