Rancho Cielo founder John Phillips.© Nic Coury for USA TODAY

To read more of Elizabeth Weise's article, please click here, Jobs, not jail: A judge was sick of sending kids to prison, so he found a better way (msn.com).

SALINAS, Calif. – Superior Court Judge John Phillips remembers the day 23 years ago like it was yesterday.

A kid stood in his courtroom who’d committed a murder, a young man who was still angry and unrepentant. Then the boy’s grandmother entered.

"He broke down and started crying," said Phillips. "He was just a kid. And I’m thinking, 'I’m sending kids to prison for life.'"

Phillips, now 81, had seen it all in 13 years as a district attorney and then 21 as a judge. Shootings, thefts, assault. He handed out difficult sentences, but he was troubled by the stories of many children who went through his courtroom.

That day in 2000 he became determined to do something different, something that would give the children he saw in court a chance to overcome the poverty, dysfunction, trauma and pain so many of them had experienced. To help them find a new way in life, a path toward college or a good paying job.

Phillips remembered a broken down, overgrown site up in the hills at the far eastern end of Salinas, a California farm town. The Natividad Boys’ Ranch was a moldering wreck, a juvenile incarceration facility that had been left to slowly rot after it closed in 1982. Why, he thought, couldn’t it be turned into something to aid the children of Monterey County before they arrived at a police station or stood before a judge?