Episode 3: The Cavalry Walked Away

Meet Catherine, a young girl from Florida who loved to dance and light up a room—a stark contrast to the difficult journey her life would take. In this episode, we explore the profound impact of childhood abuse and uncover data and insights into the unfair realities stacked against young girls in America’s criminal justice system. We are joined by experts Yasmin Vafa, Dr. Robert Kinscherff, and Marsha Levick, who provide the critical legal and scientific context to help inform these topics.

Themes may include physical, mental, and sexual abuse and suicide 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_04 0:01

After being in darkness for so long, I love the light, the sun on my skin, and my feet in the sand. It's just, it's free. And that's what I wanted more than anything when I came home. I just wanted to live and be free.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Thank you for being with us today for another episode of Before They Could Dream. If this is your first time listening, our podcast series takes a deep look at the history, realities, and consequences of youth incarceration in the United States. I am your host, Abdullah Latif. The story you will hear today is personal and unique. But it also represents the stories of thousands of children in the United States today, many of whom suffer in silence. Today you will be hearing the story of Catherine, whose voice you heard at the top of this episode, along with exploring the critical elements of the impact of childhood abuse, plus data and insights on the realities faced by young girls in America. We'll be hearing from experts Yasmin Fafa, Dr. Robert Kinshurf, and Marsha Levitt to provide the data, science, and facts to further inform these topics. 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.

SPEAKER_04 1:46

I was 30 years old when I came home. As a child, I was the kid that would be the life of the party. I would be the one in the middle dancing with my thick curly hair and pigtails with the little clocker balls in it. I was an extrovert, but also very, very studious. I loved learning. I loved reading. I became really good at closing my eyes and pretending to go to a totally different world. As a form of escape for me, I became an expert at living a lie to make people think that I was okay. I was masking the pain for the trauma that was happening in my home. I am originally from Orlando, Florida. My family unit consisted of my dad, his girlfriend, and my brother. Me and my brother Curtis were best friends. We were only 11 months and 26 days apart, but I was very protective over him. We were bonded out of trauma. We survived together. I used to think it was a love story of how my mom and dad met. She's a 17-year-old runaway working at KFC, and she meets my dad, who's her knight in shine in armor. But he's 27. He's seen her vulnerable. He loved on her, and very soon she was pregnant with me. And then the abuse started. And it escalated to the point where she left because she thought he was gonna kill her. She did what she felt like she needed to do. She felt like our dad could offer us more financially. But she also knew he was abusive. Our first spankings, we were like nine or ten months. He didn't have patience or tolerance for kids and kids making kid mistakes. My dad made a joke one time. Somebody asked, did he spank his kids? And he's like, No, they don't get spankins, they get killings. What I thought was normal discipline, it was abuse in every sense of the word. It was severe abuse. There was a fear that we lived with inside of our house where it's like, don't make dad mad. When we got spankins, it was lashes on your back. I can tell you memories of my dad beating us so bad that we would nurse each other with peroxide and wipes. It wasn't like you did something wrong. My dad could be in a bad mood if we were making too much noise and he was sleeping. If we took one of the snack cakes and ate them. I remember times where we called him whoopins, right? We'd get a whooping. He would stop and take a break because he's tired from beating us. Drink water. Have you go get the ice water after he beat you? And he's gonna finish. And it was like he was unleashing this anger, this fury that he was withholding. When I'm in hindsight, I can say I can still love him and forgive because it was the only way he knew. He did what he thought was right based on the generational abuse that was in our family.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

If you have to constantly live in a combat zone, whether that combat zone is the apartment that you share with violent family members or as broad as your neighborhood. Brain science tells us that the brain is open architecture until about 36 or 38 months. The brain is wired to engage in what we would think of as attachment, attachment first to primary caregivers, and children thrive when the environment is nurturing and predictable and stable. This kind of basic sense of security, safety, ability to engage, learning how to communicate, learning to explore the world safely through play, those are all part of the solid foundation for a child. And the older and older that they get, the more and more solid that foundation gets, compare the outcome from that child to that of the child, and they are witnesses to family violence. One way of thinking about it is if you are hiking in the woods and you encounter a bear, your brain is wired to help you perceive and respond to the threat, but it isn't equipped to have you live with the bear or to be constantly surrounded by bears. At that point, it alters functioning in your amygdala. Which contributes to the systems for threat detection, fight, flight, assigns emotional meaning or emotional valence to an experience. Your amygdala actually grows larger and becomes hyper-reactive more than if you're in a safe environment. Your hippocampus shrinks because if you are in a world in which you are responding constantly to a sense of unpredictable, often immediate threat, it's not saving its energy up to help you learn geometry when you go to school.

SPEAKER_04 6:50

When we were growing up, extracurricular things were used as a weapon. My dad didn't let us participate in the way that we were raised. It sexualized everything. I was on the step team, loved it. He seen the shorts, he was like, absolutely not. You're not wearing those little shorts. I remember playing football and I was hiking the ball, and my dad, he was living, thinking that the only reason the boys wanted me to do it was so they could look at my butt and be on my butt, and it was turned into something sexual that resulted in my dad hitting me. We have sexualized adults that have had their trauma viewing kid things as sexual and then transferring that trauma to us. Or like my grandmother's words, fast. I played football. I'm fast. I'm gonna be pregnant by the time I'm 13 because I'm playing football. It made me feel dirty and ashamed and very mindful of how I presented myself around men. I felt like a slut. I felt like I was provocative, and then it started making me think that maybe it is me. Is something wrong with me? Am I fast? Am I seductive? Am I somehow making this happen? A boy slapped my butt on the school bus. My dad went in his closet, got a gun, and went to the boys' bus stop. Luckily, he was on the bus, but my dad, he was furious. That seems in stark contrast to the fact that his brother was sexually abusing me, and he didn't have that same reaction. Around four or five was when the abuse started with my dad's brother for the sexual abuse. He was released out of prison and came to stay with us. His prior conviction was for rape and sodomizing a 12-year-old girl. There was a game that my uncle would play where he would lay with me on the couch. There was a blanket over us. He would have my brother go look for something while he touched me to get him out of the room. I felt dirty. I felt ashamed. I was afraid. And he convinced me that my dad would think it was me seducing him. And I would get in trouble. My dad thought I was being sexually active. Said he was taking me to a gynecologist. I was so afraid that they would be able to examine me and see that I was being abused. My uncle, he told me to drink bleach. To not seem contaminated. When I got on the exam table, the doctor seen my response and he wouldn't do the exam. He told my dad, something's going on with her. This is not a natural response to an exam. He's like, Ain't nothing wrong with her. She needs her ass whooped. So all these signs were there that were just ignored.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

Across the United States, over 84% of girls behind bars had suffered previous instances of physical and sexual abuse. I'm Yasmin Waffa. I'm a human rights attorney and the co-founder and executive director of Rights for Girls. Rights for Girls is a national human rights organization that was really focused on vulnerable young women and girls in the criminal legal system as a direct result of the violence that they suffer with girls, and predominantly girls of color who've experienced criminalization here in the United States. We really began to see a pattern. There was this common narrative of having suffered some sort of abuse, whether it was sexual abuse in the home or familial abuse. And somehow that was the catalyst that led them to the criminal justice system or the juvenile justice system. And so this is where we eventually coined the term the abuse to prison pipeline. It is something that is happening all across the country where girls are essentially being denied their status as children. They're being denied their status as crime victims and are being punished. It's essentially a really perverse form of victim blaming.

SPEAKER_04 11:10

The first time I remember someone in authority reporting the abuse was a teacher seeing the bruises on my brother. That was the first time that I had a little bit of hope that the Calvary was coming. And we were both terrified. We knew he would get in trouble for bringing that kind of attention to the house. And so when they questioned my brother, he said that didn't hit him and nothing happened. I also remember there was like this acrobat show that was on. And my kind of a cousin in a way was at the house. We seen it on TV and we wanted to do it. He laid on his back and lifted me up in the air, and then I fell. And as I fell, my dad's girlfriend walked past and seen it and went and told my dad that we were humping each other. He went into a rage. And my dad beat me with a bell all day long. The neighbors heard the screaming. And he used to cut the radio up real loud so that it was like the windows are vibrating. They still heard it. And they called the cop. The cop comes to the house. My dad tells him that he caught me with a little boy. And the cop said, I would do the same thing if it was my daughter. The Calvary walked away. My dad took his break and proceeded to still be me because now he had permission. And it was like, I'm a kid. I was all of nine years old. Can you not see something wrong with this? There's been various family members accused of sexually abusing somebody in the family. I just recently found out from one of my cousins that one of my other uncles abused her. And when she told nobody did anything, what goes on in this house stays in this house. That's my dad's favorite line. And I've heard my grandmother say it. I've heard some of my cousins say their parents said it. There were 13, and all of them raised their kids the same way. What happens in this house stays in this house. And it was like, we don't talk about it. If we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. I was so angry. Nobody would have looked at me and thought that I was dealing with the things internally. It came out in my writing. That was like a therapy for me. You could see the hurt, the betrayal. You could read my fury and the lack of protection. There was one time I had run away from home and reported my uncle to a pastor from the church that I went. I was like, please, I can't go back. They were like, we have to make you go back. But they said they were gonna send someone. They told my dad the allegation that was made. They told him he shouldn't even be living here. He's a convicted pedophile. His probation officer came once a month. So they knew he was there with us. They allowed him to be there with us. But they said he wasn't allowed back in the house. My dad called my uncle and said, You have to listen to this shit your niece is telling these people. They just pretended it wasn't happening. And so we go to school and we're walking to school, and my brother tells me, I know you're not lying. Because he's been doing it to me. That's a different type of betrayal. Because I'm the big sister, right? I can deal with this. I'm gonna figure it out. But you are my baby. He also threw my dad's girlfriend into it and said both of them were abusing him. My dad had a thing with me and my brother, we weren't allowed in each other's room, but my uncle lived in his room. And I thought about all the times my brother would come sleep on my floor with no blanket, and I wake up and he'd be bald up, shivering. I'm like, what are you doing? You're gonna make dad kill us. Get out. And I would send him back in that room, not knowing. And I was like, he did it to my brother. That's when that journaling changed. I'm gonna get him out of this. And then I went to the shower one day, and my uncle, after he's been told not to come here anymore, walks in the house. My dad obviously knew he's coming. My dad's in the room with his girlfriend. He walks in the shower while I'm showering. He opens the shower curtain and proceeds to masturbate while I'm balled up in a corner, crying, just mortified, humiliated. And then he leaves some change like I'm some whore. And he walks out, and I made up my mind then that I am gonna kill everybody in this house because now everybody's responsible. He's not supposed to be here. It wasn't out of anger, it was desperation, is the word that I would use, because it was like, how do I get us out of this? And there didn't seem to be any other solution. It was the teacher's job to follow up. It was the probation officer's job to make sure he wasn't around minors. It was the doctor's job. Soon as he said, Hey, she needs help, you were supposed to report that to the authorities. You didn't. My dad can be very intimidating. But you have a responsibility.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

One of the most typical examples is running away. Many people don't realize that youth can be arrested for running away. You would think be fairly obvious that if a girl is repeatedly running away from her home, that perhaps something's going on. And so it shouldn't be surprising that when we talk to young girls who are frequent runners, they are experiencing oftentimes sexual abuse. These girls are taking their safety into their own hands. And instead of asking why they are running, we are punishing them and arresting them. Also, girls will courageously report experiencing abuse to law enforcement, and then they get punished with false reporting. So they're just not believed. There's a case study of a young woman. She reported being raped. Law enforcement interrogated her pretty aggressively, and essentially they just didn't believe her. She recanted, they charged her with false reporting, and her rapist went on to rape five more people.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Children being victimized. This can lead to an incredible sense of isolation and despair. And this can lead to a very strong sense that you have no one but yourself to rely upon. We know neurobiology of anxiety and depression alters the development of brain structures. And the kind of rage that people internalize can often become explosive or really focused rage.

SPEAKER_04 18:47

When our crime happened, me and Curtis were in seventh and eighth grade. We were in middle school. Let you know how deeply traumatized both of us were. I don't even think I picked a date. It was just a day that we weren't gonna wait till everybody was in the house because then one adult could stop it. So it was like as soon as they're separated, that day just happened to be January 5th, 1999, where my dad left. And his girlfriend was the only one home. And at the end, my brother wanted to back out because I think the reality of it. We were all down for it until the day it was supposed to happen. And he was like, I don't want to do this. I was like, oh, but we're doing it. I forced him to go along with something that he didn't want to do. And then it happened, and it's not like on TV. I remember when Curtis first shot the gun, my dad's girlfriend, she was still talking. I don't know if it was panic or what, that had him keep shooting. And then I took the gun and shot as well. There were shots everywhere on the back patio and the door, and we didn't know what we were doing. I remember trying to get a towel to wipe it up because I didn't want my dad to see it right when he walked in. And that's when I realized you can't just get a rag and wipe it up. It's not just blood, it's tissue. It was horrific. As we're waiting on my dad and his brother to come home, my brother was just freaking out. He had to get out of the house. And so we did. We went on the run. I don't know what we were thinking. We were just gonna run away, start our lives over. And we ended up sleeping in the woods. Of all the times in Florida, it was freezing and it was raining, and we have one flannel jacket. I have my brother in my arms, and I say, God, please let this be a dream. Let me wake up and we're in our room. And I woke up and I heard the detectives. There's canine dogs, there's helicopters, and I was like, this is real. That morning, I just had a feeling that they were getting ready to bring the dogs to that side of the woods. We ran across the street. There was like a foxhole, and we were in there, and I grabbed my brother's leg and I was like, don't move, because I could see that the top of his head was getting ready to come out of the hole, but he kept going. All I heard was freeze. I want to say there were like 30 police officers with guns trained on my brother, and it was something so innocent that he did. He turned around and said, Come on, Catherine, because he didn't want to be out there by himself. So I crawl out. But they were freaking out. They were like, Don't move. And I was like, Can you please just put the guns down? You're scaring him. I can remember what it felt like to be 13 years old, and I just gave up. I just knew this is where my life is, right now. Now and the outcome is not gonna be good. I remember being this kid with these two detectives and then reading me my rights, not really knowing what they mean. I felt overwhelmed. What I was thinking about the most is where's my brother? And even in the midst of that trauma, there was a protection where both of us were being interrogated saying, It wasn't him, it was me. And he saying it wasn't her, it was me. I can't remember how many hours and I wasn't there for a while, and they took me to booking. I walked in and I was on the news, and all the girls are sitting there looking at it. The officers looking at it. And I heard how wrong they got it, how derogatory they spoke about me. They were scrutinizing my facial expressions. They were saying, Me and my brother, we were jealous of my dad's girlfriend. And I was like, that's not what happened. I remember calling my grandmother and she asked me not to say anything about my uncle. She didn't want her son to go back to jail. And even then, while I'm facing prison, you are more concerned about the person who abused me than me. And I just thought of the audacity to tell me not to say anything. So now these people are assuming that I just did it for whatever reason. And then two private attorneys came in pro bono. They come in my cell, they talk to me, telling me that they're gonna help, that they're gonna defend me. Come to find out later, they weren't pro bono because they did a fundraiser that covered my attorney expenses. For what I don't know, because I didn't go to trial. It was a political thing. Colin Bine had just happened. We were the first national case of teens with guns, and it was like, we're gonna make you an example. When my crime happened, when searching my room, they found my journals. It was those journal entries that expressed all of that angst and emotion and turmoil that I was going through. They used them to charge me with premeditation and to charge me with first degree murder. Once you get a certain class of felony, they're able to make the decision to adjudicate you as an adult. Had I been charged as a juvenile, the maximum sentence I would have received would have been eight years because you can only be incarcerated up to your 21st birthday. That would be nine years for my brother. And you would be placed not in prison, but in a juvenile facility. To them, eight years wasn't enough. I deserved more than eight years for what I did, which means they had to transfer me to adult court. They told me that I would have to take a plea of 18 years or I would get life in prison. According to Florida law, when children are charged as adults, they now have adult rights. And so my parents had no say-so in any legal decisions. And so at 13, my signature was valid. I took the plea agreement. We both got 18 years followed by life probation. I was arrested in January. I took my plea agreement in October. I never had a trial. There was never any discussion in the court about the abuse that we had gone through. I never got to say why.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Young people are often interrogated by law enforcement without a parent being present, without a guardian being present. There is no uniform rule across the United States that you cannot interrogate a person under the age of 18 without them being represented. While we also have something called the Miranda Warnings, they advise adults who are suspected of having been involved in some criminal conduct of their rights, of their right to counsel, of their right to remain silent, of the fact that they don't have to answer law enforcement's questions if they don't want to. While young people are also entitled to those Miranda warnings, the problem is the vast majority of them don't understand them. If you ask a middle schooler, what do you think you have the right to remain silent means, sometimes they'll just say, Well, I think it means that if I don't speak, I'll get in trouble. Actually, the exact opposite of what it in fact means. You ask a young person, do you understand what it means that you have a right to a lawyer? And many of them will think, well, how do I know that that lawyer is actually going to protect me? Because they don't understand the concept of what that means. So even though we have this protection, it tends not to work very well.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

These young survivors are often charged with very serious penalties, oftentimes murder, and they are prosecuted as adults. These types of cases are incredibly disturbing if they have good representation, if the media and the public can rally around the case. Sometimes we can intervene and get it kicked down to a juvenile charge. But it is very difficult because typically we're talking about kids of color, typically we're talking about marginalized kids, and there isn't the same sympathetic lens for these children. This comes back down to adultification bias. This is the notion of girls of color and especially black girls being perceived by the public, by the criminal justice system, by the media as being hypersexualized, less innocent as their white peers. And often they're denied their status as children. They're portrayed as hardened criminals or perpetrators. And oftentimes, many cases don't allow that context of the abuse to be shared with the jury because it's deemed prejudicial to the deceased. And so all the jury would hear is that this child killed their parent, which any jury is gonna think, what a horrible child. How could they do that to their parent? I think all of us would agree that context is incredibly important. And so there are these types of cases around the country and such unjust, overly harsh punishments being levied against these child sex crime victims for essentially being forced to protect themselves when no one else in society would.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

I don't think at 13, when they were reading my sentence, I was really understanding the sentence. I was more worried about my brother. Everybody hears stories of what happens in prisons, and I was worried about him more than I was about me. And then this tells you just where the mindset's at. My brother asked, could he bring his video game with him to prison? It shows that he was thinking like a 12-year-old. I think it was kind of at that point that I realized the gravity of what I had done and the lives that I had impacted. There is a level of accountability for my actions because I did it. I'm the victim that is still breathing and has the opportunity for redemption and restoration and healing. The person whose life I took doesn't have that opportunity. So I would think the true victim is the one who's not living. But a second truth. No 13-year-old is logical or mature or thinks about what they're doing and the consequences that come behind that, let alone one whose growth emotionally and mentally was stunted because of the abuse that I was enduring. But I don't allow that to alleviate me from any accountability. I offer it for understanding of how we got to this place in hopes that if we understand how it got there, we can avoid it from happening again. I went to prison in October of 1999. I was 13. There's no blueprint for how to navigate prison. And so you're thrust into this world that's completely foreign. It has its own rules. And I had to learn that, and I had to learn it as a kid. When I first got arrested, there was like a relief. I wasn't going to be sexually abused anymore or physically abused. I'm in solitary confinement. I'm safe. It was liberating and terrifying at the same time. And then it was just terrifying when the reality of what exactly was going to be my future. When I was sent to prison, they put me in solitary confinement trying to figure out what to do with me. It was a really old prison, and then it was infested with roaches. I mean, big cockroaches, and I'm terrified. And I'll say, can you please keep my light on? Because once it got dark, that's when they came out. But some of the officers would cut it off just to terrorize me. And I'd be in there crying myself to sleep. While I was in confinement, we can talk from room to room. I had been like adopted into my prison family. They nicknamed me kid, and then I had cousins and aunties. I was like the surrogate kid for all the mothers that were separated from their kids, and for the most part were very protective of me. I used to sing to them every night to put everybody to sleep. It was a way to stay sane, to be seen in there, is to develop these relationships. But it wasn't the people I was incarcerated with that scared me. It was the correctional officers.

SPEAKER_03 31:24

In US prisons, it's a hostile environment. Correction officers, they have been taught and trained to be fearful of who the population is that they are overseeing. As a lawyer, there are things that I think about that we do to children that are so horrific if we think about them happening to our own children. Solitary confinement is one of them. Strip searching. We strip search children. We strip search them almost routinely in prison settings when they are transported from one place to another.

SPEAKER_04 32:18

I'll never forget the lady telling me to bend over and squat and cough. And I had done that in the county. But then she was like, spread your lips. I was like, I didn't understand what she was saying. And then when I understood, I was mortified. I was like, why would you want to do that to me? I felt so violated. You take someone that's been sexually abused and touched, and now it's being done legally. It was like that from then on. It went from the women humiliating to the men. I had to be 15 when the first officer touched me. I was in confinement. I went to the door to get my food tray and he grabbed my breast. And I was shocked, but I was so angry. And I was like, nobody's doing that to me again. And I told. The inspector sat me down and told me he knows the guy personally. He pays golf with him. If I wanted to pursue the complaint, they would protect me, quote unquote, and they would keep me in confinement. Mind you, I had been in solitary confinement for a very long time. And he said, however, if you withdraw your complaint, we'll release you from solitary confinement onto population. That was the time I realized that if you report any type of abuse from a staff, you would be punished for doing so. My brother told me that a game of basketball was sometimes life or death. You'd file somebody too hard, they shank you. In the women's prison, the guards was our biggest threat. When I was 15, there was a girl next door that hung herself. She had wrapped the sheet around her neck, tied it up to the vent, and then kicked the locker from under her feet. I'll never forget how long it took them to get there. When we were calling, saying, She's hanging. One of the officers through the intercom said, Let her hang, we're eating dinner. And that was imprinted in my mind to hear when they came in there and cut the sheet and she fell to the floor. They're trying to do CPR, and I was like, They really don't care about us. We're nothing to them. And the truth is, if you have an extreme sentence and you're charged as an adult, you're treated like an adult when you come into the system. While there are people that looked at me as one of their kids and wanted to protect me, you know, now placing me in there that people that were also pedophiles are sleeping next to me and they look at me as prey. The correctional officers. They didn't care that I was 15. They didn't care that I was a kid. I was just another inmate. Just as they would ask an adult to flash their breasts to get a roll of toilet paper. They expected the same thing out of a 15, 16-year-old girl. They didn't look at me as a kid when I went into a salary port and got beat up by four male officers. I wasn't a kid to them. I was another inmate. Someone that they looked at and deemed was less than human. These are mothers. These are grandmas. These are aunts. These are sisters. A male officer knows where every camera is inside of that facility. If you were called by one of those officers to go to the laundry room, you knew exactly what that meant. There was a blind spot inside of that laundry room where the male officers could sexually abuse the women. And I have never seen any CO, male or female, stand up and speak out against another CO. And it always wasn't just the laundry room. It could be while you're inside cleaning the kitchen. The male officer comes in there and calls you in the bathroom. And to have to live in that kind of fear all the time is not only unhealthy, but it creates the very animal that society is afraid of. Then it kind of became a challenge to them. Because who was gonna be my first? I was 16, 17 years old. They were betting. We're nothing to them. It was the people that worked there that treated us the way they did that had no regard for our humanity. They were the animals. They thrived on our fear. And the fact that I was 15 or 16 or 7 didn't make me exempt from it. I didn't come out and succeed because prison worked. I came out and thrived in spite of prison. It was the very people that they thought weren't worthy to be in society that helped raise me to the woman I am today, that built that character in me. Because while the officers acted like animals, the people who were incarcerated with me were the ones that taught me morals. They kept me out of trouble. I used to try to skip school and they would grab me by the ear and drag me back to class. Like real parents. It's because of them that I know how to love. I know how to love my kids unconditionally because I was the recipient of that. For the first time in my life, they taught me not to be consumed by my emotions. Release it. What's my next? Where am I going from here? Because there's no such thing as rock bottom. When you have a solid foundation to stand on, they gave me that foundation.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

The United States, out of all of the developed countries in the world, has the highest population of incarcerated children. So that is a gross indictment on our nation. We know that children who are tried as adults are already incredibly traumatized children. Data shows that 72% were emotionally abused, 70% were physically abused, 45% were sexually abused, 37% were trafficked, and 83% came from homes where one or both parents were absent. We know that they experience physical and sexual abuse, sometimes at the hands of other incarcerated people, but also at the hands of guards and staff. And so punishing them in this way, you essentially know that this is going to be part of the sentence, that you are basically fueling a cycle of victimization and harm and further system involvement. It is just cruelty on top of cruelty and punishment for the sake of punishment and fuels a vicious cycle of criminalization and victimization for that person. It comes down to asking ourselves: what is our goal as a society? Is it to punish? Is it retribution? Or is it to create young people that are going to then become productive, great members of our community and our society? And I think if it's the latter, then we really need to rethink our current policies and practices.

SPEAKER_04 39:06

I was released from prison on August 1st, 2015, and I was 30 years old. I remember thinking my first thought is the air smells different out here. Nothing separating that but barbed wire. And I just took a deep breath and I was like, this air is amazing. And I'm ready to get home, see my brother. He went home before me. I have the picture of when we got home and he hugged me for the first time. It was like my heart just got put back together. Like this empty void was just filled. That was my first day home. But that guilt from my brother, I cannot give him back a single day of those 16 years and nine months he did in prison. But I know I'm the reason he was there. I bullied him into doing it. It was because I was scared to do it by myself. I wanted him with me. It's so much easier in this healing journey to forgive the people that hurt me. It took a lot longer to forgive myself. There's a stunting of your growth that happens when you're raised in prison. There was a part of me that never grew up that froze at 13 when they blocked me away. And so there was a little kid in me that wanted to relive the childhood she lost. And there was also the 30-year-old me that wanted to get on with my adult life and figure things out on my own. I had to figure out who I was as a free woman. And that has been now a 10-year process. I joined the Incarcerated Children's Advocacy Network, better known as I Can, a month after I was released. And it's made up of people like me nationwide that went to prison as children, received extreme sentences, and are now home, that have done the work to offer meaningful opportunities for release for juvenile lifers. It gave me a sense of identity. There can be purpose in this madness. And then all of this pain can be used for something beautiful that doesn't just heal me but heals other people. I want to do this. And that's why I'm passionate about what I do. It's a part of my healing. I'm surrounded by people that defy the odds. We show what second chances look like and why we deserve them.

SPEAKER_03 41:43

The idea of preparing people for re-entry, not just on the day they leave prison, but on the day they enter prison is not something that the U.S. subscribes to. Over 90% of the people who are incarcerated come home. In the context of a prison system that doesn't prioritize education, that doesn't prioritize rehabilitation, and that doesn't prioritize re-entry beyond giving you a bus ticket when they open the doors and let you go. The fact that they came out whole, the fact that they navigated decades, many of them in prison, after being thrust into an environment that could not be more foreign or more hostile, that they educated themselves, they figured out how to not just survive but to live is to me just absolutely remarkable.

SPEAKER_02 42:37

These young people, and especially these child survivors, they are incredibly strong, incredibly tenacious, and given the chance, given just one adult that believes in them, that invests in them, can really make a huge impact.

SPEAKER_04 42:54

My single greatest accomplishment, the thing that I'm most proud of, it is the home that I created. I have four kids. They are everything that I dreamed of. They're what motivates me, what inspires me for advocacy to live, to fight everything that's come up against me just to keep going. They have been vital to my existence. What kids need more than anything is to know they're loved and accepted just as they are. My job as a mom is to give them the childhood that I wish I had. They deserve that. To break that generational curse of abuse. Because even in adulthood, that trauma seeped over into my relationships. I got into relationships that were the men were like my dad because that was love to me. And so I want my kids to break that generational curse so they know what it is to be loved with no conditions. When I see them smiling or running around the living room laughing, when my son comes up and just hugs me and kisses me and tells me how much he loves me or my daughter. Freely runs around the house with no idea of being self-conscious. I know it's job well done. I know I've done the right thing, and the pride that comes with that is beyond anything else that I can ever accomplish. And watching them just flourish just is the greatest joy of my life. They are my advocacy. I'm advocating for them to have a better future, and I have to set the foundation for that. So, yeah, it's been a beautiful experience.

SPEAKER_01 44:33

Catherine is not only succeeding as a wonderful and loving mother, she is a phenomenal human whose impact reaches far beyond her own family. I have the privilege of knowing Catherine personally and working alongside her every single day at the CFSY, and I see firsthand how deeply she contributes to the community. Her story is a clear and urgent reminder of where the system meant to protect children is falling short and of the lasting consequences of those failures, not just on individual lives, but on all of us. If we're really truly listening to the stories like Catherine's, we're also being called to do better and advocate for the rights of children everywhere. 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 Eddie's story. Thank you for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of Before They Could Dream.