Weaving Life and Law: Inside/Outside Collaborations to Transform Youth Justice
I will co-author a publication for the advocacy community that explores how to ground legal advocacy for youth justice in the leadership and vision of community advocates. My co-authors are all visionary leaders who have turned their own experiences being incarcerated as children, or having family members incarcerated, into powerful advocacy for reform.
Section I provides an overview of the project and its goals.
Section II focuses on the history of the current legal system, including its roots in slavery and its role in persistent racial oppression. I co-authored this section with a colleague with a background in race and criminology.
Section III highlights the harms of the current system.
Section IV is the heart of the project, co-written with transformative leaders. It explores current community-led advocacy to transform the system, centering on my co-authors’ perspectives, with my primary role as a facilitator and transcriber of individual and group conversations. I also sought input on the draft from youth who are currently in or have just exited the justice system to ensure that our recommendations respond appropriately to their insights, and I am recognizing them as contributors to this section.
In Section V, I am developing concrete legal strategies building off the transformative vision of justice set forth by transformative leaders. This includes new approaches to the law, based in movement lawyering, as well as new legal theories that might help us to achieve our shared goals.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
The goal of the project is to address two interconnected problems: a harmful and discriminatory youth “justice” system, and legal strategies fail to account for the insights of transformational leaders.
Our “justice” system is rooted in cruel and discriminatory practices that date back to slavery and have been reinforced decade after decade, both through the structure of the legal system and through broader socio-economic structures that reinforce disparities. The result is a system that disproportionately pulls Black, Indigenous, and Latinx youth from their families, harms them physically and emotionally, interrupts their education, takes resources away from their communities, and silences their voices.
Legal advocacy to right this wrong too often ignores the voices of transformational leaders in the field who themselves have experienced the harms of the system; incorporating their wisdom and insights can lead to a transformative and restorative vision of justice.
Impact
The project is designed to contribute to a broader and widely-shared effort to develop a new youth justice system that focuses on repair and restoration instead of reinforcing disparities and harming Black, Latinx, and Indigenous youth and families. This system will protect childhood, respect youth bodies and voices, support families and communities, and create a safer world.
The project is also designed to contribute to the literature on movement lawyering. It seeks to explore and develop new approaches to root legal work in the expertise of those with system involvement even when the clients are not members of an organized movement.
I knew from the beginning about the brilliance of the transformative leaders who joined the conversation, and I was not disappointed. They helped clarify the problems with our current system, but more importantly, shaped a direction for advocacy going forward. One thing that really helped the conversation was the donation of time I got from Ink Factory to do visual note taking for the convening. Seeing our ideas represented visually was affirming and empowering and contributed to the richness of the discussion.
My first goal was to convene co-authors to discuss a shared vision of youth justice transformation. I met this goal, as evidenced by two powerful pieces of art from Ink Factory that illustrate the visionary conversations that took place.
My second objective was to ensure that youth currently or recently in the justice system would contribute to the publication. I accomplished this goal by inviting youth participants to our all-day convening with transformational justice leaders.
My third objective was to write a report weaving legal and community advocacy strategies for youth justice transformation. I have written four of the five sections of this report; the fifth is well underway.
