Can Maricopa County’s Juvenile-Justice System Fix Troubled Teens? Rarely, One Judge Laments

"You know exactly how things are going," the man snarled at her. "You people have no heart."

The caseworker responded gently that whatever was going to happen would take time, and she hoped that he and his wife would change their attitude.

Rick Sealock

Michael Ratcliff

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• Mike Kemp
• Michael Kemp
• Edgar Valles
• Crime and Law
• Law

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A minute or so later, she excused herself.

Judge Kemp was able to find a place to put Judith before the girl's next court hearing a few weeks later.

He told Judith and her parents at the hearing that a bed soon would be opening at a residential treatment facility in northern Arizona. The judge suggested that she would be living there for months before the next step — whatever that might be.

"Who's paying for it?" the girl's father asked.

"Frankly, I don't care," the judge responded. "It will get paid for."

"I'm ready to go," Judith blurted.

Reports from the facility over the next few months suggested that she was doing surprisingly well.

But her parents' lives continued to crumble.

Their home was about to go into foreclosure (and later did).

Judith's father became increasingly obsessed and depressed.

Months after he met with New Times at his home, he called to say that his daughter would not even speak with him on the phone anymore.

He blamed Judge Kemp and CPS for having poisoned Judith's mind.

A few weeks after that brief conversation, the man hanged himself.

At last word, Judith still was not living with her mother, who now is in parts unknown. Judith apparently hasn't gotten into trouble with the law for more than a year.

Mike Kemp continues to wonder what difference, positive or otherwise, he had on the lives of Judith and the other children who came into his court day after day.

He questions whether he was spinning his wheels, trying to craft solutions in situations where none existed.

In the end, he says, "I wasn't their parents, was I?"