Steven C. Teske
Deputy Prosecutor/Pascua Yaqui Office of the Prosecutor
Chief Presiding Judge (Ret.)
Superior Court Judge (Ret.)
Clayton Judicial Circuit
State of Georgia
As long as you keep punishing the symptom, you will never treat the cause.
- Steve Teske
About Steven C. Teske
Judge Steven C. Teske was the Chief Judge of the Juvenile Court of Clayton County, GA. He was appointed juvenile court judge in 1999 and additionally served as a Superior Court Judge by designation presiding over civil and criminal matters. Prior to taking the Bench, he was a partner in the firm of Boswell & Teske, LLP and served as a Special Assistant Attorney General prosecuting child abuse and neglect matters in juvenile court as well as defending state employees in federal and state courts in Section 1983 “under color of law” cases. Upon retirement from the Bench, Teske relocated to his birthplace of Tucson, AZ. He currently prosecutes child welfare cases as deputy prosecutor for the Pascua Yaqui Office of the Prosecutor. He is also a consultant to juvenile courts and justice systems on systemic transformation to reduce racial and ethnic disparities.
Teske has testified before Congress on four (4) occasions and several state legislatures on detention reform, zero tolerance policies in schools, juvenile justice reform, juvenile justice grant accountability, and the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act re-authorization.
Teske served as a Litigative Expert for the U.S. Department of Justice in the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” case, United States of America v. Meridian, et. al. resulting in a consent decree mandating sweeping reforms of school disciplinary practices that were harmful to kids of color.
Three Georgia governors have appointed him to several statewide boards over the years, including the Children and Youth Coordinating Council, Governor’s Office for Children and Families, DJJ Judicial Advisory Council, JDAI Statewide Steering Committee, Georgia Commission on Family Violence, Georgia Council on Child Welfare Reform, and the Georgia Commission on Criminal Justice Reform. He served two terms on the Federal Advisory Committee for Juvenile Justice and is a past National Chair of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice. He is a member of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and has served on the Board of Directors. He is past president of the Georgia Council of Juvenile Court Judges and the Clayton County Bar Association.
He has written several articles on juvenile justice reform published in the Juvenile and Family Law Journal, Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, Juvenile Justice and Family Today, Family Court Review, Georgia Law Review, and the Georgia Bar Journal. His book, Reform Juvenile Justice Now, is a collection of essays on juvenile justice issues.
He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including:
• Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize Award 2018
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• Romae T. Powell Award from the Juvenile Court Association of Georgia.
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• Clayton County NAACP Community Service Award
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• Howard K. Ables Award from the Georgia Juvenile Services Association
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• 2013 Alumni Award of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University
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• Distinguished Alumni Award of Clayton State University
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• Outstanding Leadership Award from the Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children.
He is a Toll Fellow of the Council of State Governments and received his J.D., M.A., and B.I.S. degrees from Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. Judge Teske taught as an adjunct law professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, GA. He is currently an adjunct professor at Pima Community College in Tucson teaching criminal justice studies and business law and authored the course and curriculum on Race, Crime, and Justice, which mandatory for criminal justice students to understand the relevant intersections of social justice and criminal justice.
Our Services
Empowering Communities, Transforming Futures for Kids and Families
Judge Teske has been providing technical assistance to jurisdictions in 41 states to reduce juvenile crime by emphasizing strategies to increase graduation rates.
Teske often hammers the point, "How go graduation rates, so go crime rates." In 2004, Teske convened the schools and police and together they created the School-Justice Partnership to target the most vulnerable students who most likely to drop-out of school and be expelled and assess their underlying causes and replace the harsh disciplinary punishers pushing them out of school with positive and effective interventions. In all systems who have replicated the partnership with fidelity, there has been a significant increase in graduation rates and a decline in juvenile crime.
Whether you are a juvenile court judge concerned about the number of low-level, adolescent-driven delinquent acts referred by the school system or a school administrator concerned about the risk of pushing students out of school that can place them on a path to prison or a law enforcement administrator concerned about officers called to schools to respond to non-public safety and teenage-driven behaviors that can reduce the response time to serious crime, the School-Justice Partnership Model is an effective approach to addressing these concerns while improving graduation rates, school climate, and public safety on and off the campus.
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Teske is working with the Clayton County System of Care (CCSOC) which has funding to support the technical assistance provided by Teske’s team. At no cost to jurisdictions desiring to create a partnership, Teske’s team, with the support of the CCSOC, will visit your community over a two (2) day period and help the stakeholders create an inter-agency agreement that is best suited for your community’s values and beliefs and according to your resources and in accordance with your systemic culture. This is not a cookie-cutter process. Teske knows from experience that communities do better and get positive results when the partnership is created by the community and not shaped according to what Teske and others have created in their respective community.
If you are interested, click on the link below to apply for technical assistance. Your community will receive assistance from a team that includes a judge, school superintendent, police administrator, court administrator, and a behavioral health specialist that together created the first School-Justice Partnership of this kind in the United States.
Since the article dubbed "Nothing Works" was published in the midseventies, much about what works and what doesn't in juvenile justice and adult criminal justice has been researched to discover that much does work to prevent and reduce juvenile delinquency and adult criminal behavior.
The question is if jurisdictions employing these "What Works" interventions are doing so with fidelity and in a system that is configured to sustain these interventions with effectiveness. Many of these interventions are packaged by for-profit companies and selling them for attractive costs, but there are serious questions if what is packaged conforms to evidence-based standards. For example, packaging an evidencebased program like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) doesn't mean it truly is "the" evidencedbased CBT or something similar but not effective.
Understanding these nuances in evidence-based interventions when building a system to effective in reducing recidivism among juvenile offenders, is key to promoting successful outcomes, not to mention avoiding waste of resources both time and money.
Whether you are looking to implement effective alternatives to detention, improving supervision of offenders, enhance effective diversion decision-making and programs, create specialty courts that target the needs of special offenders, and other facets of your system, Judge Teske and his team have a long history developing effective interventions and the systems to support them with proven results.
Judge Teske has experience on and in front of the Bench with child welfare systems and stakeholders for thirty (30) years.
Teske served on Georgia’s Child Welfare Reform Council resulting in systemic and other changes that improved detection of child abuse, the CPS workforce, permanent stability for children, expeditious permanency, and improving all aspects of children’s lives.
Read the Council’s final report of recommendations to the Governor:
With the passage of the Federal Family First Prevention Services Act in 2018, child welfare agencies are now, more than ever, in pursuit of finding the most effective strategies, services, and programs to prevent child abuse and neglect, respond to abuse and neglect referrals, increase reasonable efforts to prevent removal of children from homes and efforts to reunify children with parents, improve foster care when children must be removed, improve outcomes for foster teens to ensure a brighter future when they age out of foster care, and improving many more facets of the child welfare system.
The Family First Services Act requires that the prevention and kinship programs of the child welfare system implement evidence-based services and programs, and the tools to achieve the all objectives. The Act provides federal funding for states and tribal communities to implement approved evidence-based services to prevent the removal of children from their home and placement in foster care.
Beginning in 2001, Teske created a county child welfare cooperative in his county to implement best practices beginning with effective programs and services to strengthen efforts to prevent the removal of children from homes and to bolster reunification efforts using evidence based services and programs to minimize children suffering abuse and/or neglect later and returning to foster care.
The efforts of the cooperative resulted in the number of children in foster care falling by 73 percent and the re-entry rates into foster care falling 2 percent below the statewide average. From 2001 the re-entry rates fell from over 10 percent to approximately 1 percent by 2010.