A breeze rustles through aspen trees and into the open windows of the arts-and-crafts building at Camp Hope in the Uintas. Kids hunch over their hands, their fingers lacing plastic strips to create lanyards — a classic summer camp activity.

A few steps away, in the mess hall, campers and counselors eat family-style. A “whoever kills it, fills it” law is in place; the person who scoops out the last of a dish is responsible for replenishing it.

The campers stay in neatly arranged cabins, each named after an animal indigenous to the Uintas: golden eagles, black bears, rattlesnakes. At a nearby lake, campers paddleboard and kayak. For one new camper, the lake is uniquely special; there, she caught a fish for the first time.

By all accounts, it’s an ordinary summer camp. But the campers aren’t who you would necessarily expect.

These children and teenagers have been impacted by cases prosecuted by the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office. The camp they’re attending is one of many nationwide — through Camp Hope America — with all expenses paid by the D.A.’s office.

Campers aren’t only playing volleyball and singing songs around a fire pit. They’re also learning how to cope with their traumas and socialize with other kids their age, since young people exposed to trauma are more at risk for involvement in the criminal justice system as adults.

For the D.A.’s office, Camp Hope is an effort to connect with young victims of traumatic crimes and events even after their cases have closed. Relatedly, the Salt Lake City Police Department offers another program, called the Promising Youth Project, for at-risk youth.

These programs, for all their fun, also have a preventative strand; by helping children confront their trauma and enjoy the simple fun of just being a kid, these Salt Lake City law enforcement agencies hope they can prevent kids from falling into criminal behaviors down the road.

‘Connect with the kids before correcting them’

Nicole Salazar-Hall, chair of the local Commission on Racial Equity in Policing, told The Salt Lake Tribune that the Promising Youth Project’s purpose is to steer kids away from gang activity and involvement in misdemeanor crimes.

“We’re throwing a lot of money at foster care, detention centers and probation officers, when really we should be putting more money toward the front end in preventing these things from happening,” Salazar-Hall said about the benefits of funding programs like PYP.

The program’s participants are mostly students who school resources officers recommend, said Sgt. Doug Teerlink, who supervises the Salt Lake City School District’s school resource officers.

Teerlink said that the police department received over 100 applications to participate in the abbreviated summer version of the program, which stretches for four weeks and is in its second year. They were able to take on 50 youth ages 12 to 17, who participated at no cost.

The summer program just ended. Participants met on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays, when the police department treated them to golfing, zoo visits, indoor rock climbing, kayaking in East Canyon and more. For some of these children, Teerlink said, it marked the first time they had ventured out of the Salt Lake Valley.

“The value of it is obvious,” said Teerlink. “To show these kids how to have fun, to show them there’s a lot more to life.”

At the same time, the program acts like an “extra set of hands,” Salazar-Hall said, for parents and families who may be struggling with making rent, lack of work or affording food.

“This program is designed to connect with the kids before correcting them,” said Salazar-Hall.

PYP also includes a 15-week program led by the police department’s civilian advocates during the school year. According to the PYP website, the program has supported 113 clients, worked with over 60 community organization partners and provided over 30 awareness trainings.

The Salt Lake City Police Department secured $274,000 in their recently-approved $21 million budget to fund four full-time PYP positions. Previously, staffing for PYP was funded by a Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant, though that funding will expire this month.

PYP’s summer program provided a chance for “at-risk kids” and law enforcement to get to know each other in a different context, Salazar-Hall said.

“It opens up some of the officers’ minds,” she said. “The kids aren’t just causing trouble just to be mean or, you know, because they’re ‘bad kids.’ They have stuff going on. And then the kids get to see that law enforcement can be a partner, not just an adversary.”

The ultimate goal for Salazar-Hall, and for the Commission on Racial Equity in Policing, is to make the Salt Lake City Police Department an agency that everyone in their jurisdiction feels safe turning to.

But some say that goal is fundamentally unachievable.

“This money is being spent to create these programs that are part of this criminal legal system that people don’t really have the option to choose to be involved in,” Josh Kivlovitz, an organizer with Decarcerate Utah, a local prison and police abolitionist organization, told the Tribune. “There’s an inherent power dynamic in that.”

Kivlovitz acknowledged that it can feel risky and counterintuitive to pull funding from the police department and allocate it to grassroots, community-based efforts instead. But a better use of the funds, Kivlovitz suggested, might be directing money to programs that are not reliant on law enforcement.

Another option: translating funding into direct monetary support for families.

“We do need to invest money in programs like this, that empower youth and provide them with their basic needs and resources and support,” Kivlovitz said. “But we need to do it in a way that goes through systems of power that have not historically been causing harm, and that are rooted in community.”

‘How do we instill the possibility of hope?’

Allie’s daughter was a second-time camper at Camp Hope this summer; the mother is being identified without her last name to protect her child’s identity. At camp drop-off, Allie said the sentencing date for the defendant in her daughter’s case was moved because her child refused to miss camp.

“Kids’ trauma doesn’t necessarily manifest fully right after a crime takes place,” Allie said. “So, having camp come a year after the event really gave her an opportunity, especially after COVID, to heal.

“She was able to come and enjoy a lot of really fun activities … to meet a lot of people and share a common experience without any shame,” the mother said.

Camp Hope in Utah started in 2020 with day-camp events due to the pandemic. Last year marked the first sleepaway version of the camp, and this summer, two-thirds of last year’s campers returned.

For Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, Camp Hope is a way to continue fostering relationships with the families whose cases he oversees, and engender resiliency, healing and — most prominently — hope, in the next generation.

This year, 56 campers arrived in Utah’s alpine for the weeklong camp. Their days followed a fun-filled schedule of morning roll call, breakfast, activities, lunch, more activities — and nightly campfire.

For children — who have greater neuroplasticity than adults — positive experiences can mediate the impact of traumatic events, researchers have found.

“What we do is about giving them their childhood back, and helping them build hope and have new experiences for the future,” said Byron Paulsen, Camp Hope America Utah’s program manager.

On a visit to the camp, a child held Gill’s hand, aiding the district attorney as they precariously balanced on a log facing an open meadow framed by pine trees and peaks. “I’ve never worked for the government before,” the camper quipped, a comment met with raucous laughter.

Gill has served as a prosecutor for 27 years, and in that time, he’s seen whole generations of families pass through the criminal justice system. Camp Hope offers an opportunity to disrupt that cycle of intergenerational trauma by introducing children to healthy coping mechanisms, with the goal of nipping adverse behaviors in the bud.

“Historically, in the criminal justice system, we investigate cases, we put the cases together, we go to court, and then we move on to the next case,” Gill said. “So our question was, how do we instill the possibility of hope in these individuals who unfortunately find themselves intersecting with the criminal justice system?”

“This is something that every community can do,” he added. “Every prosecution office needs to think about how to fulfill that promise of justice beyond just the courtroom.”