I will no longer work with organizations or agencies within the juvenile justice system. The system is too fundamentally oppressive, unfair, and toxic to ever achieve true power sharing with young people. I’d love to be proven wrong but even if that happens, it won’t be with help from me.
For someone who has dedicated the past 15 years of my career and life to improving outcomes for youth and families in the system, this has been a difficult and painful decision for me.
With a professional network that mirrors my dedication to juvenile justice reform, this is also a risky one.
Even the best people working on juvenile justice reform question the system’s capacity for achieving equity and reducing oppression of youth and families in the system. In my work so far, this has led to waiting for the right political moment to seek reforms, trying bite-sized pilots, or placing hopes on new leadership coming in the future. Any progress achieved has proven temporary and small, and has ultimately left the promise of a more equitable, fair, or just system unfulfilled.
I left direct policy reform work because I was frustrated with the glacial progress of governments I worked with. The example I often cite was a city adding a low level offense, trespassing in this example, to their existing diversion program after working with me for a year. Research and best practice would say this offense never should have resulted in arrest for a child or teen in the first place.
Later, I paused my consulting work because I was facing similar frustration. The primary driver of that frustration was working with a juvenile justice agency for three years with the only concrete result being a revised survey of youth and families. Of particular challenge in that agency was leaders who were lying to themselves and everyone else, including me, about their willingness to share power.
But I’ve come to realize that it’s not even really the leaders of the system keeping true youth-adult partnership from happening. It’s the nature of the system itself and won’t change until we build a liberatory, fundamentally fairer system of youth and family support.
Slow progress of system change is expected, and not every system or government I’ve worked with moved this slowly, so, as I continue to evaluate and revise my work, the problem that most concerns me isn’t the slow pace of these changes. The problem is that I never told any of these systems that they had failed. I spun everything into positive and constructive messages, relinquishing my crucial responsibility as the outsider voice to tell truth to power. When I acquiesced to their failure and self-delusion, I became part of the problem.
There are people who can and will continue the work with juvenile justice reform. For now, I’m going to focus my energy on more fundamentally joyful and free work with children, youth, and families.
If you or someone in your network is interested in exploring youth-adult partnership in after-school, education, arts, or social justice advocacy organizations with me, reach out!