Episode 4: Where Dandelions Grow

Eddie, a lover of the outdoors with dreams of playing professional football, takes us back to his childhood in Washington, D.C., during the height of the “superpredator” myth era. As fear-driven policies take hold, his story reveals the devastating impact of gun violence on communities of color and the isolation of youth placed in solitary confinement. This episode features expert analysis from Marsha Levick and Eduardo Bocanegra, adding critical context to Eddie’s lived experience. 

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_03 0:01

I was a child that loved to be in nature. That's what brings me joy. Simple things. Dandelions bring me joy. Because as a child, I remember I used to play with the dandelions with, you know, the little girl, put it under their chin and say, I see the sun under your chin. But as I got older, the dandelion became more important to me when I was in solitary. When I saw one growing out the crack in the concrete. And I said, you know, if this dandelion can grow out of this crack in this pavement, so can I.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Before They Could Dream. If you're new here, this podcast series explores the history, realities, and lasting impact 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. At the beginning of today's episode, you heard briefly from Eddie, whose story we'll be exploring today. We'll also be hearing from Marcia Levick, Josh Rovner, Dr. Robert Kinshurf, and Eduardo Bocanegra. As we examine the solitary confinement of youth, gun violence in the U.S., and other themes. 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, and sexual abuse along with adult language.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Coming up as a child, I was an outdoorsman. In the summertime, I'd be in the woods. I'm like, yeah, everything okay. And we're in the woods just catching little salamanders, snakes, and turtles and frogs, and just running around having fun. And I felt free as a child to be able to do those things. My name is Eddie Ellis. Well, Eddie B. Ellis Jr. I was born in 1975, Southeast Community Hospital here in Washington, D.C. To my mother, Sheila, and Eddie Sr. Unfortunately, around one and a half, two years old, my father was killed. He was shot, um, and he lost his life, shot in the back. Nobody really wanted to talk about it. Wrong place at the wrong time, you know, and um didn't remember much of him, but pictures, you know, conversations about my father, who my father was, and, you know, how much he meant to my family. My mother, I'll never forget, and she said, you know, when your father died, a piece of me died. And I didn't have the support I needed. She was 20 years old. And I still think to this day it affects my mom. You know, but she told me, I remember she crying, and I never wanted my mom to talk about it again because I didn't like to see my mom cry. Early on, I go over my father's mother's house, I'm always there with my cousins, you know, my grandparents, and my friend's father's there. And I'm like, man, I wish my father was here. You know, and in those spots I really start missing him because I saw other people's fathers there. Having my father could have changed everything for me, even though my mother was there for me every day. You know, even if it's the emotional part of me to seeing my father, hugging my father. I I that was taken away from me. My middle brother name was Eric. He looked to me for so much, even when I was a child. We rode our bikes, our skateboards, you know. I took him everywhere with me when I could. To be able to have a little brother, to be able to protect them, to play with him, to have fun with him. It meant so much. I fought a lot of their fights for them. I protected them. I loved for them being with me, taking them to football practice with me to the creek to catch snakes, to catch turtles. As a child, the only thing I wanted to do was just enjoy life. That didn't work out for me. Around the age of 10, 11, uh, one of my best friends was, you know, killed in his bed. And it changed my life. How can a child die like that? The crazy part about it was I was supposed to spend the night at his house. And when I came home from school, my mom was like, Where you going? I said, I'm going over to Marquise's house. She said, no, not today. That's we can wait another day. I'm like, Mom, you told me I can do it. No, not today, not today, huh? And so I told Marquise, I mean, I can't spend the night, you know, see you tomorrow. And I remember getting up that day. I was going out the front door, and the dog ran out the front door and ran the direction towards Marquise's house. And I chased the dog and got him. And I see um police, fire truck, and I see his mother on the porch. She's crying. And I don't see Marquise. I see um what I know now is a Gurney coming out the house with a sheet over top of it. And I see blood on the sheet. And his mother sees me, and I say, Where's Marquise? She said he's in a better place. And um, as a nine-year-old, a better place for me is outside playing. You know, so I was confused. I didn't understand. Losing him really uh done something to me emotionally. And then probably a year and a half, a year later, another one of my good friends, his grandmother, was shot in front of me. And this lady was like a staple in our community. And she fell literally, her head almost hit my feet. That's how close she was to me. So that's a lot of stuff I dealt with emotionally as a child.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

For the last several years, we have had well over 40,000 people shot, killed, whether it's through suicide or accidental death or mass shootings. It's been a growing epidemic issue here in the U.S. And not surprisingly and very unfortunately, it's also the leading cause for African Americans that are under the ages of 18, and second for Latino communities as well. I am Eddie Bocanegra. I currently serve as the interim executive director at the Noah's Arc Foundation. And for three and a half years, I was serving as a senior advisor at the office of the Attorney General for the Department of Justice in the United States, spearheading our community violence intervention initiative. About 60-70% of the violence in most cities here in the U.S., their violence is hyper-concentrated in specific areas because of the lack of opportunity or access to resources within those communities. The other interesting thing about that is that these are also communities that historically have been disinvested and are still dealing with the collateral consequences of bad policies. And so that's what a lot of our young people in our communities, like those in DC and Chicago and Houston and LA, are constantly grappling with.

SPEAKER_03 7:49

So while dealing with the depression behind my best friend being killed, the sadness, anger of my father, I'm also dealing with the shame of being diagnosed with dyslexia. Didn't know what it was. I just know that I saw things different. I filtered things different. Sometimes I see numbers backwards. And I couldn't explain why. I just felt the shame. And I didn't know how to explain that to my mom, my teacher. But one of my teachers realized it. And she brought it to my mom, and I was tested. And when I was told that, I just felt like I was less than. Which also fed into the anger that I was feeling because of my father and my best friend being shot. And so aggression and anger became emotions that became normalized. By the time I was 12, I probably had 15, 20 fights as a child that I didn't like, but that was the environment. I started not doing what I was supposed to do. Things started going downhill. So we moved to Silver Spring. I'm going to Westland Middle School. And it was a culture shock for me. Because at this time, I've never been in a school with any other kid but the black kids. So now I'm going to a school where there's a more diverse population of students. The environment was new. I felt like I didn't fit in. Everything just seemed just so different in the community, in the schools, than I had in DC. And from day one, I just felt like I was a target in the school with everything that was taking place. And I remember an assistant principal said to me, Don't bring the DC stuff here. And I didn't understand what she was saying. I had never been in trouble. So I didn't understand what she was talking about. My gym teacher, I left my gym clothes home. Because I normally took two book bags. One with my gym clothes and tennis shoes, one with my books. And I left my book bag rushing, and I had on jeans that day. And she said, I said, I can't run around like I want to run around. I have no jeans, I don't have the proper clothes. And she said, Buck, we, you gonna do what I asked you to do in here. And I said, Buck, we I exploded, went off, said some choice words that I met, and a principal came in, they call the police. And the police come, my mother come. And the students like, yeah, she was saying racist stuff to Eddie. And they couldn't never explain why she called me that. And that opened up a womb that I've never been exposed to. So I'm really despising the environment. And I just started acting out, getting into more fights, and um got kicked out of school. My mother told me, she said, look, you gotta go to job court or something. You're gonna do something with your life. Before I can go to job court, I was arrested. I'm 15 at the time. Me and two other guys. We in a cab. We were actually going to a movies, and the police stopped the cab, guns drawn. Cab driver jumped out, ran. Police come, get out, we're the gun, and we don't got no gun. So the police say, uh, with a drugs. So I said, we don't have no drugs. They search us, find no drugs, no gun on us. They open up the trunk and find a bag of drugs. Marijuana. So they were charged with attempted robbery and possibly drugs. They hold me in a juvenile facility in Oak Hill, Seatonall, in Law Maryland. And never been in handcuffs, never been in trouble. You know, I'm rebelling. I'm acting out, fighting down there. You know, uh, first time experiencing solitary confinement as a 15-year-old child. And I'm talking to the counselor, I'm like, man, we ain't even do this. And I remember the counselor said, Yeah, all y'all ain't do nothing. But that's why y'all here, because ain't none of y'all do nothing right. So I remember my mother used to say, if, you know, if it's something wrong, go to an adult. And I'm just like, damn, I'm going to all these adults, and none of them want to listen. Fingerprints come back, match none of us on the bag that was in the trunk. Our fingerprints was just on the car door. It really shattered my trust in the system, uh, made me not trust, you know, law enforcement even more. And being in that situation, you know, feeling like I couldn't reach out to anyone and say, hey, we didn't do this. We were actually going to the movies. You know, and none of the adults that we were told to talk to believed us. My life changed from there. I just started really, really getting in trouble more.

SPEAKER_05 12:41

My name is Dr. Robert Kinshurf. 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. When young people, children are being victimized, and they see no way out of their victimization because those that they try to share that victimization with either don't believe them or they don't do anything about it, or even worse, as sometimes happens, they're told that somehow they're bringing it on themselves, it's their fault, and they need to stop whatever it is they're doing so that this stops happening to them. This can lead to an incredible sense of isolation and despair, and a sense that others think you are not worth the effort to protect, and this can lead to a very strong sense that maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but in any event you have no one but yourself to rely upon.

SPEAKER_03 13:49

When I was 16 and released, I went and really started hanging around people who are really in the streets and smoking weed, I drink a beer, I go home, I hide stuff. Where you get them new shoes from? Where you get this from? My uncle bought it for me. And she knew my uncle would give me anything if he had it. So a lot of times she didn't question it. And I met a guy when I came home from Oak Hill. We became friends. And say his name, Bob. Me and Bob became friends. We hung out, we smoked weed, we sold drugs together. But I remember one day Bob had taken something from another drug dealer. Hey, man, I took this from this guy. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that's cool. I ain't care. That was a part of the streets. And two days later, me and Bob together, this guy pulled up and pulled a gun out. I'm like, oh, it's our time to be robbed now. He don't rob us now. I don't know, I don't, but I don't know this is the person that he took the stuff from. So I say, man, what's going on? I don't even know you. I mean, y'all better give me my stuff back. Or else. So my mind, I say, it's a lot of people out here. I gotta make a scene. Man, you what you gonna shoot me in front of all these people? And he fell for the trap and he left. So I'm talking to Bob, and I'm like, who was this guy? And he was like, that was the guy I took the stuff from. Two days later, I go to the cleaners to get my grandmother's stuff out of the cleaners. And someone else pulled up on me in the car. He had his arm resting on the window with the window rolled down with a gun. Like I told y'all, y'all better return my stuff. And he said what he said. And he left. And later that day, a friend of mine came to me. He said, Hey, man, this guy going right and said he's gonna kill you. So I sat down, smoked me a joint of weed, which was the wrong thing to do. Got paranoid. And only thing I'm thinking about is my father being shot and killed. I don't want to be shot and killed. I'm 16 years old. So I got me a gun. And I meet up with Bob, and Bob said, man, listen, I'm gonna give the guy a gun back, but I ain't gonna give him the gun that I took. I said, Well, that's on you. You wanna give him a gun, that's on you. And we went to a party, Columbia Road, Northwest, Washington, D.C. And me and Bob coming out the building, and three guys coming up the step. I don't recognize the guy who pulled the gun out until we get really close. And Bob said, hey man, I'm gonna give you a gun back. It ain't your gun, I'm gonna give you a gun. And Bob had the gun in the palm of his hand, none, non-threatening, no bullets in the gun. And the guy went to his waist and went to pull out a gun. I pulled out a gun and I fired the gun. And two of them fell. But also Bob, he fell as well. It happened so fast. I didn't know if Bob was shot. I didn't know if they were shot. I just saw them fall back. So I asked Bob, I said, You shot? He's like, no, I just, he just ducked down. And one of the guys that fell, he got up and ran. So we ran and went back to my girlfriend's apartment. And one of the guys' friends knocked on the door. So I tell my girlfriend them with her kids, I said, look, y'all go in the back bedroom. I'm getting ready to get up out of this apartment. So I'm gonna open up the door and whatever happened gonna happen between us. And they like, nah, don't do that. Unbeknownst to me, she called the police. Somebody's at my door with a gun. Three to five minutes later, police come, knock on the door. You mind if I step in and talk to you? She's like, yeah. So then the homicide detectives push past him, came in. She's like, hold up, I ain't say y'all can come in. I said he can come in. So they going through that. I'm sitting on the couch. And homicide detective said, Is your name Eric? I said, No. My name is Eddie. And the guy said, Well, he fit the description anyway. So they told me to stand up. And then I saw my girlfriend's brother come in. I'm like, why is he in? I mean, known to me, he was a police. So the homicide detective was talking to my girlfriend. They walk through the house, they found Bob in the back, laid down the bed, brung him out front. And the police asked my girlfriend, who am I to her? She said, That's my boyfriend. And her brother kept saying, No, no, no, no, he's not. No, he not. And she like, Yes, he is. And the police like, man, you be 26, he's 16, right? You get in trouble behind it. And she like, no, I mean, we ain't, we can. So she changed and saying what she's saying, but they take us out and take us to the homicide building. And the homicide detective come back in and say, Well, Bob said that you did this. I said, Well, if he said it, you believe what he you believe what he said then. And I remember the homicide detective saying, Okay, since you wanna be a smart ass, I'm gonna make sure you get Title 16. So that didn't mean anything to me because I didn't understand what he was saying. And what I realized later with Title 16 was being charged as an adult. And we were eventually charged as adults for murder. I was just confused, like, we 16, how can they do that? I was in the juvenile place, oh here. It was people down there 16, 17 years old, homicide cases. You gonna get us charged as adults. So I knew the guy who got shot, he lost his life. When I realized that he lost his life, it changed a piece of me. Because I never wanted to be in a situation where I harmed someone in that way. And I take full responsibility for everything that happened that day. But for a long time, I didn't know how to feel because he involved me in something I had nothing to do with. He poured a gun on me, he had a gun that day that a person took off of him. But I read a victim impact statement where his aunt, which was his caregiver, said to the judge, please have leniency on him. They were children, like my nephew. And I hope that they do something positive with the rest of their life if they ever get out. But reading that letter allowed me to have empathy for her, which in turn over the years allowed me to have empathy for what happened to him.

SPEAKER_04 20:15

I'm Josh Rovner, senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project. I work on a number of different issues that are all about shrinking the number of youth who touch the adult and juvenile justice systems. We draw a lot of lines in this country, right? Like you can't vote before you turn 18, you can't serve on a jury or sign a contract. Car rental companies will charge you a lot more to rent a car if they'll even rent you a car at all until you turn 25. What's interesting to me is we don't have any carve-outs for any of those things. We don't take a young person who gets an A in statistics class and reads the sports page every day and say, you know what, you know enough about sports and statistics that we're going to let you bet on sports. Because we understand that there are certain things that no matter what, we're not going to let young people do in this country. We've made an exception in the criminal justice system to pretend that there are certain things that a young person can do that allows us to say, we're going to charge you as if you're an adult. I don't use the phrase charge as an adult because they aren't an adult. They don't have the capacity of an adult brain. They don't have an adult conscience. They are teenagers that we're talking about. So I talk about being charged as if they're an adult and not being charged as an adult.

SPEAKER_03 21:32

Most of my trial, my ears were clogged, in a sense. What's happening? The fear. My life lashed in front of me. It's like things coming down on me, like the family. Will they be there? My little brother. I'ma leave him home. I can't be there for him. To support him. My mom, I let her down. Sitting there trying to absorb everything. One could look from the outside and say he didn't care. But not realizing that this 16-year-old child just trying to absorb what took place. The guilt, the shame that I was feeling, the dreams I had as a child, to play professional football, basketball. And it wasn't just about the sport. It was a freedom that I would have had doing what I loved and being able to help others. To be able to impact the children in my community. So all these things flashing in front of my face. And I remember the judge saying, I never really had an impact statement where a family asked to have leniency on someone. We were found guilty on manslaughter, which was the one of the lowest charges. And manslaughter still carried 30, 30 years, 35 years. The jury felt like if it wasn't for him taking the stuff, the situation would have never happened. So we gotta find him guilty. And so they found us guilty of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced us to uh 22 years. At the time now I'm 17, you saying 22 years. Man, I ain't even been on earth 22 years. I felt a range of emotions. Where I cried, I got sad, got frustrated, I'm hurt, not knowing what to expect, and I just told myself that you gotta do everything you gotta do to survive. Whatever it takes to protect yourself, you gotta be willing to do it. If I was sentenced as a juvenile in a juvenile system, my sentence could approximately have been two years or to juvenile life till I was 21 years old. But unfortunately, they uh title 16 me and uh charged me as an adult. I was locked up in 91 and then they sent us to uh private prisons. They really sold us. People don't like to say it like that, but it's the truth. If you take people from one place to another and get money for them to hold them, that's payment for people. So they really sold us off to the private prison industry. When I went in in 1991, we had adults in the union as well, downstairs. You know, we were able to come out with them at times, socialize with them. We even fought the adults at times. It was really just a rude awakening, um, for lack of a better word. But children are impressionable. So you can have seasoned people that's an adult that's been in prison, that know manipulating young people. But the reality is when you have a prison that's 99.9% of adults, and you had that 1%, that's children. What do you normally do? You normally take care and pay attention to the bigger population than the smaller one. But we're not really focused on what these children need. Because to them now, you're an adult, and we have to treat you as such. So, early on, I've I got in fights, got in trouble, and they thought as a system we should put you in solitary confinement to separate you from people. From the ages 16 to 18, I spent approximately a year, year and a half in solitary confinement. You have people who have spent hours in solitary who've commit suicide. That's how harmful, you know, those spaces are. When COVID-19 first started and they told us to lock in, most people couldn't even stay in their own house. Well, they had almost everything that they needed. So just imagine locking yourself in your bathroom and standing there for 10 years. Coming out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sometimes, when they choose to let you out. A therapist comes through, knock on the door, hey, how you doing? I'm okay. Okay, I see you next month. 90% of people they're not okay. Then if we say we ain't okay, you're gonna try to put us in one of them strip sales by yourself, no sheets, no nothing, because you told them you're depressed, and now they feel like you're a danger to yourself or others. You know, so these are the type of things. You're not getting no emotional support or psychological support while you're in them type of sales. And for those who want to talk, not gonna talk because it's gonna be misconstrued that you're a danger to yourself. So people hold it in. It's a very harmful and dehumanizing environment. It's very damaging. You're isolated from people, you're not able to really be around people, to really engage with people, to embrace people, and that's not a natural thing for humans.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

If you were aware that uh your neighbor had locked their child in their basement, a closet, for 24 hours and didn't let them come out, I think many of us might well call 911. We would be deeply concerned that that child was being abused. And that is exactly the term that we would use. We would call this child abuse. My name is Marcia Lovick, and I'm the chief legal officer and also a co-founder of Juvenile Law Center. What's been consistently remarkable to me is that we are nevertheless tolerant of children being placed in solitary confinement in correctional settings in our criminal legal system and our juvenile legal system, not for 24 hours, for days, for weeks, for months, and for years, and don't seem to get that this is the state committing child abuse. It's nothing less than that. The consequences, the trauma, the effect on that individual soul. The kind of deprivation that someone in that situation is experiencing, the isolation, the fear, the lack of human contact, the lack of human interaction, these are deprivations that are monumental.

SPEAKER_03 28:39

Over the years, I survived 10 years of solitary confinement. I use magazines and reading books as a way of escape. I can see it, and then I can visualize me being there. I just get the Washington Post, and when I get the Sunday's paper, you know, TV guide, homes and apartments for rent and sale. I used to shop in my mind. Now I'm gonna go get these groceries to try to mentally escape the physical confinement. And it helped me out. Then I started writing affirmations on paper. You can do better. Read some more today. You are a good person. Forgive yourself. I said write a whole lot of things that really, really helped me out. That's some of the reasons I feel like I survived outside my spirituality. So I uh kept fighting, even at times when I feel that I couldn't fight no more. But those residual effects from being in prison as a child up into an adult don't go away. My brother Eric was 10 when I went to jail. Emmanuel was born when I was in jail. When I went to prison. Seeing my brothers really broke me down because I always felt like I needed to be there for my brothers. And I can't. I couldn't be there for them. So I hated seeing allowing them to see me in prison. And I remember Emmanuel, when he was like five or six, I told him, I say, I'll be home and I'm gonna teach you how to ride a bike. Because at the moment, I just wanted to be a child. And I knew that if I could ride a bike with my brother, I could be free. And I couldn't do it. So it hurt me to be away from my brothers. I still feel guilty about the things that I did to remove myself from my family and to be the cause of someone losing their life. But I'm getting better at understanding that I can't change what happened. I acknowledge the harm that I've caused and the wrong that I've done. For the most part, I've moved on, but I don't want to forget because he was a person that deserved to live. He had family and friends who loved and cared about him like I did. And I never want to minimize what took place or what happened. When I was in ADX Supermax in Colorado in 05, I knew that my mandatory release date was in 2006. When they told me the week before Mr. Ellis be gonna prepare to get you out. And I remember the counselor said, Mr. Ellis, you happy? And I said, um, yeah. But I'm afraid. Me and my Sally sat there and made a meal. Toon fish, some noodles, some cheese, mixed it up, made a wrap, a cup of tang, and we just talked. And uh six o'clock in the morning they came and got me. And I'm putting my shoes on, my clothes. And I'm like, wow, I'm gonna go home. And then I started crying because it's a lot of friends I'm leaving behind at that time. I knew what would possibly die in jail. And uh I started feeling guilty, you know, about coming home. I'm still like building relationships with my brothers. We were away from each other for a long time, so they're adults now. All of us have kids. But for a long time, when I came home, I had to focus on finding myself. Now there's an adult in the free world when I was taken away when I was a kid. I thought that when a child makes a mistake, they went to a juvenile facility, hopefully be habilitated, and come home. But that wasn't the reality for me. Being charged as an adult, I'm being held in an adult prison. Some states charge children young as 12 years old as adults. But we are one of the only countries who do this to children. We went through the tough one crime error and saw that it don't work. We went through the super predator error. This professor created this report that black and brown children are predators. And come to find out years later, his report was a lie. But the damage already been done. This is a reality of this country, you know, where mass incarceration is another form of slavery. And people don't want to look at it that way, but it is.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

They are corporations that are benefiting their shareholders, private individuals, um, all through the means of locking up people.

SPEAKER_03 35:05

The work that I do now to fight the band life without parole for children, I feel free doing this work. And I'm in a situation where I feel honored that I'm able to do this work, to free people, to bring families back together, to support people who are coming home, to help people with different resources and opportunities. So for me, I didn't achieve my first goals or dreams in life. But a new one came and allowed me to be a part of something that's worth being a part of. A lot of times, many of us don't get the benefit of the doubt when we do go through court with the things that happened to us in our life. You know, but it's something that I'm gonna talk to my son about to be aware and be prepared as much as he can as he uh navigates this world. Especially as a little black boy, you know, that uh it's a lot of dangers around the corner that has nothing to do with you, but have more to do with a person or a system. You know, you had a lot of children, you know, who've been a survivors of molestation, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse. These are things that really harm children as they grow and go through life. And through my whole court case, most people don't see me as a survivor of anything. But my father was killed when I was a child. Now I'm a survivor of that. So let's create spaces for children can grow. Let's create educational opportunities for all children to be able to have everything that they need, to be the best child in person that they can be. I'm happy at 12, my son haven't had a fight. I don't want him to have to go through and experience the things that I've experienced. So we're trying to give him a life, all our kids, a life and a space where they can grow up and feel safe, as safe as they can, feel loved and supported, and being able to dream big. I just want to continue to use my life as a vessel of hope and to show people that people can change after making certain choices in their life, especially children. And my job now, as long as I got breath in my body, is to guide my baby in a direction to be the best human being that he can be, and a person that fights for what's right.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

Eddie is an example of profound resilience and potential that often resides in children who are given extreme sentences in the United States. In spite of the 10 years he spent in solitary confinement and the fact that he was in an adult prison from age 16 to 31, he has truly built a life of consequence and impact as a husband, a father, a community member. When I think of Eddie and the work we do together, I can tell you he is that dandelion growing out of the concrete and making the world brighter. 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 BeforeThey 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 April's story. You can also find all of our past episodes at BeforeTheyCohdream.org.