Briefly, before heading off to law school, Judge R. Mark Browning, 59, spent a few years as a teacher at ‘Iolani School. That came with its own set of challenges, everything from instruction in math — never his strong suit, Browning admitted — to, upon the conversion to co-educational classrooms, the first sex-education class at the formerly boys-only campus.

But there was certainly nothing to compare with the childhood and adolescent experience of the kids who came before him in more than 19 years on the Family Court bench (Browning spent about nine months handling civil cases before that).

Some had made one or more attempts at suicide. There was drug use, often starting in the pre-teen years. Many had endured, he said, what could only be called trauma at home. Browning added that what most of them needed was not incarceration but treatment, in an effort to stave off the behavior that would turn them into a real threat to society who belonged in prison.

Last year he co-chaired the Hawaii Juvenile Justice Working Group, as part of a reform effort supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Last legislative session the group backed a bill that aims to cut the number of youths incarcerated by more than half in the next five years, directing more resources ($1.26 million so far) to early-intervention and treatment programs.

Browning’s own family life is the picture of middle-American happiness. He grew up in a large, close-knit family that still vacations together, the son of Edmond Browning, bishop of the Episcopal Church in Hawaii who later became presiding bishop of the U.S. He and his wife, Ella, have three children, 25, 23 and 17.

But that’s not the experience of kids in the worst cases he’s seen. Browning served eight years as presiding juvenile drug court judge, a program that had great success turning kids around. There was one boy, he remembered, who kept offending and re-offending.

"I couldn’t understand why we were doing everything that we needed to do and he wasn’t succeeding, and we weren’t able to change his behavior until we did some more in-depth analysis," he said. "And we found out when he was 6 years old his father threw him out of the second-story window. He had been beaten over and over again. Those are important things to know, and that’s the kind of trauma I’m talking about."

QUESTION: How did the working group come about?

ANSWER: Basically, our juvenile justice reform started about six or seven years ago, when we became a model site for the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative, which is an Annie E. Casey Foundation initiative. We worked very hard to become a model site, because we understood and we knew that we needed to do things differently.

The challenges that we still faced were systemic and had to do with resources. And we knew we needed to get to the next step. And part of what has helped us be successful in the reforms we’ve made — 

Q: You mean the prior reforms, not from the working group?

A: Right. It was the understanding that we needed to work systemically, collaboratively to reach solutions and to solve issues that were fundamental to our children’s welfare. And in order to do that, we had to build a collaborative relationship with the Office of Youth Services, with the Department of Health, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Education — all critical stakeholders in dealing with children and issues that children in our community face.

And so, through JDAI … those relationships had developed to the extent that we had started talking about how were we going to take the next steps. And then we got contacted by Pew. And Pew had not done much in the way of juvenile justice. They had been involved with the justice reform initiative, and they had been involved in some juvenile justice work in Georgia, in Texas. … We said we’d be open to hearing about whatever help they could give us, but we needed to have an understanding of what that help was going to be.

Much of the support for this was coming from the executive branch, which was important, because it meant that the three branches of government would be trying to work together to address these issues. It happened very quickly, as a matter of fact. It began in July, and by August of last year, we had signed on to the concept … All this was done in about 3 1/2 months. The legislation was completed in terms of its final form by December. …

One of the greatest problems we face as a state government is that people and institutions have often acted and not been able to get past what their own mission is. That’s always gotten in the way of sometimes making progress. Government often works in silos.

Q: That’s true of a lot in government, right?

A: Yeah. It is, and it’s certainly been a problem for a long time. So I said to everybody, look, instead of focusing on our differences, what I would like us to begin this work is to understand what we have in common. Because it’s in that commonality that we share that we have our strength.

And the commonality that we share is that everybody at that table … cares about our children. We all want to make a difference. …

Q: So you were going to incarcerate fewer kids and reserve HYCF (Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility) for the more serious offenders?

A: Yes.

Q: What was the goal of that?

A: It’s a very complicated problem. … Within our juvenile justice system in just Oahu, we have over 5,000 kids a year. There’s a carryover every year of about 2,000. Statewide there’s probably an additional 3,000 kids. 

Eighty percent of our kids (in the system) have serious substance abuse issues. The youngest ice addict I’ve ever dealt with was 10. We have seen kids on cocaine, heroin, prescription drugs, drugs that a lot of people have never heard of.

And yet we as a community, at least up until this point, haven’t really prioritized the needs of our children. Because, if 80 percent of our kids suffer from those problems, why don’t we have resources to treat kids? And we simply didn’t have enough resources …

Mental health: 60 percent of our children have … everything from depression to schizophrenia, to you name it. I’ve had kids who’ve attempted suicide five or six times … we can’t get them treatment. …

There are two facilities, Kahi Mohala and Queen’s, and they’re short-term facilities; in order to get them qualified under the Department of Health standards, it’s pretty difficult.

Q: The bar is pretty high because of resources?

A: Those two facilities have limited resources. They don’t have enough beds; secondly, they’re not long-term facilities. They’re acute care, short-term facilities. And they can’t take our kids, a lot of times.

Those are the kinds of issues we as a community were facing for years. If we care about these children and we really prioritize the needs of our kids, then we understand that we need to put the money up front toward treatment and toward resources in terms of helping these kids, instead of incarcerating these kids.

And ultimately, sometimes what was happening was you had a child who was a drug addict and was constantly running, and the sense from some people was, you lock them up so that they don’t hurt themselves. I don’t think that’s something that’s acceptable and that we would want for our own individual kids, or that our community, if they understood the issues, would think is acceptable as well.

And judges in our court are different in terms of the juvenile division. The judges have two responsibilities. In adult court, judges are not necessarily what we call the trier of fact; there are juries that make decisions about guilt or innocence. Our judges are triers of fact; there are no juries, they have to make decisions.

Adult court, after the jury makes the decision, the judge simply sentences … What distinguishes the Family Court judge is the second part of our responsibility, is not so much the sentencing part but is what do we do to help this child? What do we do, and how do we help this child? So you have two parts: deciding guilt or innocence, but the second part is the most important.

Q: You’re not getting entirely away from incarceration?

A: No. I think that, No. 1, public safety is the ultimate priority for us as judges. … 

But we’re talking about kids who, for the most part, are not serious threats to our community. They simply are kids who have suffered trauma and have had serious family problems, have been treated in ways that are sometimes horrible, or sometimes have suffered horrible things that they shouldn’t ever have. As a result they’re acting in ways that are either self-destructive or not consistent with society’s norms. 

Let me give you an example. Before this reform, kids who committed misdemeanors would many times be placed in incarceration. Now, you don’t see adults going to prison or being incarcerated, for the most part, for shoplifting.

Q: But kids have been?

A: Yeah. They have. And that had to change. And that changed before we began the Pew initiative. … The message that comes out of the Pew report is that if you want judges and probation officers to make a difference in terms of the quality of our community, you’ve got to give judges the tools and resources to help these kids.

And we worked very hard in the Legislature last year to deliver that message. …

I did a survey, for example, in trying to assess how to analyze this problem. I asked for all the files of the last 30 kids that had been sent to HYCF. And this is what I saw.

All of them had some sort of drug issue; all of them had trauma; a lot of them had some sort of mental health component. And most of them had entered the system when they were 13. And if we’d had the resources at that point to intervene to change their lives, by the time they turned 16-17, they would have not committed the crimes that got them placed in HYCF.

So the point is, it’s almost like a cost-benefit analysis. We know from all the years we’ve been doing this as a judiciary system, and this is nationwide, that the system has been essentially built upon the notion that you invest in prisons and you invest in those kinds of facilities. We’re putting all the money at the back end. 

And that is exponentially much more costly, both in tax dollars and in terms of human capital, than placing money up front to intervene as early as possible, to redirect these kids in a positive way.