Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

and he gave me the acceptable answer: ‘It has given me a chance to change my life,’ he said, but then maybe it was true.

      Inez agreed, and perhaps she should know. She was practically a jury-addict, having come along every time since the programme began its trial phase six months before. She had also been studying what she called Street Law in high school.

      She skipped out of the room, and I witnessed a brief exchange which made me feel differently. As she passed Jimmy by the door, he said, ‘Thanks’. It was a bit like the man on the rack thanking the Spanish Inquisition for making him taller.

      ‘Why are you thanking me?’ said Inez, embarrassed at her role as sixteen-year-old inquisitor.

      ‘Oh, because you didn’t sentence me to death or anything,’ he said.

      Why did that cheer me up? Perhaps because it crystallized my feeling that the process had made sense to Jimmy – even if from my position on the hideous green chairs it had seemed bizarre and confused. ‘Like you said,’ said Edgar, as we collected our papers. ‘It isn’t just about barter.’ I wasn’t sure I had said that, but it was certainly true, because Edgar Cahn is one of those old-fashioned specimens: a real radical. He sees his youth court as a way of undoing some of the damage caused by the ‘proper’ courts – for all their pompous attorneys, tough sentencing and white-faced social workers.

      ‘It is clear that the message given by the legal system has reduced the issue of norms of acceptable behaviour to a question of risk aversion – about what the percentages are of getting caught, and what the consequences are of getting caught. The legal system is in fact sabotaging its own attempt to shape and affect people’s behaviour.’

      In other words, the criminal justice system was turning into a kind of money. Theft costs three years, murder costs fifteen, and the free market in its amoral way decides what you should and shouldn’t do.

      Once again we came back to the old-fashioned morality at the heart of time dollars. Time dollars are all about right and wrong, but they are also about inventing a kind of money which can make sure wasted resources – people’s undervalued time and skills – get used more efficiently. And some of the biggest waste in Washington seems to be wasted youth.

      ‘The Youth Court came about because it seemed a natural application of the principle of co-production,’ Edgar told me later, during a brief attempt to interview him on tape. ‘That means that those who are designated as problems are in fact assets. But for them to be re-classified as assets, they need to go through a process it was clear the legal system was not capable of generating. We need to redefine people as productive. We professionals keep defining other people by their defects, their needs, their liabilities and their problems. What time dollars are about is allowing people to redefine themselves as contributors.’