SALINAS, Calif. – Superior Court Judge John Phillips remembers the day 23 years ago as if it were yesterday.
A kid who had committed a murder stood in his courtroom, a young man who was still angry and unrepentant. Then the boy’s grandmother entered.
“He broke down and started crying,” Phillips said. “He was just a kid. And I’m thinking, ‘I’m sending kids to prison for life.'”
Phillips, now 81, had seen it all in 13 years as a district attorney and then 21 as a judge. Shootings, thefts, assault. He handed out difficult sentences, but he was troubled by the stories of many children who went through his courtroom.
“It’s very easy to pull a trigger if you don’t have any future, you don’t have any goals and you don’t have anything to look forward to,” he said.
That day in 2000 he became determined to do something different, something that would give the children he saw in court a chance to overcome the poverty, dysfunction, trauma and pain so many of them had experienced. To help them find a new way in life, a path toward college or a good-paying job.
Phillips remembered a broken-down, overgrown site up in the hills at the far eastern end of Salinas, a California farm town. The Natividad Boys’ Ranch was a moldering wreck, a juvenile incarceration facility that had been left to rot after it closed in 1982. Why, he thought, couldn’t it be turned into something to help the children of Monterey County before they arrived at a police station or stood before a judge?
Today, Rancho Cielo looks more like a high-end private school than a place of last resort for kids for whom regular high school isn’t working. New, colorful buildings abound, full of light-filled rooms with nooks to read in, workshops to tinker in and classes to learn in. There are horses to ride, bees to tend, bike paths to explore.
