When a 25-year-old man visited Summit County Juvenile Judge Linda Tucci Teodosio years after he had been through her court, he told her how much he hated her and that she made his life miserable.
He added, though, that he got off of drugs and survived, unlike many of his friends who died of heroin overdoses.
“You were like a speed bump in my life,” he told Teodosio. “Thank you for being a speed bump.” Teodosio shared this story Thursday during an Akron Roundtable discussion about juvenile justice held at Quaker Station. The event featured Teodosio, Summit County’s juvenile judge since 2003, and Marcia Morey, a state representative and former juvenile judge from North Carolina, and was moderated by David Hunter, chairman of the Roundtable’s Program Committee. Hunter asked questions he prepared and others submitted by the audience.
Teodosio told the crowd of about 300 that treatment — not incarceration — is the answer to helping troubled youth.
“A child who is drug addicted, if you lock him up, he will come back out with the same behavior,” Teodosio said.
Morey said Summit County offers many more treatment options than are available in Durham, N.C., where she was a juvenile judge for 18 years before being appointed to the state legislature in April.
Morey also pointed to another difference between the communities. In North Carolina, a youth who gets into trouble currently is considered an adult at the age of 16, rather than the threshold of 18 in Ohio. She said the North Carolina House of Representatives passed legislation this week that would boost the state’s age for youths to be adjudicated as adults to 18.
Teodosio said juvenile courts in Ohio can maintain jurisdiction over a youth until the age of 21. She said there is discussion in some states, including Connecticut, about boosting the cutoff to 25 because of recent studies that suggest the brain is still developing until that age.
The studies, Teodosio said, have found that the last part of the brain to develop helps people to make good decisions and warns them, “Maybe I ought to stop and think about this.” She said when she asks a youth what they were thinking when they did something foolish, they often answer, “I wasn’t thinking, judge.”
Teodosio and Morey both highlighted the importance of the community getting involved in the problems plaguing at-risk youth. Morey said she recently took North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to a juvenile court session and he was astonished by how the youths were simply normal kids who made bad choices.
“Why should anyone care?” Morey asked. “How does it affect me? It is our family, our community.”
Teodosio said people can help by serving as mentors.
“They need help,” she said. “We are begging for mentors for these kids. If you have it, spend time mentoring.”
Asked her advice for the 30 Akron Public School students who attended the Roundtable event, Morey told them to go to school every day and “be careful who you hang with.”
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at 330-996-3705, swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com and on Twitter: @swarsmithabj .