Judge Joyce Warren Works to Help Children and Guide Families

In the almost four decades since Joyce Williams Warren has donned a judge's robe and launched her career of protecting the young and guiding their families, the world has not become more idyllic.

Children still hurt. Families remain living in squalor, babies continue to be born drug-addicted. Parents lose jobs, lose custody, and go to prison.

Yet the vigor with which she continues to plead for children to be protected, for their families to be lifted from poverty, and for sensitivity to be offered for traumas they have endured, is none diminished.

“These are all our children, and they need help,” Judge Warren asserts.

“You’ve got to have someone continually sounding the alarm. I want a court system, a child welfare system, an employment system, an educational system, and a community that would treat me the way I would want to be treated.”

Warren is now retired from Arkansas’ Sixth Judicial Circuit (serving Pulaski and Perry counties) and works as a judicial consultant. She continues to confront these challenges with a fantastic determination, despite their persistence.

“We don’t have the ideal world, but we need to seek perfection,” she says.

“The foundation of society is the home – the family. So you start there with the family, making sure parents have the resources they need, making sure parents get the healthcare, the housing, the food, and that they are healthy enough to do what they need to do to take care of themselves and their children. Every child deserves the best, but every child is not going to have access to the best. What we want is a minimum safety.”

And the tools with which to labor? The elements she turns to are timeless: Respect. Kindness. Sensitivity. Starting young. And relentless collaboration.

“It costs money, yes, but it costs much more money on the human side as well as the financial side when you wait,” she says. “We need more money poured into what families need, more resources, more substance abuse programs for mothers where they can be in treatment with their children. We need more re-entry programs that are going to help the families when parents have been to prison and have a child in foster care. We need to provide services early on.”

Judge Warren in her lifetime has begotten many firsts, being one of 10 Black students to integrate West Side Junior High School in 1961, then being the first Black female graduate of what is now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law, where she completed her Juris Doctor degree in 1976. She was the first Black female judge in Arkansas and the first Black law clerk for the Arkansas Supreme Court. Many other firsts of appointments and awards were to follow.

Her mother, grandmother, and her grandmother’s two sisters were school teachers.

“So I grew up knowing that you need to help families in every area, and in a holistic way,” she says. “People want to be treated with respect, have a decent wage, have decent and affordable housing. They want their children to be able to live to their full potential. They want a community that’s safe.”

She is frank and direct. She harps, reminds, and encourages. Her last year on the bench was the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and thus her most challenging, with some caseworkers and lawyers often crying due to stress and shortages. “I would tell them, ‘You are valued, you are loved, and it’s a pandemic. This work we do is hard, it’s traumatic and it has affected us in ways we do not know.’ I would sometimes leave my home office where I was working remotely, go into the family room, cry, and tell my husband I did not know if I could continue my job until my retirement date. Then I’d say my prayers at night, and in the morning I’d be ready to go again.”

Her devotion now lies with nonprofit ZERO TO THREE, providing babies and toddlers with a strong start to ensure they reach full potential. Healthy connections make healthy brains, the organization says. Safe Babies Court Teams are formed, featuring a community coordinator who assembles a team of resources based on a child’s needs – such as doctors, dentists, therapists, foster parents, schools, and agencies.

“Early is best. So with ZERO TO THREE, the beauty is you use the science of brain development. The studies that have been done – and one was done in Pulaski County during the time I presided over a Safe Babies Court Team – show that children who have been involved in Safe Babies Court Teams spend less time in foster care and have a lower rate of recurrence of abuse and neglect after they leave foster care. But even if we don’t start early, then, at whatever point we notice a family is in trouble, we need to offer all of our resources. Humans are of value. If we don’t take care of them we are throwing away human capital and creating more problems down the line. We know the problems. So if we know them, we need to be addressing them. We dismiss too many things.

“People often assume that parents aren’t meeting children’s needs because they don’t want to, but it’s critical to find out what traumas lurk behind any glaring shortcomings,” she says.

“You don’t know their backstory, and that’s why I was always so big on social histories. Everything that touches parents and babies should be done with a trauma-informed lens. I cannot tell you how many times we had some social workers and caseworkers who would say, ‘I think we’re helping these people too much; we’re going to make them dependent.’ Well, no. If a child needs to walk you’re going to help that child to walk. And when that child is able to walk then you let go, but you’re there in case the child needs help again. So if we help people through this process before court, and during court, then we owe them an opportunity for them to continue to move forward after court ends. It’s not enabling.”

Judge Warren’s days now afford her more moments for pleasantries, studying French and playing the piano, but the privations of which she is keenly aware leave her unable to step aside – or to cease outcry.

“I have a part to play. Everybody has a part to play. If one church adopts one family to help. If one business adopts a family to help. If one neighborhood adopts one family to help. You can help one family at a time. ‘I see you are in a bad situation; is there anything we can do for you?’ We’ve got to keep trying until we get it right!”