One day, in April of 2010, I was walking home
from the candy store with my other friend, Mikey. We were just
walking and laughing—then we hear two gunshots. We hit the ground
and duck, wondering, “Where is this coming from?” We run the
opposite way into the alley, give it some time and then go back
around. It was like there was nobody outside because we heard the
gunshots but don’t hear any screams or anything. We turn the corner
at Ridgeway and Iowa and see a body lying in the middle of the
street. Then, we see dudes closing the doors of a car and driving
off. There are people at their screen windows, staring, and others
looking like they are calling the police. We walk toward the body
and say, “Dang, who is that?” We go closer and we’re like, “That’s
Trevon!”
Trevon is lying facedown with a blood-stained
shirt. He looks as if he is sleeping with his eyes closed. I think,
“What can I do? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to
retaliate? Am I not?” I see the group of boys hop in the car—do I
chase it? It’s crazy, like out of a movie,
Boyz n the Hood
or something. I always hear about things like this happening but I
never expect to see it in real life. Mikey and I scream, “Help me!
Call 911!” We don’t have a phone so Mikey runs off screaming for
help and I just stand there in shock.
It’s just crazy. I can’t believe this. I just
saw him that morning. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and all three of
us were just sitting on the porch talking. Mikey and I decided to
go to the candy store; Trevon didn’t want to go. So Mikey and I
went and came back and now he’s dead. I start thinking, “I was just
with you. This could have been me if I was still with you.” I stay
there for a minute, and then go to my granny’s house. I sit on the
porch and then just walk around.
I don’t know why they killed Trevon. Some say
he was involved with the wrong people. Not involved like selling
drugs or anything, but in the wrong neighborhood saying the wrong
thing. He came back on our side of the neighborhood, they followed
him, he tried to run, and they shot him. When things like that
happen, I don’t cry. I don’t know why; all I do is think about it.
I think about what will happen to me after I die. Will people
remember me? Will people cry? Will people come to my funeral? What
if there is not a heaven or hell? That’s when I start to think
about it real deeply, and I might cry then.
I dream of a community that has nice
neighbors; kids that come outside and play; patios; old ladies on
their porches in the summertime, smiling and being able to talk to
the young kids; mowed lawns with real grass instead of potato chip
bags and cans out front. Although, I know I wouldn’t fit in this
community; it wouldn’t fit my life. Not having to worry about
anything would just leave my mind to think about my personal
problems like, “Where is my mom? Where is my dad?” Everybody would
be all smiles and laughing in this perfect community, which would
be phony to me. It would feel like I was living in Mayberry.54 What
comes along with me, my problems, my thoughts, wouldn’t fit there.
Like the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the ’hood but you
can’t take the ’hood out of the boy. I know I am not ghetto, but
this is where I am from, this is where I live.
I dream of going to college, graduating,
getting a nice job, getting my money right, paying back student
loans, starting off small with an apartment, getting a nice job,
getting a house. My home would be in the city, not in my current
community, but not in a place like Mayberry. It would be some place
in between. I would talk to youth, tell them what I did and what I
came from. When I dream, I do dream of perfect communities and a
perfect world. Even though I don’t think it would fit my life, I do
dream of it.
—
Interviewed by LaDawn Norwood
Endnotes
53 Mick Dumke, “Besieged,” Chicago Reader,
April 25, 2012,
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/besieged/Content?oid=6141461&showFullText=true
54 Mayberry is a fictional community that was
the setting for two popular
sitcoms of the 1960s, The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D.
The town
was white, rural and violence-free.
THE DREAM CLUB’S CHIEF
DREAMER
COLLEEN F. SHEEHAN
Judge Colleen F. Sheehan presides in the
Cook County Juvenile Justice Division, one of the largest juvenile
court systems in the nation. She is the daughter of Irish
immigrants who taught her to work hard and pull herself “up by the
bootstraps,” encouraging her to begin delivering papers at age 8
and to get her first real job—in a restaurant kitchen—at age 13.
After graduating from John Marshall Law School in Chicago in 1987,
she began her career as an assistant public defender for the Cook
County Public Defender’s Office. In 1991, she went into private
practice, representing clients in criminal and civil matters. She
was elected as a Cook County Circuit Court judge in 2000.
Openly gay, Judge Sheehan believes that her
sexual orientation often gives her empathy for young people from
minority communities. “I am not saying that I know what it means to
be an African-American 15-year-old or an African-American male,”
she says. “But I can understand what it feels like to be hurt from
discrimination.”
During the course of her career, Sheehan has
become an advocate of “restorative justice,” an approach that
stresses conflict-resolution over punitive incarceration, often
through “peace circles” that bring together affected members of the
community, including the victim and the offender. The focus of this
approach is to help young offenders understand the real harm that
resulted from their actions, to take responsibility for those
crimes, and to commit to repairing the damage they’ve inflicted
upon others. Restorative justice also encourages the community to
be a part of the solution and the restorative efforts.
In conversation, Sheehan is confident and
animated, taking on many characters, each with distinct accents and
hand gestures. Drinking sparkling water and twirling a paper clip,
she leans back in her chair as she speaks.
One day I was coming out of Whole Foods, and
a man asked me if I would sign his petition to be a judge, and I
said, “How do you do that?” He told me how to get the petitions
downtown, and I thought, “I could do that.” I enjoyed being an
attorney and did not want to abandon something that was so much a
part of me. But I was searching for a different way to serve and
needed to find the right path. I had secretly dreamed of being a
judge one day, but didn’t dare believe that it could really happen.
In that moment, the barrier of self-doubt suddenly lifted. I knew
that I needed to do something about making my dream a reality. I
ran for judge in 2000 and was successful.
In 2006, I was asked to come to Juvenile
Court. It was a very sobering experience. During my first year or
so in Juvenile Court, five kids I sentenced to probation were
murdered. When a child is sentenced to probation, I have an ongoing
relationship with that child, and I am very much invested in their
well-being. I receive periodic reports from their probation officer
as to their progress. The kids often come back to court and let me
know how things are going with them. So to have a probation officer
step up on a case and tell you a child has been murdered is
gut-wrenching and surreal. Here we all are, living in this
beautiful city of Chicago. But for some kids, it seems like they
are living in a war zone.
When I first came to Juvenile Court,
attorneys argued that science shows juvenile offenders’ brains are
not as developed as adult brains and that’s why they were making
bad decisions. The science was sound, but I thought it was being
used to excuse bad behavior. I mean, even a 4-year-old knows that
it’s wrong to break into somebody’s house and steal something.
But after you work in Juvenile Court for a
while, things aren’t so cut
and dry. You see everything here. You have kids that are
cognitively delayed. They were born that way. Maybe their parents
didn’t have the correct nutrition. Maybe a child was born with
drugs in his system. You get some kids that have been abandoned—and
more than once. They’ve been abandoned by their parents, so their
grandmother raises them for a while, and then their grandmother
dies, and then a cousin starts to raise them. Now they’re 14 years
old, and they’re getting in trouble, and the cousin says, “I can’t
take
it anymore.”
Then the state enters the picture. That may
be necessary, but the state is not a decent substitute for a loving
parent. These kids are in serious stress. There are real social,
economic and race inequities stacked against these kids and their
families. That is wrong. In America, the one thing everyone should
have is a chance to succeed. I’m not saying that these children do
not engage in bad or even criminal behavior, but it’s
complicated.
Sometimes all I can do is to acknowledge how
painful it must be for them. I tell them, “I see you’re in pain,
and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that all of us together—me, society,
the system, your parents—have failed.” You see a young kid who’s so
tough that they almost seem dead in the eyes. And then to see a
single little tear just roll down their cheeks. Those are the kids
that stick with me the most, when I make a profound connection to
someone who is virtually a stranger to me, and connect with them on
such a deep, human level.
In the past six years, thousands of people
have come before me. And in only one case, the victim’s family
seemed out for blood. In the remaining cases, I have been so amazed
at the generosity of the victims who come to court and don’t want
revenge or punishment for the minor. Time and time again I hear
them say, “I want better for you.” These victims have suffered
serious pain, whether it’s physical or emotional. I think it is the
best in all of us that says, “If we can’t save a child, how can we
have hope for any of us?” There’s just something about children
that evokes empathy in people.
When I worked in the adult system, some
defendants were as young as 17 years old. I’d ask them what they
wanted out of life. What was their dream? The first time I asked a
young man what his dream was, his face lit up. It was as if no one
had ever asked them that question.
I was taken by the two responses I would get.
Some young men and women turned into completely different people
when they were asked about their dreams. They went from tough kids
with an attitude to innocent and childlike. They opened up about
what they wanted and how they were going to get it. Usually their
dreams were unrealistic—playing in the NBA or the NFL—but they
seemed happy dreaming big. The other response I would get was
telling. Some kids didn’t have a clue what their dreams were. They
had a flat affect, and I saw the deadening of the hope inside of
them.
I remembered those young men and women when I
was asked to have a CPS55 high-school student intern with me.
That’s when I hatched the idea of Dream Club. Basically, the idea
was that, if you had an adult who worked one-on-one with a kid
every single day—if you could help them identify their dreams,
formulate a plan and then help them execute that plan—then those
kids could achieve anything.
I ran the idea by my sister, who is a social
worker, and she said, “You really should make it a group of kids,
so they can support each other’s dreams.” So I called the teacher
in charge of the intern program back and said, “I’ll do it, but I
want two or three kids.” She called me back and she asked if I
would take four.
So these four kids were with me for nine
months, two hours a day. We talked about goals and dreams: What’s a
goal? What’s a dream? Why do you want that goal? Why do you want
that dream? Why do you want 22-inch rims on your car? What’s the
value of that? Maybe you want power. Maybe you want respect. Maybe
you want notoriety. We discovered that what they wanted, even more
than the rims, was what the rims represented.
Then we looked at how they could achieve
those things in a way that was more meaningful and longer-lasting
than owning 22-inch rims. I gave them movie cameras and sent them
out to find out what other people’s dreams were. They interviewed
attorneys, probation officers, judges and their peers. They were
surprised at what people revealed. One of the attorneys they
interviewed said, “I don’t want to be a lawyer. All I ever wanted
to be was a writer. But I don’t know if I could ever make that
change.” This shocked the kids. They looked at this young lawyer
and thought he had it all. So they learned that what seemed to be
an end-all and be-all wasn’t, and that the dream keeps
evolving.
I took them out to “business lunches” at
fancy restaurants. We visited college campuses. I tried to expose
them to things they didn’t even know existed. On the day after the
historic election of President Obama, we had a picnic in Millennium
Park, in front of the Bean. Each of them declared their dream. At
first, one girl said, “This is it. This is my dream. To be here,
downtown, on this beautiful day, having a picnic in the park.” She
had lived in Chicago her whole life and had never seen
downtown.
Finally, each of them said that their dream
was to go to college and find a way to pay for it. None of these
kids had parents that went to college. And one young man never had
anyone in his family make it past junior year in high school. We
went to work. I helped them with the applications and, in one case,
literally raced to Loyola with my intern, making the deadline by
three minutes.
When we were making real headway, one of the
kids came to me and said he wasn’t going to college because his
father was giving him grief about being better than everyone else.
In fact, he almost dropped out of high school. But in the end, they
are all in college. Three of them are seniors now and they all
still call and text me from time to time. My dream is to go to each
of their graduations.