Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Judge Soonhee(Sunny) Bailey: Breaking the Cycle and Creating America's First Autism Court Program
Tue, 01 Apr 2025
Send us a textJudge Sonny Bailey shares how she created the nation's only court dedicated to helping autistic youth stay out of the criminal justice system. What began in 2018 as a quieter courtroom for one overwhelmed teen has evolved into an innovative program with a 90% success rate, recently recognized through Nevada legislation as the country's first official neurodiversity specialty court.• Autism court began accidentally when officers brought in an overwhelmed teen who needed a quieter environment• Program uses applied behavioral analysis and positive reinforcement instead of punishment• Success looks different for each youth—from college preparation to simply learning not to punch walls• Late diagnosis (some at age 16+) means many youth missed years of early intervention• Court addresses entire family system through parent training and consistent approaches• 90% success rate with over 100 graduates since program began• Program started with minimal resources—"a box of fruit snacks and chips"• New legislation will expand services to include other forms of neurodiversity• Many autistic youth are in foster care due to family breakdowns and behavioral challenges• Parents should immediately alert legal authorities about a child's autism to ensure proper accommodationsIf you know anyone who would like to share their story, visit TonyMantor.com/Contact. Tell everyone everywhere about Why Not Me? The World, the conversations we're having, and the inspiration our guests give to show you are not alone in this world.https://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: Who is Judge Soonhee (Sunny) Bailey and what is her groundbreaking court program?
In 2018, Judge Bailey established the Detention Alternative for Autistic Youth Court, a groundbreaking diversionary program to provide services that help youth with autism spectrum disorder stay out of the criminal justice system. It remains the only program of its kind in the nation dedicated to the youth with ASD.
In May of 2023, Nevada became the first state to pass legislation creating a specialty court for youth in the delinquency system who are diagnosed with or suspected of having ASD. We're thrilled to have her here to share her story. Thanks for coming on.
Oh, no, thank you.
I imagine you come across a variety of topics in your work. Can you expand on how autism became a big part of your workload?
I'm a judge, so that's what I do. And I just happen to have a court that handles children with autism. So I guess that's where it starts. So I happen to have a court that deals with neurodiversity. So I guess what you're asking me is how I ended up with the court with neurodiversity. That kind of happened by accident.
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Chapter 2: How did the Autism Court Program start accidentally?
So back in 2018, we had a youth that came into detention and the officers came in and they came to me and said, hey, we've got a child that came in with domestic violence charges, came into detention. They didn't know what to do with them. He was overstimulated. He couldn't handle a regular calendar, which often happens. And so they said, do you know what to do with them?
Can you do something with them? So I said, sure. My Thursday calendar was really light. And I said, why don't you put them on my Thursday afternoon calendar? I don't mind to hear them then. So we said, why don't we just put them on the Thursday calendar? So we had them on a calendar with just him. He came in and we handled this case.
And the next thing I know, the probation officers were coming in saying, hey, we have an autistic calendar. No, we don't. I had an autistic youth. So they were all excited because I continued up to another Thursday calendar because that was my light calendar. And they were so excited. They said, you have an autistic calendars for autistic youth. Why don't we just put another kid on there?
I said, again, I don't have an autistic calendar. I just happen to have a youth with autism on this calendar.
So what developed from there?
Next thing I know, I had two youth on this calendar. And so they were all excited. And so I kept telling them, no, I don't have a calendar. What happened is I then had two kids on this calendar. And so a couple of weeks went by with these two kids on this calendar. That original kid who came back, we had a, it's called a wraparound Nevada. It was a service coordinator.
He came back and handled the one youth that he already had services for and he saw the other youth and he said, hey, I'll just take this other kid. Hey, it's great. You have this calendar for autistic youth. And again, I was like, I don't have a calendar for autistic youth, but I'm glad you'll take the second kid. Then the two kids came back on the quieter calendar.
And then the probation officers were so excited. You have this calendar for autistic youth. And again, I kept saying, I don't have this calendar. for autistic youth. I had these two children. So then the next thing you know, this wraparound Nevada person came back because I just kept the two kids on that quieter calendar. They needed the quieter calendar.
The wraparound Nevada worker came back for the two kids. He said, hey, I brought a friend for your autism calendar. I brought this friend who wants to volunteer on this calendar. He kept saying, I don't have this calendar. And so he goes, but he wants to volunteer on this calendar. I said, great. We could use the services for this other kid. And the next thing you know, I had another kid on there.
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Chapter 3: What legislative changes have recognized the Autism Court as a specialty court?
So this person volunteered. And the next thing you know, I did have a calendar for Youth on the Spectrum. that just continued to grow. And we had originally not realized we had so many youth with autism because probation had been trying to handle them informally. And so we had ended up putting them on this calendar because it was quieter and everything else.
Long story short, that's how our calendar developed is accidentally not realizing that all these people they were trying to have informally, we developed this quieter calendar for them. And then We ended up having this calendar. And then apparently I didn't realize that when you had this calendar, we needed an acronym because I didn't realize you couldn't just have a calendar without an acronym.
So then we became the detention alternative for autistic youth because our first youth was in detention. So that is how we developed our calendar from there. And it just grew word of mouth. So people just started volunteering and saying, hey, I have someone with these services. And so that is how we ended up starting in April of 2018. Yes, not a very great story. It's just a very disjointed one.
Oh, I think it's quite a great story, actually. It seems like a lot of times some of the things that are meant to be fall in our laps and we just move forward with them. Sounds like that's what happened to you and it also sounds like that's what you're doing. So how has it evolved from when you very first started to what it's become today?
Well, and I do have a direct link with autism, though. My oldest daughter is on the spectrum, which is why they came to me in the first place. My oldest daughter is on the spectrum. That's why I have knowledge on it. But that's how it developed. But I didn't know we had this need for it in the delinquency system where I was sitting. But it has developed since 2018.
Since then, we continue to develop word of mouth. We were grassroots. And then the last session, our legislative session only meets every two years. We're very fortunate. One of our senators, Senator Orenshaw, is actually also a public defender. Last session, two years ago, they actually proposed a bill, Senate Bill 411, to actually recognize Neurodiversity Specialty Court for Autism.
So that way it could be recognized as a specialty court because our day court didn't fit under any type of specialty court under the statute. Because you have mental health, you have drugs and things like that, but ours didn't fit. And so with Senate Bill 411, they actually created a specialty court for us to allow a diversionary court to exist for us for autism.
And so it was proposed last session and unanimously passed both the Senate and the House. And so SB 411 became a law last session. So that's where we were recognized. So we are the only recognized autism specialty court in the nation. That's where we became a law last session. So we've expanded out. And then currently SB 140 is currently pending.
We just passed the Senate yesterday where we can expand out to fetal alcohol syndrome related neurodiversity and as well as neonatal abstinence syndrome. So we're looking to expand out to be a truly neurodiverse court. We can be recognized. There will be the only truly neurodiverse court in the country.
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Chapter 4: How does the Autism Court Program achieve a 90% success rate?
But people are continually reaching out to us, trying to figure out how to start a court and asking us how we do it. I think a lot of people think it costs a lot of money. We try to explain. We started out with no money. We started out with a box of, I think, fruit snacks and some chips. And so we keep trying to explain. It's just reinforcers. It's just time.
We started out with a session and just being able to just separate some time and just having people willing to come in. And then the way that we have found with the community, if you just carve out the session and just let people know you're there, people have been wanting to come in and just volunteer time. We function completely off people who are willing to volunteer their time to come in.
and just take on the extra time and effort just to make sure that we can address the needs of the neurodiverse community and make sure their needs are met. And so far, we haven't had an issue with that. Everyone just keeps answering our needs and coming into court. To answer your question, we've graduated our 102nd graduate from our program. Our recidivism rate hovers around the 90th percentile.
Our success rate's 90%, and so we've been doing pretty well.
When you're working with an autistic child, what are some of the steps you can take to guide them effectively, helping them understand what they're doing and how to adjust their behavior? One key aspect of autism that people often overlook is autistic individuals may not process or express emotions in the same way as neurotypical people.
So how do you communicate when they've done something wrong and need to make changes to better adapt to society? What practical steps can you use to support them and how do you help them shift from their current patterns to ones that will work better for them in the future?
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Chapter 5: What methods are used to guide autistic youth in the court program?
We have two different paths. First of all, we have to figure out if our youth is competent because there's different levels of autism. So we also have to figure out the competency level. So we have some that aren't even competent, some that may be competent, and then we have to go from there. We rely heavily on applied behavioral analysis. and getting them into applied behavioral analysis.
And then it's baby steps on accountability because obviously some people believe that autism, that we're not holding people accountable, but we are. Through that, we build through the reinforcement system where we rely heavily on behavioral modification and reinforcement. So we want to reinforce the behaviors that we want while trying to extinct the behaviors that we don't.
And then we always start with something small, something small that we can reinforce. And then we build upon that, which we can't. It could be something very small. Very small in terms of we're going to work on your language. We're going to reinforce and try to extinct the language that we can't have because we can't have abusive language.
And we build off the abusive language to the aggressive acts. We got to work on you can't physically harm people. We can't hit people. And then we got to reinforce that. So it's the baby steps into that. And then of course, once we can do that, then we can build on it. And then we progress from there.
And that's been our major thing because mostly we're going to have battery domestic violence, possibly breaking items. things like that. So we got to figure out what the heavily preferred reinforcers are so we can build on that. The abusive language can build into that because it's the frustration and the denied access to heavily preferred items. So that's what we build in.
And then we can go from there. Once we can do that, we usually can then be very successful with getting the behaviors down. So they're not going to look at the physical, the batteries and things like that.
You mentioned a 90% success rate, which is outstanding. So it's clear these methods you are doing are having an impact What happens next? After going through your system, what kind of progress do you see in these individuals? Are they able to achieve the goals that everyone strives for, like getting a job and finding success in the world?
Or is it more about gradual progress, taking baby steps towards bigger outcomes? How do you measure their success as they move forward through your system?
It's different for every child because again, autism is a sliding scale. For one child, it could be going to college. It could be living independently, but that may not be the success for another child. For another child, it may simply be not punching holes in the wall, not abusing the parents. For another child, it may be simply just getting them to stay in a home.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does the Autism Court face with late autism diagnoses?
Some of these children had never been diagnosed until age 16. So we're fighting against a system that potentially we're all that's going to keep them out of the prison system. Our whole goal is to simply get them to a place where maybe they could stay in a group home and not in a jail. And so it depends on each kid. And so our goal is separate for each child.
So we have to look at what each child's capable of and hopefully get them to the most independent state that they are. And so it depends on each child. So we have to be careful that we're not putting an unrealistic goal on each kid. So that's where we're at.
It's very well known that males tend to be diagnosed autistic at a rate higher than females because females tend to mask their symptoms and go undiagnosed so to fit in in society. Because of this, do you see more males in your courtroom than females that would go along with this scenario?
We have a majority males. It's hard with the females because of the masking. You also have to remember we have a lot of comorbid up to 75 to 85% of our children because they're coming to us in their teen years. They also have psychiatric issues as well. And so we're fighting against the psychiatric as well. And so we have to get them before the psychiatric outweighs our autism needs.
And sometimes we failed there as well. That's our most frustrating is when we get them so late that by the time we are treating the autism, we may have the autism where we have the ABA under control, but then the psychiatric issues will engulf our children. autism successes. And then we failed in that part.
Despite autism becoming more prevalent and recognized over the past 30 years, it still remains relatively misunderstood. Society still struggles to grasp what autism is and how it affects individuals differently. What are some of the ongoing challenges this lack of understanding creates, particularly in terms of perception?
And how can these challenges be addressed to better support those with autism within your system? What kind of challenges have you been seeing?
Oh, gosh. Let's see. There's a new challenge every day. So we walk into court. We have so many children in the foster system. So there's a challenge there because we can't find homes for them. So if you have a child on the autism spectrum who's looking in the teen years and we can't find stable homes for them, It's very difficult to find appropriate treatment.
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Chapter 7: How does gender affect autism diagnosis in the court system?
So if you can't find appropriate and consistent treatment because they're being bounced from home to home, consistency is so important for them. So if we don't have consistency, how are we going to get them into adulthood? We have issues with appropriate IEPs. Some of them have FAS as well, so fetal alcohol syndrome.
So we're trying to get that with the fetal alcohol syndrome plus the comorbid psychiatric. We need to get parents on board. And we need consistency. And so we have that. Then, of course, we have all the various issues with you name it. We have everything going on. We have the late diagnoses. We don't have the appropriate diagnoses.
And you have to remember all the kids that I have now are the ones that are usually insurance didn't cover originally because insurance is a late new coming thing for these children. Now we have the kids that are being diagnosed at three and four, but insurance didn't come along until recently.
So these are children that would maybe have been diagnosed at three or four if insurance had been around at that time. We've lost 10 to 12 years of potentially early intervention that possibly would have allowed them to become independent, but now we have. So those are the issues that are, we're playing catch up. So it's very difficult. with all these different issues.
So we feel like we're playing catch up. And then of course, insurance doesn't cover everything. So we have insurance gaps as well. These are all the different factors that we're dealing with to play catch up and everything else. We feel like we're always behind the eight ball. Funding's always an issue. We're always having a lack of resources.
You name it, just pretty much the gamut, usual every day.
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Chapter 8: What are the ongoing challenges in understanding autism in society?
You are on the cutting edge of innovations that other court systems across the country haven't yet implemented. Are you still exploring new ideas and approaches to improve your system?
If so, what are some of the innovations you're considering or starting to work on, perhaps ones you're gradually introducing, that could expand and strengthen the system you already have and make it even better for the people you're serving?
Interesting. I feel like there's so much pressure on us for something that we created accidentally. We're always looking for new things. We try things and then it doesn't work. And then we try new things. We're here to help the children. And so we're constantly trying to figure out what's going to help the children more and what we can do for them.
And then we always look to the children, what's helped, what hasn't helped. What can we do more to help them and try to get them ready for adulthood and how they could be more independent and how we can get them reunited with their families? This was really about helping the families because really what you want is having a youth on the spectrum is chaotic for the families.
People don't understand is that these families are walking on shells. They don't know what to do. And they don't understand the chaos and the chaos for the other children. We're trying to just give back some kind of peace and normalcy and just get them ready for the future. They're so scared. And when they come into our court system, they don't know what to expect.
The last thing they're expecting us to offer a bag of chips. We're looking at reinforcers and they're like, excuse me, what? And we're like, hey, we're just trying to get him to stop cussing and we don't want to punch holes in the wall. We're willing to reinforce this. And they're like, what? You want us to bribe our kids? That's not what we're trying to do.
So we're trying to get them on board with this behavioral change and it's very hard to explain to them why we're doing it. And so we got to get the parents on board and they're like, we're not the ones that are in trouble, but no, we're trying to get you to understand what we're trying to do and get everyone in the same place. They're so used to this different way of doing things.
And so we have to completely change everyone's way of thinking.
How challenging is it to help parents and families shift their approach and mindset when adapting to these strategies?
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