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21 CHAPTER ONE Calendar Days in the Youth Part Mundanity and Drama “Calendars days”—usually Fridays—were set aside in the Manhattan Youth Part for the routine processing of ongoing cases. Sometimes there were new cases on for the first time, but the majority of cases on a typical calendar day were on for “control dates” or “updates”—checking in on cases awaiting the slow progression of legal matters, or checking in with kids who had been assigned to alternative-to-incarceration (ATI) programs . Anywhere from fifteen to forty defendants would come before the court between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Friday. Other days of the week were reserved for trials, probation violation hearings, conferences with defense counsel and prosecutors, and other court work.1 Somehow fittingly, the Manhattan Youth Part courtroom wasn’t located inside the main Criminal Court building at 100 Centre Street in downtown Manhattan. Instead, it was housed on an upper floor of a nondescript , off-white, twelve-story building across the street that serves as an annex to the main Criminal Court. Two black swinging doors marked the entrance to the courtroom. The square, compact room was an incongruent mix of richly polished dark woods and bright whites. Just inside the doors was the audience area, with two long hardwood benches on each side. The thirty or so seats available were rarely enough to accommodate all the kids, family members, lawyers, and program representatives who came to court on a given calendar day. In an attempt to ease congestion, lawyers, ATI program representatives, and observers were asked to take up seats in the unused jury box that ran along the right side of the room. Kids and family members who couldn’t find a seat in the audience area spilled out onto the three or four wooden benches in the hallway outside the courtroom, knowing that a lawyer or a court officer would come and get them when their case was called. In the hard, cramped seats of the audience area, families of young defendants waited their turn to stand up for their son, daughter, brother, sister, cousin, nephew, niece, or grandchild . Some defendants had dedicated family members who showed up at every court appearance, while others’ families only showed up sporadically . Sometimes there was only one family member present. Occasionally, seven or even ten members of an extended family network would fill up the audience. Some kids never had anyone show up for them at all. 22 Calendar Days in the Youth Part Families waited both with and for defendants. Family members of released defendants arrived with their kids at the start of the morning and waited with their child for the case to be called. Family members of detained defendants arrived in court and waited for a chance simply to see their child, to make eye contact for the short time the case was before the court. Sometimes this waiting was in vain—family members could sometimes wait for two or even three hours only to learn that for some reason their child had not been produced from detention, or that the defense attorney could not be there and so the case was postponed—information that was somehow never relayed to family members. More often than not, it was women who showed up: mothers, grandmothers , aunts, sisters, girlfriends. There were fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers , and uncles who waited for a youth sometimes—either with other family members or alone—but the burden of sitting on a hard bench in the cramped Youth Part waiting for your kid’s name to be called on Friday mornings seemed to fall heavily to these women, most of whom were poor women of color. Many Youth Part kids came from impoverished minority communities with high rates of female-headed households. The Legal Aid Society found that 77% of its Juvenile Offender clients came from families with only one adult or guardian (50% a parent, 27% a nonparent).2 For these primary caretakers, most often women, many of whom were already struggling to keep families together, the added burden of traveling to court, taking time off of work, finding child care for younger children, and making the necessary appointments with social welfare agencies initiated by ATI programs could be onerous.3 A four-foot-high wooden wall ran the width of the room in front of the cramped audience. Two swinging doors in the center of the wall provided access to the inner courtroom—the area...

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