Honorable Sheila Calloway on Supporting Children in the Courts
Judge Sheila Calloway graduated from Vanderbilt University, where she earned both her undergraduate and law degrees. After law school, she served as a public defender in Nashville until 2004, when she transitioned into the role of Juvenile Court Magistrate. In 2014, she successfully ran for Nashville’s Juvenile Court Judge and was re-elected for another eight-year term in 2022. Hearing approximately 1,000 juvenile cases annually, Judge Calloway is also a strong advocate for recognizing secondary trauma and supporting her staff through the intense demands of their work. In this episode, Spencer, Carli, and Judge Sheila discuss factors that contribute to juvenile delinquency, family dynamics, and strategies for preventing misconduct.
About The Honorable Sheila Calloway
Honorable Sheila Calloway serves as a Judge in the Juvenile Court of Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County. Originally from Louisville, KY, she moved to Nashville in 1987 to study at Vanderbilt University, where she earned both her Bachelor’s in Communications and later her law degree.
Judge Calloway began her legal career at the Metropolitan Public Defender’s Office before being appointed Juvenile Court Magistrate in 2004. She won the election for Juvenile Court Judge in 2014 and was re-elected for another eight-year term in 2022. She also teaches Trial Advocacy at Vanderbilt Law School and Juvenile Law at Belmont College of Law. Known for her unique blend of humor and judicial wisdom, she continues to make a significant impact on her community.
As a TedxNashville featured speaker, she delivered a talk titled “Can Forgiveness Transform the Criminal Justice System?” highlighting her belief in the power of forgiveness to effect change in the legal system.
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Spencer 00:06
Judge Sheila Calloway, welcome to Signature Required.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 00:09
Thank you. I'm excited about being here.
Spencer 00:11
I'm excited to read your bio here so that everybody knows who we've managed to land on. Signature required. Graduated from Vanderbilt University. Go doors. Go doors, with both undergraduate and law degrees.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 00:22
Double Door.
Spencer 00:25
After law school, you worked as a public defender in Nashville until 2004 when you took on the role of juvenile court magistrate. In 2014 you ran and won your seat as Nashville's juvenile court judge and were re elected for another eight year term in 2022 you also serve as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, Belmont College of Law and American Baptist College. I tell you, Carly, we've made it. I mean,
Honorable Sheila Calloway 00:53
I love it.
Spencer 00:54
The first thing that we do judge is we go through and give five things that we have found most interesting about you, and we really try hard to narrow down.
Carli 01:03
By the way, I feel like we could have 117 things, but we'll, for time sake, do five.
Spencer 01:09
So I read these five, and the way we kick off this podcast is you get to talk about whichever one of these five are really what you'd like to have the audience first learn about you, and you can tell us a little story or talk about it. First, you hear approximately 1000 juvenile cases per year. That's one. Number two, 1/3 of cases you hear are for juvenile misconduct, and two thirds are custodial or family disputes. Number 370, 5% of children coming to juvenile court for misconduct were previously in court due to a family dispute. Four, you were a TEDx Nashville speaker on quote, can forgiveness transform the criminal justice system? And five, you are an advocate for recognizing secondary trauma and supporting your staff through these very intense professional experiences, which of those five resonate the most with you?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 02:05
My goodness, it is hard to pick one, five and an hour on any of them, absolutely. And I think truthfully, two and three are kind of together.
Spencer 02:17
Two being a third of the cases you hear for juvenile misconduct and two thirds are for custodial family disputes. And then corollaries, 75% of children coming to juvenile court for misconduct were previously in court due to a family dispute.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 02:30
Yes, and I think I'll start there. I think that'll be my one when people think about what I do in juvenile court, they always think about what they see in the news about a young person who's been arrested for something, and that's probably the least amount of work that we do, the most amount of work that we do, really working with the entire family. And so when we talk about the two thirds of the cases that we hear, there are parentage cases, which are unmarried parents, where we have to determine first of all whether a father is a father. We actually do paternity testing at the building where we do swab testing, send it off to the lab, and we announce in court whether you're the father or not. Oh, wow, really, we do, which is, you know, traumatic in itself. Once we do paternity testing, we determine how much time each parent should spend with their child. We determine who should be the primary residential parent and who should be the alternate residential parent, and then how much child support the alternate resident should pay, and what should happen if they don't pay. And so that's literally a third of the case. The other third, the other third that is really significant is those cases that a parent alleged is alleged to have abused or neglected their child, and so we get a lot of those. Those primarily are generated from the Department of children's services. When someone makes a referral, they see someone's being abused, or what they think. And DCS does the investigation, it brings the case to us. There are some that you know, grandparents says My granddaughter is not being treated right by their parents, and we think that they need to be removed and have custody. And so we have to make that determination of whether or not we believe that that child's been abused or neglected, and then what should happen to that child? And so we don't prosecute the parents, we just make that decision on what's best for that child. Should they go back with their parents, with some type of services? Should they go with a relative or a friend, or should they go into the foster care system? So literally, two thirds of the work that we do are all about the parents, and if we spend more time and resources in building up our parents and teaching them the proper way to parents, then we would have a significant less number of youth that are coming in that have misbehaved.
Carli 04:58
And so no because you are saying. Too, that a lot of the people that are the youth that you see come in because maybe they actually did something that landed them in front of you. They had been there before for one of these two thirds, absolutely patients.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 05:12
That's correct. That is correct. So we did a study of the youth that ended up doing something serious enough, like a murder case or a aggravated robbery, something that is really significantly hurt someone in our community and their community risk, and the state has asked that they get transferred to the adult system. And over a 10 year period, those cases that someone got transferred to the adult system, the majority of them started in our system because of what the parents, or what had happened to them, and so that's really significant for us, if we as parents, you know, you think about almost everything we do, driving, fishing, camping, hunting, whatever it is, we get a license, and we learn how to do it. The most significant things that we do as adults is raising children, and it's like, you go to the hospital and you get a baby and they say, Okay, go for it. Good luck.
Carli 06:09
I know. I couldn't believe they gave us our first newborn after two days. Are you sure you're not supposed to ride along with me? Right? Show me how to do this, right? It's so true. There's they don't come with a rule book.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 06:21
They don't come with a rule book. And if you don't know the rules, and if you've never seen the rules, if you've grown up when they at a household that didn't know how to really take care of children, that didn't know that you know if you constantly yell in your house, that disturbs the brain development of your child. If you didn't know that fighting amongst the parents um affects the brain development of your child, then that's what they see and that's what they get. And so when I think about this, and I'm slipping into number five and and I advocate about, you know, our children and their development. And I think about the brain science, what we absolutely know is that our brains don't fully develop until we're about 25 years old, right? Yes. And I always say for the men, it's like 3540 I 40. The women is like 20, and they kind of like, it's a range. The men bring us down. But you know and and what we know about adverse childhood experiences is that there are things that happen to people when they are young that literally affect the brain development, physically the brain development. And so if you are in a household that has a lot of domestic violence or physical abuse or neglect, or parents who are incarcerated, and the higher you rate on the adverse child experiences test, the more likely that your brain has physically been changed and doesn't develop, the same as someone who didn't have that.
Spencer 08:12
I've seen that where in autopsies, just like you can tell with concussions, and they can do work to say we're able to tell which one was the football player and which one was the accountant? Yeah, yep. In the same way, they're able to conclusively tell from the autopsies which one has had childhood trauma, yes.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 08:32
And so we know they had childhood trauma, and I'm working with two thirds of these families that were trying to teach them about childhood trauma, that if you all continued on this road and continue to you know, we have literally people who fight, physically fight when they're exchanging their child for child custody, if you continue to do this in front of your child, you are negatively affecting their brain development, which is causing them or could cause them to come back into our system on a behavioral issue or a crime. And so we got to do better with literally that two thirds of the cases that I have.
Carli 09:19
I have so many questions I want to start here. You say you're teaching these families, but you're seeing 1000 cases a year. Logistically, how much time do you get to spend with these families? And then if obviously you can't sit and have the bandwidth to tell them all of your vast knowledge, where are you sending them for resources on how to become a healthy family?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 09:43
Those are wonderful questions. I would say, I personally probably do the 1000 cases, but I have a staff of 120 there are, I am the juvenile court judge, and I have nine magistrates, and so they literally see even more than I see, because I only see the cases if you. Case will start with a magistrate, and if you're unhappy with your decision, then you get to appeal it to me. And so I only hear the ones that haven't had anybody touch it. So they me.
Spencer 10:10
It's just the stuff that really nobody else can figure out and the hard ones, yeah, all the tough stuff.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 10:17
So when you think about the nine matches I have, I would say they probably, each one of them hears at least 1000 some cases. And so I think, like our numbers, like of petitions in a year, around 15,000 petitions that we have that come through the court system.
Carli 10:35
And is that Davidson County?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 10:39
That's Davidson County as a whole, and so it's important for me slipping really into question. Number five is to teach my staff and to train my staff that we have to do a holistic approach on how we do our services for our families. And so I'm not the only one that's teaching, so I'm empowering my staff to actually be the ones that are on the ground teaching as well. And so it's a whole court system that we're changing the way that we do our services. And so we absolutely work with lots of community based organizations. We cannot do it by ourselves. A court, a court should not be doing these things by ourselves. What's so important is, I believe that, you know, it takes a village to raise children, and the court system shouldn't be the village. And so we reach out to our community partners and let them be part of their village, because we want our families and our children to be in a community, in community settings where people are helping them and people are around them to support them. We want to be a village, and we want to support the village. And so we work with lots of community organizations. You know, I'm always like, if you got a program that you want for the families or for the children, just come in, talk to us, and we'll put you on our list, and we'll and we'll get you plugged in, because the more people we have helping everyone, the better. And the way we like to do it, for instance, is I have a Marion Smith is in charge of our resources, and so she'll, you know, talk to the people who want to come and bring services to our youth and our families, and we'll figure out like, what area town Do you live in? What area or what area town do you serve? So if it's a community based organization that's their offices are in West Nashville, then we're going to try to refer families that are in West Nashville. Because what we used to do is we pick one program, and we make everybody go to that program. And whether you lived in East Nashville or South Nashville, you had to go to this over here. And what if you had not have transportation issues? And, you know, I know Mayor O'Connell is working on it, but we don't have the best transportation system in the world. You know, maybe in a couple years we'll have a better one. But if you're living in South Nashville and you got to go to a program that's in West Nashville. Sure, you got to take like, three busses to get there, right? And that's your kid with your kid. Yeah, no one wants to do that. No one wants to do that. And so, you know, we were filing, like a lot of people, not being successful because they couldn't get to programs, not because they didn't want to. It doesn't it's not that they're saying, We don't want the help. We don't need the help. We want the help we can't get to it, and so we're very strategic about how we refer people and what what programs we prefer them to.
Carli 13:30
You sound like you're half lawyer, half neurobiologist, 100% motivational speaker, 15 jobs, right? So help me understand do they teach all of you this at Vandy law school? Like, should we all be trying to go to Vandy law school? Or, where did this depth and breadth come from for you?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 13:50
Oh, that's a good question. I don't think I learned it all at Vanderbilt law school. I learned a lot, and I had wonderful experiences at Vanderbilt. That's why I'm a double door. Loved to go twice, you know, I had the opportunity when I was a magistrate under Judge Betty Adams Green was my boss. She was the judge. We were a part of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court judges, and that's like a national based organization, and they support evidence based practices. They support other, you know, communities across the country and juvenile systems across the country on doing things better. And so we were a part of the model court team. And it wasn't we were model court because we were the best, but we were model court because we wanted to do better, and we wanted to see other things and do other things. I was fortunate enough judge green appointed me as the lead for that team. And so in that role, I got to go places, and I got to go see other court systems, and I got to go learn some things. And so I think that really was that helped my journey. I'm still with we are. Is a court with National Council, and I'm actually on the the Board of Directors now, and so I really get to go see a lot of different court systems in here, and they have these amazing conferences that you get to go and learn. And so I think it was just a desire to learn more.
Spencer 15:16
Judge Calloway, one of the dear friends that Carly and I have, does childhood cancer at Vanderbilt, and when we meet him, we say, How in the world are you a functioning human in the rest of your life? Because it's like the most devastating sad. It does remind you, on some level, I have no problems. Like you spend one minute in a childhood oncology wing and you're like, I have absolutely nothing to worry about. But for you that not only do you see these types of cases, but the hardest of these type of cases, but you come in here, and we can just feel the lightness of your spirit. I think people listening can feel that too. How do you manage that mentally, to be a normal, functioning human out of the cases that you hear?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 16:05
That's a great question. And I have the question, what actually is normal?
Carli 16:12
Maybe normal is overrated. I think normal is overrated. Bright light.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 16:16
You know, I will say I'm I am definitely very spiritual. I believe that God has me in this place for this moment, for this season, for a reason, and it is my ultimate goal to live out what he has for me. And I love the job. It is absolutely, very challenging. It is very trying. There are times that I want to cry on the bench, just from the hard things out of here and the hard decisions that I have to make. You know, my my court officer will tell you, I pray before every decision. I pray before I go out on the bench every day and I leave it, you know, I do all that I can while I'm there, when I go home, I'm home, you know, I have a Tuesday night karaoke that I go and I just go and sing and relax every Tuesday Yeah, come on, it's tonight.
Carli 17:15
What's your karaoke song?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 17:17
First, I was afraid. I was petrified. Kept thinking, I could never live without you by my side, and I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong. I grew strong. I learned how to get along and saw your back.
Multiple Speakers 17:34
I'm out of space. Yes, yeah, that was incredible. I will survive. Ah,
Spencer 17:43
That is, that's the best answer. I have no more questions.
Carli 17:47
Throw the card.
Spencer 17:49
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Carli 17:52
Okay, I have one question. We have a segment on this podcast called no stupid questions, and so I've wanted to ask this question of somebody that could tell me, because we're in an election cycle, and I won't bring it down with talking about politics, but there's always this buzz issue, right? Of Be careful who you vote for. They appoint all the judges. And when I read your bio, I was like, Okay, here's a really accomplished woman that's been appointed, and that's also one election. So can you help me understand a little bit the distinction between different roles you've taken and what it means to be elected versus appointed.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 18:27
So that literally, would be a class that would take probably a good month. So the role
Carli 18:37
Twitter stuff like short characters.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 18:40
For me, it depends on the type of Judge, whether you're appointed or whether you're elected. And so most local and state judges are elected. And then your federal level, most of the federal judges are appointed. And so it definitely makes a difference on what type of judge you are and what you oversee. And so, for instance, in our court, there are nine judicial officers. I am the only elected one, and then I appoint the magistrates. And so they serve at my pleasure, and they hear the cases, and they do so. They have the judicial power. But if one day I walk in and say, they're not quite getting it right, and then I can, literally, I can fire them and then hire or appoint some more. On the federal level, like you hear about the Supreme Court justices, the circuit court justices, they are all appointed, and it's usually some type of political appointment. And so once a Supreme Court justice, or Federal Court Justice is appointed, they usually have lifetime offices, and so they don't have to worry about being reappointed. On our state level in Tennessee, our Supreme Court justices are appointed as well, and they're appointed by. The governor. They don't have lifetime terms. And what happens is that we as a community get to vote, and literally, on our last election, we get to vote whether we want to retain some of the Supreme Court justices or we want to remove them. And so technically, they have an election, but it's not like a local election where I literally had to, you know, beat out someone else by the number of popular votes that you get. They have just a popular vote of whether the community wants to retain them as judges or whether they want to get rid of them. And most of those judges get retained. I think in Tennessee, there's only been two judges that were ever removed from a retention vote, and so technically, they're they're not on for life, but it's really difficult to have them removed.
Spencer 20:53
Does campaigning for a judge? Is it similar to a politician, you can accept donations that you're out there. Like, what is that dynamic? Because normally you think that those two worlds should never meet. So what's that dynamic?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 21:09
It's very different. It's very odd. So campaigning for Judge is just like campaigning for any political office. You got to put up signs, you got to have ads and, you know, send out mailers, but as the candidate, I cannot directly ask you for money, because there should be a distinction. I shouldn't know who's giving me money, because you may come into my court and I'll be, oh, yeah, he donated $1,000 in my campaign. Does he get an unfair advantage? And so they try to keep judges separate from the actual collection money. But the way we do it is you have a team, and you have call time, and I call you and I say, hey, Spencer, just want to remind you I'm running for judge again. I love your support. And Spencer says, Well, how can I support you? I said, Hold on, let me, let me talking. Let you talk to Karen. She can tell you how you can support me. And then you call and you say, Oh, you can support her by giving a donation. And so, and we see all the donations at the end, we have to sign off, you know, for the donations like so it's nice. You see it anyway. You see it anyway, but we're not allowed to ask for it. Now, I will say that was probably the hardest part of campaigning for me. I loved going to forums, because, as you can see, I can talk a little. I love to go to forums.
Carli 22:36
I love to go for them, though I do think for them the privilege.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 22:41
I'm sorry. I do sing most of the times I go places. Sorry,
Carli 22:46
Hopefully you'll do it again.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 22:48
But you know, to sit down and have call time to ask people for support was a really difficult part of campaigning that.
Carli 22:59
So there's a buzz issue going around, and I want to phrase this question correctly, so give me a second to make sure I say this. I think a lot of people have the impression, and there's statistics out there that a lot of juveniles that commit crimes are repeat offenders. It happens again and again. And I love your heart for these families, and this idea that these kids have had a really hard time, and it's even changed their brain chemistry, and that's only a third of what you do. But what is your thought on that about these kids that maybe have an offense and then get out and do it again? What could we be doing to support that?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 23:41
I love that question. I get that a lot. What, what people don't understand is the number of youth that get arrested. There's a small, small, small number that repeat. And so what we have to do better is that those youth that we know that are at risk of repeating, we have to connect them more with more intensive services. So let me say, for instance, and I will say too, there's also a belief that juvenile crime is like out this world crazy, and there's so many kids that are running around doing things. It really is not nationwide, juvenile crime is down significantly from where it was 10 years ago, and specifically in Nashville, Davidson County, we are down about 60% so in 2013 we were resting about 5000 youth a year, and in 2023 that was down to about 1000 youth a year.
Carli 24:37
So you trying to work yourself out of a job.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 24:42
I'm working myself out a job. Yeah, I am. And so when I think of that, first of all, that's huge, and it took some time, and it took some work with partnerships with the police and the school system and a lot of our community organizations, to really figure out, let's do. More preventive stuff so we can prevent youth from getting arrested, and so we've really worked together as a community to decrease the number of youth ever getting arrested. So what happens is you have a smaller number of people getting arrested. We are able to give more intensive services for that smaller number. What we do in Nashville, in our juvenile court is we have evidence based risk assessments that we give to that youth that we are determining whether or not they should be diverted from the system or whether we need them to have some more services. And so for those who are low risk and low needs, we divert them, and we literally give a referral to our community based organizations and say, Hey, this kid's got a little off track. He needs probably just a little mentoring and some other things, but we think he's going to be all right. And so we connect them to community based organizations. Of the youth that we have diverted over the years, we are about at a 6% recivism rate, so it's literally small number of youth that are coming back in. But when we look at our higher risk youth, and what the study showed, the deeper a child gets into the system, the more likely is that they're going to stay in the system and that they're going to repeat and so what we are concentrating on, instead of giving our court services to all of these youth that don't need it, and their risk is low. We send those to our community organizations. The ones that are left, their risks are high for reoffending. We put more court intensive services for them. And so we have like different court programs. We have a Youth Recovery court, and so those are for our youth who are struggling with drugs and alcohol and are abusing those and so we have some specialized program for them where they have to come to court once a week, and they have to see their case manager on a regular basis. And so we are our youth case managers will go out to their schools to make sure that they're in school, and during their things would go to their homes, and we'll, you know, check the home, check the room, make sure that there's nothing that they don't need in their place. And so there's a lot more stuff that we do. We also have a gang resistance intervention program. It's for our youth who have been identified by the police department as being gang connected or a lot of association with gang. They may not be in the gang yet, but their associates are, and they're on that that borderline. If they do, you know a little more, they're probably going to be in it. And so we have several case managers, youth case managers through our grip program that give extreme, intense work with those. And we partner our grip program with the Oasis center real program, which is reaching excellence as leaders. And they partner also with Cafe momentum, which is a work based Cafe program, which is wonderful and epic girl, which works with our young girls. We also work with a organization of why we can't wait and find f, i n d find design. I could name all of them, but these are some of the main ones that work with our most justice involved youth, and those are the youth that we have to get more and more intimate services, that they have accountability partners, that they have mentors, that they have someone that they know, oh my. They're not called probation officers, but my FA officer is coming over and they're going to check my house. I got to get stuff together. We use curfew curfews for them. Sometimes, if it's extreme case, we might use electronic monitoring. And so those are the cases that we have to set aside and do a lot more stuff with. And so we can do that now, because we're diverting the ones that don't need this. We're diverting the ones that just need. Hey, Spencer, come on, let's, let's go on this way. Let's, let's hang out with these people, not those, but together. Let's pull it together. Yes. And so those we can just send to our community based organizations and say, you know, do what you can to make sure they don't come back and they don't come back. The majority don't. And so that's, that's what we do.
Spencer 29:20
Judge Callaway, one thing I love about your story is you are truly seeing the everyday realities of how policy impacts things. And you probably see some that's like, okay, that's having the desired effect. And then a whole lot of them that's like, if they only spent a day in my court, what they would do differently. So I wonder, do you get invited to speak in front of the state legislature and have the chance to really testify in a way that your opinion gets heard? Or what do you do to get your voice out there?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 29:56
That's a great question. Spencer, we just went through a cycle. Was very heavy on juvenile laws. We have an organization called the Tennessee juvenile court, Tennessee Juvenile and Family Court judges, TJ CFA, and we have an executive committee and a legislative committee, and our legislative committee, which I have been on in the past, and I'm on the executive committee now, we spend a lot of time during session, trying our best to explain to the legislature exactly what some of the policies, the effects they may have. I have had the opportunity. There was a summer session about two years ago where they were looking at things that they could do with the juvenile court reform. And I did have the opportunity to testify in front of the legislature twice, and kind of explain to them how the judges felt some of the laws might affect us. And we try our best. We will probably, if you would say, we would probably say that we don't think we were very successful this time. There were some laws that were passed that we probably would have loved to have more input on. And now that it's come to the time that we have to begin implementing some of these things, it's going to be difficult. And so we are working our way through some laws, and would love to have a better working relationship with the legislature and more opportunity to really talk to them and tell them, you know, what things work and what things don't.
Spencer 31:34
How powerful would it be for the legislature individually to say, at some point over your two year term in the house, you've got to spend one day in Judge calloways court. Like, how impactful would that be in faith restoring amongst your average Tennessean, to say, all right, they are having to go out there, like I experienced that in the FedEx delivery world is going out and delivering a box and running from dogs like I can appreciate totally differently what people go through than if you're just in a spot of trying to manage your schedule. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that is there an organization in particular that you feel like is a place that for someone that's hearing this and wants to hear more from judges, more from people that have gone through your experience. Is there a channel to get, to tune in and learn like clearly, we're doing that today, but anything regularly that you do?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 32:34
So I don't know if there's like an organization or agency that has regular conversations with judges are a way to learn more about the system, but we do in our court, I have a community outreach team that's run by Tony Smith and Tangela Wilcox, and we regularly have tours of the building, and so you can sign up for a tour, you'll get To see and hear cases and walk around and see all the things that happen. And on a good day, you'll get an opportunity to spend at least 30 minutes, an hour with me. For me to give you this the overview of everything that we do, and we do it on a regular basis. We have a wonderful partnership with the Vanderbilt hospital, Children's Hospital, the pediatrics residency program. And so as residents come through, they come as part of the, I don't know if it's like part of their class or requirement, but they set up an appointment, and I come and or they come to the courthouse, and I sit with two or three of them at a time and just talk to them about the things that we see. I also give them tips. As you know, resident that scary work with children and youth. These are the things that we see in the court that we think you should be aware of. And so it's a wonderful partnership. We do it for a lot of the metro schools. There are, as you all probably know, the Metro schools are divided in academies, and there are four schools that have law academies, and as part of their law academies, they'll come down and spend some time with us and bring their students down with us as well. And so there are definitely ways that you can learn more about the great work that my staff does and the work that we're doing to help change our community to make it more loving and safe for everyone. And we love our work we're doing. We love to spotlight it as often as we can.
Carli 34:31
I'm curious, as you're talking to those residents and saying, This is what we know about our families. This is what we know about the youth that's coming through for our audience, that most of whom aren't residents at Vanderbilt and maybe haven't taken a tour, what would you say is most common misconception? Or what would you say that you want everyone to understand about the people that you are blessed to work with?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 34:52
You know, I love how you said that the people that I'm blessed to work with, I really am blessed to work with them. And. It. You know, there is a sense that people who hurt other people are just evil, even if they're young, and if you were just to come and see them and hear their stories and hear where they came from, and hear the things that they have overcome, even in their short, short lives, you would have a different perspective on what they need and what needs to happen to them. You know, I think about a youth that I had one time in front of me that was in front of me because they broke into their neighbor's home, and they broke in because their mother had three jobs and she was unable to pay the electricity bill, and it was a cold day, and she was at her second job, and he was, I think, about 13, and he had a six year old sibling, and they were cold. And so he had the sense enough, or the wherewithal to think, if I can just figure out how to plug this heater up. And he plugged, broke in to plug in the heater, and he was arrested, and he did not need to be locked up for that. His mother did not need to lose custody for that. That's one of those community issues where you have a struggling single parent who's doing her best to make ends meet and hasn't been able to do it. And so if the community could see that, to see where we could help her, we could help her pay for the electricity. We could help give her a better one job, so that she'd had time to spend with her children at night, that we could help them, that child would have never come into the system. And so those are what I want people to see.
Carli 37:07
That's hard to follow with another question, but I'll ask you one more. If you had a magic wand and you could do one thing in our city, one policy change, or one program that was built up. What is the one thing that keeps you up at night that you wish you could get done?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 37:30
If I had a one, a magic wand and I could do one thing to help our community, I think I would focus on providing everyone a safe, stable place to lay their head down each and every night. I think if all of our families, all of our youth, all of our children didn't have to think about if I lay my head down here, as a gunshot going to come through the window. If I lay my head here, are people going to be fighting outside my window. If I were able to get a good night's sleep, how much better will I be in school the next day? If I could just lay my head down every night and know that I'm going to be protected and I'm going to be safe and it's the same place and it's the same good place in a good area, how much better is my life going to be? I think that's what I would concentrate if I had the magic wand.
Spencer 38:49
That's an unbelievably powerful answer, and just you can hear it in your answer of how many cases you've seen and the impact that that has left on you, but it's given you an incredible platform to be able to say, I know what is going on here, and the authenticity with which you speak is just really something that I'm so thankful to get to learn from you. So you've seen it a long time, but thank you for continuing to share it with us. It's just really it's really moving to me. One thing that I just love to ask you about was during COVID, when I imagine being on the bench and I'm making decisions about which parent is going to have custody, the body language that you see in the room, I have to imagine ways into some of the thought process is that you see things in COVID, though, and you can correct me if I'm wrong with it potentially being virtual. A lot of those things were taken out of your ability to judge a situation. How did you. Go through that season, and how did it impact the court?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 40:06
So COVID season was definitely difficult. I will say, personally, I was one of those extroverts that people said, check on your extroverts. We struggled. We struggled. I hated people. I will say we were under all the Tennessee courts were under the authority of the Tennessee Supreme Court, and there were certain cases and hearings that we had to have throughout the entire stage of COVID in person. Okay? And so I was fortunate enough as the leader of the court to get to go home, to leave my home every day and go somewhere. And so every day I was at court, okay? And we would have groups of people come in. Like three magistrates a day would come in, and they kind of worked in teams. And so this team would come on this day, so that if COVID came, then we had one team out, then we still have another team to come and handle the rest of the cases. And so during COVID, any child that was removed from the parents custody because of neglect or abuse, we had to hear those cases in person, and then any child that's arrested in is held in our pre trial housing facility. We had to hear those in person as well. We also have parentage cases of people who don't pay child support, who may have had an arrest order if anybody was arrested on a child support case, we had to hear those cases in person as well. So there was a category of cases that we heard in person. The rest of the cases, the custody cases, we did have to do them by zoom. It was WebEx. Is what Metro government required us to use. I will say, was super, super difficult to have long custody hearings on a virtual space, yeah, and so I will the majority of the cases that I had, we did not hear them, and we waited until there were times that people could come in person, we would hear small kind of things, like, if there was a issue of, of who should if parenting time should change, like, who should do the pickup and drop off that we could hear, that wasn't going to require a whole lot of evidentiary rules and documents and stuff that we can hear quickly. We would do those on WebEx. But if we was a con, a very complicated, involved a hearing with lots of witnesses. We just waited until there were times that we could actually bring people into the courtroom.
Spencer 42:47
I appreciate just learning about the mechanics of the court, because, as you mentioned, there's just so many cases that, as a logistics guy, I really appreciate how much you all have to go through altogether. Maybe just one last question about the magistrate judges that you appoint. When you are appointing those judges, are you choosing from hundreds and hundreds of people that just would give anything to be in that spot? Do you find that what I've seen is a lot of public officials, when you compare the salary that they receive versus what they could receive in the private sector. You know, a lot of times they're taking literally, like, 20% of what they could make somewhere else. So how do you see that playing out in the magistrate appointments?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 43:33
Yes, I will say, when I started off as a magistrate, I had been practicing law for about 10 years, literally, I started magistrate, and the pay was about $90,000 a year. When I graduated from law school, I had many of my my classmates who were already at that time, making like 90 100 and literally, 10 years out there in the you know, three, 400,000 that they're making. And I'm excited about being a magistrate at 90,000 it's a big distinction. I will say the majority of the people who applied to be one of the magistrates, they worked in the juvenile system, and they understood nobody works in juvenile court to get rich. Yeah, they don't get rich monetarily, but they definitely get rich emotionally, and, you know, spiritually, they get rich because it's, you know, for me, it's like it literally is God's work. We're doing it. We're taking care of his children. And so I think the people who apply absolutely know that it's not something that they're going to make a whole lot of money on, but they are going to make a big difference in our community. And I think that they love that and love that ability. See to make some changes for people.
Spencer 45:01
You brought a book for us today, so take a moment to tell us what we have here on the table. And if you want to pick it up and show it to the camera, then you can do that too.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 45:11
So this is one of my favorite books. It is the deepest well healing the long term effects of childhood adversity, by Dr Nadine Burke Harris, when I first learned about adverse childhood experiences and how it actually changes the development of our children's brains, it was something I needed to learn more about, and I actually ran across a TEDx talk that was done by Dr Harris, and it was amazing. And I said, Oh, I need to learn more about her. Read the book. Couldn't put it down. And it really goes through her journey on, you know, she started off just, you know, fresh out of med school, wanting to change the world and wanting to make a difference. And picked a small community in San Francisco that was kind of impoverished and had a lot of low health things, and went in and said, I'm going to change this. And started, you know, seeing all these kids and thinking, okay, I can make a difference. I can do this. But then would just keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. And she tells a story about the deepest Well, what she learned in her education, and she was a public did public medicine, education thing, and what she learned is, you know, you can have all these people who drink from the well, 100 people come to you drinking from the well, and 98 of them have diarrhea. And you can give each and every one of them some ammonium or something to cure the diarrhea, but at some point you need to go look in that well and say, what is in that well that's causing all of this? And so as she started getting all these kids that were coming with diagnosis of ADHD or behavior disorders or whatever she said, what's going on, I can treat as much as I can, but I need to prevent. I need to figure out what's going on. And that's when she read the study about adverse childhood experiences, and it talks about her journey on. You know, she wanted to yell it from the rooftops, this is how we fix it. This is how we make a difference. And how much pushback she got from everybody, everyone in the community, pushed back, and she didn't understand that it was like, but this is going to make us all whole. And this, we should, you know, we should all be on this. We should all you'd be ready to make a change. And what she realized is like, because it affects so many of us, it's hard for people to talk about it's hard for people to reconcile. Oh, so really, when I was abused, that really is why I can't lose weight, or that's really why I can't stop drinking, and it's hard for people to reconcile and to deal with, and that's why there was a reluctance in their community to make a difference. But now that she is the Surgeon General of California, she's able to make policies and make a change, and so I love this book.
Carli 48:21
So much of what's happening as a mom, and I know you're a mom, and the buzz issues we hear right now is so much around youth mental health, and everyone seems like they're reading the anxious generation, right and the pressures on our kids, and it's really manifesting in a lot of ways. How much have you seen? I know that you said that the rates are going down for juvenile crime. But how much are you seeing this mental health crisis impact your work?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 48:47
That is such a wonderful question, that mental health crisis is real. It really is real, and we see it on a regular basis. The when I started occasionally you might have a child that's diagnosed or has significant mental health issues, or someone who's incompetent to stand trial, like they just don't understand things, and it was here and there. I mean, it wasn't non existent, but it was here and there. Now it's like on a regular basis, and it's so much more regular now that we actually have a specialized docket for our youth who are suffering from mental health indices or severe mental health illnesses or who are incompetent to stand trial, and that docket gets heard once a month and easily the match. Here's that docket. Here's a good 2030, cases in that one docket period. And so it's a testament to say that more and more of our youth are suffering. There's lots of mental health illnesses, and it's unfortunate we don't have enough providers. We don't have enough intensive placements. For youth who are suffering. And, you know, we have a child that might be having a psychotic episode and needing immediate services, and they might end up getting on a waiting list, yeah, and that waiting list, send them.
Carli 50:15
What resources do you have for these families?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 50:18
A lot of the youth, unfortunately, if the we can't find resources within our community and resources that are their local insurance can pay a lot of those youth end up in the Department of Children Services custody, and they get placed out of state. And so we have a lot of them to get placed. There's a facility in Georgia that we use a lot, and there's definitely one in Georgia, and I think I can't remember the other one that that is used a lot by the department, but we're literally sending children out of our state because we don't have the necessary resources here to really care for them. It's an issue with our mental health. We don't have enough services.
Spencer 51:04
Do you sense that there's ample recognition of that lack?
Honorable Sheila Calloway 51:09
I absolutely believe that there is a recognition that there's ample, ample recognition that there's not enough resources. And, you know, I get to work with Commissioner Quinn Margie Quinn, who is the Commissioner of the Department Children's Services. And you know, that's one job that doesn't get enough support and doesn't get enough kudos and thanks for it. Is a hard job. And she has, time and time again, tried to figure out, how can we keep our youth in our communities and address their their mental health needs? And I know she's reached out, and, you know, working with Commissioner Williams and for the Department of Mental Health and Disability and trying to come up with a plan on, how do we increase services within our own community and try not to rely on others in far out communities that you know when, when you send a child to a placement that's in Georgia, how does that family go visit? How do they stay connected with, with the people who they love, and how do they, you know, how do you help that really help them when they're so far away? And so that's one of those things that I don't have a magic answer, and I wish I had a wine to solve that as well. It's a troubling trend that's getting worse. And the more youth that we see that need mental health services and help, and the lack that we have, it just really hurts.
Carli 52:51
I imagine you see it in the families too. If you're seeing two thirds of it being family cases, and you have young parents, a lot of them you said were single parents. I mean, I imagine the mom that's working her three jobs isn't focusing on her mental health needs while caring for her children.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 53:09
Absolutely she doesn't have time, or sometimes doesn't have the ability. Yes, we see a lot of mental health issues within the parents as well, and lack of being able to really get resources to help.
Spencer 53:27
I'd say Judge Calloway, having you here does go right back to what Carly started this off with, is that you're careful who you vote for, because they end up appointing a lot of people, and I'm really thankful that people were careful in the way that they voted for you, because you have had enormous influence on Davidson County and families that you're making generational impacts and how the decisions come down from the bench. But your heart for the Lord is so evident, and it does restore faith in my own mind that you see some of the hardest stuff that there is to see, and with just a couple stories, you can make us all cry here, and that for you to carry is unbelievably honorable and noble and serving to our community. And I just really want to say a genuine thank you for what you do for our city and our state. And I love getting the chance to give your voice a little bit of a louder megaphone, so that the people that are in the places of getting to decide how this stuff gets fixed, you know, there's no fixing it, but how you make a difference that your voice is one that I hope they really listen closely to.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 54:45
Thank you. Thank you.
Spencer 54:47
I really appreciate you being here on our podcast today. Thank you.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 54:52
Thank you. I had fun. Y'all are wonderful.
Carli 54:55
It was a privilege. Have fun at karaoke.
Honorable Sheila Calloway 54:57
I will. Are you coming?
Carli 54:58
You don't want that you.
