Youth Court - What it is

Mat-Su Youth Court is an intervention program that takes juvenile criminal defendants out of the traditional court system and puts them into a court where their peers serve as jurors, attorneys and judges. It's one of 15 youth court programs statewide. Mat-Su Youth Court processed 166 cases last year. Of the 104 defendants who successfully completed the program last year, only five went on to be arrested again.

Youth court sentences often include community work service, letters of apology, visits to a jail and financial restitution for crimes. As with misdemeanor cases in the traditional courts, the majority don't go to trial, but are instead settled via plea bargaining with youth court prosecutors.

To qualify for the program defendants must be first-time offenders under the age of 18. Mat-Su Youth Court handles misdemeanors only, but that also includes minors accused of possessing alcohol and some misdemeanor assault cases. Alaska law prohibits youth courts from prosecuting felony crimes, but allows misdemeanor defendants a chance to avoid conviction in the traditional courts.

LeAnn Chaney, executive director of United Youth Courts of Alaska, said youth court programs are able to take weight off the justice system while applying more attention to the first-time offender cases they handle.

"These programs are designed to hold youthful offenders accountable for their actions in a way that the formal juvenile justice system may not have time for," Chaney said.

Statewide there are more than 900 youth court volunteers who adjudicated 900 juvenile cases last year. Alaskan youth court defendants serve 15,000 community-work-service hours a year and pay about $15,000 in restitution to victims.

Youth courts lighten the work load for probation officers, according to Sean Owens, the Mat-Su supervisor for state juvenile probation officers. Owens said his office of five probation officers had 23 percent of its cases diverted to Mat-Su Youth Court. Without the youth court program the state would likely have to hire one more full-time probation officer for the Valley, according to Owens.

Owens is also on the board of directors for the Mat-Su Youth Court and believes the program is successful because it is run by teen-agers.

"Their peers do the sentencing -- They're not being talked to by adults, who teen-agers frequently tune out as being out-of-touch anyway," Owens.

Owens and Mat-Su Youth Court program coordinator Lisa Albert-Konecky both said the program is more hands-on for first-time offenders than a traditional court sentence.

"If we didn't have youth court, the first-time offenders would basically be meeting with a probation officer one time and being told not to do it again," Albert-Konecky said.

That's because the traditional law enforcement system must devote its resources to more serious crimes and to repeat offenders, according to Owens.

"What it comes down to is that they have resources to deal with these lower-level offenses in more detail than we would, because we also deal with those [offenders] who commit serious assaults on people," Owens said. "We could do as well, but [the cases] would take an extraordinary amount of time to monitor."