At the request of the California Center for Judicial Education & Research (CJER), CAHRO helped organize a training session for judges on how to develop sentencing options for juvenile
hate crime offenders for the Juvenile Law and Procedure Institute in Monterey this past April. CAHRO Director, Fred Persily, Jill Tregor, Director of Intergroup Clearinghouse and Sandy Bargione, Director of the San Francisco
Police Department Hate Crimes Unit collaborated on the training presentation. The presentation was preceded by a panel of young people from Santa Clara County who described their experiences with bigotry and provided
thoughts on ways schools can develop programs to prevent it. The young people, aged 16-19, also discussed methodologies they felt would be useful in dealing with youth perpetrators of hate crime. The members of the
panel, all of whom had been victims of hate, were unanimous in their belief that incarcerating youth perpetrators of hate crime was counterproductive in that their biases would be reinforced in custodial facilities.
In the next
session on juvenile hate crimes, Sandy Bargione led off with a short presentation focusing on both the perspective of those who commit hate crimes and those who judge them. She suggested that judges in hate crime cases need
to focus on what the mindset was of the person committing the crime and how it needs to be changed.
Fred Persily presented materials to allow judges to assess the likely motivation of the perpetrator and the characteristics of
programs that would most likely work to change the attitude of perpetrators. He pointed out that there are no juvenile alternative sentencing hate crime programs that have been evaluated as effective anywhere in the country
and that there is only one ongoing program operating in California. Judges seeking to use alternative sentences are forced to link with non-profit organizations and start from scratch. He also provided the justices with
a list of the community based hate violence prevention and response networks in California that they could approach to design an alternative sentencing program.
Jill Tregor completed the presentation with a discussion and
analysis of a comprehensive alternative sentencing program Intergroup Clearinghouse designed at the request of the District Attorney for young women charged with committing a hate crime.
What was clear from the presentation and
the discussion with the justices attending was that this is a field that needs much more attention before significant progress will be made. A report on the state of juvenile alternative sentencing programs in the United
States is currently being prepared by the National Center on Hate Crime Prevention, and CAHRO will provide more details when it is approved for distribution.
