Rachel wanted some pretty things for her new baby. She didn't have money or a job, so she bought her infant's new clothes with a stolen credit card. Even though at 16 she's already a mother of two, by law Rachel is a juvenile, which was about the only good thing she had going for her six months ago when she was convicted of credit card fraud -- that and the fact she committed her crime in Tarrant County.

Because it was her first offense and the misdeed was not violent, she drew a probated sentence and was put into the nonprofit Tarrant County Advocate Program. The program, under contract with the juvenile probation department, provides a community-based alternative to confinement in a Texas Youth Commission facility.

T-CAP's intensive "wrap-around" plan typically lasts five to six months and works with the whole family, if there is one, director Tiwana Bell says. T-CAP provides at-risk kids daily mentoring, academics, on-the-job employment training, counseling, sex education, and group therapy. It helps them and their families connect to an array of social services and surrounds the family with a support system that will be "solidly in place once the kids are on their own," Bell says.

Rachel is one of their success stories. "She's a real good mother and a hard worker" who now has her GED and has stayed out of trouble. That doesn't mean she's home free, says Bell, who has a master's degree in social work and has been dealing with troubled kids for 13 years.

As with most of the youths who go through the program, the conditions that landed Rachel in court are still in place: poverty, immaturity, and an overwhelmed social-service system. She married the father of her children, but he, too, is only 16. They live in the Cavile public housing project in Fort Worth's Stop Six neighborhood, a predominantly minority area marked by pockets of high unemployment, home to the poorest of Fort Worth's poor. He has a minimum-wage job, but she can no longer work because she lost her baby-sitter. She's on the waiting list for subsidized day care, which could be a year off.

Still, Bell believes Rachel will not show up in the criminal justice system again because of the survival tools that T-CAP gave her. "She responded, she never missed a counseling or a mentoring session, she showed up on time for work every day. She has a support system. Now she knows she's not alone. Even though she's out of the program, officially," Bell says, "we try and keep up with these kids. They know our door is always open."

Rachel's opportunity to stay at home with her kids and turn her life around instead of being locked up is due primarily to a controversial decision made five years ago. Today that decision is being heralded as one that has made Tarrant County's juvenile justice system a "guiding light for reform" for the nation.   NEXT »

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