In the fall of 2023, Yessenia Reyes, 15 at the time, was sitting in her freshman video production class at Denver’s North High School when a police officer showed up at the door and called her name.
The officer told Reyes she was under arrest. He handcuffed her and walked her to the principal’s office.
A few days prior, Reyes got in a fight with another girl at school and broadcast the resulting cuts and scrapes she suffered on her Instagram feed.
“I was talking about it, explaining my side,” said Reyes, now 17 and a junior in high school. She didn’t understand why the officer had to arrest her in the classroom in front of her classmates instead of in the principal’s office. It was embarrassing, she said, walking through the entire school in handcuffs, all the other kids staring at her.
A few weeks after Reyes was arrested, she appeared in Denver Juvenile Court where the judge told her that as a first-time offender, she had two options: She could go through the municipal court process, which would involve a trial in front of a judge, or she could complete a diversion program. Reyes opted for the latter, and she chose to participate in Healing Generations, a community-based organization.
In Colorado, diversion programs exist at the district court level, which handles more serious juvenile cases, and the municipal court level, which deals with minor offenses within a city or town. Diversion programs aim to rehabilitate youth and connect them with resources rather than saddle them with criminal records.
But for public defenders and advocates who work in Denver’s juvenile justice system, Reyes’ experience reflects how even diversion programs are part of a broken approach to youth justice—an over-reliance on ticketing and other punitive approaches to low-level offenses, particularly those involving children of color. They argue against the current system and say that youth who commit minor offenses are better served outside the court system through community-based, restorative alternatives, which they say are mostly no longer offered as an option for diversion in Denver.
A January 2025 report by the National Center for Youth Law details how the city of Lakewood has vastly overcriminalized students through the municipal court system by having school resource officers issue tickets for minor infractions at their schools—findings that the municipal government disputes.
According to the report, Lakewood police and school officials filed over 8,000 municipal court charges against juveniles from 2016 to 2022, with more than half of the tickets issued for a variety of low-level offenses, such as shoplifting, disorderly conduct (fighting in public) and possession or consumption of marijuana.
In a written statement from the city, Lakewood officials stated that the 2025 report relied on old data. It asserted that the municipal court’s juvenile cases, which represent individuals who were charged, were 4,243 in that time frame (the number of cases was incorrectly conflated with the number of charges at least a couple of times in the report). The report’s findings also don’t portray changes implemented in 2023 to minimize juveniles’ interactions with the court system, according to the city.
Advocates, however, still believe the overall system needs revamping based on many factors, including school districts’ heavy reliance on ticketing, and for involved youth, lack of access to counsel and the serious consequences of involvement in the municipal court system. Hong Le, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, said most of the offenses referenced in the report should have been resolved in a more developmentally appropriate way for teenagers at their schools. And even though court officials reduce or waive fees based on financial need in almost all court cases, they are still imposed, Le noted.
“Instead, we’re funneling (juveniles) into a court system, where they have to pay fines and fees, and the threat of having a lasting criminal record and potential detention if they don’t comply with the court’s terms,” she said.
Denver Healing Generations Network, a nonprofit based in North Denver that serves young people who are struggling at school or have had run-ins with the justice system, seeks to provide an alternative. Now in its third year of operations, the organization uses ceremonial practices and Indigenous Nahuatl teachings to encourage accountability, healing and repair, rather than punishment. Reyes continued to voluntarily enroll in the group’s programs, even after she completed her diversion requirements.
“Most of the stuff you get in trouble for as a juvenile—smoking weed, for example—the system puts you through drug and alcohol or anger management classes,” said JoJo Padilla, one of Healing Generations’ founders who used to work in the juvenile justice system. “We’re like, ‘No, there’s a better way to heal our young people.’”
What constitutes diversion?
A growing consensus among juvenile justice experts is that empowering community partner organizations like Healing Generations, as well as schools and families, is more effective in addressing young people’s misbehavior than through the justice system.
Diversion programs are meant to offer alternatives to incarceration, particularly for minor or nonviolent offenses, and are designed to address the root causes of misbehavior and reduce recidivism. Supporters say these programs are cost-effective and allow young people to remain in their communities.
But advocates of community-based alternative programs argue that too often, the typical court-run diversion programs end up resembling the very system they’re supposed to counteract.
Many diversion programs, including Denver’s, carry the threat of future prosecution if kids fail to comply with the program.
“The state is essentially saying, ‘If you mess up on this, we can bring you back, and you can face the original consequences that you were facing before,’” said Nicole Duncan, a youth public defender in Denver.
Duncan said the moment kids have contact with police—even if they just get a ticket, as opposed to an arrest—their chances of being brought back into the system increase significantly. The racial disparities are stark: Black youths are 11 times more likely to be arrested by age 20 if they had an initial encounter with law enforcement in their early teens than Black youths who don’t have that first contact, according to a 2022 study. Duncan also noted that in 2024, 26% of all school-related charges in Denver were directed against Black girls, who account for less than 14% of Denver Public Schools’ enrollees.
In an online essay published in March, Padilla detailed the challenges that families must navigate. Ticketed kids often miss school (and their parents frequently miss work) to appear in court, where they are offered the option of diversion programs in exchange for clean records. Those programs often require youth to participate in costly classes at the family’s expense, designed to correct adult criminal behavior.
The Denver City Attorney’s Office also regularly imposes rigorous community service assignments that can include dozens of work hours. According to Duncan, it’s often hard for youth to find organizations willing to take them on since many have a 16- or 18-year-old minimum age requirement without parental or guardian supervision, due to liability concerns. Duncan said she’s seeing more kids donating blood to fulfill their community service requirements.
“Just because you call it ‘diversion’ doesn’t make it diversion,” Duncan said.
In written responses to questions, Kevin Lwango, program manager of Denver’s Diversion Services, said the program is designed to be holistic, individualized and responsive to the specific needs of each young person, and that involves partnering with community organizations.
Padilla and Duncan dispute that assertion, claiming that almost all the partnerships between the diversion program and community-based organizations, including Healing Generations, have been cut in recent months.
Lwango also wrote that Denver’s diversion unit helps to defray or cover the cost of classes for youth and families who cannot afford them.
“We always aim to provide opportunities that are culturally responsive, trauma-informed and rooted in positive youth development,” Lwango wrote.
He noted that more than 85% of youth who participate in the Denver Diversion Program complete it, but he said the system doesn’t have data about participants after they leave the program, mostly because the court expunges their records 45 days following completion.
“While this is a positive step in supporting youth by giving them a clean slate, it also makes it difficult to systematically track recidivism or long-term outcomes,” he said.
A history of violence
Padilla was raised during the 1970s and 1980s by his white mother and Latino father in the Denver suburbs, attending predominantly white schools. As one of the only Latino/a/x kids, he often felt ashamed of his Mexican heritage. In high school, his dad gave him a copy of Armando Rendón’s “Chicano Manifesto,” a book that Padilla credits with helping him see the beauty of his culture that his father, a cop, had never fully acknowledged.
After high school, Padilla enrolled at Metro State University, majoring in Chicano Studies and getting involved in advocacy efforts for Denver’s Chicano community. It was the early 1990s, and rising gang violence dominated the headlines, culminating in the notorious 1993 “Summer of Violence,” a spate of youth violent crime that received outsized media attention. (Crime rates were actually lower compared to the previous summer.) Dozens of teens, most of them kids of color, were locked up and handed life sentences.
In response, Denver enacted a curfew law. Kids caught out after curfew could participate in a diversion program, allowing them to avoid a criminal record by completing specific requirements, like treatment or community service, instead of facing prosecution. The program was particularly applicable to first-time or low-level offenders. Within a short time, the municipal juvenile court in Denver began asking if other kids could also enroll in the diversion program.
To Padilla, the shift toward diversion sounded like a positive change for his community. He started working as a youth diversion officer in 1999 for the City of Denver. On Padilla’s first day, his boss threw a stack of 150 cases on his desk and asked him to figure them out.
Virtually every day, Padilla would see long lines down the block outside the juvenile courthouse with kids and their families waiting to have their cases heard. These were kids getting ticketed in incidents like food fights in a middle school cafeteria, Padilla said. One of his cases involved a 10-year-old who had thrown a pencil at another kid.
As a diversion officer, Padilla had to pull a terrified kid into a drab interrogation room in the juvenile probation building on West Colfax Avenue and run through a litany of questions.
“The only thing this little kid understood is he’s a bad kid, that he’s been charged,” Padilla said.
Padilla became more disillusioned with diversion. He said it looked benevolent on the outside but failed to address the underlying issues that many system-involved kids faced, such as childhood trauma and mental health struggles.
Padilla’s own experience taught him that feeling connected to one’s community and identity could help erase the isolation and shame he experienced growing up—an ethos he saw in a program offered by the California-based National Compadres Network.
The organization’s Joven Noble curriculum is a 12-week course for young men, offering a different approach than traditional diversion programs. Instead of drug and anger management classes, the curriculum incorporates a rite-of-passage ceremony inspired by Indigenous traditions and other culturally relevant practices to address the root causes of substance abuse and violence.
Since its inception in 1996, Joven Noble has been implemented across the U.S. in schools, probation settings and justice-alternative programs. A 2023 case study indicates the curriculum enhances leadership, builds cultural knowledge and self-identity, uplifts cultural esteem and decreases the incidence of relationship violence among participants.
In 2013, Denver community activist Francisco Gallardo brought the Joven Noble courses to the city’s juvenile diversion program with Padilla as one of the facilitators. The goal, said Padilla, was “reconnecting our young people to a way of existing together in a community that’s healthy.”
Despite the course’s success, Padilla eventually became frustrated with what he described as growing pushback from juvenile justice officials toward cultural diversion programming. He retired early in 2022. That year, Padilla and two fellow Denverites incorporated Denver Healing Generations Network as a nonprofit and began facilitating Joven Noble courses throughout the metro area.
Later, they added Girasol, a companion program for young women and a youth leadership and advocacy program called the Huitzilin Warriors (“Huitzilin” means hummingbird in the Nahuatl language). Now in its third year of operations, Padilla said over 200 youths have completed Healing Generations’ programs, with 84% successfully completing its flagship Joven Noble and Girasol courses.
Connecting the dots
Healing Generations operates out of an old furniture store in north Denver. The large interior room is mostly empty, save for an array of cacti and succulents arranged below the windows.
At 5 p.m. on a Monday in early March, kids started filtering through the door for the weekly Huitzilin meeting, greeting Padilla and picking up plates of food (Healing Generations provides a free dinner for participants at each meeting). The focus of that day’s meeting was discussing the upcoming spring issue of the magazine that Healing Generations helps kids publish, featuring their personal stories, interviews, photography and artwork.
The idea behind the Huitzilin Warriors is to make kids the messengers of their own story, Padilla said, helping them connect the dots between the traumas they’ve experienced in their personal lives and the harms they’ve experienced from the justice system.
Before long, everyone was seated in a circle for the opening palabra ceremony. “Palabra,” which is Spanish for “word,” represents the concept of acting with integrity, a principle that every Healing Generations program tries to impart. As the palabra baton is passed around, each participant shares their “baggage” and their “blessing.”
This was Reyes’ second time in the Huitzilin program. After completing Joven Noble (at the time, it was co-ed) to fulfill her diversion requirements, she completed two Girasol programs and a Huitzilin program. She kept coming back, she said, because she liked feeling connected to something.
Holding the baton, she talked about her baggage: a recent breakup. She also talked about her blessing—thanks to the money she made through her “side hustles” working at a nail salon and a flower store, she was hoping to move out of her grandmother’s apartment into her own place, which she’ll share with three friends.
Next to Reyes, a high school student named Galilea Cano took the palabra baton. Her baggage was a case of the Mondays. Cano was behind on her schoolwork and had a lot to catch up on, but she was feeling hopeful, too, she said.
“I’m not letting a lot of things bother me.”
A way forward
To Reyes, her arrest felt almost inevitable. Growing up, she had seen it happen to people around her.
When Reyes was young, her mom worked back-to-back jobs, leaving Yessenia alone with her younger siblings. Then, her mom got addicted to drugs. She was in and out of jail for years and then prison. Reyes was abused until she was 5, the same age her younger sister died from abuse. Her younger brothers were sent to live with an aunt, while Reyes was sent to live with her grandmother in Elyria-Swansea.
The separation lasted for years and took an emotional toll on Reyes. She started getting into fights and skipping school to drink and smoke. By the time Reyes was arrested, she said, she was failing her classes and felt angry all the time, like she was holding so much inside.
Research shows that most kids who commit so-called “status offenses”—including behavior like truancy, shoplifting and public fighting—don’t need punitive measures, which tend to send the message that they’re bad. What kids need, Duncan said, “is to know that they are an important part of this community.”
Now, many youth justice experts are pushing for a “deflection” approach that redirects kids away from the justice system to community-based organizations before any tickets or charges are considered. Earlier this year, Padilla testified at the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee in support of a $10 million deflection bill to codify these policies. While legislators laid the bill over, effectively killing it, in another committee, lawmakers placed the $10 million grant program for deflection and community investment in another bill that passed.
Padilla cites Longmont, which offers a deflection program called REWiND, as an example of success. Since the program was implemented in 2017, 86% of those referred to REWiND have successfully completed the program.
In his email, Lwango said Denver has an “Alternative to Citation” program that was developed as a partnership between the Office of Neighborhood Safety, the Denver Police Department and Denver Public Schools to connect at-risk youth with community-based services without requiring a court appearance or formal justice system involvement.
Duncan, however, said the program is a voluntary measure—it’s up to the discretion of individual schools and police officers whether to ticket a kid or offer an alternative to citation.
Reyes is unequivocal about where she thinks she would have ended up without Healing Generations: “locked up,” she said. But going through the community program, she realized she could be a different person. The smoking and drinking at friends’ houses after school was partly a product of having nowhere to go and nothing to do after school. She needed a community where she felt supported—a place she could be herself.
When Reyes imagines her future, she sees herself graduating from college or trade school and running a business. Eventually, she wants to open her own combined nail salon and flower store in South Dakota where her great-aunt lived. Reyes always looked up to her.
“She always told me that she knew I was going to make it one day,” she said. “Now, I believe it.”
Freelance journalist Sarah Tory wrote this story for The Colorado Trust. It first appeared at coloradotrust.org on June 18, 2025, and can be read in Spanish at collective.coloradotrust.org/es. The Colorado Trust is a philanthropic foundation that works on health equity issues statewide and previously funded a reporting position at The Colorado Sun.