Zakiya Cherif of Philadelphia was at work when she received the call that her 17-year-old son, Zaphir Reddy, had been arrested. 

“I was scared. I was really scared. I feared for my son’s life,” Cherif said.

Cherif’s life quickly changed. On top of being heartbroken, she said the costs have been enormous because of legal fees and all the time she has taken off work for court dates and visitations. Before COVID-19, she was visiting him once a week, renting a car to drive 2 1/2 hours to the Loysville Youth Development Center in Loysville, Pennsylvania, where he has lived this past year. Cherif’s son was sentenced for two years in 2019 for a crime she didn’t want to discuss.

She also pays for extra food and toiletries.

“There is not enough food being given to the children,” Cherif said. “You have to order it through a system that they have set up with the prisons.”

Because of the enormity of the financial, emotional and psychological burdens on families of those incarcerated, small and large nonprofits around the country often step in to try to fill the voids, to help parents navigate the complicated justice system.

“What you see is a juvenile justice system that does not allow for family input or family participation. Very few juvenile justice systems work with families,” said Liz Ryan, president and CEO of Youth First Initiative, a national advocacy campaign to end the incarceration of youth and direct resources to community programs for youth.

Justice for Families reported in a study that 75% of families of kids in the juvenile justice system face financial barriers related to transportation and time. Fifty-one percent said their annual household income amounts to less than $25,000, while the national median income for families is twice that. 

Single parents like Cherif struggle more with only one household income to pay the price of incarceration. One study indicated that more juvenile offenders come from single-parent families, particularly mother-only families.

The Youth Art and Self Empowerment Project in Philadelphia, also known as YASP, is Cherif’s first support system. YASP staff members support mostly Black and brown families, helping parents understand the justice system legal jargon and processes, filling the courtroom with support during court dates, and helping their children reenter the community after incarceration.

 “They kept note and kept me focused and paid attention to things that I wouldn’t know to pay attention to,” Cherif said. “So that was my support.”

“And then my church family made sure they attended the trial dates,” Cherif said. “They kept my son in prayer, they checked on them. They visited him. They wrote him letters. And my family, too, they started to step up as well.”

Cherif began volunteering for the Philadelphia group after her son was incarcerated, as payback for the help it provided her. She became a member of YASP’s “youth participatory defense hub” when she realized how limited support there is for people who look like her son, an African-American male. 

“You feel like you failed to keep your child away from the legal system,” Cherif said.”… He’s already got several strikes against him and then to add the incarceration on top of it.”

She now sits with other mothers and fathers in court and tries to help them through a juvenile justice system that she said doesn’t work for many of them. She doesn’t want other moms or dads to go through what she did.

Across the country, In Wichita, Kansas, Tyler Williams is a founding member and a community organizer with Progeny, a youth/adult partnership focused on alternatives to youth imprisonment. Williams and others in this youth justice advocacy group also mentor kids and get them involved in juvenile justice reforms in the community. 

His passion for advocacy and reform grows from his own experiences. 

Starting at 13, he spent six years at a juvenile facility. He now works with youth at risk of getting in trouble with the law. He also helps those readjust after being in detention.

After his release at 19, he and other formerly incarcerated youth worked to build Progeny.

“We were really young, really just trying to make a change and a difference in our community, as youth who have been directly impacted by the system and have firsthand knowledge,” he said.

They saw problems that a lot of youth are facing due to what Williams describes as holes in the justice system.

“We wanted to be out there, try to make a change, give the youth a voice – to enact policies that are a lot more beneficial, not only to youth, but to also … the communities and victims as well,” Williams said.

Earlier this year, the advocacy group created a “COVID-19 call to action,” requesting that Kansas develop a better plan for keeping youth safe in juvenile detention facilities. They called for such things as halting new admissions, finding alternative living options, and providing immediate medical care to detained youth.

“While some jurisdictions have canceled visitation, we believe that this is not a time for youth to be separated from their support systems,” said Williams in July. “This will only exacerbate mental health issues and further isolate youth.”

Another Progeny effort is the “Invest Don’t Arrest” campaign, which is working to reimagine the juvenile justice system and reinvest in community alternatives.  Williams said one of Progeny’s goals is to close Kansas’s last youth prison, investing those funds into the community instead and keeping families whole rather than sending kids to detention facilities.

Ryan of Youth First Initiative said the best, most effective programs for young people across the country are ones that work with the whole family, not just with the young person.

“It’s really a question of are we willing to do the right thing here and keep kids together with their families? And invest in youth and their families.” Ryan said. 

Another organization, Youth Advocate Programs Inc., or YAP, a nonprofit with offices nationwide, uses a “wrap-around” model to support families impacted by their childrens’ incarcerations. 

Jeff Fleischer, president and CEO of YAP, explained that his organization receives a small portion of money that originally would have gone to incarcerating youths and instead invests in the families of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth. The group mentors, counsels and helps both kids and parents find jobs. 

“We’re the alternative to incarceration,” Fleischer said.

Resources are redirected from incarcerating young people and redirected to serving the entire family, Fleischer said. Advocates are assigned to a whole household and are available to provide support to not only the youth, but the parents and siblings as well. 

“They have a team of people now that are supporting them. They have an advocate that’s in their home for 10,15 hours a week,” Fleischer said.

Tyler Williams agrees the approach in reforming juvenile justice today has to go beyond the youth. It needs to be community-based, he and other nonprofit leaders say.

“In order to help heal not only yourself you got to heal the other people around you because it’s a community,” Williams said. “And if there’s one bad thing in the community, then we need to help fix it.”

Source for art: Artwork created by youth during a Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project workshop

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Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, there has been a wave of advocacy that has successfully removed police officers from public schools.

But Floyd’s murder did not start the movement. It added fuel to a fire that has burned for decades in communities of color. 

The story of school policing is one that is rooted in the fights for civil rights and education equality. 

In 1948, the Los Angeles School Police Department, which would go on to become the largest school police department in the nation, was created to combat violence in newly integrating schools, according to a 2017 ACLU report. Around the nation, as schools began to integrate, the notion prevailed that bringing Black students into white schools would also bring violence. 

Police presence grew in schools and so did its opposition. In 1971, Boston’s Black Student Federation staged a boycott of its public school system. Nearly half of the Black students in the city stayed home from school during the week of Feb. 8, according to a report in the Journal of Urban History. Among their demands was “the removal of police from schools and surrounding areas.”

Decades later, amid the uprising following Floyd’s murder, a handful of school districts have answered renewed calls to remove police from schools. Advocates say police escalate school discipline situations and their strict surveillance of communities of color disproportionately funnels those students into prisons, according to the ACLU and the Advancement Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. 

Despite their proliferation after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, there is no evidence that school resource officers actually make schools safer.  The Advancement Project identified 62 assaults by school police officers between 2009 and 2019.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the decision to end the school district’s decades-long contract with the local police department came just over a week after his death. In Oakland, the city voted to disband its school police department a month after his death, after falling one vote short in March.

But for both cities, there was a George Floyd before 2020. 

Four years earlier in a suburb of Minneapolis, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside of Minneapolis in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter. 

It was just the latest highly-publicized offense in the fraught relationship between police and the Black community. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while selling CDs  outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

“We don’t need to tie that history to learning environments in our schools and to also be developing fake narratives around what police actually mean when we are seeing differently every day what police mean to our communities and how that history continues to live on,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis.

Talks of eliminating school resource officers began in the Twin Cities following Castile’s murder, Eban said. 

Nearby, a Minneapolis suburb ended its contract with local police departments in 2017. After several incidents of excessive force, Intermediate District 287 in Plymouth, Minnesota got rid of its police officers and replaced them with student safety coaches, trained to de-escalate conflict and address students’ mental health needs.

The battle was ongoing. 

“We wouldn’t have gotten here, even with everything that happened with the murder of George Floyd, if we didn’t challenge the school district and the school board’s values a year earlier, when the Minneapolis police department had done other racist things,”  Eban said. 

In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project’s work zeroed in on removing police from schools in 2011 after the murder of Raheim Brown, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by an Oakland school police officer. It launched its Bettering Our School Systems (BOSS) Campaign.

After realizing how deeply embedded police were in their schools, the campaign launched efforts to reform the police in schools. Not only was there a school police department, but the schools also contracted a number of city police officers and school resource officers, said Manning.

“Police in schools were normalized,” said Ni’Keah Manning, the advocacy group’s program coordinator. “It was so normalized that it wasn’t even questioned.” 

The campaign started with small reforms, such as formalizing a complaint policy against officers to empower students and parents, and establishing a memorandum of understanding to limit the power the city’s police department had in schools. 

Despite their victories in reform, Manning said the goal was always complete abolition. 

“We knew in organizing that a system will only revert back to doing what it was designed to do. And there is no one to make sure they’re being held accountable,”  Manning said. 

The international uprising caused by Floyd’s murder was a catalyst that created a moment of opportunity,  Manning said.  

“It was divine timing,” she said. 

On June 24, the Oakland School Board voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department.

Now, in both cities, the next step is providing alternatives to police in schools. 

In Minneapolis, there had been research for at least 10 alternatives prior to the decision to end the contract with their police department, though none had been approved, according to Eban. 

Manning said the work of the next two to three years will be creating a safety plan that gives the community a seat at the table and focuses on restorative practices that emphasize repairing harm caused by wrongdoing, rather than punishment. 

Source art courtesy of Black Organizing Project

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One San Francisco area nonprofit helps incarcerated girls find the connection between their mind and body through an activity viewed by some as exclusive, privileged and lacking in diversity — yoga.    

Former nurse practitioner and founder of The Art of Yoga Project, Mary Lynn Fitton, saw a pattern of young female patients seeking help for conditions like substance abuse, anxiety and depression.  Issues she knew through her own practice, could be remedied by yoga.   

“I really felt that there was this gap,” Fitton said. “We had talk therapy, we had pharmaceuticals, and I felt like it needed to be so much more. It needs to be in the body.”

With the juvenile justice system at its focal point, The Art of Yoga Project brings movement and art to the underserved population of girls Fitton once helped in her healthcare career.  The group encourages youth to look inward, teaching self awareness, understanding and respect through an activity that may otherwise be out of reach due to race and socioeconomics.

“I wanted all the young women that I saw to have that same sense of coming home to their body to learn to have a positive self dialectic,” Fitton said, “to improve their relationship with themselves.”

The 15-year-old organization has grown into a team of 50 art, writing and yoga teachers, visiting 26 sites one to three times a week in the San Francisco Bay Area, including five juvenile facilities in three counties. 

Fitton said the project prides itself on sourcing teachers from within, creating pathways to jobs for formerly underserved youth through yoga teacher training scholarships.  It also provides workshops and programs to educate staff on how to work with at-risk youth. 

“We realized the importance of having teachers that represent the population that we serve,”  Fitton said. “Because of mass incarceration and because of social injustice, we have primarily Black and brown girls. So we strive to help our teachers match that population and body, body identity, body size, gender identity.”

Despite a body of research proving the universal mental and physical health benefits of the Southeast Asian tradition, yoga’s role in American society has become a phenomenon of racial exclusivity, largely reserved for the white, rich and privileged. 

“Seeing [The Art of Yoga Project] come to the shelter was one of the first times I saw a yoga teacher of color, so that was very affirming for me,” said Sadie D., now a teacher with the nonprofit. “I’m a Black woman and at the time, I felt very insecure about my interest in yoga because the spaces that are meant for it are predominantly white and [cost] a lot of money.  There’s a lot of class disparity there.”

Sadie, who asked that her last name not be used, was homeless in the Bay Area since about the second grade, before she was aware of what being homeless really meant, she said. The now 24-year-old was introduced to The Art of Yoga Project in 2013 when she attended a yoga class at one of its partner studios in Redwood City for her birthday. 

She later received a scholarship from the project to complete her yoga teacher training, and has been an instructor for the past five years. She said the opportunity came full circle for her when she taught her first class at the shelter she once lived in. 

“I was happy for the opportunity and really humbled, grateful that I could be in a space that I had been in and be a reflection for the youth. I really identify with them,” Sadie said.  “It didn’t feel like it was out of the question for them to want to pursue something like yoga.”

Though never incarcerated herself, Sadie said she knew the struggle to survive from her own childhood experiences, and while teaching in juvenile facilities, was overcome with emotion. 

“It felt a lot more vulnerable being in those spaces with them, in a good way though,” she said. “That was one of the first times I’ve cried from teaching yoga…They make an impact on you.”

At one of the San Mateo facilities partnering with the group in 2012, many youth reported prior abuse, neglect, dysfunctional family dynamics and addiction, said Danielle Arlanda Harris, a professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia and former research director for The Art of Yoga Project.

“They’d done some of these things that were horrible, but they hadn’t done them because they wanted to,” Harris said, “…they had done them because they had been so horrifically abused and were so vulnerable and were from such horrific backgrounds that I just couldn’t fathom.”

These occurrences are known as Adverse Childhood Experiences are apparent in an estimated 70-90% of juvenile offenders and if left untreated, can leave traumatic effects on a developing child. 

“Sometimes you don’t even want to be connected to your body,”  Sadie said.  

The Art of Yoga Project considers the perspective of traumatized youth, presenting each class as a set of choices to restore the youth’s sense of power over their body, even during vulnerable yoga postures or when their eyes are closed,  Harris said. 

“Downward dog and puppy pose and even child’s pose, it can be awfully triggering to a body that has experienced sexual trauma,” she said. 

Implementing a set of practices with an understanding for adverse childhood experiences in mind is what qualifies behavioral management and therapy programs as being trauma informed, according to a 2016 report by the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice.  

“When I got [to the facilities], I really realized it was so much more about social injustice and trauma,” Fitton said. “We quickly had to learn to be trauma informed before that word was even known, before people were using that term, before people even talked about trauma.”

Even with trauma informed practices, the positive impact of yoga on incarcerated girls is hard to quantify,  Harris said. 

“I was constantly being asked to provide evidence that the program was working right,”  Harris said. “The question was always… ‘How many downward dogs does it take to reduce recidivism?’…I wish I could tell you.”

Harris said she did see change in the girls’ demeanor.  On days that The Art of Yoga Project held a class, Harris noted fewer fights in the facilities, girls began to open up more in group settings and privately in written reflections.

“I had taken yoga for years…But these girls, they were in their bodies,”  Harris said. “They would talk about it and they’d write about it in the journals, about being a woman and thinking about it in ways I had totally taken for granted.”

To track the progression of education or a learned skill, Harris said researchers administer tests before and after to measure the difference.  Since yoga is an internalized practice, Harris adjusted her methods to a series of check-ins with youth throughout eight weeks of yoga.  

Instead of a drastic increase in positive internal dialogue or self image responses, Harris said participants were honest, authentic and reflective in their check-ins, as yoga encouraged their own mindfulness.

“We weren’t able to reach statistical significance,”  Harris said. “But that was the moment, I think, that I learned that qualitative research is where we need to be. Because answering all of these questions with numbers doesn’t tell the full story.”

Sadie said the impact of yoga has made on her life can be traced to one moment.

“I got overwhelmed with emotion that I couldn’t really explain, but it didn’t feel chaotic… It felt like I could move in it,”  Sadie said.  “It’s one of those things that feel so personal that it’s hard to even put into words why and how it matters.”

The instructor guided the class into a variation of a wide-legged forward fold — a posture that compresses the body at the hips and changes perspective by redirecting the gaze.  Sadie said in this posture, she felt in control of her life. 

Newly 18 and living in a shelter at the time, Sadie said she felt strength.

“That moment, I remember it,”  Sadie said. “After that I remember feeling my body more.  Feeling powerful in my own skin.  I could walk taller. I felt that connection, it’s like something I hadn’t realized I was missing.” 

On and off her mat, Sadie shares a common mission with The Art of Yoga Project. 

“Right now, my thought is that there is more of a need to provide yoga in the spaces who don’t have it,” she said. “People of color and bigger bodies.”

Source art courtesy of The Art of Yoga Project

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Erin Espinosa from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency conducted a webinar in April where she presented her research on pathways of the juvenile justice system.

The webinar, “Pathways Girls Take to and Through the Juvenile Justice System,” highlighted how mental health, trauma and gender all intertwine and affect the paths that juveniles take that may lead to their involvement in the juvenile justice system.

Espinosa discussed the differences in pathways girls take that increase their likelihood of involvement in the justice system versus boys, and said girls are detained for longer periods of time in comparison to boys.

Factors taken into account when analyzing a youth’s length of stay stemmed from ethnicity to mental health markers, she said in the webinar. Girls who have experienced trauma or received mental health treatment are likely to be incarcerated for longer periods of time, up to five days longer than boys, Espinosa said.

“Boys…none of that was a factor [trauma or mental health] — it was crime-related activity,” she said. “We keep boys locked up longer, essentially for criminogenic issues, and girls tend to stay longer for treatment issues.”

Aside from higher levels of traumatic experiences, girls of color additionally face higher rates of sexual abuse that contribute to their funneling within the system, Espinosa said in the webinar.

The National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice reported that four out of five girls in the juvenile system reported experiencing some form of sexual abuse in their adolescence. Additionally, 35% of Latina girls under 18 experienced sexual abuse during their childhoods, according to a 2013 study by San Diego State University scholars. 

The U.S. Department of Justice revealed in a report that minority youth make up half of the youth population in placement facilities. Black girls make up 34% of girls in placement facilities across the United States, while Hispanic girls account for 22%.

Victimization endured by girls can translate to an increased likelihood of their involvement within the justice system. Factors of victimization can include such as adultification and hypersexualization.

Girls of color, notably Black girls, are unprotected members of society who are often hypersexualized,” LaTasha DeLoach said.

DeLoach, a senior center coordinator in Iowa City, Iowa, said visibility of a body plays a role in the high levels of sexual abuse of Black women.

Upon further discussion of sexual assault and kidnapping rates, LaTasha noted how Native American kidnapping numbers “are terrible,” as many cases remain unreported, and thus remain unmentioned.

Black and Latina girls, in comparison to their White counterparts, are perceived to be less innocent and more adultlike, as highlighted in a report by The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. Further in the report, paradigms of Black femininity –– like Mammy and Sapphire –– are mentioned which emulate the idea of Blackness correlating with hypersexuality and aggression.

As mentioned in the report, the Mammy and Sapphire stereotypes originated during the period of slavery in the United States and portray Black women as “hypersexual” and “aggressive.”

The Sapphire paradigm reflects an angry and stubborn Black woman whereas the Mammy paradigm is that of a nurturing and loving mother-figure, as stated in the report.

Black girls are viewed as being adultlike in all stages of their childhood in comparison to White girls, as revealed in a study conducted by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Iliana Pujols is a 22-year-old Latina who has been involved in the juvenile justice system in West Haven, Connecticut, since she was in fifth grade.

Pujols was charged with her first offense when she was 11, and she kept committing a variety of crimes, she said.

“I ended up going into my 18th birthday with about nine assaults,” she said. “I had like larceny, conspiracy, all kinds of things.”

Pujolos was suspended during her sophomore year of high school and soon after attended an alternative school, which she graduated from and said it was a great experience.  

Pujols said from a young age she was expected to be mature and play the role of an adult. She was raised to sometimes “play the role of mom,” and on occasion act as the head of the household. 

Appearance is also a factor of adultification — individuals are perceived as older despite being of a younger age. Pujols said she was often viewed as an aggressor due to her build and mature demeanor.

“The immediate assumption was that I was the aggressor because I was necessarily a little bit bigger than the other girl,” she said. “They thought I was over 18, but I’ve always presented myself as a very mature person, and an older person. So nobody knew that I was like 16 years old at the time.”

Though a Latina –– from Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and Dominican descent –– Pujols said she was often perceived as a younger white woman, which she said sometimes “played in her favor” in juvenile court.

Pujols mentioned she was often put in a lot of “privileged predicaments” during her encounters with the justice system, citing living in West Haven and passing as a white girl as contributing factors to her privilege.

Though Pujols was able to divert some consequences for her actions, her friends were not necessarily as lucky as she was. Recalling an instance where she and her friends got in trouble, Pujols mentioned that she might “get off with a ticket,” whereas her friend “might end up locked up for the night.”

Pujols said it’s important to approach incarcerated girls on a relational level. She recalled when she first began working at the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance and spoke to an incarcerated girl who positively spoke about her experience with a counselor.

“One session in specific stood out to me when I had this conversation with this young lady, and she was like, I like my program because, like, I can talk to my counselor about sex and losing my virginity and having my period and what to use and stuff like that”  Pujols said.

Young girls are likely to go through changes while they are detained, ranging from hormonal changes to transitioning into a young woman.

“One of the things that we’ve heard come up a lot is the need for not only role models and credible messengers,” Pujols said, “but more specifically when it comes to females needing that emotional connection, no matter where you go.”

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What started as four people on Facebook, is now an advocacy group of nearly 4,000, including 1,300 current inmates of Texas detention facilities. Together, they’re fighting for a new state law to allow for earlier parole consideration of prisoners who were given extreme sentences as juvenile offenders.  

The legislation, known as “second look” parole reform, allows those serving a longer-term prison sentence, usually upwards of 40 years, to have their cases reevaluated after serving 20 years or half of their sentence, whichever is shorter. The Parole Board would also take into account evidence of rehabilitation and growth during a defined period. 

The earlier and more meaningful parole review could lessen the number of years left behind bars, providing them an opportunity to rebuild their lives outside of prison.

Several states, such as Nevada, Washington, North Dakota, and Virginia, allow a parole hearing to happen after a maximum of 20 years in prison. The opportunity to have a parole hearing sooner can help encourage young offenders to put effort towards rehabilitation and good behavior while in prison, according to a 2020 Second Look report by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition (TCJC).

“Second Look is a product of policy changes that were unnecessarily harsh,” said Lindsey Linder, senior policy attorney at TCJC.

Leaders from Epicenter Ministries, a faith-based nonprofit in Austin, Texas, focused on assisting individuals and families of those who are serving extreme sentences in adult prisons for crimes they committed as kids, are preparing to testify in front of the Texas Legislature during the 2021 session to pass a Second Look bill in Texas. 

The bill, if passed and signed into state law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, would grant inmates the ability to be reviewed for parole after 20 years, or half their sentence — whichever is shorter — if they are serving a 40 year or more sentence for a crime committed as a juvenile.

Deanna Luprete, founding executive director of Epicenter Ministries, and others have attempted to get the Second Look bill passed during the past two Texas legislative sessions, which occur every other year. 

Linder said past attempts to get a Second Look bill passed in Texas failed due to reasons such as political climate, excess of other bills on the legislative agenda and a lack of public knowledge about extreme sentencing.

“We’ve just learned more and more about this issue and how deep the whole of injustice is, with regard to juvenile extreme sentencing,” Linder said. “As we’ve learned more about how deep this really goes, we’ve been able to educate people and really change hearts and minds around this issue.”

Luprete says she feels confident the bill will pass in the upcoming session. 

“This is our third rodeo,” Luprete said. “We know what we have to do and it’s going to be incredibly difficult.”

Luprete served as a prison minister in Texas in 2017, where she met three inmates, all of whom were serving extreme sentences after being incarcerated for high profile crimes under the age of 18. One of them, Luprete said, won’t be released from prison until he was 91 years old. 

“That’s the moment my heart was broken,” Luprete said. “From there, I just dug in, you know, and started looking into the laws.”

Luprete started Epicenter as a private Facebook group with herself, her daughter and two other members, but it started to gain traction among families who had incarcerated relatives. The group grew and had 100 members during the 2017 legislative session when it introduced a Second Look bill, Senate Bill 556 and House Bill 1274.

“We’re just asking for them to get a second look.” Leah Metzler, Epicenter chief of staff, said.  “Not a second chance, a second look.”

States were required to eliminate mandatory life without parole sentences for youth up to age 18 after a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning in 2005 — such as the Miller v. Alabama decision in 2012, which stated that all youth “regardless of their crimes” could be rehabilitated and mature out of their illegal behaviors, making life without parole an unconstitutional sentence for a juvenile.

Harsher and longer sentencing became more prominent in the 1980s, during the rise of the “superpredator” era, when both state and federal lawmakers put into place harsher sentences for convicted juveniles, according to the TCJC report.

Despite the national elimination of life sentences for kids, Texas still has the harshest parole eligibility of all states. The state requires that youth, who previously would have received a life sentence, to instead serve at least 40 years before being eligible to even be considered for parole review. 

“They call it Texas tough, you know, tough on crime,” Luprete said.

The TCJC report also states that over 2,000 people in Texas are currently serving life sentences for a crime that was committed when they were younger than 18. At least 600 of those people won’t be eligible for parole until they’ve served 40 years.

“Keeping kids in prison until they die is not making us any safer,” Metzler said. “It’s a drain on us. All of these guys, they’re hitting 40, 42 years old. They are completely rehabilitated.”

Supporters of Second Look policies across the nation argue that sentencing a minor to a life sentence with little eligibility for parole is unethical, as research shows that significant brain development typically occurs in a person’s late teens through mid-20s, affecting their maturity, judgment and decision-making abilities, according to The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.

The first Second Look bill was filed in Texas in 2015, which would have allowed parole eligibility to happen earlier — at 25 years instead of 40 — for a person convicted of a capital felony for an offense committed when they were younger than 18 years old but it never received a hearing. 

During the next legislative session, which occurs every two years in Texas, a similar bill was favorably voted out of committee after having 15 people testify in favor and no one in opposition, but the bill was never put on the House calendar before the session ended. 

Edwin Debrow, media relations coordinator for Epicenter, was incarcerated at age 12 and served a 28-year prison sentence in Texas. He’ll be on parole until 2031, totaling a 40-year sentence, but a Second Look bill in the state might have allowed him to be released sooner.

“This is what I’ve been through,” Debrow said. “If I could reach one person and change one person’s life, I feel like I can make a difference. So I want to change as many young people’s lives as I can.”

Luprete mentors about a dozen “second lookers” involved with Epicenter, like Edwin, almost every week to check in with their progress in reentering society.

Debrow will serve as a spokesperson for Epicenter at the Texas Capitol in Austin during the 2021 session.

“We can’t forget those kids,” Debrow said. “Children are really more than their worst mistake. People should believe that.”

Source photo courtesy of Epicenter Ministries

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Organizations across the U.S. are working to put an end to gun violence in schools that puts students and educators at risk in a place they –– and their families –– expect them to be safe. 

Since 1970, 43% of all school shootings were committed by a teen under 18. Nearly half of the shooters were students who attended the school, and almost two-thirds of the shootings were targeted attacks at a specific student or teacher, according to data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. 

With such a large percentage of school shootings being committed by students, a number of nonprofit organizations have been created to identify students before they become school shooters, preventing their entry into the juvenile or adult justice systems.

Some programs are aimed at increasing school security measures. Others focus on increasing knowledge of potential warning signs and creating a culture of inclusivity at schools to ensure a student never feels the need to pick up a gun and put other students’ lives –– or their own –– in danger. 

Rob Wilcox, deputy director of policy and strategy at Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit created in the merger of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said school shooters often show signs beforehand that concern those around them.

“And more often than not, they told somebody ahead of time about what they were going to do,” Wilcox said. “These are all opportunities for intervention.” 

Everytown for Gun Safety endorsed an evidence-based threat assessment program, where students and the surrounding communities can submit their concerns about warning signs, behaviors or conversations they feel could put a school or an individual at risk for harm. The nonprofit also advocates for and educates on secure gun storage at homes. 

“Every parent in a school community should know that if there are guns in their home, they need to be stored securely, both for the health and safety of their family at home, but also for the entire school community,” Wilcox said.

Over three-quarters of student school shooters acquired the gun or guns used in an attack from their own home or that of a relative, according to a National Threat Assessment Center report.

Aimee Thunberg, communications director at Sandy Hook Promise, founded in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, said attention to mental health is the most important aspect of preventing gun violence.

“It’s upstream violence prevention,” Thunberg said. “It empowers the community –– be it the youth, the educators, parents, whoever –– empowers people to be able to do something about it.” 

The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six teachers at the school. 

Since its creation, Sandy Hook Promise has worked to put an end to gun violence in schools by presenting school programs on how to create an inclusive culture, identify at-risk behaviors in students and intervene. 

“We create and deliver in a way that schools can customize for their own context,” Thunberg said.

Sandy Hook Promise’s “Know the Signs” programs consist of different lesson plans, activities and games aimed to engage students of all ages in conversation, inform them on how to recognize the warning signs of violence and encourage them to take action by telling a trusted adult. 

“The goal is you do the initial training and then it just becomes part of the culture, so you’re doing different things to reinforce it,” Thunberg said.

Over 14,000 schools across the country have utilized the organization’s programs that are offered for free, and there are nearly 3,000 established Students Against Violence Everywhere Promise Clubs. 

“Just because they have the reporting mechanism doesn’t automatically mean they’re going to know what to report,” Thunberg said. “You have to teach them that and then continue to teach them that over and over again.”

Other organizations are working to prevent gun violence by focusing on improving the security of schools.

Robert Jordan, founder of Protecting Our Students, a nonprofit founded in February 2020, worked with the Department of Education to create an in-depth site assessment that evaluates the safety of a school by looking at the layout of the building and all the ways a gun could get inside. The nonprofit then provides funding to implement a plan to improve school security. 

“We want to build what’s called a reference point,” Jordan said. “And the reference point would be schools that currently have an outstanding score relative to gun prevention at schools.”

The  goal is to standardize security practices at schools across the country to eliminate the possibility of a gun making it inside. 

While organizations fighting against gun violence use several different approaches, they all agree on one thing: it needs to end.

“By the time a student has reached the point where they brought a gun to school to harm themselves or their classmates, we have failed and it is way too late,” Wilcox said. “Our job is to create climates and environments where these incidents don’t happen.”

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Each of Richard Ross’s photographs starts with a knock on a kid’s cell door and an introduction to his work. Then he hands them his camera for them to take a picture. 

“You trust them with it,” he said.

By giving his camera to the children he photographs, Ross invites them to become participants in the image that they create together. For the past 15 years, Ross has traveled the country on a mission to document children and teens in solitary confinement. 

His award-winning series “Juvenile In Justice” captures the images of more than 1,000 children who are incarcerated at over 300 U.S. detention centers. His photos illustrate the ways in which U.S. detention centers manage kids through detainment, treatment and punishment. For Ross, the use of solitary confinement is an indicator of a failing juvenile justice system.

“I’m not really the activist,” Ross said. “But if you’re pushing legislation or policy, I have the images. I have the audio. I have the library to help you get your message out.”

Despite a lack of data, anecdotal reports from advocates across the country suggest the practice of solitary confinement is far too common throughout the juvenile justice system. Ross said he believes the data exist in a “cold fluorescent light” and that the images and voices of the kids are essential to building empathy and enacting change. 

Ross challenges his viewers to ask themselves how they would react if they came across a kid locked in a closet. For him, the answer should be easy. 

“You would immediately take them out and comfort them,” he said. “You would try and find out who put the kid in the closet and what their thinking was. You [would] try to hold those people accountable. Then you would also try to do something to explain to the adult in the room, [that] you can’t do that to a kid, it’s way too damaging.”

People often ask Ross how he was able to photograph inside detention facilities. At first, he said, access was easy. 

“I started going around to institutions, and I would go at least once a week,” he said. But when his photos became the catalyst for juvenile justice reform, “doors started closing in front of me,” Ross said.

In his photo series, Ross invites viewers to empathetically visualize the conditions of confinement that children endure. For advocates like Jennifer Lutz, an attorney for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy in Washington, D.C., and campaign coordinator for Stop Solitary for Kids, his images are a “game-changing tool.”  

“Photographs and images from inside juvenile jails and prisons undeniably show that these youth are not frightening offenders,” Lutz said. “Instead, they are children, no different from yours or mine. These images capture the inhumane, bleak, and overly-correctional conditions inside some juvenile facilities –– places where no child should be.” 

Across the country, more than one-third of children behind bars have spent time in solitary confinement, according to a report by the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. A typical stay in isolation can range anywhere from a few hours to six months, leaving many with physical, psychological and often developmental damage. 

As a photographer and professor of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ross said he thinks of himself as a conduit for the voices of these incarcerated children.

“Each kid’s image and voice is compelling to me,” he said. “And it’s my job to pass it over to you, with the lightest touch possible and just let that kid tell the story.”

Ross’s photography is supported through prestigious grants from philanthropists Pam and Brook Smith, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also was awarded Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships. 

The power of his images is their ability to illustrate the “inhumanity” of the justice system, said Laurie Garduque, criminal justice director of the MacArthur Foundation. 

“The system causes damage and harm, and it shouldn’t be this way,” Garduque said. “Behind the images is a narrative that compels people to ask why is the system this way and how can we change it. Richard isn’t issuing a call for help but action.”

Ross said his journey documenting children in the justice system began when his book  “Architecture of Authority” brought him to an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas. It was here when he saw six detained kids in cells, with their backs turned toward him, that he realized the focus of his work was about to transform.  

“I was sitting there talking to them and I was the only way they were going to have a voice,” he said. “And then it really became a mission.”

Over the course of his 15-year journey documenting America’s isolated youth, Ross’s work, lauded by advocacy groups, filmmakers, writers, academics and policymakers, has helped to push legislative reform for juvenile justice –– notably exhibiting in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, along with state and local courthouses.

For Ross, his images are not for the traditional art student, but instead for the people who are most affected.

“My ideal viewer is the kid, to make sure that they know they’re valued,” he said. “The kid that’s been released, to make sure that their experience in this world has been noticed, honored and responded to. And the people that are going to change that policy for the future.”

Laura Abrams, a University of California, Los Angeles social welfare professor, used one of Ross’s images for the cover of her 2013 book, “Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C.” 

“Youth imprisonment in this country is extremely diverse,” Abrams said, pointing to Ross’s collection as one that portrays the vast range of facilities. 

The kinds of juvenile facilities are as varied as the kids they detain. Some are old orphanages, some transitioned from mental health facilities into juvenile holding centers or treatment centers, some are group homes and some are locked facilities, Abrams said.

“A lot of people have an image of youth imprisonment as just being in a cell, [and] that fits some facilities, but a lot look more like dormitory style,” Abrams said.

In over 35 states, Ross has captured images of hundreds of facilities and isolation rooms. His photography showcases the vast range of detention types and the architecture behind them, while drawing the viewer into the blurred and obscured faces of kids in isolation.

Seeing these graphic images can and should be shocking, Lutz said.

“Much like [how] images of the murder of George Floyd have sparked a new awareness of racial violence and oppression, images of incarcerated youth speak to our shared humanity,” Lutz said. “We cannot look away. Ross and other artists’ work is a critical driver of reform, empowering advocates to compel justice professionals, judges, legislators, and other stakeholders to confront these realities and the urgent need for change.”

Driven by conditions children in detention facilities are subjected to, Ross sees no end for this project, calling it a moral imperative. 

“How do you walk away from it?” he said. “I can’t figure out how it stops unless it’s handing it off to another generation that’s going to say, ‘I’m going to make a difference, not in all these kids, but in some of them.’”

Lead source photo courtesy of Richard Ross

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Raised by a teen mother, becoming a teen mother herself, and with a brother in prison, statistically, Charese Jamison narrowly missed the juvenile justice system.  

Instead, she became one of an estimated 10 million girls helped by National Crittenton, an 137-year-old girls-centered nonprofit organization, now based in Portland, Oregon.

Jamison, a resident of Utah, was helped by her local Crittenton agency in West Virginia as a teenager.  

Now, Jamison travels across the nation, speaking to members of Congress, donors and at-risk girls navigating the same childhood challenges she did, advocating on behalf of National Crittenton, the group that helped her change course nearly three decades ago. 

Founded in 1883, National Crittenton was the first group to open its doors to young women pushed to the edges of society, providing a safe place to sleep, community and emotional support.  National Crittenton still wrestles against the risk factors — sex trafficking, domestic violence and poverty — that drove girls into the juvenile justice system more than a century ago, and still do today, but now without federal funding to fuel its cause. 

“I thought we’d be further along in terms of social justice, but we’re really not,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, the organization’s president.  

Girls account for nearly 30% of youth in the juvenile justice system, the majority of whom are arrested for nonviolent crimes  – theft, simple assault and disorderly conduct, according to a 2015 study by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 

In 2013, National Crittenton worked alongside various states to address the needs of incarcerated girls with the hope of keeping them out of the juvenile justice system altogether. The nonprofit introduced trauma programs, conducted research and provided facility recommendations to keep girls out of the juvenile justice system, until its government funding was suddenly cut off under the new administration in 2017. 

National Crittenton now operates on private grants to maintain its progress, Pai-Espinosa said.  While the nonprofit once advised facilities directly, it now helps other nonprofits with similar philosophies on how to continue what it started.  In its advocacy, National Crittenton looks to its 31 independently-run  local agencies across the country, encouraging young women in their own communities to share stories and spur widespread change for girls.  

“There was a growing recognition that the girls [states saw] in the juvenile justice system, by and large, pose little risk to public safety and really are victims as much as anything else,” Pai-Espinosa said.

Sexually abused at a young age, Jamison, now 43, said she was severely depressed by age 10, attempted suicide at age 13, pregnant at 16, and a few months later, was homeless.  This was the moment a music teacher at her high school showed her love, kindness and pointed her to the Crittenton agency in West Virginia. 

“I could have been one of those kids that went to juvenile detention.”

Charese Jamison, now an advocate for at-risk girls. (Photo courtesy of Charese Jamison)

“If Crittenton had not come into my life, I could have been one of those kids that went to juvenile detention for minor crimes,” Jamison said.  “And if I would have wound up in detention, my kid would have probably wound up in the foster care system, and you can just paint the picture of what would have been.”

Though the number of adolescents in the juvenile justice system has decreased in the past two decades, the percentage of incarcerated girls has been steadily rising, according to Girls in the Juvenile Justice System, a 2015 report from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.  The findings indicate that young women in the system often experience multiple forms of childhood trauma including exploitation and abuse prior to their arrest, which Pai-Espinosa said has increased among girls and at a younger age. 

A 2015 survey conducted within 18 of its agencies found that Crittenton’s young women were similarly impacted by repeated exposure to childhood trauma including emotional and physical abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and trafficking — the same experiences that make youth, particularly young women, vulnerable to the juvenile justice system, and are nearly identical to the top risk factors identified in data by National Crittenton in 1900. 

Six months into her pregnancy, Jamison was welcomed into a Crittenton home on Christmas Day where she stayed for 18 months.  She learned how to care for herself, her child, and years later, how to use her voice to empower others, too. 

At 31, Jamison was invited to Washington, D.C., by Pai-Espinosa to speak in front of an audience of 300 people.  Young girls, donors, National Crittenton advocates and members of Congress listened as Jamison told her story.

“I was raised to believe in God,” Jamison said. “I remember praying, ‘Someday I’m going to tell my story and help other little girls.’ When I got up there to speak, it was that moment I prayed for at 9 years old.”

Jamison traveled for nearly 10 years, advocating for teen mothers and children in the foster care system, finding new depths to her own healing process through sharing her past. 

Knowing what drives girls into the juvenile justice system in each state is the only way to stop the multitude of pipelines that target girls, and disproportionately, girls of color, Pai-Espinosa said.  Now, without additional funding, “there’s simply no money to do that,”  Pai-Espinosa said.

The number of regions National Crittenton once advised has since dropped from over 12 to four. 

Though it is commonly known for supporting young mothers, National Crittenton’s reach extends much further, serving survivors of abuse, neglect, trafficking, addiction and more.  

Less than 40 years after the women’s suffrage movement and before the 19th Amendment passed, National Crittenton was founded in 1883 by two friends and advocates, Dr. Kate Waller Barrett and Charles Crittenton. Barrett, a women’s physician, and Crittenton, a self-made millionaire influenced by missionary work and his daughter’s untimely death, defied social norms to acknowledge disadvantaged women who were otherwise forgotten.  

Today, Dr. Kate Waller Barrett and Charles Crittenton’s great-great-grandchildren, Charles Baldwin and Kate Rademacher, continue their namesakes’ work as board members of National Crittenton.   

“Her legacy is very much alive,” Rademacher said of her great-great-grandmother. “But I’m sure she would be deeply saddened and troubled by how much more we have to do and how in some ways, a lot of the same problems are just as pronounced as they were then.” 

Pai-Espinosa said the organization is emboldened by the current social climate, which is asking for more focus on the underserved and those who have endured trauma and injustice.

“For a long time, we operated in silence,” Pai-Espinosa said. “That’s changed in the last 10 years, but it’s really changing now.”

Lead source photo courtesy of National Crittenton

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“Humanize My Hoodie” is a short statement with a complex meaning.  

The Midwest-based clothing brand’s co-founders Jason Sole and Andre Wright aim to destigmatize clothing trends that are associated with Black and brown individuals while also humanizing the person underneath the hoodie.

“The hoodie has been demonized for so long,” Wright said. “Black people, we’ve been criminalized for so long.”

Both men are fathers, husbands and outspoken leaders in their Midwestern communities. By combining their talents, passions and experiences as Black men in America, they say they are using their brand to have meaningful conversations about police brutality, racial inequality, combatting racism and how to be an ally to the Black community.  

Both Sole and Wright say wearing their apparel helps them lead by example. 

“We are being us, we are being free,” Wright said. “And with us wearing these three words, it helps people resonate with the fact that we are just humans. Just humanize us, right here and right now.”

Sole, a Chicago native and current Minneapolis resident, has many roles –– and hoodies. He is a criminal justice professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with the unique experience of being formerly incarcerated. He also serves as an activist and advocate for issues facing the Black community.     

Humanize My Hoodie was born from a social media post in 2017. 

“[The project] started with Jason making a post on Facebook saying how he was going to teach his next semester at Hamlin with a hoodie on. He hashtagged it #HumanizeMyHoodie and I gravitated to that because I saw what he was trying to do,” Wright said. 

The goal was to help his criminal justice students get more comfortable with Black men in hoodies while questioning their biases and preventing future officer-involved shootings, Sole said in his Facebook post. He surveyed his students at the beginning and end of their semester together to examine their reactions. 

“A lot of them couldn’t get past [me being] a Black man in a hoodie, especially somebody who was formerly incarcerated,” Sole said. In the beginning, some students viewed his actions as disrespectful to the professionalism associated with academics. 

The impact, however, was much greater in the end. 

“When I first kicked off Humanize My Hoodie, they were just students in my class. Now they are protesting against police [brutality]. And that’s a big shift,” Sole said. 

Wright and Sole officially teamed up in the summer of 2017 to create the Humanize My Hoodie brand.

“I was like, ‘Man, if we put this together, I think we can change the world,’” Wright said. 

Wright of Iowa City, Iowa, and raised in Waterloo, Iowa, is the creator of the fashion line Born Leaders United. He is also a community organizer and builder, a mentor and a businessman. Using his artistic background, he handles all apparel designs and marketing campaigns for Humanize My Hoodie.

Sole’s academic background and Wright’s artistry allows the duo to make unique statements through what they call fashion activism. Their workshops, apparel and virtual community conversations allows their followers to engage with the greater conversation.  

Sole and Wright regularly host ally workshops, art exhibits and have walked in New York Fashion Week. They said these conversations continue to be relevant, especially with recent police brutality against Black Americans in the news.

They point to several recent examples like that of Breonna Taylor, who on May 13 was fatally shot eight times in her apartment by police officers while she was sleeping in Louisville, Kentucky. On May 25, George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis. On June 12, Rayshard Brooks was killed by an Atlanta police officer outside of a Wendy’s. These events have sparked protests and riots across the U.S. 

Racial disparities and overrepresentation are present at both the adult and juvenile levels of the U.S. justice system, especially for Black Americans, experts say. Black adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than whites, according to a report by the Sentencing Project. 

Black youth are five times more likely than white youth to be detained or committed to a facility, according to a report from the Sentencing Project.  

Disparities are present in Sole’s and Wright’s states as well. In Iowa, Black youth have a 7.3 times higher rate of being held or jailed than white youth. In Minnesota, the rate is similarly stark with an 8.6 times higher rate. 

“Wherever there are Black people, there are these struggles,” Sole said. 

Wright said these numbers reflect a longstanding practice of criminalizing and fearing Black Americans.

“It’s important to have those conversations about Black individuals being seen as a threat to society,” Wright said. “That’s probably the most important work we could be doing right now.”

Wright and Sole say they hope their personal strengths and their brand continue to add to the current national conversation.

“Because we are approaching this work from two different lenses, it allows us to be super effective,” Sole said. “To be able to change hearts and minds is powerful.”

Lead source photo courtesy of Jonah Terry/Humanize My Hoodie

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Nick Shubert stood in front of a Harvard lecture hall this spring. The room was dead silent as he shared his story. They were listening to him. 

“They understood where I was coming from and my pain and my passion for making things right,” Shubert, 22, said. 

He had traveled to Massachusetts from Florida with a few peers and a teacher, as part of a group called the EVAC Movement, which started in Jacksonville’s Robert E. Lee High School five years earlier. They were invited to come to Harvard to talk about the power and danger of youth storytelling, and the start, success, and eventual demise of their student-led social justice initiative. 

“It changed how I look at people,” Shubert said. “It changed how I look at life. It just changed everything. That was the best experience I have ever had, probably, in my life.” 

The EVAC movement, coordinated by teacher Amy Donofrio, morphed from a lesson Donofrio would teach in her co-ed leadership class about using personal storytelling to escape the “cave” of their life, or whatever is holding them back.

In 2015, Donofrio was asked to teach a male-only leadership class for predominately black students. They reversed the word cave, and dubbed it EVAC. 

Of the 13 high schoolers in the group, 12 had an immediate family member in jail, seven had been arrested, nine had been shot at, 11 had seen someone get shot, and 12 had a close family member murdered. 

“EVAC is about getting an understanding of each individual,” said Bernard Thomas III, an EVAC member and current junior at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. “Without understanding, you cannot go as a community. You cannot go as one. You can never be united without understanding.” 

Thomas and Shubert said the class was atrocious at first. Some of the boys didn’t know each other. Others outright hated each other. Donofrio cried a lot, and day in and day out her lesson plans failed to strike a chord. 

A few months in, they decided to go back to where they started, sharing their stories. Donofrio, a white woman, learned from hearing the stories of the young black men. 

Shubert, Thomas, and the others started to share their negative experiences with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and how they felt labeled as a criminal and gang member because of their skin color and hair style. EVAC started to sell hoodies that said, “I am not a gang member.” 

What started as a leadership class quickly became a movement, the former high school students said. 

They hosted roundtables with local leaders including the Jacksonville mayor, Jacksonville sheriff, and Florida state attorney to discuss issues important to them. 

Local and national news outlets started picking up their stories. Within a year they had met with President Barack Obama, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker and civil-rights legend and Georgia Rep. John Lewis. 

“It all happened so fast,” said Thomas. 

The New York Times featured one of its members on the front page in a story about juvenile fines and fees. The White House invited them to participate in a roundtable on juvenile justice. They won Harvard’s national KIND Schools challenge. They traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, to present to teachers on how to implement the program in their schools in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting. 

But in May 2017, as most of the boys were about to enter their senior year, Donofrio found out that the EVAC class would no longer be on her schedule. 

Robert E. Lee’s principal told Donofrio she would have to use her planning period to teach the class, but she was already staying at school until late at night every day. She declined. The class was canceled. 

She fought for a month to keep the class. She looked for a funder. She met with the mayor. Donofrio was encouraged by the principal to continue doing EVAC lessons in her speech classes, but the program that gained national attention for telling their story would no longer meet during the regular school day. 

After teaching EVAC lessons in her speech classes for a couple years, Donofrio found out she would be reassigned to teach British literature in spring 2019. That summer, Vinceté Waugh, an EVAC member, said he arrived at Donofrio’s classroom to see all of EVAC’s posters and photos dismantled.

“The journey of our journey was there,” said Waugh, a rising senior at the time. “And then to see it all crumpled up, thrown into trash bags and thrown on top of eachother, it just made me feel like, wow, no one understood.” 

The Duval County Public Schools was not available for comment.

Waugh, emancipated from his family, says without EVAC he lacked the support he needed in his final year of high school. He started the year with a promising outlook to get into Florida State University, but he ended the year without meeting the minimum admissions requirements. 

“It didn’t turn out to be the year that it was supposed to be,” said Waugh.

But, this May he became the first in his family to ever graduate high school and has begun attending community college as a first generation student. 

The other EVAC members have all since graduated and now find other ways to speak out. One founding member, Reginald Boston Jr., was shot and killed by a police officer in January. The boys and Donofrio have leaned on each other for support and demanded answers. 

They recently have taken to the streets in protests after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. They will publish an essay about the story of EVAC and the power and dangers of youth storytelling in the Harvard Educational Review this summer. Donofrio says they still talk weekly, and she talks to many of them every day. She said Shubert, Thomas, Waugh and the other EVAC members are like family.

“We’re going to fight until our very last breath for the ones that are struggling,” said Shubert. 

Lead photo courtesy of Amy Donofrio

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