Lawyers & Law Students Teach—and Learn From—Teens in Detention
They’re uneducated, living in what amounts to a prison, and often minorities from low-income families who haven’t had a lot of luxuries offered to them in life.
But two lawyers in charge of an unusual program at a Washington, D.C., juvenile detention facility are seeking to make a difference for these teens by treating them, as much as possible, as though they were students in an upscale private school, reports the Washington Post in a magazine-length article.
Classes are small and intellectually challenging. A recent class on advocacy was taught by students from Georgetown University Law Center, where co-founder James Forman Jr. teaches about juvenile justice. His partner in the educational effort, David Domenici, is a Stanford Law School graduate who formerly practiced corporate law but gave up his legal work to focus on teaching teens like those at the detention facility.
Information about world and United States history is interwoven with more practical lessons intended to make clear, for instance, how the governmental structure and operations of this country are important to a teen’s daily life.
“We always believed that one of our roles should be to help kids self-advocate or advocate on behalf of a community,” says Domenici. “We think this is a good skill for students individually and also one that our democracy demands.”
On the law students’ side, participating in the class at the detention center was a chance to see how juvenile justice operates in real life and hear directly from the teens about their own experiences.
A hard lesson for those in charge of the school is that students, despite their teachers’ best efforts, won’t always succeed. “I talk to staff about the fact that, day to day, our job is to do the absolute best work you can in the domain that is within your control,” says Domenici, who, like his staff, can only do so much to counteract the difficulties his students face in life. “And if you do that well, you have done the moral and just thing.”
