School Sister of St. Francis Catherine Ryan teaches, although not, perhaps, in the traditional sense. Instead, Ryan runs the juvenile division of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which is charged with handling the cases of children referred in delinquency petitions and with protecting children in civil prosecutions of neglect or abuse cases. Her goal, she told Catholic New World staff writer, is not to punish, but to teach appropriate behavior and restore balance and harmony to the community.

The bureau’s 111 attorneys and roughly 100 support staff review more than 3,000 child protection cases and 23,000 juvenile delinquency referrals each year. Of that number, less than half go to court. Many of the rest are settled with community-based mediation or other programs, she said.

Ryan, who grew up in Glenview, graduated from Northwestern University Law School and spent 11 years with the state’s attorney’s office in the 1970s and 1980s, the last eight in the juvenile division. She returned to take the helm in 1997 after working for 11 years in private practice.

The Catholic New World: Which came first for you, law school or religious life?

Sister Catherine Ryan: Religious life. I’m a Franciscan. I grew up in this area, and my family was always very supportive of faith life and religious life, and so I met and was very impressed by the sisters who taught in our grade school (Our Lady of Perpetual Help). So I joined that order, the School Sisters of St. Francis. While I was studying in college, I became interested in law, so I asked if I could go to law school, and they gave me permission to go to law school.

When I first left law school, I clerked for a wonderful judge in the chancery division for a year and a half, and then I came to the state’s attorney’s office.

TCNW: How do you live out your religious life when you’re in a position that is high-pressure, high-power, political?

SCR: Well, the state’s attorney, Dick Devine, really buffers the political piece as much as possible. He takes care of the political issues, and he wants us to address the merits as best we know how.

Let me start with the delinquency area, if I could. The direction he’s supported and that we’ve taken here in Illinois is what’s known as a balanced restorative justice approach to juvenile delinquency. I think you’ll see how congruent it is for Franciscans, and certainly for a lot of other people, too. …

The idea of restorative justice is that if a young person commits a crime, then he or she has hurt someone and the young person has also hurt the community from which they come. What we should be about in our juvenile justice system is helping our young person and requiring our young person to understand that they hurt someone and hurt the community and that they should be taking steps to try to repair that harm. We also want to heal some of the harm that’s been done to the victim.

That’s the restorative part of it. The balanced approach says there are three equally important principles in the juvenile justice system: accountability, competency or skill development and public safety. So if someone hurts another person, those of us who cause the harm have to take responsibility for it; we have to be accountable in a way that’s appropriate for our age and developmental level. Then competence development—these kids are our future. We want to give them the skills they need to be positive, productive members of our society. And then public safety is also important. We want to protect all the members of our society from crime. … Short-term, we can say to a judge we need to have someone’s liberty restricted for a while. But long term, what protects a society is that the individuals who pose a threat internalize the positive values, so they don’t want to hurt other people, they want to help contribute to that harmony.

That approach for me is quite Franciscan, quite Christian [and] Catholic, but it’s also congruent with many other faith groups. That is the direction we’re trying to go in juvenile justice. We’re still learning how to do it.

TCNW: I didn’t hear the words “retribution” or “punitive.”

SCR: It’s not designed to be punitive. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t ask our young people to do some things they don’t want to do.

When parents are raising children, they may have to say, “Look, you have to eat healthy food. You’re going to eat your spinach whether you like it or not.” Kids are going to have to do some things they don’t like to do as part of their growth.

“Punitive” can sometimes be a subjective term, so I’m not using that, but certainly “corrective.” We tried to find ways in which our young folks can do community service or even service for the particular victim, depending on what the offense has been.

TCNW: Do you think your religious vocation brings something unique to this position, or do you do it the way any other lawyer would?

SCR: Each of us has to know what mission we’re being called to. For me, my religious vocation provides me with a religious community that helps me stay focused on what the values are. Others may have other supports that help them stay focused on those values.

The staff, and many of the people who work in this justice system are wonderful people, good values, very dedicated, hard-working, and so there are ways in which they are finding their faith and their support. For me, my religious community and my faith life that I have is what leads me this way.

TCNW: What is it you like about this job?

SCR: The mission of lawyers, when we do it right, is to be peacemakers. Historically, we know what it’s like for a society to settle its disputes violently. You do something to me, I do something back to you. The establishment of a legal system, when it’s done right, provides people with a non-violent way to address their disputes. So we have a dispute, we have a way to talk about it, or maybe we bring people in to speak for us, and maybe a neutral person to make a decision and settle it so there is no violence. I think when we do our job well as lawyers, we are peacemakers, and I’m excited to have that kind of a mission. Not everyone thinks of lawyers that way.

My favorite lawyer is hanging on the wall behind you; Gandhi. I don’t think he walked into courtrooms too often, except as a defendant, but he was certainly a peacemaker.

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