Judge Soonhee(Sunny) Bailey: Breaking the Cycle and Creating America's First Autism Court Program

Welcome to Why Not Me? The World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me? The World?
You managor The Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event. Joining
us today is Judge Sonny Bailey. In twenty eighteen, Judge
Bailey established the Detention Alternative for Autistic Youth Court, a
groundbreaking diversionary program to provide services that help youth with
Autism spectrum disorder stay out of the criminal justice system.
It remains the only program of his kind in the
nation dedicated to the youth with ASD. In May of
twenty twenty three, Nevada became the first date to pass
legislation creating a specialty court for youth in the delinquency
system who are diagnosed with or suspected of having ASD.
With Thrill to have her Here to share her story.
Thanks for coming on, Oh no, thank you. I imagine you
come across a variety of topics in your work. Can
you expand on how autism became a big part of
your workload.
I'm a judge, so that's what I do, and I
just happen to have a court that handles children with autism,
So I guess that's where it starts. So I happened
to have a court that deals with neurodiversity. So I
guess what you're asking me is how I ended up
with the court with neurodiversity. That kind of happened by accident.
So back in twenty eighteen, we had a youth that
came into detention and the officers came in and they
came to me and said, hey, we've got a child
that came in with domestic violence charges. Came into detention.
They didn't know what to do with them. He was overstimulated,
he couldn't handle a regular calendar, which often happens, and
so they said, do you know what to do with them?
Can you do something with them? So I said sure,
My Thursday calendar was really light, and I said, why
don't you put them on my Thursday afternoon calendar. I
don't mind to hear them then, so we said, why
don't we just put him on the Thursday calendar. So
we had him on a calendar with just him. He
came in and we handled this case. And the next day,
I know, the probation officers were coming in saying, hey,
we have an autistic calendar. No we don't. I had
an autistic youth. So they were all excited because I
continued them to another Thursday calendar because that was my
like calendar, and they were so excited. They said, you
have an autistic calendars for autistic youth. Why don't we
just put another kid on there. I said, again, I
don't have an autistic calendar. I just happened to have
a youth with autism on this calendar.
So what developed from there?
Next thing, I know, I had two youth on this calendar,
and so they were all excited, and so I kept
telling them, no, I don't have a calendar. What happened
is I then had two kids on this calendar. And
so a couple of weeks went by with these two
kids on this calendar, that original kid who came back.
It's called a wrap around Nevada. It was a service coordinator.
He came back and handled the one youth that he
already had services for you, and he saw the other
youth and he said, hey, I'll just take this other kid. Hey,
it's great, you have this calendar for autistic youth. And
again I was like, I don't have a calendar for
autistic youth, but I'm glad you'll take the second kid.
Then the two kids came back on the quieter calendar,
and then the probation officers were so excited you have
this calendar for autistic youth. And again I kept saying,
I don't have this calendar for autistic youth. I have
these two children. So then the next thing, you know,
this wrap around Nevada person came back because I just
kept the two kids on that quieter calendar. They needed
the quieter calendar. The wrap around Nevada worker came back
for the two kids. He said, hey, I brought a
friend for your autism calendar. I brought this friend who
wants to volunteer on this calendar. He kept saying, I
don't have this calendar, and so he goes, but he
wants to volunteer on this calendar. I said, great, we
could use the services for this other kid, and the
next thing you know, I had another kid on there.
So this person volunteered, and the next thing you know,
I did have a calendar for youth on the spectrum
that just continued to grow. And we had originally not
realized we had so many youth with autism because probation
had been trying to handle them informally, and so we
had ended up putting them on this calendar because it
was quiet and everything else. Long story short, that's how
our calendar developed is accidentally not realizing that all these
people they were trying to have informally, we developed this
quieter calendar for them, and then we ended up having
this calendar. And then apparently I didn't realize that when
you had this calendar, we needed an acronym because I
didn't realize you couldn't just have a calendar an acronym.
So then we became the detention alternative for artistic youth
because our first youth was a detention. So that is
how we developed our calendar from there, and it just
grew word of mouth, so people just started volunteering and saying, hey,
I have someone with these services and so that is
how we ended up starting in April of twenty eighteen. Yes,
not a very great story. It's just a very destroyed one.
Oh, I think it's quite a great story. Actually. It
seems like a lot of times some of the things
that are meant to be fall in our laps and
we just move forward with them. Sounds like that's what
happened to you, and it also sounds like that's what
you're doing. So how has it evolved from when you
very first started to what has become today?
Well, and I do have a direct link with autism
though my oldest daughter is on the spectrum, which is
why they came to me in the first place. My
oldest daughter is on the spectrum. That's why I have
knowledge on it. But that's how I developed. But I
didn't know we had this need for it in the
delinquency system where I was sitting. But it has developed
since that than eighteen. Since then, we continued to develop
word of mouth. We were grassroots and then the last session,
our legislative session only meets every two years. We're very
fortunate one of our senators, Senator Orangshaw, is actually also
a public defender. Last session two years ago, they actually
proposed a bill, Senate Bill four eleven to actually recognize
neurodiversity specialty court for autism, so that way it could
be recognized as a specialty court because our day court
didn't fit under any type of specialty court under the
statue because you have mental health, you had drugs and
things like that, but ours didn't fit. And so with
Senate Bill for eleven, they actually created a specialty court
for us to allow a diversionary court to exist for
us for autism. And so it was proposed a last
session and unanimously passed both the Senate and the House,
and so SB four eleven became a law last session.
So that's where we were recognized. So we're the only
recognized autism specialty court in the nation. That's where became
law last session. So we've expanded out and then currently
SB one is currently pending. We just passed the Senate
yesterday where we can expand out to fetal alcohol syndrome
related neurodiversity and as well as neonatal abstinent syndrome. So
we're looking to expand out to be a truly neurodiverse court.
We can be recognized there will be the only truly
neurodiverse court in the country.
I've spoken with several judges across the country. They've expressed
a clear need for support given situations involving autism, mental health,
all within the judicial system. Given the groundbreaking work you're doing.
Have any judges, legislators, or other officials reached out to you.
Are they curious on how you're developing this and are
they curious on how they might integrate it into their
own efforts in their local areas.
Actually, we have spoken across the country eight times last
year alone, and then people have reached out this year.
We have a couple more engagements, about three more this year.
So people are reaching out and asking us. They're still
a little overwhelmed to try to attempt it from what
I've heard so far, but people are continually reaching out
to us trying to figure out how to start a
court and asking us how we do it. I think
a lot of people think it costs a lot of money.
We try to explain we started out with no money.
We started out with a box of I think fruit
snacks and some chips, and so we keep trying to
explain it's just reinforcers it's just time. We started out
with the session and just being able to just separate
some time and just having people willing to come in.
And then the way that we have found with the community,
if you just carve out the session and just let
people know you're there, people have been wanting to come
in and just volunteer time. We function completely off people
who are willing to volunteer their time to come in
and just take on the extra time and effort just
to make sure that we can address the needs of
the Narrativerse community and make sure the needs are met.
And so far we haven't had an issue with that.
Everyone just keeps answering our needs and coming into court
To answer your question. We've graduated our one hundred and
second graduate from our program. Our recidivism rate hovers around
the ninety percentile, our success rate ninety percent, and so
we've been doing pretty well.
When you're working with an autistic child, what are some
of the steps you can take to guide them effectively,
helping them understand what they're doing and how to adjust
their behavior. One key aspect of autism that people often
overlook is autistic individuals may not process or express emotions
in the same way as neurotypical people. So how do
you communicate when they've done something wrong and need to
make changes to better adapt to society. What practical steps
can you use to support them? And how do you
help them shift from their current patterns to ones that
will work better for them in the future.
We have two different paths. First of all, we have
to figure out if for our youth is competent because
we have there's different levels of autism, so we also
have to figure out the competency level. So we have
some that are new and competent, some that may be competent,
and then we have to go from there. We rely
heavily on applied behavioral analysis and getting them into applied
behavioral analysis. And then it's baby steps on accountability because
obviously some people believe that autism that we're not holding
people accountable, but we are. Through that. We build through
the reinforcement system, where we rely heavily on behavioral modification
and reinforcement. So we want to reinforce the behaviors that
we want while trying to extinct the behaviors that we don't.
And then we always start with something small, something small
that we can reinforce and then we build upon that
which we can't It could be something very small, very
small as terms of we're going to work on your language.
We're going to reinforce and try to extinct the language
that we can't have because we can't have abusive language,
and we build off the abusive language to the aggressive acts.
We've got to work on. You can't physically harm people,
we can't hit people, and then we've got to reinforce that.
So it's the baby steps into that, and then of
course once we can do that, then we can build
on it and then we progress from there. And that's
been our major thing because mostly we're going to have battery,
domestic violence, possibly breaking items, things like that, so we've
got to figure out what the heavily preferred reinforcers are
so we could build on that. The abusive language can
build into that because it's the frustration and then denied
access to heavily preferred items. So that's what we build
in and then we can go from there. Once we
can do that, we usually can then be very successful
with getting the behaviors down so they're not going to
look at the physical the batteries and things.
Like that you mentioned a ninety percent success rate, which
is outstanding. So as clear these methods you were doing
are having an impact. What happens next after going through
your system? What kind of progress do you see in
these individuals. Are they able to achieve the goals that
everyone strive for, like getting a job and finding success
in the world, or is it more about gradual progress
taking baby steps towards bigger outcomes. How do you measure
this success as they move forward through your system.
It's different for every child, because again autism is a
sliding scale. For one child, it could be going to college,
it could be living independently, but that may not be
the success for another child. For another child, it may
simply be not punching holes in the wall, not abusing
the parents. For another child, it may be simply just
getting them to stay in a home. We have many
children who are part of the foster system. We're just
trying to get them out of a residential treatment center
and into a home where we're trying to get them
someplace where they can stay that's safe, that's not a
treatment facility, where we possibly can get them into adulthood
where they're not going to end up in the prison
system because we've gotten them so late. Some of these
children had never been diagnosed until age sixteen, So we're
fighting against a system that potentially where all that's going
to keep them out of prison system. Our whole goal
is to simply get them to a place where maybe
they could stay in a group home and not in
a jail. And so it depends on each kid, and
so our goal is separate for each child. So we
have to look at what each child's capable of and
hopefully get them to the most independent state that they ought.
And so it depends on each child, so we have
to be careful that we're not putting an unrealistic goal
on each kid. So that's where we're at.
It's very well known that males tend to be diagnosed
to autistic at a rate higher than females because females
tend to mask their symptoms and go undiagnosed so to
fit in in society. Because of this, do you see
more males in your courtroom than females that would go
along with this scenario.
We have a majority males. It's hard with the females
because of the masking. You also have to remember we
have a lot of cool morbid up to seventy five
to eighty five percent of our children. Because they're coming
to us in their teen years, they also have psychiatric
issues as well, and so we're fighting against the psychiatric
as well, and so we have to get them before
the psychiatric outweighs our autism needs. And sometimes we failed
there as well. That's our most frustrating is when we
get them so late that by the time we are
treating the autism, we may have the autism where we
have the ABA under control, but then the psychiatric issues
will engual for autism successes, and then we failed in
that part.
Despite autism becoming more prevalent and recognized over the past
thirty years, it still remains relatively misunderstood. Society still struggles
to grasp what autism is and how it affects individuals differently.
What are some of the ongoing challenges this lack of
understanding creates, particularly in terms of perception, and how can
these challenges be addressed to better support those with autism
within your system? What kind of challenges have you been seeing?
Oh, gosh, let's see, there's a new challenge every day.
So we walk into court, we have so many children
in the foster system, so there's a challenge there because
we can't find homes for them. So if you have
a child on the autism spectrum who's looking on the
teen years and we can't find stable homes for them,
it's very difficult to find appropriate treatment. So if you
can't find appropriate and consistent treatment because they're being bound
from home to home, consistency is so important for them.
So if we don't have consistency, how we're going to
get them into adult poo. We have issues with appropriate IEPs.
Some of them have fas as well, so field alcohol syndrome,
so we're trying to get that with the field alcohol
syndrome plus the comorbid psychiatric we need to get parents
on board and we need consistency, and so we have that,
then of course we have all the various issues with
you name it. We have everything going on. We have
the late diagnoses, we don't have the appropriate diagnoses. And
you have to remember, all the kids that I have
now are the ones that are usually interns didn't cover
originally because insurance is a late newcoming thing for these children.
Now we have the kids that are being diagnosed at
three and four, but insurance didn't come along till recently,
So these are children that would maybe have been diagnosed
three or four if insurance had been around at that time.
We've lost ten to twelve years of potentially early intervention
that possibly would have allowed them to become independent, but
now we have So those are the issues that are
we're playing catch up. So it's very difficult with all
these different issues, so we feel like we're playing catch up.
And then of course insurance doesn't cover everything, so we
have insurance gaps as well. These are all the different
factors that we're dealing with to play catch up and
everything else. We feel like we're always behind the eight ball.
Funding is always an issue. We're always having a lack
of resources, you name it, just pretty much the gamut
usual every day.
You are on the cutting edge of innovations that other
court systems across the country haven't yet implemented. Are you
still exploring new ideas and approaches to improve your system?
If so, what are some of the innovations you're considering
or starting to work on, Perhaps ones you're gradually introducing
that could expand and strengthen the system you already have
and make it even better for the people you're serving.
Interesting, I feel like there's so much pressure on us
for something that we created accidentally. We're always looking for
new things. We try things and then it doesn't work,
and then we try new things here to help the children,
and so we're constantly trying to figure out what's going
to help the children more and what we can do
for them. And then we always look to the children,
what's helped, what hasn't helped, what we do more to
help them, and try to get them ready for adulthood,
and how they could be more independent, and how we
can get them reunited with their families. This is really
about helping the families, because really what you want is
having a youth on the spectrum is chaotic for the families.
People don't understand is that these families are walking on shelves.
They don't know what to do, and they don't understand
the chaos and the chaos for the other children. We're
trying to just give back some kind of peace and
normalacy and just get them ready for the future. They're
so scared and when they come into our court system,
they don't know what to expect. The last thing they're
expecting us to offer a bag of chips. We're looking
at reinforcers and they're like, excuse me, what, and we're like, hey,
we're just trying to get him to stop cussing, and
we don't want to punch holes in the wall. We're
willing to reinforce this. And they're like, what, you want
us to bribe our kids? That's not what we're trying
to do. So we're trying to get them on board
with the behavioral change, and it's very hard to explain
to them why we're doing it. And so we've got
to get the parents on board and they're like, we're
not the ones that are in trouble, but no, we're
trying to get you to understand what we're trying to
do and get everyone in the same place. They're so
used to this different way of doing things, and so
we have to completely change everyone's way of thinking.
How challenging is it to help parents and families shift
their approach and mindset when adapting to these strategies.
It's really hard to change the whole family and the
dynamic and everything else. When you got everyone involved in
the different two different families, split families and grandparents and
everybody else. We've got to change a whole family dynamic
that's been going on for sixteen years. It's a task,
and so that's what we're doing. If anything, we're really
trying to get into the parent training. We love the
parent training portion because we do that, we really want
to reinforce the parents, and that's something that we hadn't
thought about. So now we reinforce the parents, we reinforce
the siblings and everyone else, which is something a compled
that we had not thought about and we forgot about.
Now we started doing that as well. Those are the
new innovations. Those are we had forgotten about that we
needed to do. So those are things we're still looking at.
We're constantly looking forward to the ABA component. I don't
know if you saw the New Yorker article. We had
to face some criticism with ABA, so we were looking
at that. We had to explain to people ABA isn't
the same. It evolves. It evolves with the children. It's
not about sitting at a table. They go out to
the community. They learned socialization, they learn about dating, they
learn about workplace. We understand the criticism about people feel
it's pigeonholing and things like that, but it's not how
it is anymore. When you go to the workplace and
you get frustrated, you're not allowed to punch a coworker.
These are what gets you into my system. And so
we're trying to teach them how to cope and how
to become independent, how to learn, and we do love
their independence. We foster that. We want them to have
adult relationships, and so that's the things that we're trying
to teach people. And we recognize all those things, but
those are things that we're adapting to and trying to explain.
It's been very difficult with everything and just trying to
show everyone the system and that it does work. And
when you talk to the youth and you see them
and you watch them change from when they first come
in and when they come back, it's fantastic when you
just see them and the families, when you watch the
families change, it's amazing. Those are the things that we're
really working on.
In the autistic community. There's unfortunately a high rate of
family breakdown where husbands and wives struggle to understand each
other and end up separating. I believe the divorce rate
is around seventy seventy five percent. Do you often see
autistic children coming from those broken families? And when you
begin teaching them and implementing your strategies, have you noticed
any positive impact on the family unit? Have you observed
any changes in that regard?
We do, we see that. Unfortunately, most of the families
aren't together, but we do see changes. Unfortunately, I see
way too many kids in the foster system. Because I'm
also dependency, I get to deal a lot with the
foster kids. See way too many from the homes that
are not together. But we do see families. We've actually
seen step parents come and learn. Do we offer it
to them too? Because I'm a domestic I'm here in family.
I also do settlement conferences in mediations for child custody
cases because we get a lot of parents that are
splitting up with custody cases and they want to hear
from someone. I'm a parent of a child on the spectrum,
so they want to hear from us. First thing you're
scared of is who's going to understand my unique needs.
I'm also a mediation judge for that, a settlement judge.
So I come in, I'm like, hey, I do understand this.
I do understand what's out there, and we actually talk
about what services do you have? Do you have enough services?
Because that's one of the stressors of this, so and
so we actually talk about that as well. We do
see the families and we say, hey, if you're going
to mom and Dad's how you know, we need to
talk about this. So we do that both independency, delinquency
and in our domestic world because we got to deal
with all of it down here in family. So I
have coworkers come running and Bailey, I got another one
because we see it just as morning. I just don't
in the dependency side. Another kid on the spectrum. I
can't tell you. Week doesn't go by when I don't
see someone in my foster care system, unfortunately, and so
we deal with that. And I'm never going to place
a kid if I can't get that dealt with as well. Actually,
a great success story in day court is if I
had a youth on the spectrum who came through day court,
got involved and did a couple of things he wasn't
supposed to, and one of the providers was watching him
and saw great potential. He's in the foster care system
as well. Grandparents couldn't handle his behaviors and just a
long story short, provider became a foster parent as in
the process of adopting him.
Right now, that's awesome.
We have some success stories there. I'm trying to convince
him to take a couple more, but he said in
one at a time. But we have to deal with
all those and that's the issue. But no families cannot
deal with all the behaviors alone. To deal with all
these behaviors, autism is a twenty four hour it's twenty
four hours. School districts can't handle it by themselves. Parent
can't handle by themselves, and two parents need to co
parent and they both need the skills to deal with
these behaviors because if you have inconsistency, then the behaviors
happen at one house and not the others. And that's
what we're finding, especially in delinquency, if one parent was
finding a lot of the behaviors happening in one place
and not the other's and that's because this is what
you're doing. And we can send in someone to do something,
and sometimes we find we can get them to mesh
a little better and then it helps out a lot.
When a child becomes involved with a legal system, particularly
the court system, it can be frightening and overwhelming experience
for the parents, often even more daunting than when they
first learned the child was autistic. What advice would you
give to parents to help them understand the legal process
and what potential outcomes they might expect if the situation
is managed well. What do you think is important for
them to hear?
I think I'm very fortunate because the probation department, prosecutors,
everyone here is so aware of autism now because we
have the court and so we're so fortunate. Our officers
in detention, if someone's arrested and sent to detention, they
are immediately aware of the youth. They're set into a
particular unit. They're aware of the reinforcement schedules. They know
how to make sure they're not overstimulated. They know how
to reinforce the behaviors that we want in order to
not have someone escalate. So I think that's very helpful.
They immediately in probation they know how to start speaking
to the parents saying, hey, we understand if your youth
is on the spectrum, we know what to do with him.
We have an autism court. We know how to reform
to them. Can you please get us the paperwork so
they understand you know how to speak with them about that.
I think it's very important for parents to immediately alert
law enforcement, to immediately alert the prosecutor or wherever the
facility is. To let them know that they have someone
on the spectrum, to let them know what their needs are,
to let them know about things so they don't become overstimulated,
to let the court know how they may react. I'm
a former public defender. I remember we used to have
a couple adults that would come in. I remember one
used to hide under the table, things like that. I
think they need to be aware of that and how
they may be. I think there's been a couple that
have come in. I think the ones that are level
one are higher functioners. I think those are the harder
ones because they tend to be especially if you start
getting into the odd their reactions. I think people think
they're more.
Like a holes, So I think they need to let
them know that their reaction may be more in terms
of their behavior. I think you need to alert that
this may be how they react in a certain situation.
And it's not going to be because they're a certain way.
When odd people come in, they're going to react in
a certain way. You need to alert and so I
think awareness is very key. Let the attorney know as.
Well so they can represent. And I think it's always
education is key. We're very fortunate that we're so aware
here in Clark County with it, and I think just
we've been going since twenty eighteen, so we're so aware
of it at this time where we have fidget toys
all over or first someone comes in, you're going to
get a fidget right off the bat, so we're aware
of it. You're automatically going to get that. We're going
to reinforce you. Sitting still, We're going to reinforce you.
We're aware of those that are ten and seekers. The
elopers are a little bit hard immediately locked down the courtroom.
We've got that. We know how to deal with the
behaviors and those kind of things, so we know exactly
how we're supposed to deal with each one and how
we're going to deal with each behavior. So we need
to know what their particular behavior is. So it's important
for the parents to let us know as well. Do
you have an attention secret? Do you have a lope er?
What do you got? So awareness is key. So that's
my advice is let us know what you have and
what the behaviors are so we can help, because that's
the key, especially in a juvenile delinquency situation. We need
to know what it is. And so the more we know,
the more we can assist. The adult is a little
bit harder because obviously they're going to be looking at
different things, but it's always knowledge is going to give
us the more information to assist.
Yeah, that's great information. This has been really really good.
I appreciate you taking the time. Thanks for coming on
anytime anytime.
You can always come. Like I said, you can always
come and watch a session as well. We're sealed. You
can't talk about the names or anything, but you can always.
It's always a big eye opener when you see the
different behaviors that we have, because again it's.
Yeah, that sounds awesome. Thanks again, thanks for taking the
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