Paul Bass Photo
Judge Clarence Jones found a way to clue the public in on the drama he witnessed behind the closed doors of juvenile court — by changing the names of the guilty, and throwing in a mob hit.
Jones (pictured) does all that in a rollercoaster of a first novel called Triumph.
Jones is a former New Haven legal-aid and civil-rights lawyer who served 21 years as a state judge before retiring in 2010. He spent eight of those years presiding over juvenile court, in which he determined the fates of alleged child-sexual abuse victims and teenaged criminals outside of the public eye. (To protect minors’ and families identities, the state keeps juvenile-court proceedings private.)
Jones was moved by what he saw, especially the case of one baby almost strangled to death her mother. That scene, in a hospital, opens Jones’ novel, which is set in New Haven. The mother — in real life, and in the novel — suffered from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, which leads a parent to a harm a child or make the child appear sick in order to gain attention and sympathy.
As a judge, Jones had to decide whether to order the child placed in foster care. (He did.) He doesn’t know what happened to that child in real life. As a novelist, Jones spins an imagined life story for the child, now named Katie. Along the way we meet exploitative foster parents, heroic foster parents, ambitious attorneys, whistleblowers and cover-up bureaucrats, a corrupt prison-bound governor (sound familiar?), and the governor’s co-conspirator newspaper publisher. (Does that sound familiar?)
Then there’s the hit man who needs to keep a sleazy attorney out of trouble. (I won’t spoil the ending here.)
It turns out Judge Jones has his own compelling backstory, beginning with his childhood in Montgomery, Alabama. He came of age listening to Martin Luther King Jr. preach in town to support the Rosa Parks-spawned bus boycott that launched the national civil rights movement. He joined the Selma voting-rights marchers when they reached Montgomery, and marched with them several miles to the state Capitol.
Then he studied up on “the rules” of society in order to make his own lifelong contribution to social justice.
Judge Jones talked about all that on an episode of WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.” While acknowledging challenges facing the juvenile justice system — especially a shortage of lock-down hospital beds for teens in crisis — he offered a message of hope echoed in the pages of Triumph. Click on the above sound file to hear the program.