COURT SYSTEM OFTEN DEALS WITH KIDS WHO ARE IN CRISIS

A 16-year-old boy is caught stealing compact music discs from
neighborhood vehicles.

A 14-year-old girl repeatedly ditches school to meet with her
18-year-old boyfriend.

Police raid a meth lab and remove three toddlers from the home.

According to Circuit Court Judge Gary Isbell, 90 percent of children
like these who come before him in the District Juvenile Division are
there because of their parents' failures.

"The simple answer is you can't be friends to your children. You have
to be a parent," Isbell said.

Isbell is a 14-year veteran judge in the juvenile division of the
14th Judicial District - which includes Baxter, Boone, Marion and
Newton counties. Before that, he served as deputy prosecutor for 14
years in Baxter County. He recently was voted Juvenile Judge of the
year by the Arkansas State CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocates)
in Little Rock.

"There are parents who have not provided a proper example for their
children, and there are parents who do not insist upon an education,"
Isbell said. "There are parents who participate in illegal activities
or do not provide supervision appropriate to a child. I would say
that 90 percent of my problems are parent-related in that they have
not fulfilled the obligations of being a real parent.

"Sometimes it's because parents simply aren't capable of doing so;
but more often it's because they choose, for whatever reason, to
allow kids to just raise themselves or be friends with the kids and
let the kids do whatever makes the kids happy."

Isbell says there are three basic divisions within the juvenile
court: juvenile delinquents, families in need of services - or FINS -
and dependency/neglect cases.

Juvenile delinquents are children who have violated the law in some
fashion, he says. The crimes range from misdemeanors to felonies but
do not include traffic offenses or game and fish violations. The
court must find ways to both punish and correct juvenile delinquent
behavior - through probation, supervision and sometimes detention.

FINS are cases in which the child and the family have issues
requiring court intervention.

"Some deal with attendance at school, some deal with runaway behavior
and some deal with destructive behavior," Isbell said. "There's just
a multitude of things that can cause a family to come into court, and
the purpose of that court then is not to punish or to correct - like
in delinquency matters - but to try to find a way for the family to
weather that storm and to become stronger as a result." Often, courts
refer to these juveniles as "status offenders," or children who
commit acts which are considered offenses merely because of the
child's status as a minor, not because the acts themselves are criminal.

While delinquency and FINS cases look to the child's behavior,
dependency/neglect cases focus solely on parental behavior. The child
is an innocent victim.

"In those cases, the parent alone has done some act that renders a
child subject to being placed in foster care or being removed from
the home," Isbell said. "It could be anything from drug abuse by a
parent to neglect of the child to physical abuse of the child."

Drugs and alcohol are a big part of that problem, he says.

"I think 70 percent of the cases are related mostly to drugs, some
alcohol, but mostly drugs and mostly methamphetamine," Isbell said.
"It's huge."

"The worse thing about it is that under federal law, and dependency
and neglect court is uniquely guided by federal law, federal law says
that after a child has been in court for 12 months, I have to be
making permanency decisions about where that child's going to go. And
there's not been a lot of people who have been successful in kicking
the methamphetamine habit inside of a year.

"To get clean, perhaps the greatest motivation for somebody to get
clean would be the salvation of their children or to get their
children back," Isbell said. "But that drug has such an incredible
drag on people. Even after they go into treatment, and they get done
with the treatment and they come back into the community - their
exposure to the same people and the same place and the same triggers
that they had before are there, and their ability to resist is almost nil.

"And, there are a number of people who, for selfish reasons, are
giving up their rights to their children because the drug has more of
a hold on them than anything else."

The meth problem in the Twin Lakes Area is costing everybody, Isbell says.

"It's almost pandemic," he said. "Meth costs society in the
incredible use of resources across the entire spectrum of the
community: You have the cost of prison; then you have the cost of
medical care; then you have the cost of the children who are in
foster care; then you have the cost of treatment programs; then you
have the cost to the children in developmental delays and
deficiencies that have arisen since their parents were using."

But, Isbell says, there are success stories for some families who
have been plagued with meth-related problems.

"We expect, and this is true across the board in all kinds of
substance abuse, we expect people to relapse," he said. "The secret
in my court is how do they deal with the relapse, whether or not they
rekindle their efforts to quit or not.

"We have some people who have been incredibly successful," he said.

"You have to dwell on your successes to get you prepared to go to
court every day, because if you just dwell on your losses, you'd just
be overwhelmed."