NCYL California Youth Justice Initiative

- 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.