My home state of Louisiana is one of the most heavily incarcerated places on the planet, and that unfortunate distinction is not by design.
Many state laws have passed over several decades that have aided the swell of Louisiana’s prison population, specifically among its Black citizens, and perhaps most alarming, among Black youth.
Fortunately, there are change-agent organizations that are committed to rescuing Louisiana’s Black youth from the unrelenting snare of mass incarceration, with one of the leading organizations being the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights (LRCC).
LRCC’s mission statement simply reads “We fight to keep children out of the justice system so that they can thrive in their homes and communities,” but their quest to do so can often be a daunting task in an area that hungers for the slavery-era labor that comes with caging young Black bodies en masse.
Last month I had the opportunity to be in conversation with LRCC co-executive director, Kristen Rome, who spoke about the state’s controversial repeal of the Raise the Age legislation that allowed 17-year-old defendants to be tried as juveniles, the consequences of the general public having access to a juvenile transparency database, restorative justice as a healing and preventive practice, and her hope for the future.
Listen above, and read the transcript of our conversation below.
Donney Rose/Observations In Blackness: First, can you describe the implications of the overturn of the “Raise the Age” legislation as someone who leads an organization dedicated to keeping marginalized children out of the criminal justice system? So what is the impact of the overturn of the legislation?
Kristen Rome: The impacts are going to be pretty huge and far spread. I think the most concerning and the biggest is that by repealing Raise The Age and becoming the first state to repeal such a law, we are increasing the pipeline to prison for black young people. We're expanding, we are speeding it up, I should say, not even expanding it. We're speeding it up. And so now we're saying as young as 17, these are children, they can't vote for the people that are going to be presiding over their cases. They don't vote for the da. But we are deciding by some fictitious standard that 17-year-olds are now adults for the purposes of criminality. So the biggest impact is going to be it is speeding up the prison pipeline for black children, overwhelmingly black boys, but increasingly black girls are being arrested as well.
Kristen Rome: Some of the other implications and impacts of this are the effect it’s going to have on our jails and prisons in Louisiana. So the federal law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act requires that children be sight and sound separated from adults. And so now what that means is that for these 17-year-olds, because PREA requires that they be sight and sound separated from adults, the prisons and jails in Louisiana will now have to create separate spaces where the 17-year-olds can be held and can be sight and seen, sight and sound separated from the adults who are housed in the jails. And for many of our jails, like our Orleans Parish Jail, [and] our East Baton Rouge Jail, those are our two biggest cities. So you can imagine in the smaller parishes, but they are not equipped to do it. Their facilities are already at capacity, they're already understaffed, and so they just do not have the capacity to be able to separate children, separate 17-year-olds in this way.
Kristen Rome: Another big impact is that federal law [and] state law requires that 17-year-olds receive education. It's mandatory that if a 17-year-old is being held in a jail or a prison, they have access to education. And again, jails across our state are not set up in that way to be able to provide schooling to young people. And for example, in Orleans Parish where there is a school in the adult jail, that school educates 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, and in some instances, young people up to 21 years old depending on their educational needs. But these 17-year-olds can't be in a classroom with 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds because the Prison Rape Elimination Act doesn't allow it. So in addition to speeding up the pipeline for black children to go into prison, it is also going to cause a lot of financial strain as well as capacity staffing strain on our local jails. And we know anecdotally that when jails are overpopulated, understaffed, and don't have the resources that they need, jails become really unsafe places for the people within the jails.
Donney Rose/Observations In Blackness: Thank you for laying that out. So clearly I want to pivot to talk about some of the work and the mission of the Louisiana Center for Children's Resources, particularly around this idea of restorative justice and ensuring that young people, particularly marginalized young people, black and brown young people, do not encounter the criminal justice system. I want to ask you about common misconceptions people have about the idea of restorative justice, particularly when it pertains to young people because I know that sometimes folks will think that because we are so socialized to look at punitive justice as the way to deal with criminality or to deal with people who may be outliers. So what are some common misconceptions about restorative justice as it pertains to rehabilitating young people?
Kristen Rome: Yeah, so at Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, we are a nonprofit law office that specifically serves incarcerated and arrested children. And we serve them in two ways through direct representation in the criminal and juvenile legal systems, as well as statewide policy and advocacy work. In New Orleans, we serve as the Juvenile Public Defender's office in East Baton Rouge Parish. We support the juvenile, we support the public defender's office. And so one thing, as you mentioned that we really advocate for, though it is not commonly used in Louisiana at all, we advocate for restorative approaches. Our DA's office had a very, very, very short-lived restorative justice diversion program for young people, but did not continue to invest in that program. But all across the nation, there are programs designed to engage young people in restorative processes, and there's plenty of research about the impacts of that and how helpful it is.
Kristen Rome: I think one of the biggest impacts, or to answer your question, a common myth is that if we respond to crime with a restorative approach, that we are [in] some way not holding the individual accountable, for the act that they committed. And restorative justice actually is the exact opposite of that. It not only allows the person that has been harmed to have a say in what accountability looks like, and it also allows the person that has committed harm to have some say in what accountability looks like and having to face the community that you harmed in and of itself, whether it's facing the community that you harmed or the individual that you harmed. That in and of itself is real accountability. The criminal legal system, the way it's designed now, separates the individual from accountability. There is no accountability in just locking someone up.
Kristen Rome: There's no conversation about what harm they actually did, why they committed the harm, how the harm impacted the community, and how they can change these behaviors and restore themselves, redeem themselves, [and] make amends to the community. None of these possibilities are created in our criminal legal system. And so this myth that there is not accountability in restorative practices or restorative practice is a slap on the wrist. It's just that it's a myth, it's a lie. When restorative practices are done right, it is heavy work. There is heavy lifting involved in confronting whatever it is that someone is dealing with that led them to commit harm is confronting those root causes, getting to the root causes, naming them, and sharing them with the person that has been harmed. So the person that has been harmed can understand why that happened in a way that then allows them to feel like there's a just outcome.
Kristen Rome: Another thing I think is a myth of restorative justice is that it doesn't consider the victim or the person that has been harmed. And actually what we know about restorative approaches is that oftentimes people who are victims actually prefer this because what victims oftentimes want to know is that this isn't going to happen to someone else. And by having the process of a restorative approach in a restorative circle, the understanding then allows behavior to shift. And then the victim or the person who has been harmed can walk away with more confidence that this isn't going to happen again, and that the mind has been changed. And these things work particularly well with young people because of the malleable nature of a young person's brain. We know that young people's brains are still developing. And so when a young person commits a harm, it is a prime opportunity to redirect them because we know their brain can be changed, they can be changed. Young people are capable of incredible change. So restorative approaches work and the things that people believe, I think there are a lot of myths because people just don't understand what it is that actually happens when there's a restorative approach.
Donney Rose/Observations In Blackness: Cool. I'm definitely familiar. I work in the youth development field as a teaching artist and as a program director, so I've been trained in restorative justice through that lens. So I was very interested to hear you talk about it through the lens of the juvenile justice system and yeah, absolutely right about all of the benefits. I want to talk a little bit now about, I know that your organization deals with assisting young people with various resources. Can you speak a little bit about the value of young people having access to resources such as transportation, mental health services, or maybe even full-service grocery stores in their community as a deterrent to crime? So what does it mean to need resources?
Kristen Rome: Yeah, so at LCCR, we employ an innovative holistic defense model. And so what that means is, well, first and foremost, we understand and we represent young people and we approach youth justice from the lens of when a young person commits a harm, it is a symptom of something greater going on. And in order for us to shift the behavior and create more community safety, we need to get to the root cause of the harm. And so our innovative holistic defense teams do just that. So typically when you have a public defender's office, you have an attorney and an investigator, and they are working to defend the person and get them out of jail and make sure they don't go to prison. Well, we have an attorney, an investigator who does that piece. But part of what we know, again, knowing that harms are symptom and there's something greater going on in our clients' lives, we also have, along with our defense teams, a social worker, a youth advocate, access to a civil legal services attorney and a reentry specialist.
Kristen Rome: And through that, what we do is we figure out what is happening in this child's life that they ended up here. Whether we believe that they committed the harm or not, the fact that they even got arrested signals to us, [that] something is happening in this child's life that we need to address. And so for example, one of the most common things that we see with the young people we serve is that they are unhoused. And oftentimes people think when we say our clients are unhoused, we mean, oh, our clients are sleeping under the bridge. And people have a lot of empathy for that. But people don't have a lot of empathy for if we say, no, they don't sleep under the bridge. They sleep somewhere different every other night. They sleep, they couch surfing essentially. And what we know about young people is that stability and consistency is vital to their survival and their ability to thrive and grow into healthy adults.
Kristen Rome: And so our social workers work with our young people to figure out what's happening in their lives and to be able to pull out these big issues, housing, education, mental health, and then put together release plans for them so that we can begin connecting them and fill in the gaps and plugging in where they need. And then after the social workers create these plans based on assessments that they do with their mental health background, we then have our youth advocates start to put feet to these plans. So for example, if we have a young person that is unhoused and a social worker connects them with a resource that will help their family get housing, well mom might need help filling out the application. That's what our youth advocates do. Mom and the kid might need a ride to get to the house to get to the apartment complex to sign the lease.
Kristen Rome: We do that sometimes even looks like us saying, we've had clients that have children and they don't have beds for their children, and we'll tap into our client welfare fund to be able to buy a bed for the child. And I think where that becomes important to provide and connect young people with resources is that we know when people are unable to have their basic needs met, nothing else matters. You can't think about anything else when your basic needs are not met. And so part of what we do and what we recognize is that through connecting young people with resources, we can then let them breathe, let them level set, let them get some space so that then they can start envisioning a future for themselves that's different from the one that they have, but as long as they are in survival mode just trying to survive because they can't get their basic needs met, they are trapped in a cycle. So it's really important to us that we are getting our clients plugged in to get what they need. And we know that happy, healthy, well-adjusted young people don't commit crimes. They don't harm people, they don't harm one another. So we envision a world and hope for a world and are working towards a world that when we see a young person commit a harm, that we figure out what the root cause is, and that we have investments in [the] community to make sure that our children never have to do these things.
Donney Rose/Observations In Blackness: I want you to quickly speak to [this], as I was reading a lot about a lot of these just like horrendous Draconian legislation that's passed. One of the things that was really alarming was the idea that the public will now have access to a juvenile transparency database. Could you talk about just the impact, the consequence of the public having access to this type of database, especially because it doesn't matter if a young person was innocent or guilty of a crime?
Kristen Rome: Yeah. So the juvenile system was designed with the understanding again, that children are different and children are capable of great change. And so with that in mind, across this country, juvenile legal systems were created to be shielded from the public so that a young person if they go through this system, the system helps to rehabilitate them and connect them, and then they can go on and live healthy adult lives and leave this behind and it won't follow them for the rest of their lives. By making young people's information public just based on an arrest, we are going directly against the core tenant of the juvenile system that says that a young person should be able to move on from this. We live in the world of the internet right now and we know that there is nothing that you can erase from the internet if it's on the internet, it lives on forever. And so creating a system by which, if I'm arrested, I'm using myself as an example. I'm a 16-year-old girl and I get arrested for something even before I'm convicted. My name is associated with this criminal act that can be found in a Google search 20, 30, [or] 40 years from now. And it's just completely unfair. And it sets our children mostly black children, it sets them up for failure, it ends their lives and their chance for success before they even start actually living.
Donney Rose/Observations In Blackness: So on a closing note, with respect to this legislation that has passed and the activism of the work of your organization and other like-minded organizations, how can the general public advocate on behalf of black youth in New Orleans that will be disproportionately impacted by the repeal of some of these reform measures? So what actions can be taken? What does advocacy look like on behalf of these young people?
Kristen Rome: I think it looks a few different ways. One is being vocal, being vocal, and beginning to have conversations. One of the biggest challenges that we have in the work that we do is that this terrible narrative around who our children are, and this is across the nation, that we are going back to the type of language that we saw in the nineties with the super predator lie, that they are talking about our children as if our children are monsters and as if our children are incapable of love and unworthy of love. And so the first thing to me in advocacy is always to begin shifting the conversation. So as we sit around with our families and friends or whoever, and they make one-off comments about a young person you engage about that and you let them know this is a child. I was looking at something recently that said, we take care of children no matter who they belong to, these are our children, this is our future and we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to our future.
Kristen Rome: We owe it to those who came before us to protect the future. We don't get to dismiss the future, we don't get to throw it away. And so one, I think an advocacy tool is just to begin to have conversations. Another thing is to require and talk about in our communities what investments we want to see. So when our city council or our state is talking about how to invest we are acknowledging programs that support young people and that make sure that young people have creative outlets, that young people have mental health support, and young people have everything they need to be able to thrive and survive. And so that looks like organizations like Lead New Orleans, Be Loud Studios, Grow Dat Youth Farm, The Re-engagement Center, all of these organizations that are not only committed to young people but committed to all young people.
Kristen Rome: Oftentimes we see from our lens at LCCR, we see that there are so many programs in New Orleans and throughout the state for young people, but so many of them exclude the most vulnerable young people. And so the organizations that I named don't exclude any young people. All young people are welcome there. And so that's a really important piece, being clear about where our investments need to be and then our personal investments as well. Where are we putting our time, our energy, our money? What are we supporting to make sure that our young people have everything that they need? So I think that those are all ways. And then at LCCR, we are always putting our action alerts and calls to support us, to show up at the legislature, to send emails to legislators, to send emails to city council members about what you want to see happen. And we think it's important for people to stay tuned in, [and] stay tapped in, and when it's time to move, to move, this is not something we can do on our own. We are a small but mighty office. It's about 33 of us across two offices. We work hard, but the reality is we fighting a machine here. And so in order to be able to fight this machine, we need the support of everybody. We need all hands on deck because the future depends on it.
Donney Rose/Observations In Blackness: I think my real last question for you is what is it that personally drives you to do this work? When you get up every day looking at the landscape that you have to face, particularly against a very oftentimes archaic justice system, being a native of South Louisiana, like I understand what that system often does and how it viciously incarcerates black folks, particularly young black folks. What is your driving motivation when you get up to do this work every day?
Kristen Rome: I think as cheesy as it sounds, it is just my love for children. It is my understanding and recognition through study, through experience, through relationships of knowing that any significant change, any revolution, [and] any dismantling that has ever happened in our world, has been led by young people. And if we want to continue to see our world evolve because that is what life is about, that is what nature shows us, that evolution is where we are all going. And if we want our world to continue to evolve and change in ways that move us forward, then we can't afford to just not care about children. We can't afford to let children not be supported. I am a mother, [and] I have a 6-year-old, but even before I was doing this work before I had a daughter, I had nieces and nephews and cousins and friends with children.
Kristen Rome: And as I look at them and I see, especially when they are small children, so much promise and joy in their hearts, and for particularly black boys, I was looking at a picture of some of my little cousins recently at a pizza spot in Mattie, which is a predominantly white area. And my little cousins, they got locks, they got chains on, they got their Jordans on, they like 10, 9, 8. And I'm looking at them and we laughing and we think it's cute. And I'm saying to myself, in five years, somebody going to look at them and think they [are] dangerous if they look like this, and why is that? And so I think my motivation is just wanting better for the future, wanting the future to be better, and recognizing that even at 38 I'm old news, I'm cycling to a different part of life. And that as we move forward, we have to take the young people with us. We cannot just leave them behind and expect them to figure, figure all of this out on their own. So I mean, I don't know if that is kind of a cheesy answer, but it is the truth.
To learn more about the work of The Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights be sure to follow their social media pages at @lakidsrights on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, or visit their website at lakidsrights.org/
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