That’s the voice Stacey Hayes heard when he was arrested for assault in an alleged drive-by shooting a few years ago. Peering at Hayes in court, Williams decided the 18-year-old was not too old to learn from an old-fashioned trip to the woodshed. “He needed to be gotten under control,” says the judge. So Williams asked Hayes’s mother, Helen, if she would allow him to paddle her son. She agreed. Williams then took Hayes into chambers and whipped him. “The judge did exactly what he should have done,” says Mrs. Hayes. Young Hayes is now working and studying for his high-school diploma (per Williams’s order). He calls the judge regularly to tell him about his progress.
Such calls are what Williams lives for. He grew up in a housing project and worked his way through Morehouse College and Howard law school and into the middle class. Many judges view the bench as a place for dispassionate discourse; Williams instead unabashedly sees himself as a red-hot advocate for self-help and personal responsibility. Salvation is always possible: he orders defendants who haven’t finished high school to get their equivalency degrees. (About 500 have done so in the four years Williams has been a judge.) He conditions probation for students on getting higher grades. And Williams specializes in requiring public acts of contrition and restitution. “Wrongs can’t be fully righted without those things,” says Williams.
A youth who broke into Chattanooga’s Rock Island Baptist Church was sentenced to shine the pews. “I told him if he wanted to get in the church that bad, we’d certainly make it available to him,” recalls Williams. And a prankster set off fire alarms at a busy hotel. Furious after squads of fire engines rushed to the scene, Williams ordered him to polish the department’s trucks. “You get retribution, and you get deterrence, because others see what happens when you break the law,” Williams points out. “You only get real deterrence when people know there’s a price to be paid.”
