When Rutgers Law–Camden student Steven Salinger clerked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District Pennsylvania last summer, he left with more than just vital work experience. He returned to law school inspired to make a difference by engaging Camden youth in an in-school system of restorative justice or as he puts it “student-led democracy.”
Salinger, with fellow law student Justin Kozinn, has been teaching a class Friday mornings to 20 juniors and seniors at Urban Promise Academy in Camden as part of a pilot youth court initiative. This month the high school students who have been enrolled in the youth court class went on a class trip to Rutgers Law–Camden, using the school’s Archer & Greiner Moot Courtroom to try an actual student case and meet with a former judge.
According to Salinger, the Urban Promise students have been learning instructional and interactive lessons all semester often through examples of possible cases they might handle, from students throwing a juice box, cursing at a teacher, even possessing a small amount of narcotics.
“We have built up the students’ restorative justice vocabulary and knowledge. Students work on achieving constructive and restorative outcomes rather than stock punishment,” says Salinger. “The basis of Youth Court is democracy – students governing students. It practices restorative justice to counteract the ‘School to Prison Pipeline’ phenomenon.”
The newly launched Rutgers Law–Camden initiative at Urban Promise Academy functions through the law school’s existing Street Law Pro Bono Project, of which Salinger and Kozinn took part, that places trained student volunteers in Camden schools, detention centers, and community sites to teach Camden-area kids about the law in their lives.
According to Demetrius Marlowe, principal at Urban Promise Academy, Rutgers Law–Camden supports four innovative law offerings at the school, providing a kind of legal curriculum for students from ninth through 12th grade.
“Our students are graduating as engaged citizens and the Rutgers law students are developing a skillset they might not get if schools like ours did not open doors and engage,” says Marlowe.
In addition to the Camden high school students donning robes and serving as judge, bailiff, and student advocate, the students got a sense of their own voices in the justice system, especially when serving collectively as a jury challenged with “restoring justice” to a peer who had been sanctioned.
Urban Promise Academy freshman Christian Palanco thought his school’s Youth Court could be a game-changer for getting students to make better decisions.
“When you get in trouble now, you wouldn’t keep getting detention after detention,” he says. “If you give them some other punishment that really makes them think, maybe they would not do the same thing twice.”
Rutgers Law–Camden Prof. Dennis Braithwaite, a former judge of the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey, also facilitated a discussion about juvenile justice and his career in the law with the Urban Promise Academy students.
“In a zero-tolerance world, restorative justice is a very different way of looking at the important issues of school safety and justice,” says Jill Friedman, adjunct professor and acting assistant dean of the Rutgers Law–Camden Pro Bono and Public Interest. “Principal Marlowe has worked with us for years on various civic programs. In Youth Court, he saw the potential for young people to develop their voice and identity as members of a community, with responsibilities toward one another and for the good of the community as a whole.”