- I am a youth advocate.
- I am a mentor.
- I am an Oakland native.
- I'm an attorney.
- I am formerly incarcerated.
- I am the father of two wonderful children.
- I'm a policy analyst.
- I am an example of redemption.
- I'm hoping for change.
I'm hoping that what I went through,
this generation won't go through.
(rhythmic drum music)
- Our mission is to advance justice
by protecting the rights of children and youth
and by improving the systems that impact their lives.
- I was involved in a system, the youth prison system,
that at the time had 11,000 kids
in a system designed to hold only 6,000 young people.
But tremendous amounts of violence, abuse, and neglect
at the hands of the state and the guards.
It made me much worse having gone there
than when I went in.
- Being in that frame of mind where you think
that you aren't worth anything,
that you have no hope for the future,
it's a dark place to be.
I just didn't value myself or my life at all
'cause I thought that, you know,
I had been told over and over that I wasn't going anywhere.
- A lot of kids these days,
they don't feel loved, so they put up a front.
So that's why they get in trouble a lot
and they want people to think that they're all big and bad.
But like once you really get to them,
you know, they're still kids and they need love too.
- There's essentially an abuse-to-prison pipeline
where we're criminalizing foster youth,
we're criminalizing girls who've experienced
sexual abuse and physical abuse.
And we need to disrupt that pipeline
and do everything we can to actually help people
instead of just continually pushing them away into prisons.
- People with imaginations
and ability to dream only goes so far.
And so we often say, you know,
"Well, we have to lock them up because nothing else works."
Well, the truth is we haven't tried very many other things.
And so unless we show and prove that these things can work,
people won't really take them as viable alternatives.
- The California Youth Justice Initiative
is really at the center of all
of the juvenile justice reforms taking place right now.
- We are working on legislation.
We're working on a communications campaign.
We're working on research and civic engagement
and community capacity building
to essentially change conditions on the ground
as well as policies coming from the capitol.
And we never do that without the participation
and leadership of directly impacted communities.
- Through the work we do, policy work,
we can impact thousands of kids at a time.
Hundreds of thousands of youth at a time.
- How healing it is to have been disempowered for so long
and then to take your power back and to speak
from your own experience about what matters to you.
- When they know that I share those experiences
of having an incarcerated parent,
of being incarcerated myself,
it allows 'em to let their guard down
and it allows them to reach them.
- My name's-- - So we bring young people
up to the capitol, we give them space
to tell their stories to legislators and to staffers,
to testify at hearings, write letters to the governor.
However they want to share their stories,
we give them the space to do so.
And we educate them about the policy process
here in California.
- We recognize that the policies
that we're putting into place,
the movements that we're trying to build,
the campaigns that we are putting together,
the people who are going to be most impacted
are the people on the ground.
It's gonna be the communities,
it's gonna be the families, and it's gonna be the youth.
- Our youth justice work is not just
some of our most important work,
it's a piece of the work that we've grown significantly
over the past three years because of the momentum
that we've generated here in California
and the moment for change being right now.
- When you think about where
is some of most progressive change
regarding juvenile justice happening,
we need to look no further than the Bay Area.
- Kids today are so much more engaged.
They are so much more informed about the issues.
Kids are so much more tolerant
than older generations have been.
Like I really think that kids, that youth
are really ready to take the reins and fight for themselves
in ways that we haven't seen before.
- This movement inspires me because it's my people.
It's people from the streets
or from the jail cells, things like that.
People who turn their pain and experience
into inspiration, into education, into power.
- [Frankie] Right now is the time to be really aggressive
and aspirational about what we expect out of our government,
out of our leaders, for our communities
and for our children and our future.
- [Man] We have to do more to acknowledge
not only the harm of incarceration,
but the promise that the communities possess
in being able to deal with our young people
in a much more responsible and healthy fashion.
So that's what this conversation here is about.
We're talking about.