Judge Sends Teenager to Jail, With Time Off for School

When taking his son to school more than a decade ago, Thomas Mealey would often wave to a 16-year-old boy he had represented as a lawyer.

The boy wasn’t going to class. The teenager, who had been expelled, would walk his friends to school and stake out houses to burglarize. Scores of crimes later, the teenager wound up in the Wyoming State Penitentiary.

“It’s a broken record,” Mealey said. “It’s an old story in Wyoming and lots of other places.”

When the right case came along, Mealey--now a Uinta County judge--saw a chance to write a new chapter to that old story. He thought a little hard time might make an impression on a tough kid and save a juvenile from the same fate as his former client.

When the case of a 14-year-old joy rider came into his courtroom, instead of sentencing him to the typical probation, Mealey gave him six months in jail with time off each day to attend school. The plan is similar to work-release programs for adult convicts.

“This is unique,” said Jack Greene, the American Correctional Assn.’s director of professional development. “I think it would be a model that every community and every jail would have to evaluate on their own.”

The boy had borrowed a car on New Year’s Eve and crashed it into a fence while drunk. Police also found a pipe with drug residue in his pocket. The unidentified juvenile pleaded guilty to joy riding.

Mealey gave the boy the option of getting out of his jail cell long enough each day to go to class.

“Wisely, he elected to go to school,” Mealey said.

For the teenager, it means a 6 a.m. wake-up, breakfast and a bus ride to school. The bus returns him to the jail about 3 p.m., where he receives counseling or recreation time. He spends most of his remaining time in his 12-by-12-foot cell.

“He’s got a lot of study time,” Sheriff Forrest Bright said.

“When he first came in here, he had a very bad attitude, his behavior was very poor, his temper was violent, he wasn’t very cooperative,” Bright said. “Over a period of time his attitude has got a lot better, a lot more positive. It’s my understanding he gets A’s and B’s now.”

The arrangement has not been adopted as an official program and may not happen again. “We can’t make it a permanent thing because we just flat don’t have the manpower to do it,” Bright said.

Civil rights groups have not objected. The Wyoming chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has said the jail is apparently following laws requiring that the teenager be kept apart from adult convicts.

Mealey credits detention officers with helping the boy with homework and serving as father figures. He said the boy could be out by his birthday April 29.

“I’d like to think that somewhere along the line he catches on,” Mealey said. “Because he was headed for a life of crime.”