Deputy Public Defender Rewards Recovering Youth With Travels

Life for many of the Stony Knoll Youth Services teenagers has been troubled, even rough. They are all recovering drug addicts with cases in the San Diego Superior Court Juvenile Delinquency Drug Court.

Certainly, a 17-day trip to London, Paris and Germany was not something that some of these teenagers even dared to dream about before March 23 when it became a reality. Not everyone who went through the drug court system was invited to come along either, only those who had successfully completed the program or were close to graduating.

The San Diego County Juvenile Drug Court program is a nine-month program that intensively supervises juvenile drug abusers who are non-violent, but have repeated failures with drug-treatment programs. The youth receive incentives for positive behavior and a series of graduated sanctions for noncompliance.  The program is led by a team of judges, probation officers, juvenile recovery specialists, a deputy district attorney, and a deputy public defender. The team meets weekly to discuss each teenager’s progress and determine their progress.

Deputy Public Defender Daniel Ybarra has been assigned to the juvenile drug court since its inception in 1998 as its only defense attorney. He started the youth trips to reward those teenagers who were most successful.

Kaitlynn Lewis, 17, in Mission Valley had just graduated from the program in January but had been told in December that she could go on the trip.

“It was an amazing opportunity to have. It was all I could think about for the three months until we left. I kept saying, ‘I’m going to Europe!’” Lewis said. “I felt honored that he took me.”

Ybarra dreamed up the idea of the trips in 2001 after he took a small group of teenage boys from drug court on a camping trip to Julian. He realized that many of these teenagers had never traveled far beyond their own neighborhoods and he wanted to offer them something special.

“I wanted to do more than threaten these kids with juvenile hall if they were not compliant,” said Ybarra. “I wanted to take them places.”

The teenagers shed their tough exteriors when they travel, said Ybarra. They are all appreciative and polite to the people they encounter, he said. The experience shows the teenagers there is a world beyond San Diego and California and even the United States.  

Using his connections, Ybarra has managed to arrange trips to Kake, Alaska as well as New Zealand, Hawaii and Europe. Ybarra said his trips are not focused on tourism, he always arranges some form of community service project for the young travelers. The teenagers also meet and stay with community members. Ybarra raises money for the trips year-round, sometimes even while on the trip itself. The donations mostly come from the law community, including his Harvard law school peers across the country.

The trips make a big difference in the lives of the teenagers who are chosen to go, Ybarra said. It gives many of them a sense of self-worth and some have even called the trips life-changing. He requires all of them to keep a journal while on the trip, and those entries have detailed new perspectives and introspections, and a sense of hopeful anticipation for the future.

For Lewis, drug court has been about transforming her life. She started doing drugs at age 10, dropped out of school and moved on to heroin and methamphetamine before landing in the system. Based on her admittedly poor life choices prior to drug court, she never thought she could travel and be sober and happy.

Now, she plans to start college in June and join the U.S. Army. The trip was a reward for her hard work.

Lewis liked Paris the most because they got to interact with other teenagers there and she learned that people are the same no matter where they live.

“We got to tell our stories at the high school, and that was my favorite part because it might prevent someone from taking the same steps I did. You never know who you’re helping,” Lewis said.

Ybarra said he genuinely cares about the teenagers and often hears back from them years later thanking him for investing in them.

“A lot of kids that we work with have had a lot of bad things happen to them growing up. Some of my kids didn’t have a lot of support or not enough,” Ybarra said. “I want them to know if they do well there are benefits, and that life is more than their small neighborhoods here and what they know. There is a lot more then what is here. I think we are successful in planting that seed.“