SSU discussion touches on juvenile justice, school resource officers and what society overlooks

How society at large saw her cousin versus how his family and friends knew him, and the lessons that held. School resource officers. Rhetoric about youth and crime.

In a wide-ranging discussion with the leader of a foundation focused on criminal justice and youth justice reform, Sonoma State University’s police chief probed these and other topics Wednesday as part of an ongoing effort intended to build bridges between the community and law enforcement.

It was the 16th such event in the “Conversations with Black and Brown in Blue“ speaker series, which Chief Nader Oweis spearheaded three years ago.

On Wednesday, in a ballroom at the SSU Student Center, Oweis sat for a discussion with former director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice Candice Jones, now president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Welfare Foundation.

Jones described to Oweis a key influence that drove her to head a foundation with a mission to “advance justice and opportunity for people in need” and that invests in “transformative approaches to youth and criminal justice.”

She recalled an older cousin in Chicago who, “if young Black boys could be the kind of thing we see as All-American, he would have been All-American, you know, great skin, beautiful teeth, just really great.”

Her cousin, as a teenage father, conscientiously raised a son who had cerebral palsy. Yet, Jones said, as someone who was involved in gangs and sold drugs, he also, “for all intents and purposes to the world, was public enemy No. 1.”

The lesson, she suggested, was to be found in what was overlooked.

“In my mind,” Jones said, “if society couldn't see what he was capable of, that was society's problem. He was nobody's monster. That really influenced the way I thought about justice and what our system could be capable of. If he literally could sort of be branded as public enemy No. 1, I knew that we were doing something wrong.”

Both Oweis and Jones noted the nation’s increasing polarization surrounding many political and social issues and called for a move to “the center” where people of differing opinions can discuss their perspectives and learn from one another.

Soon, there arrived an example.

Oweis raised the issue of school resource officers and whether they should return to Santa Rosa schools, something many parents and educators started to call for following the fatal classroom stabbing last March of a Montgomery High School student.

“Yeah,” said Jones, “I'm not a big advocate of school resource officers.”

She argued that officers are rarely deployed in more affluent schools that have more support services to be offered to students who get in trouble. On the other hand, she said, students in less well-off districts lacking those services are more likely to end up shunted into the criminal justice system when they act up.

“Justice that is not equal is not actually justice. And I think that's one of the things we have to grapple with, really, in our democratic society,” said Jones, who noted that she wasn’t familiar with Sonoma County schools.

“If you have a school where they can show you they've made as much investment in supportive services like paraprofessionals, mental health professionals and social workers to wrap around kids with support, as they have in getting law enforcement on those campuses, and that it's comparable districtwide no matter the income level, then I think you might have a case, but I think they'll be very few districts,” Jones said.

Following the event, Oweis allowed that he favors school resource programs. But, he said, he and Jones are in agreement that wraparound services should an integral aspect of any such program.

“There has to be all those approaches. And it can't just be a one size fits all for everybody,” Oweis said. “And we really have to work at the individual student level to understand what their needs are and why they have those needs. And then work through all those processes.”

Asked by Oweis what she foresaw for juvenile justice in five or 10 years, Jones said that since the 1990s, research into adolescent development had spurred systemic reforms that reduced the number of youth in custody and youth crime rates.

But, she said, “we're currently experiencing this backlash” and a “real fear” around children and crime, especially gun violence. Those fears are misplaced, she said.

“So you can have this rhetoric that's really dangerous. We can get to a place in this country where we're much more responsive to youth, but we would not just have to stop doing the punitive things to youth we were doing,” she said. “We really have to deeply invest in making sure we have continuums of care to respond to youth and need.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay