Episode 1: No Child Born Bad

In the United States today, children as young as 10 can face adult charges, and there are 12-year-olds living in adult prisons. The first episode of the Before They Could Dream podcast lays the foundation for the series which sets out to illuminate a system most Americans are unaware of - exploring the historical context, key facts, and the challenging realities young people face when forced into a carceral system not built for them. The episode also explores the experience of the show’s host, Abd’Allah, who was sentenced to life without parole as a child growing up in Pennsylvania.

Themes may include physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with adult language.

A partnered production of The Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (AIFCS), The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY), Green Buzz Agency and our expert panelists. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Picture this. You're a kid again. Remember the mixture of elation and fear of riding a bike without training wheels for the very first time? Your hands sweaty, your heart racing. Feel air rushing around you as you finally take off. Remember the summers? Days that would just stretch on forever. Running home to beat the street lights before they come on. The fresh thing of scraping your knee on concrete, playing basketball, jumping rope, hanging out with your neighborhood friends. Remember adults asking, what do you want to be when you grow up? Hairdresser, a scientist, a musician. I want to be Michael Jackson. I want to be Michael Jordan. But what happens when that childhood wonder and innocence is interrupted? Stolen before you could even dream. Welcome to Before They Could Dream, a podcast where we explore the realities of youth justice in the United States, and I am your host, Abdullah Latif. Throughout this series, you will hear from adults who were once children who caused harm. They'll share their stories, their early lives, their hopes and dreams, the choices they made, and the consequences they continue to carry. These conversations are not meant to excuse harm, but to help us better understand it and how it happens. Out of care for our listeners, we want to advise that each episode of our podcast series is unvarnished and truthful. Therefore, topics may be difficult for some listeners. Themes may include physical, mental, sexual abuse, and suicide along with adult language. Children as young as 12 years old are currently living with adults in prison, not in juvenile facilities. These youth are forced to navigate a complex legal system, face terrifying living conditions, and are denied the opportunity to fully continue their education. My friend at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions, Ari Jones, invited the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth, where I currently serve as the Deputy Director, to be partners for Before They Could Dream. The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth is a national nonprofit that leads efforts to ban juvenile life without parole and other extreme sentences for children. The CFSY works to dismantle the racial disparities, social injustices, and residual harms caused by the legal system.

SPEAKER_04 3:05

Most people do not just wake up one day and choose to commit a crime. There are a series of steps, there are a series of mistakes, a series of societal failures that lead people to causing harm. And that is especially true for young people. I am Ariane Jones. I am Senior Program Manager for Justice at the Aspen Institute's Forum for Community Solutions. Prior to my time here, I was a licensed new practicing attorney. I investigated housing discrimination claims. I was a federal judicial law clerk. I worked on children's education issues. And then I served as senior policy advisor and was a sworn assistant state attorney. The Aspen Institute is an international nonprofit that was founded in 1949 with a mission to drive change through dialogue, leadership, and action in order to solve some of the world's most pressing issues. One of our visions is a future in which communities can self-determine their own lasting solutions to the social and economic problems they faced. Communities are best situated to know what they need to thrive and grow, and all they need is a little assistance. When you reduce someone to one moment, one decision, one tragic decision, what you do is deny them their humanity. The podcast is meant to give the folks who shared their stories the space to share the fullness of their story. So when I think about the fact that these are people who were all babies, I think about the dreams that were ripped from them. I think about the dreams that were altered because of the environment in which they finished coming of age. I think of this podcast as a way to hopefully expand people's mindsets and expand their beliefs of what justice is and can be, and to think about ways that we can move into a world in which we treat children with the compassion and the grace and the mercy that they are deserving of.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Throughout the series, you'll hear from my brothers and sisters from the Incarcerated Children's Advocacy Network, otherwise known as ICANN. We all share a common experience. We were incarcerated as children, and we were forced to navigate our childhoods behind prison walls along with the emotional weight of what might have been. We are each bound by a story of truth, redemption, and the willingness to change and thrive. Alongside these lived experiences, we've invited a group of experts to help ground the conversation and add critical context. We're joined by Josh Rovener of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization working to end mass incarceration in the United States. Dr. Robert Kinscher, Executive Director of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior. And by my dear friend Marcia Levitt, former Chief Legal Officer and Co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center. Together, they help spell out the data on youth incarceration research about brain development and policy and legal history to help understand not only how we got here, but where we must go next.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

My name is Dr. Robert Kinscherf. I'm the executive director of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is one of the teaching hospitals of the Harvard Medical School. The first phase in human development is in fetal development up to about 36 months. The brain is open architecture, and then it continues to develop and the child continues to learn, social learning, academic learning, learning about how the world works around them. But then there's a second phase in which the brain literally is reconstructing itself. That is triggered by the onset of puberty. It begins to develop from the back to the front. What this means is the second area of the brain to become more active is the midbrain. That includes the amygdala, which contributes to the systems for threat detection, fight, flight. It's the part of your brain that assigns emotional meaning or emotional valence to it in experience. It is constantly shifting and changing and responding to its environment. Also in the midbrain is the hippocampus, which is the part of your brain that allows you to learn. And that becomes more active before the cortex and prefrontal cortex, which means that for a period of time, there will be stronger emotionality and less ability to control that emotionality. By the time you get to 16, 17, 18, 19, and you see this spike in risk behaviors, a lot of those risk behaviors occur in what cognitive neuroscientists call hot cognition. They're with friends, they're psychophysiologically aroused, they feel like they have to make a decision right now, and there's kind of an immediacy of reward. And then at around 21, 22, 23, as that frontal lobe turns on, becomes more efficient and effective at regulating emotions, pausing decision making long enough to really think about it, all of those risk behaviors begin to sharply drop, which is why it's so important. Young people get access to positive youth development supports, and why young people who don't get positive youth development experiences are so much more likely to end up in high-risk situations in which they or other people can be severely injured or even killed.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

We are by far the leader in youth incarceration. There's no country that locks up a greater percentage of its young people or a greater percentage of its general population than we do as a country. I'm Josh Rovner, senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project. The Sentencing Project is a research and advocacy think tank dedicated to ending mass incarceration in this country and shrinking the footprint of the criminal and juvenile justice systems. The statistic that one will hear often is that we have 4% of the world's population, about 25% of the world's prisoners. It's also the case that we seem to be the only country that sentences young people to die in prison. It's worth noting that until 2005, this country was also willing to execute young people as well. So as soon as you think that the crime that a young person has been accused of is all that you need to know, it sends you to some very ugly places. There's a kid in Milwaukee who almost surely killed his mother. That child is ten years old. And the assumption that that's all that we need to know, that he committed a murder and therefore he needs to be sent away is a wrong idea. He is now twelve or thirteen years old. His case has not been resolved. But because of the fact that Wisconsin has made a decision that if you are over ten years old and have been accused of murder, Wisconsin will pretend that you are an adult, no matter what. And thus their Department of Juvenile Justice doesn't have anything to offer him any more than the community college has something to offer a six-year-old. The adult criminal justice system is not built for a 10-year-old.

SPEAKER_03 10:31

My name is Marcia Lovick, and I'm the co-founder of Juvenile Law Center. Juvenile Law Center is a public interest law firm that advocates for kids who are involved in both our justice and child welfare systems in this country. You know, the very earliest incarnation of the juvenile justice system in America was created in 1899 in Cook County, Illinois. The system operated largely behind closed doors. There was no formal due protest, kids who were not represented by lawyers, there was not even a prosecutor in the courtroom until the 1960s, when several cases came before the United States Supreme Court, which really required the legal system to sit up and take notice about what was happening behind those closed doors. And then a landmark case in 1967, in which it held that children were, in fact, people under the Constitution, and that they had significant constitutional rights such as the right to counsel, right to cross-examine witnesses, right to confront your witnesses, right to notice of what you're being charged with, those rights which had really not been applied to young people were now required as a matter of their constitutional rights under the U.S. Constitution. We kind of went along for the next 20 years or so. And of course, what happened in the 1990s, I think many people will remember was this is the era of the superpredator myth. The idea that as we entered the 21st century, as we turn the corner, we were going to be facing a generation of predator teens who would terrorize our communities.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

This was really targeted at young people of color, especially in cities. The idea that these were amoral young men with no sense of value of human life, and thus we were willing to throw those people away to sentence them to extremely long terms in prison, to in fact execute them occasionally. The article that coined the term superpredator was published in December of 1995 by John Di Ulio. John Di Ulio is a political scientist, he's not a criminologist, he put some numbers into a blender and came up with the theory that youth offending was going to get much worse unless we got a lot tougher and a lot more religious in this country. And I think that all of us can take great comfort in the fact that none of us will be as wrong as John Di Ulio was about that. Youth offending actually peaked in the year 1995. Violent offenses peaked a couple years before that, but the damage had really been done.

SPEAKER_03 12:51

Every single state in the country made it easier to try more children as adults. That had a profound consequence for the last 25 years and how we are thinking about justice for young people in this country.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

I'd like to tell you about my story. I was born and raised in Philadelphia. Both my mother and my father, they worked my father at a convenience store and a restaurant. And my mother was a registered nurse. And so the perception was that we were well off, kind of like the hookstables of the neighborhood. And I gotta admit it, I was a little bougie. What I enjoyed most and what I excelled at is playing sports. I was quite athletic. I could shoot a basketball really, really well. But because I didn't like the attention. I would just downplay my skills. I would start missing shots on purpose. And I know everybody got these stories about being Steph Curry and all of that, but I was him for real. I was so good because I spent so much time by myself shooting. So childhood was uneventful until I was about 12 years old. I was bicycling and had a horrible accident where I flipped over the handlebars and severed my upper lip. I was rushed to the hospital and had reconstructive surgery, which, in my opinion, was botched. The swelling in my upper lip just would not subside. And typical of young children, I was teased relentlessly. I would be called bubblish, I would be called platypus. Everybody in hearing distance would laugh. And I would just sit there and I remember even crying on a few occasions. This actually went on for quite some time. I felt betrayed by the adults in my life, whether it was on the school bus or in the classroom. What I always wonder about is why no adult intervened, particularly like the bus driver, the teacher. Or even my parents, it wasn't that it went unobserved. There just wasn't a response to it. As a result, around 13 years old, I started to go out into the neighborhood. And as I did, I would engage with people who aren't older, like 18 years old at the time, finish school, hanging out, playing cards, drinking beer, smoking reefer, and started hanging with those people who were significantly older simply because they didn't tease me. Even at that age, I knew part of that was rooted in usury in some ways. There would be times people would run out of cigarettes, and it's like, you finally got a store, go get some cigarettes. I would do that. I would be sneaking them, of course. I had no permission. Whereas sometimes I would be able to get money from him to help pay for whatever it was that we were trying to get. But again, they didn't tease me. There was a degree of acceptance that I was craving and yearning for and found in some older adults, even some of whom were not the most savory individuals. Some of those relationships grew. One individual in particular was like the older brother I wish I had. He was 18 years old, already had graduated, but he was sleeping in an abandoned car that he had made his makeshift home. And on one particular day after school, I just happened to be walking by. He asked me for a cigarette, and I took one cigarette out for me and just gave him the rest of the pack. And I would see him the next day and the next day, and I would allow him to come and shower and get something to eat, and we just connected. He was a funny guy, too. Major laugh, and we would introduce one another as brothers. As I became a little older and was maturing, my dream and aspiration was to be as my father was and go into the military. I made the decision looking for all of those morals, manners, character, and conduct that my parents tried to instill in me. And I'm seeing that the way that I'm living is not conducive to that. So I was moving into this space of maturity and responsibility. And so my trajectory was going opposite of what the relationship that me and this person had at the time. When I was 17, his situation had not changed. Being unhoused, and the night of July 9th, 1986, he asked for my assistance to help him get some money. We've engaged in retail theft before. So I'm thinking in those lines, but he said he would not tell me of the plan until it was time. We went out that evening and he took me to a residence that I had never been before and explained to me that he needed me to knock on the back door while he would slip in, and when the person came to the door, he would grab them from behind, a word rifle in their pockets and take the belongings and run. And essentially, that was what was carried out. It literally happened in maybe three seconds. And I heard a commotion, but I didn't stand around to witness. I just grabbed what was in his pockets and turned to flee. Not knowing that the individual was injured over a month later, from the night of the incident. I was going to be transported to Fort Mifflin Naval Base. And as I was saying goodbye to family members, police pulled up and came out of nowhere and just surrounded me and arrested me. They asked me, Do you know why you're being arrested? So I say no. They asked me, you know, what you did on the night of July 9th. And I hesitate for a minute. And then he says, you know, the man that you robbed. He died. In the same way and the same response that I have now is the same that I had then. That elderly gentleman was thrown to the floor and suffered a fractured femur. Went to the hospital to have that repair. Complications ensued that led to a bowel obstruction that ultimately required a second operation, and 18 days after which he died of cardiac arrest. That was inconceivable. The shame, the guilt, and like that's despicable, to be quite frank and quite honest. I had anger and resentment towards myself for participating in something that was so egregious and so counter to the way that I was raised. As much as I had participated in some illicit activities as a child, it was never harming someone. And I was transported to the county jail, but someone said to the arresting officers, He's a kid, you're not bringing him in here. He refused to process me. Said you're gonna have to get a court order because I'm not bringing him here. He's a kid. The police left, put me back in the car, and went to a district magistrate and somehow secured a court order remanding me to a county jail. And I was charged. I was charged with first degree murder. And first degree murder is when you willfully, deliberately, and intentionally extinguish someone's life. In Pennsylvania. Every degree of murder, first degree, second degree, or third degree murder, you have to be able to prove that the person also acted with malice. That is a problem for a child, especially in an unarmed snatch and run robbery where the victim was not stabbed, shot, bludgeon, or beaten to death, but died of heart attack 18 days later. The reality is that to charge me as an adult with first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and even third-degree murder is an overcharge. None of the elements of those offenses fit the reality of what happened that particular night on July 9th. Knowing that there's not another case in the country at that time where a child was charged with first-degree murder or an unarmed snatch and run robbery where the person died of a heart attack. Knowing that there were people who intentionally caused that level of harm and still were treated in the juvenile system. It's unheard of. And to hear what we always heard, if your child was not black and the victim was not white, if he wasn't from Philadelphia County, coming into Montgomery County, the outcome would have been different. That isn't happenstance. Those are deliberate choices that people chose to make. And whatever the consequences or the punishment, adults felt justified in doing what they did to a child. It was because of the first-degree murder charge that enabled them to ensure that I would be charged as an adult. And so the prosecutor, after he secured that I would be charged as an adult, offered the guilty plea to an involuntary manslaughter that would have resulted in a two to five year sentence. When my lawyer informed me about it, I initially accepted it. But my parents refused me from accepting it to understand their rationale. Knowing the circumstances of the case, knowing the person actually died of a heart attack, they didn't see me responsible for his death to begin with. And even a conviction in adult court for involuntary manslaughter, what that would mean for my future. It was never mentioned to my parents or to myself that I faced a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole until after I was convicted. That was the very first time that any of us heard. So I'm certain that their decision would have been different if they knew that a life sentence hung in the balance. And that's compounded by the trail at the person that I call brother, who pulled me into that situation to begin with. And he was savvy enough to negotiate a plea deal, and he ended up serving seven years as a 22-year-old, and me as a 17-year-old was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. I do not absolve myself of blame for being engaged and involved in activities that I knew was wrong. I also don't absolve the prosecutor of blame for overcharging and refusing to see me as a child and treating me accordingly. Had I been trialed as a juvenile as opposed to an adult, I would be held in the juvenile system until 21 years of age. Again, this wasn't negotiated from my defense attorney. The prosecutor offered a plea. Had my father not intervened, it would have worked. Overcharge, leverage that to induce a guilty plea, save the money and resources of going to trial and still have a conviction. That's the way what we call justice works in America. I'm a victim of Winnette backfires. The guilt, especially for my father, he was never the same afterwards. He died a few years later. And everyone who knew him knew it was because of guilt. The thought that you contributed to your son being away for the rest of his life. He just could never get over it. Just watched his health just deteriorate.

SPEAKER_03 27:30

Pennsylvania was ground zero for the perpetuation of racism that our justice system reflects. The young people who came out of the 90s in Philadelphia, many of them found themselves serving life without parole sentences. We had more incarcerated children serving life without parole sentences than any other state in the country by a large number. We had 525. Michigan, Louisiana, Florida had a little over 300. The comparison was not even close. We had over 320 who came out of Philadelphia who were serving life without parole sentences. It's really important to understand that this was all about race. This wasn't about white boys. This was about black and brown boys.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

We have a system in this country where youth of color, particularly black youth, are right now about two and a half times as likely to be arrested as their white peers. And that's not because of differences in behavior. What happens along the way is that white youth are given off-ramps that black youth are not. At the moment of arrest, the black youth are more likely to be detained and white youth are more likely to get to go home. As the case proceeds, white youth are more likely to get a more lenient sentence and black youth are more likely to get probation. For those who are getting more serious convictions, white youth are more likely to get probation and black youth are more likely to get locked up, and black youth are more likely to be sent to the adult system where they are subject to the longest sentences that are available in this country to someone under the age of 18. That's how you get from a place where black youth are about two and a half times as likely to be arrested, and then they're about five and a half times as likely to be incarcerated. It's because the disparity grows at each step of the process.

SPEAKER_03 29:13

One of the very unfortunate mantras that came out of the 1990s was this idea of adult time for adult karma. What that meant to legislators was that it didn't matter how old the person was. If you killed someone, you were no different than the 30, 40, 50-year-old who killed someone. And then you needed to be punished with the exact same level of severity that we would punish an adult who had committed the same crime. What the Mad meant in the courtroom was that it permitted prosecutors to dehumanize the young people in that courtroom, to diminish the really significant and relevant characteristics of them being children, to ignore the traumatic histories and life experiences that many of them walked into that courtroom with, to dispose of them in many respects, as individuals who were not worthy of compassion.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

I don't think there's words that can adequately capture what it means to be feeling like you're at the depth of hell. To say it was a horror movie is really to sugarcoat the reality of how harmful jail or prison is for any human being, but especially a child. With sexual overtours. And you just still have to note instinctively that you can't break down, you can't cry, you can't stumble, you have to show up like a man, even though you're feeling like a vulnerable little boy. That was day one. And it's not just the stories that you hear, it's what you witness. It's going to the yard for recreation and seeing people in their addiction. It's seeing people with mental disorders, sometimes fist fights, sometimes knife fights. It's the screams that you hear when you know that someone is being sexually assaulted. And it's usually the young people who are the most vulnerable to that level of violence. It's the smell of blood that you just never forget that puts a copper taste in your mouth. It's the sound of someone being hit in the head with a weight bar, a curl bar, and the sound of a metal smacking against someone's skull. It's the constant yelling and screaming and whistles blowing and orders being blurted out and doors slamming still on still. It's the routine of daily suffering. Realizing that there's no one to protect you but you. And when you have to live with that level of fear, that level of vigilance. By the time I was 25, I had gray hair. Just because of the stress of the environment. It's days turning into weeks and weeks turning into months, and then the next thing you know, one decade turns into the next, and then then into the next. And in the process, you lose all of your family, as I have lost all of my immediate family in the 30 years of my incarceration. Just to be subjected to that level of animalistic predatory environment is unimaginable for a child. But that's a reality in this country. Even as young as 12. How did I survive? I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it's through divine intervention. Because it's not a statement, it's a reality. That death was more appealing to me than life. I think about how determined I was that if these last rounds of appeals did not pan out, there's no need for me to be here anymore. The legal appeals process is just one more cog, one more spoke in that ever-turning wheel of harm and hopelessness and despair. That was grueling and expanded over decades. From the first appeal that was filed in 87 all the way up to 2017, no matter the merits, one denial after the next, one denial after the next, trial court, intermediary state court, superior court, supreme court, federal court. The feeling of detection that you feel when the court says no. Acknowledging that there's a strong constitutional claim and then still saying denial because of procedural issues, the message is that you just don't matter. If you don't matter as a person, your constitutional rights certainly don't matter. That is a hard burden to carry for 30 years. And then as I was going through my resentencing case, the surviving family was willing to meet with me. Every aspect of the system is geared towards separation between the person who has committed harm and the survivor family members. The court order itself is to have no contact or engagement with the survivor family member unless the survivor party themselves ask for some level of engagement. That is rare that that happens. But the value of it, when it does, is immeasurable. Originally, they were adamant that I deserved to spend the rest of my life in prison. And we had a conversation. What we shared was cathartic for both myself and for them. The essence of what they said is that they heard from me what they needed to hear over 30 years ago. And where they were in opposition to my release, that is not how they felt afterwards. And it wasn't that 30 years was enough. It was that through the conversation, the ideas of this monstrous guy who was unremorseful. Conversations undone all of those presumptions. All of the anger and the resentment that they have been harboring for 30 years evaporates, and there is human connection. And the pain doesn't go away, but is felt in a way that is conducive to healing as opposed to detriment. When you have lived through demonization, being stripped and deprived of the very essence of your humanity, and then to sit with the people who are most proximate to the harm that you caused and have them recognize your humanity. Nothing else matters in that moment. That meant the world to me. And then 2017, I finally won my appeal. I was released October 17th, 2017, and I was 48 years old. Being disappeared from society served absolutely no purpose whatsoever. But being able to reappear, to reimagine, to dream all of that darkness, all of the pain and the suffering and the real loss, there's also a thread of hopefulness that something beautiful can come out on the other side. And that too is part of my story. At the end of the day, as a human being, as a species, I think what we all need and what we all want is to belong, to be loved, to be seen, to be felt, and to be heard. The work that I do, we continue to press for it with hope. We continue to change the narrative. We are committed to doing justice differently. And all of that is rooted in uncompromised, vulnerable, bold, audacious truth-telling. And I think that this is what we're doing now. And this is what I think is going to get us to a better tomorrow. When I think about my own journey and the journeys of so many children in this country, I keep coming back to a single question we are rarely encouraged to ask. For decades, we've been told by the criminal legal system that punishment equals justice. But what if there's another way? What if, instead of relying on mass incarceration for children, we imagine something different.

SPEAKER_03 40:21

And the idea of trying children as adults is actually prohibited by the UN Convention, as are extreme sentences, such as the death penalty and life without parole.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Countries in Central Europe have defined a system of youth justice that involves understanding that young people are going to be coming home someday, giving them tools to reintegrate into their community, giving them job skills, addressing their mental health needs and their drug addictions or their anger management issues. It's very much about these are young people who are capable of doing great things with their lives. And I often feel as though our system is based on an idea of punishment. The reason that we send young people to adult jails is to scare the hell out of them and to coerce a guilty plea. We know that overwhelmingly cases in this country are resolved via plea bargains. You send a young person to an adult facility knowing how terrifying that is, knowing how likely they are to be abused, or at minimum knowing how they are afraid of the likelihood of being abused, and you are so much more likely to coerce that guilty plea out of a teenager by the fact that you sent them to an adult jail. Not because of public safety rationale, it's about getting a conviction later on down the line. The idea that we can predict at age 16 which lives are disposable is a preposterous construct. And the idea of a life without parole sentence says, I know exactly who you're going to be based on who you are, and we also know that that's not true. We know that's not true about our friends and families, we know it about ourselves, that we are not the person that we were in our high school years. Mandatory minimum structures or other long sentences issued to young people ignore what we all know to be true, which is that young people and all of us have a capacity to change.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

After the case of Miller v, Alabama in 2012, which held that life without possibility of parole is unconstitutional for persons under the age of 18. Many of these young people had the opportunity to go to a parole board to show that they should be released. And Tariqa Duftari Kapoor, a professor at Montclair State University, she followed 135 of these young people. These were 135 people who had committed homicides under the age of 18, who had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole. The worst of the worst, the ones that the world said could never be redeemed, never be changed. She followed them after their release three years, and out of that 135 juvenile lifers, longer term follow-up, the recidivism rate was two to four percent. The most serious crime that had been committed by these worst of the worst kids who kill was a purse snatching. The rest of them were living stable lives, reunited with their families, almost all of them working. It's an excellent example of the maturation of the human brain.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

The fact is that overwhelmingly, young people come out of our system worse than they came in. We can look at similarly situated young people, some of whom were diverted from court, and some of whom were given formal processing. That could include probation, that could include time in a youth facility. And the kids who are diverted from the system do better on basically every outcome that you would want to measure them on. You see higher re-offending for youth who were incarcerated, you see higher re-offending on the most serious charges, you see worse academic achievement and career achievement for youth who were incarcerated or otherwise formally processed. The system itself does not do what we all wish that it would do.

SPEAKER_03 43:55

I have never felt more concerned, more outraged. But therefore also more energized to confront the demons around us. Youth justice isn in America does not function for the people that it purports to serve. It breaks them. And I am more of the mindset now of blow it up and start over. I'm not sure that we can tinker any longer with the edges of our current system. I don't think we can paint the walls blue and pink. I don't think we can plant flowers on the outside. We need a fundamental transformative rethinking of how we want to hold children responsible in this country. We can do better. We can do differently.

SPEAKER_05 45:23

My name is Ayula Mitchell. I really work to help people understand their trauma and how it impacts how they show up in their day-to-day lives. I spent so many years on defense teams doing investigations, a mitigation specialist, litigation support, just a myriad of jobs within the criminal punishment system. And all that changed in 2009 when my family was impacted by violence. My oldest son suffered 17 gunshot wounds. He survived, but his friend was killed that night. Fifteen months later, my middle son was murdered. And then in 2013, my godson was killed by a drunk driver. Those three tragedies really changed how I look at life and how I look at both people who have suffered devastating loss as well as those responsible for that devastating loss. I know that this work is what I'm called to do. I have been in spaces where I've been able to build relationships with survivors and ask them what it is that they want, what is it that they need. And oftentimes, survivors want understanding of what happened and want to hear from the responsible party. And so restorative justice is an approach that focuses on healing. It focuses on understanding really each other. And it's not about being punitive exclusively. It's a very humanistic approach because now the person is not just the defendant. It's not just the state of whatever versus whoever. It is my family talking to you about the harm that you've caused. And it's a lot of work. It will end up a kumbaya moment, but it doesn't often start off like that. Oftentimes, when you heal, you're in touch with your own humanity, empathy, compassion, and even grace for themselves because when you become keenly aware of the harm that you've caused other people. One of the problems with the punishment system is there is little room for flexibility. We're not looking at every case as a person, as an individual who has a whole ass story of who they are and what their journey has been up until this point. But we have these Zacronian laws in place that people who don't know them other than what they read in a file are making a decision, but you're not talking to people like me who have journeyed with them and it's not working. Just like when you go to the doctor, they want to know your whole medical history. So that's going to help inform how they treat you now. And it's also going to help inform what not to do, right? Why wouldn't we take that approach with the punishment system? Why wouldn't we look at what went on in the 17-year-old's life? That now here we are. We have to continue to yell and scream about the importance of healing work. It's a journey. And I'm not suggesting it's easy. We don't need easy. We just need possible.

SPEAKER_02 48:40

Throughout this series, these conversations ask us to listen deeply, to stay present even when it's uncomfortable, and to imagine forms of justice that move beyond punishment. These conversations are not meant to excuse harm, but to help us better understand it and how it happens. To explore what accountability might look like if we centered healing and restoration from the very beginning. And for the possibility that honest storytelling can be a first step towards justice. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Before They Could Dream, brought to you by the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions in partnership with the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth and Green Buzz Agency. We are deeply grateful to all of our episode contributors for their courage and insights in helping us to tell these vital stories. If you are enjoying this podcast and the work we are doing to explore youth justice in the United States, please be sure to like and share this episode with others. It is one of the most powerful ways you can help us expand the conversation and reach a wider audience. You can also subscribe and listen to Before They Could Dream wherever you get your podcast. Be sure to check out our next episode as we continue to uncover the truth behind youth justice and incarceration and learn Donnell's story. Thank you for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of Before They Could Dream.