Last month, Catherine Ryan left her private law practice to become the chief prosecutor at the nation’s oldest juvenile court. As the head of the juvenile justice bureau of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, she supervises almost 100 attorneys and thousands of cases involving children who are abused and neglected or accused of crimes. In the 1970s, she helped start the office’s child abuse unit. But law isn’t her only calling; she’s also a Franciscan nun.
Q: You donate your $101,000-a-year salary to the religious order, so money obviously isn’t your reason for coming to Juvenile Court. What is?
A: I believe there’s a real opportunity to work with youth and their families for the betterment of society. The sisters with whom I share a religious community tend to work with youth in education or in other areas. I see my contribution as working with some of the youth they’re not working with. For whatever reason, they didn’t become successful in education or other areas. It’s kind of the rest of the circle, if you will.
Q: How do you reconcile the two callings in your life?
A: My religious community’s mission is the healing and defending of life, and we try to work in this way in about 12 countries. There are almost 1,800 of us. Our mission is often seen in terms of health care, education, parish work, social work.
Lawyers, I think, are to be peacemakers because our legal system is how a civilization agrees to handle its disputes non-violently. I think that’s congruent with healing and defending life.
Q: How has the court changed since you worked for the state’s attorney’s office here in the 1970s and 1980s?
A: On the child-protection side, it’s clear we’re filing more cases and taking more children away . . . One study (of Michigan, New York, California, Texas and Illinois) showed that we take away more children and keep them longer than any of the other states. It came to the conclusion that the reason for this is not the cases themselves, but rather the administrative policies that we have here.
On the delinquency side, we file a great many cases, we prosecute a good number and we dismiss a great number. We’re taking a very hard look at this. It’s clear that some of the cases being brought into court can be addressed adequately in other ways. The difficulty is that we and the police are under such time constraints. The police cannot have a youth in the station for more than six hours. That limit is workable when the charge is shoplifting. That’s unworkable when the charge is a gang shooting. I’m sure we’re going to be asking the legislature to consider changing the six-hour rule in the serious cases.
Q: What can be done to deal with the high volume of cases?
A: We can try different treatment approaches and different diversion programs. We need to work with those programs. Diversion means the case doesn’t come into court. Diversion does not mean we do nothing. Diversion means we’re able to do what we would have done if we came to court, but we’re able to do it without going to court.
It is unreasonable to continue with more than 3,000 cases per courtroom. We cannot possibly know all of those cases well. Either we find out which cases need to be in court and work with the other cases outside court or we’re going to have to ask the taxpayers to triple the size of the system, and that would be unreasonable.
Q: A report released last week by the Citizens Committee on the Juvenile Court criticized what it called an “increasingly adversarial atmosphere” among attorneys at the court. Have proceedings become too adversarial?
A: Due process offers us the check and balance so we don’t prosecute innocent people. Having said that, there are responsible ways we ensure due process without personalizing the debate. That’s where I think we’ve become too adversarial. “I don’t like someone so I do this.” “I get mad about what they do, so I do this.” There’s no place for that among professionals.
Q: Some critics say the office uses the court as a lawyers’ training ground and that many of the assistant state’s attorneys don’t want to work here. Can you address that?
A: I’m new here, so I didn’t hire the people who are here, but I’m very impressed with the state’s attorneys. They care a great deal. They work very hard.
We do have in the juvenile justice bureau attorneys who have been practicing for a period of time. No one is coming to the juvenile justice bureau fresh from having been sworn in as an attorney. The one exception may be that we may hire some attorneys specially trained for this area.
And we are going to be having specialized training for our attorneys.
Q: Are transfer laws–which allow youths to be tried as adults for some crimes–being used appropriately?
A: In a good number of cases, juveniles are tried as adults in cases in which they can get probation as adults. I would suggest that if the disposition is going to be probation, we could do that quite well in Juvenile Court.
There are some times when we think juveniles should get longer times in the Department of Corrections, but under the Juvenile Court Act, we cannot send them there beyond their 21st birthday.
The prosecutors of juvenile cases in Illinois are meeting to draft legislation that might consider a two-tiered juvenile system. The idea is that for some of the more serious offenses which may not need to be tried in the adult system, we could give them a longer sentence beyond their 21st birthday. What it does is create a middle ground between what we have now in the juvenile system and trying them as adults.
Q: If cases in which kids now tried as adults are brought back to the juvenile system, how will caseloads change?
A: Many cases could be handled appropriately in diversion. That will help reduce the caseload. And then I think we should deal with these more serious offenders.
Q: The court will mark its 100th anniversary in 1999. What would you like accomplished by then?
A: I’d like to see a court that’s known in the community as family-friendly. Not that people would want to come to court, but when they did, they would know our priority is strengthening family ties or developing new family ties. They should believe we are knowledgeable, effective and treat them with respect. And that we hold them accountable for their actions.
Our claim to fame should not be that almost a century ago we were the first juvenile court. It should be that today we’re a forerunner in working with families and dealing with family problems.
Q: Why do you have a picture of Gandhi on your wall?
A: He’s my favorite lawyer.
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An edited transcript
