Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Restorative Justice

Good afternoon and welcome to the Assembly. Select Committee on Restorative Justice.

Our goal in the California State Assembly Select Committee on Restorative justice is to discuss in this hearing how to potentially move our state's traditional criminal justice system to a restorative justice system by involving all interested parties to work together to shift from current punishment focused system to one centered on healing and accountability.

I am honored to chair this Committee and I'm looking forward to hearing from the LA County District Attorney representatives from Ljve Free California creating restorative opportunities and programs, Homeboy Industry a new way of life advocates for peace and urban unity, La Voice Centinella Youth Services and men collaborations Men collaboration Urban Unity, La Voice Centinella Youth Services.

So I'm now going to give a brief overall structure of this hearing and go over simple housekeeping. Because we have limited time today for Members of the Committee, which will trickle in. You'll notice. Well, the Members aren't here yet, so I'll skip that part. We will hear from LA DA George Gascon.

Restorative justice represents a transformative shift in how society addresses crime. Moving away from a system centered on punishment and towards one focused on healing and reconciliation, restorative justice marks a pivotal shift from conventional punitive approaches to a system that prioritize healing, accountability, and inclusion. First, law enforcement can have a significant impact on community led restorative justice programs.

It is important to note that law enforcement, prosecutors or other justice system officials are not appropriate to lead or control restorative justice programs. They are not a neutral entity. Restorative justice can only be effective when led by a completely neutral party that does not also hold responsibility for investigations, prosecution or defense.

This is crucial to ensure the participation parties. The participating parties can be truly open and honest in atoning for any wrongs and making things right with each other. That said, law enforcement and other system officials can play a key role in valuing and partnering with this critical community led service.

Second, findings suggest that restorative justice not only reduces the rate of recidivism, but also contributes to the broader goals of justice and rehabilitation. It offers a more humane and effective approach to dealing with crime, focusing on restoration and community involvement rather than retribution and isolation.

This method can lead to transformative changes in individuals and communities, fostering environments where healing and reconciliation are possible. Third, restorative justice practices have had a significant impact on the California State law, particularly in the areas of criminal justice reform and the healing of youth.

The impact of restorative justice in California reflects a broader shift towards more holistic and community focused approaches in dealing with crime and misconduct, aiming to heal rather than to simply punish. Fourth, administering restorative justice through community based organizations and actors offer several compelling advantages that align with the goals and principle of restorative practices.

Public perception of restorative justice in California vary, but there are some reoccurring trends noted below that illustrates the broader feedback from various segments of the community. Overall, when supportive trends exist, the public perception in California is nuanced, with ongoing debates about the scope, effectiveness, and appropriateness of restorative justice in various contents.

In California, this approach has gained traction, supported by growth, growing public endorsement of rehabilitation over retribution, and a legislative push towards more holistic, community centered justice practices. As this approach continues to evolve and expand, it offers a promising path towards a more just and compassionate society.

The first panel will be Sentinella Youth Services Men Collaboration. The second panel will be CROP, LIve Free California and Homeboy Industry. The third panel will be a new Way of Life, LA Voice Advocates for Peace and Urban Unity. We'll allow for a public comment at the end.

If you're unable to make comments during this hearing, you may submit them in written comments to this Committee. I understand and appreciate a lot of folks are passionate about the subject of this hearing.

However, regarding disruptions during this hearing, the Assembly and Senate have experienced a number of disruption to Committee and floor proceeding in the last few years. So this is. So let's be crystal clear to everyone, conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or impedes the orderly conduct of this hearing is strictly prohibited.

To address any disruptive conduct, I will direct the individuals to stop and warn that if the disruptions continue, they may be removed from the participating hearing or city hall. If disruptions continue, we may temporarily recess or simply adjourn the hearing, which we don't want to do. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Now I'd like to turn it over. Well, it's no Members in attendance, so I don't have to turn it over to any Members. All right, let's get started. And we welcome DA Gascon. Thank you for being here today. You may proceed when ready. You have five minutes.

Here we go. Thank you so much, Assemblymember McKinnor. It's really an honor being here with you today and with the others. What I'd like to do is I'd like to first of all, give you an overview of why I think restorative justice is so important.

Then I'm going to give you some data points, and then I'm going to tell you a little bit about what LA is doing District Attorney's Office. But let me tell you why. And why. I'm going to break it down into three areas.

I'm going to talk about victims, I'm going to talk about community, and I'm going to talk about safety. You know, a lot of people think that restorative justice is actually offender center in that the victim is ignored. Why the contrary?

In order to be successful, the restorative justice process requires a acknowledgement of the harm that was caused to the victim by the offender.

It provides an opportunity that is not afforded in our regular adversarial system, where the victim is actually heard, the victim gets to discuss the pain, the harm that was caused, and the offender is actually there to listen, to absorb the harm that they have caused.

And then the process requires that there would be a discussion and a conversation around how we're going to repair the harm. And that does not occur in the regular system for the community. It has multiple benefits.

Number one, it gives the offender and their family and the entire community an opportunity for redemption, to make things right and to move on and not have a scarlet letter of a criminal record for the rest of their life or incarceration That might even make things worth not only for the particular individual, but their family members and other community members.

Finally, when it comes to public safety, we know that when people go through the restorative justice model, the success rate far outstrips the regular system. I will give you a couple of data points.

The Department of Youth Services in La County reports a 95% success rate on people that they run through the restorative justice model. When you consider the success rate for prosecutions, it's somewhere around 50% to 60%, meaning that people go back to cause harm again.

Personally, when I was the DA in San Francisco, we put together fully restorative justice model for juvenile. It was called Make It Right. We worked with impact justice from Oakland, and we saw our recidivism rate drop below 10% for the kids that were being involved here, as opposed to somewhere around 45% under the normal system.

In LA, What we're doing is we're taking a multi pronged approach to this, and you're going to hear from some of the partners that we have. We're working in pre filing the version with Sentinel youth center. So I know you're going to hear from Miss Ellis. We're working with a new way of life, Miss Suzanne Burton.

We're working on post filing for the 18 to 25 years of age with Homeboy Industries and Champions for Service you know, we have Members of our advisory boards, including Rebecca Weicker, who is here now.

She's no longer on our victims advisory board, but she did, you know, she conducted restorative justice hearings and processes for us. To recap, when we're talking about creating safety for our community, restorative justice Far, far outperforms the traditional system. And I agree with the comments that were made. Law enforcement, that includes prosecutors. We are a partner.

We cannot be the ones in the room. We're not the central drivers. We simply have to work and ensure that we are cooperating and that we're providing the avenue for the process take place. By the way, I didn't even go into the economic impact of this.

Restorative justice is a fraction of the cost of traditional arrest, prosecutions and incarceration. So whether you're talking about victim support, whether you're talking about community, whether you're talking about public safety or even economic consequences of doing the work this way, restorative justice is far superior to our traditional adversarial system.

And I hope that legislatively we begin to start requiring certain types of offenses are a mandatory directive that at least on the early stages, RJ must be implemented, and only if it fails should we revert to the traditional system. I'm open for any questions that you may have.

Thank you so much. DA Gascon. What type of offenses would you suggest as we look at legislation next year? Because I want, hopefully we get some really good policy out of this hearing. What types of offenses would you suggest we should use for restorative justice?

Yeah, you know, I think that the data is very clear on this area. I think that you, first of all, you have to have. Well, you don't have to, but it's better when you have a victim that is someone that we can identify as a community Member. Right.

If you have a corporation or you have a big business, generally, that's not going to work as well, because part of the process is that interaction between a human being, the victim and the human being the offender, and the harm that was caused to that person and to that community.

That tends not to work when you're dealing with large corporations. Secondly, the data also shows that to do this for very minor offenses generally doesn't have the impact because it's hard to connect the harm caused when you're looking at minor offenses. So you're really looking at, number one, people, victims and offenses that cause some harm.

The question, and there's a political question to this. Right. You know, the restorative justice has shown to work with very, very serious crimes. But we realize that there are. Sometimes the community is gonna be very apprehensive to deal with things that include severe violence, even though that technically we know that they work.

So I suggest that we start on those crimes that are harmful to individuals, that there is a clear connection to a human being on the other side of the equation, but that it's not going to be the ones that are going to cause so much angst. Because people traditionally feel that the only way to do this is to do an eye for an eye.

It must be heavy retribution and perhaps do it in an escalated manner where we have an introductory period of a cycle of time, whatever that is, a year or two, and then slowly, as we gather data, then begin to expand and learn and adjust accordingly.

And so maybe we would have a combination, because politically, as you said, it depends on what we can get our colleagues to vote for. But maybe it's a combination of both. Maybe we should always use a restorative justice component when people are getting sentenced.

Yeah. And by the way, I think the best success when it comes to restorative justice is starting really early. Right? You need victim, you know, you need victim participation or approval. By the way, the victim doesn't have to be in the room, but we will not move forward unless the victim agrees.

We educate the victim, and then if the victim wants to be in the room, they can. If the victim decides not to be in the room, then we can have a proxy that is trained to do the work.

Because the success of this process is having the person that causes harm, understanding the impact of the harm... it's critical to that component of it. So having victim approval is critical. And then, you know, the type of offenses that you do, I think it really becomes a political question for communities and certainly for the legislation.

And then lastly, the economic impact. We all know that it's in this room, know that we had a tough budget this year. What type of economical impact would this have? If we look at restorative justice, instead of just locking people up?

At the State level, you're probably looking at hundreds of millions of dollars. If this became central to our practice. When you consider just the money that we spend in the California correction system, somewhere around 15, $16 billion a year, an office like mine, we spend 530-540 million a year.

Police departments, our sheriff Department has a $14 billion budget. La County. If you start reducing the amount of work that these agencies have to do, not necessarily reducing their footprint, but just reducing the work that they have to do. Officers don't have to come to court. Prosecutors don't have to prosecute.

Nobody's spending time in custody over a certain period of time because you have this adjacent system that is working. And we're using organizations like a new way of life. Centinela. You know, Homeboys, right? Quite frankly, they work for a fraction of the cost of what government works. And you're also saving all the custody time.

You know, the numbers will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, even if you took a small chunk of the work, by the way.

Thank you. And we can use the money for other things,

100%, schools, roads, public health. I mean, God knows there are many things that we could be investing in our community.

And I'm very proud of the Legislature and public safety that was led by Assembly Member Reggie Jones Sawyer because we have implemented a lot of laws that decreased beds in prisons, and we've saved millions of dollars doing this, and we want to make sure that we continue that work. Do you have any questions?

Well, thank you, DA Gascon. I want to open it up to the public. We have five minutes. I don't see a microphone. I don't know where the public. You don't want to do it with each? I think we should do it with each. If we have any public comment, step in the middle there.

We have five minutes total for public comment related to this part of the hearing. Seeing none. Thank you, DA Gascon. I appreciate you for attending today. Thank you.

Thank you for your work.

So, now we'll move to the second part of this hearing. We'll have Jessica Ellis, Rebecca Weiker, and Trino Jimenez who will discuss the victim and youth perspective. Welcome and thank you for your time and participation today. I also ask the public to be courteous and not interrupt this part of the hearing or these presentations.

Each person please introduce yourself, the organization you represent, a brief overview of your experience on the subject. Of course, if you have more information to provide beyond an overview, you are welcome to do so. Each panelist will have up to five minutes. You may proceed.

Thank you, Assemblymember McKinnor, for highlighting this important topic. My name is Jessica Ellis. I'm Executive Director of Centinela Youth Services and I come to this work because my own family was impacted by the justice system with the loss of a loved one to gun violence and family members to incarceration.

I'd like to start us off with a definition of restorative justice. According to the California Restorative Justice Policy Coalition, which is a diverse group of restorative justice practitioners across the state, restorative justice is a community based, non-punitive approach to harm that encourages accountability, healing, and repair.

And it allows the person who was harmed to share the impact of that incident and what they need in order to heal. And the person who caused harm is supported to articulate the reasons for their actions and take accountability to meaningfully repair that harm.

Through restorative justice, we can get a lot more creative than we can in the courts. In the courts, really all we have to ask for is money. So, the more hurt I am, the more money I ask for. But money doesn't heal my heart.

And so, through this process, we can really, most victims really want answers to why did you do this to me? And they really want to be heard. And when we do victim impact statements at court, it's like screaming into the void. You get no response back. And humans were about connection.

And without a response back and knowing that your message really landed, it can feel very empty. And so, to achieve a sincere and authentic and meaningful process without coercion, it is important that the restorative justice process be led by community, not systems of authority. And I thank DA Gascon for highlighting that really effectively.

And it must be voluntary for all involved. And you'll hear examples today where restorative justice is used to repair, bring repair to the survivor of crime after sentencing has occurred. And you'll hear examples where restorative justice is used to interrupt the next legal step and divert or limit system engagement in the incident.

But restorative justice can also be used as an alternative to even calling police. More than half of victims of violent crime don't even call the police because what our systems have to offer can often create more harm than good.

So, there are powerful opportunities to use restorative justice as a complete bypass of our system so the crime survivor can maintain more say, in the overall process that will be healing for them. And there's some phenomenal programs in the state that are doing some of that.

It's important to note that in order for the parties to come together in session, there are intense preparation and vetting processes to ensure safety and integrity. In the cases of serious violent crime, that preparation process can take up to a year before the parties are brought in the room together.

So, the process is deeper than the point at which they come to meet. You'll hear more about what amazing transformation can transpire from those meetings and the preparation that leads up to them. At CYS, we've been serving youth since 1975, and in the early nineties, we brought in restorative justice diversion.

And so, when a young person here in LA County has committed a crime, we work with law enforcement and the courts to put the arrest or the court process on hold for the youth to come to our community-based restorative justice processes.

And if they complete successfully, that arrest goes away or the court process goes away and gets sealed. We provide the opportunity for youth who've caused harm to meet directly with the person. One example, I lost my childhood best friend to drunk driving. And so, a young person was arrested for a drunk driving charge with no victim.

They flipped their car. There was nobody else involved. But we can still do restorative justice even without a victim. I was impacted by that crime, so I sat down with that young person, and it was an amazing transformational process, even for me.

Even though that had happened, I'd lost my friend 30 years prior, and the young person got a lot out of it. It really hit home for him. He ended up raising a bunch of money for mothers against drunk driving and doing a lot with his peers to raise awareness.

We have over 30 years of data on nearly 10,000 restorative justice sessions that we've conducted with young people, and we see consistently 98% victim satisfaction rates, 96% youth satisfaction rates. They feel the process is fair and equitable. 86% of restitution agreements completed in full, which far exceeds our restitution completion rates through the court system.

90% of our youth do not recidivate or get rearrested. We have proof, 30 years of proof, that this process makes communities safer while supporting meaningful accountability and healing for those who've been harmed and those who've caused harm. And for that reason, our work has always enjoyed bipartisan support.

Restorative justice is a solution that can get us out of the partisan fights on criminal justice reform. It's an approach that both sides of the aisle can agree on. Thanks.

Thank you, Jessica. Rebecca.

Thank you. Just going to keep track of my time. So, my name is Rebecca Weiker, and I am the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Mend Collaborative. We are a restorative justice organization here in California that supports victims and survivors of severe violence and people who are responsible for harm.

Most of the folks we work with are in community and incarcerated in California State prisons, or who are people who are on parole or have been actually released from parole. Our work is really post-conviction work.

After harm happens, as Jessica explained for us, there's different contexts of restorative justice, and for us, we're really focused on after harm happens. What the criminal legal system does is incarcerates people. But survivors often have many, many needs that have been left unmet after incarceration, after many years, 15, 20, 25 years of incarceration.

What we provide for survivors is an opportunity to initiate what's called a victim-offender dialogue, which is a direct conversation between the person who is responsible for harm and the survivor. The needs that people have that can be met through this process is to answer questions of why this happened.

Who were you at the time that you committed the crime? What have you been doing since that time? How do I know that you care that you're accountable, that you're responsible for what happened, and also to share about the impact of their experience over these years.

Part of the reason why we believe our programs are so important to have for survivors and incarcerated people right now in California is there has been tremendous work to, in the interest of justice, reduce our prison population, give young people, people who committed their crimes as young people, opportunities to return home, who were sentenced to life without parole or severe sentences, to give people who were sentenced to extreme sentences as they approach their elder years, a chance for elder parole.

And so, all of these sentencing reforms which are in the interest of justice, impact survivors.

And so what restorative justice processes do is they give to survivors an opportunity to understand how they fit into that process of criminal justice reform, that they can request to actually have their own conversation to understand who this person was, who this person is, to share about the impact. So, one of the things that we're doing right now is to reach out to district attorneys, public defenders, to victim advocates, to community members to let them know that these processes of victim-offender dialogue are available to people.

It's through. We do this work in collaboration with the Office of Victim Services and Survivor Rights and the Department of Corrections. And there's four other community-based organizations that do similar work throughout California. And so we really want for people who have been harmed and people who have, who have committed harm to have these opportunities.

One more thing I just wanted to share is that sometimes there's not a direct match between the survivor. There hasn't been somebody identified, or that person isn't a good partner for a dialogue. And those people are also deserving of healing, of understanding.

And so, the surrogate dialogue process where people who are survivors go inside of prisons and speak with incarcerated people who are doing their own work of accountability, can be equally powerful for folks and are a really important component of restorative justice and healing. Thank you.

Thank you, Rebecca. Trino.

Thank you, Assembly Member McKinnor, for creating this space and just allowing us to speak on such an important subject here. My name is Trino Jimenez, and I am a VOD Facilitator with Mend Collaborative. I am also a Member of the Crime Victim Advisory Board for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office under the leadership of George Gascon.

My oldest brother was a victim of a violent crime as he was brutally murdered. As a crime survivor, it was important for me to participate in this victim offender dialogue for my own personal healing journey and participating in a VOD, it gave me answers that only the person responsible could provide.

It also gave me insight and understanding of what led to this person's criminal behavior. Some answers that the criminal justice system didn't or couldn't provide for me and when the crime occurred, I'm going to be honest and transparent. I was angry, I was hurt, I was deeply hurt.

And I was kept away from this person responsible for harm, which at the time, maybe it was the right thing. But I was left alone to navigate my anger with no follow-ups, no care. Which I felt it was a failure and injustice to me.

I often ask this question that what if I acted on this anger that I held? Then I would have been treated as a perpetrator in our criminal justice system. I believe that many have fallen into this category. There are many system-impacted individuals that have unresolved issues that were never addressed by the criminal justice system.

Restorative justice addresses these things. The person who took my brother's life, he was the person that introduced me to the victim-offender dialogue program. So, that brings another question. Why was there no representation from the government structural system to guide me as this being a possible option? I had never heard of restorative justice from any government official.

And one year prior to this introduction to restorative justice, it was a person who was formerly incarcerated that told me about victim services through the CDCR.

I was able to request a transcript of past parole hearings, and I was able to obtain information of this person that had done harm to our family. Yet even the Office of Victim Services had failed to offer me information of VODs and other avenues for me.

The impact that restorative justice has had on me has led me to the work that I do today, to offer other victims and offenders a chance for both to experience some form of healing in a transformative way.

I have witnessed firsthand individuals express their remorse, their regret for the choices that they've made to harm another human. And as a society, we hold individuals accountable for their actions. But restorative justice adds the opportunity for the person themselves to hold themselves accountable for the harm that they've committed.

So, it gives an extension of just greater work that can take place. And these individuals are given the opportunity to to gain insight of the magnitude of the harm that they've inflicted on a family and even on a community.

So, restorative justice connects individuals for them to have empathy, for them to have care, so when they return to society, they have a better chance to respond, to respond to their emotions in a positive way. Restorative justice has given me, and to many, I believe, a healthy outlet for our emotions. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Well, it sounds like it helps both parties, it helps the victim, and then it helps the person that committed the crime. And so, as I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, like, restorative justice should be a mandatory component to crimes like this because it actually rehabilitates people. Jessica, I have one question for you.

If we can, is it any way we can have the outcome data that you have in writing so that we can use it as we go forward in our work?

Yes, definitely. I'll send that.

Thank you. And I look forward to working with each and every one of you guys. Also, can you give us, the three of you? Can you give us an idea of how many people you serve every year?

We currently have 18 victim-offender dialogues that we've facilitated since we started working this. I think over the last year, we've gotten that many referrals, and we have served hundreds of people through surrogate restorative dialogues.

I think one thing that I would say is that I think it should be mandatory that everybody is offered these processes in our work with people who've been experienced, you know, survivors of homicide. My sister was murdered, and it took me years before I could even start to think about what I needed.

And so, I think people have their own journey. Some people are ready immediately. Other people, that's not their journey.

And so, I think it's really important to provide those opportunities and make it available to everybody who needs it and to have a menu of opportunities, whether it's a direct conversation or an indirect with other folks who've committed similar harm.

And how do you guys identify your participants?

In our program, we work through diversion. And so, we get agreements with law enforcement to agree that all misdemeanors and the vast majority of nonviolent felonies will get diverted into our program. That's not to say restorative justice is, as we've said, very effective with violent situations as well. That's because our program is tied to diversion as well.

I would say that those minor misdemeanors really could be done through a community-based restorative justice process, often without police contact. And so, there's avenues to expand even on the front end, before we even get to system contact.

Our victim-offender dialogue program is done in collaboration with the Office of Victim Services and Survivor Rights. Although, this year more than half of our referrals have come not through them, they come through community members. Our own facilitators are working in the community all the time, so through just our own networks of people.

And also, we do trainings for district attorneys and public defenders to let them know that, you know, it's funny because we have issues on both sides with the DAs, they sometimes don't think that they're not supportive of restorative justice or don't see how it fits in.

So, we have to make clear that they're not substituting their judgment for the needs of a survivor. And public defenders are sometimes worried, and we let them know that this process is separate from the rest of the criminal legal system. And so, we have our work to do to kind of untangle this process from those systems.

But we want people to get the word out. And so, we do trainings all the time of all around the state for different district attorney offices and public defenders.

Last question, what challenges have you encountered in implementing restorative justice programs and how have you addressed them?

One challenge we have is we really operate with kids under 18 because of legal protections. There's a lack of legal protection around evidentiary privilege for people over 18. Anything they say in a restorative justice process could be used against them in court. And that gets us to where we can't get really honest in that process.

So, we've elected not to do the process in a diversion context because we don't want to put somebody over 18 at risk. So that locks our program in under 18. So, we look forward to that legislative protection and expansion.

Well, I tried to do it this year and I'm going to try it again because we want people to be able to really come and be honest, and they can't if they're afraid to tell the truth. And so we tried it. We'll try it again.

Thank you for championing that.

I'd like to point out, I'd like to point out one challenge that I feel that we have is that getting information out to our crime survivors, I feel that in the court system, if they were to say, hey, there's some people here that do restorative justice, I've been in groups of just crime survivors that come together.

Yes.

It's such a safe space. There's no judgment. Everybody comes how they feel. If crime survivors could just have an access to have that and give them choices, if it's not for them, it's not for them, but at least for them to know and to be informed.

So, I feel that that's just been one challenges for us, is getting information out of restorative justice and what it offers.

Thank you. We will. Well, one more, I'm sorry, I have one more question. What safeguards are in place to protect vulnerable youth and victims during the restorative justice sessions?

The process is completely voluntary and confidential. So, we let people know that at any point in time, and both people, both the survivor and the person responsible, that they may end the process at any time. It's also not part of an incarcerated person's C file or parole. It's cut off from that.

So that people know that the folks who are showing up for this process are showing up to connect, to share, to participate in the process and not for other reasons.

And there's a lot of vetting and conversation ahead of time to hear how they're seeing each other and how they want to come into the space.

So, if someone is still making threats or in a place where they're being manipulative, we're not going to bring them together, and there are opportunities to do restorative, sort of shuttle diplomacy, restorative justice.

We had a crime survivor who was just releasing a lot of abusive language, and we knew she wasn't going to be able to follow the rules.

And so, we still found a way where the young person offered to still pay for the damages and make things right, but instead of bringing them together and subjecting the young person to the verbal abuse, and they were both happy with that result.

Thank you. Well, now we will move to five minute of public comment. Does anybody have any questions from the public? We're going to bring the microphone and stand in front. And we have five minutes for this portion. And please make it a question. Thank you.

First of all, it's good to see you. Assembly Member. Thank you for gathering, everyone. Thank you for this panel. I'm Elder Joe Paul, the Promise Enterprises, LLC.

The question is, when you think about the scale of what this takes and the diversity of victims and the diversity of offenders, how do you incorporate this into the public safety system? By really truly allowing the public to be a part of it. How does that happen?

I've heard a lot of anecdotal situations and some data that will be shared with you guys, but how does that really happen at scale from the sense of a public safety perspective?

Thank you, Elder Joe Paul.

I think there's a really good model starting around this in LA County, where, and DA Gascon spoke to in the Bay Area as well, where there were, there are county investments in providing funding to local community-based providers that specialize in restorative justice and then creating the pathways out of the system into those providers and then really leaving them to do the programming.

So, the programming is not controlled by the system actors, but the system entities do divert out to those programs and provide funding. And so that is a way that can really be scaled out and being as neighborhood based as possible so that you have cultural competency and localized to local needs.

Funding.

Right.

I'll take that fact.

We're part of the TPW, which is a coalition of over 100 in-prison providers, and it costs over $135,000 to keep a person incarcerated. And so, we're asking for 1% of the Department of Corrections budgets to actually do the work that's the most transformative work in the system.

And so, it is very labor-intensive and expensive work, but nothing compared to what CDCR pays for incarceration.

Absolutely. Well, I would like to, before I close this section, anyone else have a question? And thank you, and good to see you, Elder Joe Paul. Thank you guys so much for coming and participating. I look forward to continuing to work with you guys. Thank you so much.

Now we move to our third panel part of this hearing. We have Jason Bryan, Tim Karnegay and Miguel Lugo who will discuss the system-impacted perspective. Welcome and thank you for your time and participation today. I also ask the public to be courteous and not to interrupt this part of the hearing.

Each person please introduce yourselves, the organization you represent, and a brief overview of your experience and the subject. Of course, if you have any more information to provide, please do so. Welcome, and you may start.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and Members of the Committee. My name is Jason Bryant and I am the Director of Programs for the CROP Organization. As a young man, I made a series of terrible decisions that resulted in me receiving a sentence of 26 years to life in prison at 20 years old.

Upon my incarceration, I came to the sudden realization that my decisions didn't only impact myself and my victims, and my community, but also my family. It was the first time in my life that I actually saw my father cry, on the day of my arrest. I made a decision to make some new choices.

I began to pursue my education, and over the course of my 20 years of incarceration, I earned a bachelor's degree, two master's degrees, and became a state-certified drug and alcohol counselor. I began to use my education as a tool to give back to my community, my incarcerated community, and help them in their rehabilitative journey.

With a small group of individuals who are also co-founders of CROP Organization, we began to implement programs around personal leadership, around establishing vision for themselves, what it meant to live a responsible life, to live in alignment with what they say is most important.

And as a result of this work, we also started a scholarship where the incarcerated population, who, as you know, makes a little over $0.11 an hour, raised a little over $32,000 to support a disadvantaged youth in the community, to attend a college preparatory school.

As a result of this work inside, in 2020 Governor Newsom commuted my sentence and ordered my immediate release from incarceration. Back in the community, myself and the founders noticed that there were some key distinctions, or not even distinctions, but similarities between the prison system and the reentry system, largely geared towards punishment.

The services that were provided in the reentry space very siloed.

So, the five of us sat around a table with about 100 years of lived experience behind prison and said, you know, what does it really take to create a program that supports an individual coming back to society in a holistic way, not only with personal leadership, but with job training, housing support, and supportive services.

And I'm happy to say that in 2021, we partnered with the State of California to launch a three-year pilot for the Ready for Life Program, which is now operating in both Oakland and Los Angeles. And, you know, we have aspirations to increase our services in Los Angeles with the housing component specifically and launch operations in Sacramento.

While I'm really proud of the work we've been able to do the last few years, supporting some of our justice-involved participants, it's a small step in a long, long road of, like, real restoration for the way we're regarding people who are coming home from incarceration and how we're providing support for them.

I know firsthand after spending 20 years inside, that the transformation in my life, it didn't come from, you know, being locked in a cage. It came from having people around me who believed in me, who supported me, and the same is true out here.

So, I want to thank you so much for bringing us together in this space and share our thoughts. And I just want to say that, you know, there's an old saying, if you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go with others.

And we certainly appreciate the invitation to go far with the Legislature in making some necessary changes and bringing real healing to our community in the State of California. Thank you.

Thank you, Jason. Miguel.

Thank you for giving me this time to be here. And so, I've been both. I've been a victim and a victimizer. I'm an ex-lifer. At one time, I had life in prison. And yes, my little brother was murdered.

And when he was murdered, it's part of the beginning of my transformation when I walked into Humble Industries.

We do healing in different kind of ways at Homeboy Industries. We do healing circles and we get people together. And I take them camping if they don't get along. We got over 800 different gang members from different gangs in that place and figure out how to play together in the same sandbox. That's what I tell them.

My job is, some people call it security, but my job is community relations, is to stay with the community on the floor and know what's going on with every single gang in LA, know what's going on with every single person that walks in through our doors, and be able to tell them that we're here to heal, not to, not to gang bang. And that's the honest truth. I can sit here and give you, I had written down a whole bunch of stuff, but as I came in, I left it all in my phone. And I left my phone behind so I wouldn't look at it to be honest with you.

Cause the truth is, I used to think therapy was for white people because we don't talk about our problems. And I walked into Homeboy Industries and they introduced me to therapy. I've been in therapy now for nine years. And it has saved my life, and it has saved my family relations.

I'm able to go back into my community, the same community that helped destroy, to help rebuild. And that's the biggest things that are needed in anything that got to do with healing. It's the same people that helped destroy the community, the same people that have to help rebuild it. We burned it down.

We have to rebuild it together. And a lot of times as we start different programs and we forget about those people there, that's part of their healing, that's part of our walk. We have to be able to go back to the kids and to the younger men and say, hey, I felt this pain.

You don't want to feel that. And at Homeboy, without having to happen, I got the opportunity to do that. I had other job offers in different places. And I said, nah, I'm here. Because I took so much. I hurt so many people, and I hurt my family most of all.

And I know in the process of healing, we need to be able to see restorative justice is... When I first took the class, I thought it was... I was still angry, so hurt people hurt people. So when I first took the class, I remember saying, ah, what is this going to do. When I see my victim in front of me, I said, oh, my God, like, I just wanted to cry. And I went into the bathroom and did.

And being able to see them and talking to them and being able to heal with them and tell them, that was just the lost kid that didn't know what he was doing. That was just somebody in pain. They took somebody from me. I wanted to take somebody else. And somebody in pain will bring pain.

And being able to sit there and talk about our pain and being able to say, hey, I'm sorry. And then when it was my turn with my little brother, oh my God. It was, it was painful because I come from a place of violence. That you do to me, I'm going to do double to you. And to go work for a priest and say, now, nah, we don't do that. We're about kinship, love. And I didn't understand none of that until I started living it.

And now when I'm living it, I'm able to say... And taking my mom into that room and seeing the breakdown of her kid being killed and seeing that, those are the moments where I come to places like this. Doesn't matter what I'm doing. I'll be here. You call, I'll be there.

Because it's seeing my mom just getting a little bit of peace after seeing her crying in her room for hours. Those are those moments that count. Being able to move forward, being able to be in a relationship with one another, being able to be ourselves. And I may just go into Homeboy Industries real quick because I know we on time. And I may say, and Homeboy Industries, we run healing circles. We take kids camping together from different gangs, and I put them in the same tent.

Father Greg has been doing this for years, taking them and speaking engagement and put him in the same hotel room. He did that to me when I first got out of prison, for me with a rival gang member and said, we're gonna go talk in San Francisco. And I thought it was just I got a free trip.

No, it was a moment to see that guy take off his shirt and see all those tattoos of my rival gang member and saying, oh, whoa. And me and you gone and talk tomorrow about healing. That was a moment. And those are the moments that you see at Homewood Industries. Every day it's different magic that happens there.

And I'm not here to sell you Homeboy Industries. I'm not here to do any of that. I'm just here to tell you my facts and my truth. Cause I was once told, one of my friends, truth to power will be the best way to get through these changes that we're trying to do here. And organizing been one of the ways that I've been being able to do that, being able to bring people back together and saying, like, no, we don't have to hurt each other. And I just wanna say thank you for this moment.

And I always wanna tell you that anything that could change the perspective of a young man, anything that could help open the door instead of putting them in a cage. Cages never helped. I've been in juvenile hall since I was nine years old. That was my first time in juvenile hall, and so I ended up in prison.

So cages never helped me. Places like that where they kept me away from my family has never helped me. I spent, when I was in the shoe in Pelican Bay, I spent eight years without even seeing one family member. And to get out and heal and be able to be a dad today.

Today, this is what it is. This is life. This is freedom. Now I learn how to live, not how to survive. And thanks to all these organizations that have made it and everybody else in the political atmosphere that has changed the laws here in California, thank you for taking your time for this. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Tim.

Thank you, Assembly Member McKinnor, Will, and Terry, for having the wherewithal to bring something like this to the forefront because it is so important. Oh, let me say my name. My name is Tim Kornegay, and I'm the director of LiveFree California, which is 20 black led organizations across the State of California, all doing some degree of social work.

But I'm also the co-director for the Southern California Ceasefire Committee, which, every Wednesday, is a space where individuals who have been responsible for harm are in the same space with those who have, who are survivors of harm. And it's a space where I learned that I was a survivor of some degree of harm. But when you're living a particular lifestyle and you're the recipient of some degree of violence, you accept it because you think it's just an occupational hazard because of the life you live, and you hold yourself responsible.

So I think there's a level of restorative justice that should hand individuals like myself and others, Bryant, Miguel, their humanity back and understand that these acts that take place are birthed in the mind of children that don't even understand their trajectory that they're putting themselves on.

My first experience with a degree of violence is when I was five years old and someone killed one of my mom's friend's child. And it frightened me to the degree at five years old, I couldn't wait to grow up and get a gun, not because I wanted to harm folks, but because I wanted to protect myself from something like that happening.

And what you find in situations with folks who are responsible for this, they have been traumatized at early ages, and oftentimes they act in a manner because they don't understand what their humanity is because it's been lost to a behavior that they experienced as children.

We need to have a definition of what restorative justice is because it means different things to different people at different times. What does it look like to the community is different than what it looks like to the court system and the systemic application of it. And it needs to be revisited and rearranged and have a preventive element.

There needs to be investment in survivors and those who have been traumatized by the experiences that we've been through to keep them from entering juvenile hall at nine years old, or for getting 22 year sentences for committing crimes and making decisions that are instantaneous that you don't realize the direct consequences. I think that this is important, but we must realize that the survivors of these crimes, they need help, they need therapy.

As Miguel has said, there needs to be investment in that because there's a large number of folks who are questioning why they were harmed, who think that if I had not went to this particular place, if I had not made this decision, and no one should have to walk around carrying such a burden, feeling like they're responsible for their own harm.

Systemically, the judges that are responsible for the implementation of some of these restorative justice practices need to be trained on the value of it because they're entering into the space with the lock them up mindset and have to be convinced of the value of when they're in that position.

They should know that this is something that's really important. This is something that makes both survivor of violence, of crime, and those who are perpetrators of violence, of crime, to give them their humanity back, to put folks in a space that they understand and have the ability to apologize across the table from someone that's been harmed, which is really a hard thing to do.

And I see it frequently every Wednesday where someone who has lost their children, there are folks in our space who have lost all their children to violence, and they have to sit across the table, when they don't have to, but they choose to, with folks that they know may have been perpetrators of violence, and they are only able to do that through a level of forgiveness.

But how do you do that journey without help? There are a lot of folks who have been lucky, but there are a lot of folks that need support, and, in a restorative justice space, In my opinion, there needs to be investment in the survivors. At some level, the state has to step out of the way and let those who have been harmed step up and be taken care of. And thank you all for creating this space.

Thank you guys so much for your testimony and for coming and sharing this with us and being brave enough to talk about your experiences. I heard a couple of things. We're going to talk about the Ready 4 Life Program. What year did it start? Because that's, you said it's a three year program, and we don't want to... This is something maybe we could do next year to make sure it doesn't expire. And then we had another question. Can you elaborate on what the Ready 4 Life Program is and the work that it does?

Absolutely. So we entered into a partnership with the State of California in 2021. We launched our first cohort in the spring of 2022. We are currently getting ready to launch our fourth cohort in Los Angeles, which is a virtual service program, and our third cohort in the Bay Area, which is an in person full service with housing as well as training in October of this year. So that's where we're currently at. We've served a little over 170 formerly incarcerated people.

Our target is approximately 390 over the course of the contract with the state. The program is a year long program that consists of four pillars, personal leadership development. So helping people who are coming out of incarceration unpack the limiting belief system and understand, essentially, if it's meant to be, it's up to me. How to be responsible, how to be accountable, how to be a contributor to their community. We also provide them with digital literacy and financial wellness in this first three months of the program.

The second part of the program, we call it upskilling, where we provide them market driven, livable wage training in careers while we simultaneously work with partners to get them employed upon completion of the program. The third pillar of the program, we call it equipped for life, where we provide them with the employment skills they need. So how to do a resume, how to conduct an interview, things of that nature, how to establish a social media profile on LinkedIn, because that's where a lot of work is done these days.

And the fourth pillar of the program, which we call home for life, is where our reentry team works with them and with community partners to find permanent housing upon completion of the program. We pay the participants $1,000 a month stipend to take off some of the cheat of living because it is a very intensive program.

Most recently, we launched a program with the eye on the technology industry, tech and tech adjacent. And we are currently doing a market analysis to make sure that we are serving all of the needs of, not only the community, but people coming out of incarceration who don't necessarily want to sit behind a desk, click away at a computer all day.

Thank you. You said three years, so this program might be coming up to expire.

Yes. We have a little over a year and some change left to fulfill the contract, and, yes.

So that's one thing we could put on our list is looking at how we can go back and expand that. The second thing I heard was about therapy and services. So, Miguel, you received services from Homeboy Industries, not from the government. So are there any... And I don't even know this, are there any programs that the government provides when you come out for therapy or inside for therapy? Therapy services.

Well, first of all is you have to get the person to therapy and to understand that therapy is going to help them. Like I said, for me, when I first got out of prison, I said, no, no, no. We don't talk about our problems. So it's about creating a safe environment. And that's what Homeboy's has done.

That's what we got over 10,000 people coming in every day through the doors every year, 10,000 people coming in to see what kind of services they need. As we walk in through the doors, we don't know what we need. We as somebody that has got out of prison, we need help.

And therapy is one of the things that they really push on you, like, hey, you might want to talk to somebody about your problems. And then it becomes a normal thing. Now, at Homeboy Industries, it became normal for people in our community to say, hey, how can I get into therapy.

How can I get some help and talk to somebody about my problems? But it also takes a culture as a culture change, as a switch, it's a switch that we have to hit in our community to be able to bring those kind of services. Because we're never about therapy in prison. We don't talk about our problems.

We leave that in R and R. And the way in, you know. And that's what we do. And then, so you have to change the culture. It's a culture in the community that needs to be changed. It's a culture of saying, hey, it's help here. And Noah, my parole officer, I asked him for therapy, and I asked him for different things that I needed help. He told me to go find a church. That's what my parole officer told me. And I, so I did. I went and found the priest, you know, and, um. And that...

That was just some of those things that happens in our communities. Many things are probably out there, but they don't offer them. Like, even housing and thing for people that getting out on parole, like, they got the system, but they don't offer it to people when they get out, so we have to go searching for it. It's a lot of things that they keep under budget.

Thank you, Miguel. For us, for all of us. For African American folks, too. We don't talk about therapy. It's like, you know, your little boys start crying and they used to say, well, dry your tears up and don't cry. Suck it up. Well, we all need a little therapy. We had to all learn in our culture that having therapy is okay, but it sounds like we're not at, from the government, from the state, we're not providing that therapy.

What I'd like to do in my tenure is make sure that people that are coming out, that we are making sure that they have the services they need to move on. And so it looks like therapy, guys, is one of the issues we will tackle. One last question for each of you. How have you been able to forgive others? And how have you been able to forgive yourselves?

So, for my self, Assembly Member, you know, I was one of three co-defendants. As I shared, I was sentenced to 26 years to life for first degree murder, for being a part of a crime. I didn't actually commit the murder. So there was a long process of forgiveness of my co-defendants and myself.

One on the, for my co-defendants, understanding that it wasn't their decision to go, it wasn't mine. And forgiving them for being human and making terrible choices. Forgiveness for myself was another long process. There were several years of incarceration where I went into kind of a very dark place in my mind after my father passed away, actually.

And I was unwilling to touch the pain, because what I came to realize inside when my dad died in 2002 was that, you know, as much as he loved me and cared for me, he had never gotten the opportunity to see me do anything good with my life, and he was gone.

So I had to do a deep process of mourning, grieving, and coming to the realization that the best way to honor him was to live a life in amends for the behaviors that I had, you know, harmed the community with, devastated my victims with. Like, I cannot bring back my victim. But I can live a life that is antithetical to the behaviors that I contributed, the outcomes that I contributed to in 1999. And it's also the best way to honor my dad and my two small boys.

Digging deep in therapy, digging, digging, and finding out why, when it became okay to harm somebody else in my life, when it became okay for somebody else's life not to matter, or for my own life not to matter. Start loving myself, start respecting myself, finding a purpose.

Because without a purpose, you just out there in the world, and then nothing really matters. And that's how gang members recruit. I was one of the biggest recruiters in my gang. They don't got a purpose. We give them a purpose, and it's the same thing. And what we say in the legit life now, find a purpose.

And the purpose is to be coming over here and sharing the message of therapy, sharing that I'm able to heal. I'm able to touch my wounds. Without touching those wounds, how can I move forward? Without digging into them and saying what got me there? What made me say it was okay to become a gang member? What made me say it was okay to harm myself and others? And my family most of all. A lot of times we don't talk about the people we harm in the offskirts, which is grandma and everybody else.

They want you to become the good little member of society that somehow, some way, they have to see you walking in and changed into a holding cell like that. I need to go back and really feel this and cry and talk to my therapist and tell my therapist, I don't want you to be my therapist no more.

We're digging too deep. You know what I'm saying? We digging too deep. And it's that type of thing that the healing part comes with pain. We have to be able to touch our pain, to be able to heal from our pain. And that's what I had learned at Homeboy Industries, that they always say, hey, stability before mobility. But stability also comes in here. If you're not stable in the heart and the mind, then you can't move forward. You can't offer people boots and a job, but if they're not healed, they cannot go out there and perform the job.

I've seen guys go get a union job and lose their job because somebody say something and they want to call them out like they're in the hood. Like, no, you're not going outside and fighting somebody. You have to heal. And that's the thing at Homeboys, before we used to give people jobs, it was jobs for the future. Today we give people healing first before a job. So if you don't heal, you can't move forward. And that's the biggest thing that I had learned in my journey.

When you're sent on one of those, no offense to any of you, state sponsored vacations where you don't get to come home for a while, their idea of therapy is pills. If you say you're going through suffering, they'll give you a therapist, and the therapist will recommend some degree of high powered narcotic where you'll just be lost and walking around like detached from what you're going through. So for me, in the forgiveness space, I didn't want to take any pills.

So I just started studying what therapists do. And through that study, I realized that I became the person I was based on the decision of a five year old kid that was angry at something, but I was 42 years old at the time. So what I needed to do was reconnect with that decision and forgive the five year old for that choice that was made and work forward from that point knowing that I had to change. So every day for me in that space was a degree of therapy because change is the hardest in there.

But I recognize that if I could do it before I got physically free, it wouldn't be that difficult for me to do it when I actually got out. So what I did was that, and knowing when I got free was just to dedicate myself to a life of service, to become an advocate and some degree of example of what you can do with the right tools, what you can do once you gain the right relationships.

But never lose track of the fact that forgiveness is an everyday experience because we wake up, or at least speaking in I statements, I wake up with a recollection of who I was. Knowing that, moving, I have to forgive myself and to move forward just to continue to do things and be the best example of transformation so others like me, who are looking for something to see, who are looking for something to hold on to, will have that.

Thank you guys so much for sharing. Is there any questions from the audience before we move forward? Please.

Elder Joe Paul, again. Just first of all, to see these gentlemen and the journeys they've been on is just remarkable. And I appreciate each one of your testimonies. I think to Tim Kornegay's point, the question is the process of having these lived experiences, having these memories, and then figuring out there's an alternative way. How do we, again, in a public scale, help to assist individuals, to tap into that five year old that made a decision that needed to be reconciled?

To answer that, I think the first thing that we should do is let folks know that it's okay, that we should not be concretized at the moment of our worst mistakes, and that you can become different. That if you are allowed to forgive yourself and be the kind of person that's a contributor in a positive manner instead of someone that takes away from the community that you're in, I think that's the beginning of the journey.

But a lot of us are just looking for somebody to say that, hey, it's okay not to be like that. Because the term has been used a lot up here. Culture. Culture has infused us into belief that we have to carry on a certain way because we come from a certain place at a certain time, is to just, you know, give folks the opportunity to be able to detach and say, it's okay if you want to change and put a support system in place that they can attach themselves to in order to continue the journey forward in a positive manner.

Can I add something?

Yes.

So that was awesome. Thank you. And, you know, one of the things that I've noticed through my lived experience is that, he was speaking about it very well. Like, people need a purpose. And part of the work that we're doing is like, it's an intensive program, but when people inside are hearing about what Jason or Miguel or whoever that they knew is out here in the community and doing well, they begin, inside, to do the hard work of rehabilitation.

Because if it can happen for him, it can happen for me. If it can happen for her, it can happen for me. So. And to that point, you know, I shared a little bit about my education. When the Governor commuted my sentence and ordered my immediate release, the next day, I called my old celly, or he called me, and he told me that the enrollment in college went up 300%. The next day, the next day at the institution.

So when we show that there are people in the community who are coming from the same situation and are succeeding, it plants the seed, and it gives the incentive for them to begin looking inside and saying, okay, something else is possible for me.

Yes.

I just wanna... Well, we don't. Okay. Wow. It's just. We just need a safe place. That's it. Our neighborhoods haven't been safe for a long time from the trauma. And I'm talking about trauma, and I'm talking about, like, the violence of the. A lot of people say, when they say safe, they want to say, oh, police and this. No, no, no. From the trauma. And all people are looking for is a safe place to go.

And that's why our different organizations, like many organizations that are here, that are going to be asking for funding for different things, they are creating the safe places for all of us to be able to walk through. The sidewalk becomes a safe place because we don't got enough room in the offices.

The parking lot becomes a safe place with somebody having a breakdown that doesn't know what to do. It's about safe places. And it's our job to create the safe places, especially for the youth. When I was a youth, I didn't have no safe places. The best thing I had was football.

They kicked me out of school because I was a gang member and all the raft that comes with it. But that was my safest thing I had, was sports. And at least for those couple hours, I was safe. And always used to get hard, get harder in my football equipment. But that's a different story. But safe places. And I think that's what our whole community is asking for. Safe places in different places.

When people come out of prison, when people come out of juvenile halls, before kids go into juvenile halls, to have safe places all the way across. From youth centers to adult places, to just a place where people could say, I could breathe today for once. I just want to breathe. For a long time, we always...

My community where I grew up at, the water felt like if it was here at all times, like we were just waiting just to let it just go another level to where I could drown. They told me when I was a kid that I wasn't supposed to live till 15. Then when I was 15 to 18, and then when I was 18, I was in prison with life. So it was already a thing that was created. And that's the thing that we need to break. We need to break that cycle. We are the new generation of people that are coming out here that we have to make a difference. And I'd be damned if I don't.

Yes. And I look forward to working with you to make that. I'll be damned if I don't either. Michelle.

Hi. Good afternoon, and thank you all for having this very informative conversation and being honest and vulnerable. And my friend Tim, when we're talking about restorative justice in these spaces, there's a five year old out here now that still needs help.

So there's a five year old right now that goes to a middle school or, excuse me, elementary school in LAUSD or in our communities who still see these things and need help. However, when there is help that's asked or a teacher notices, what do we do with the psychologist or the counselors in school?

Then it becomes a social service problem. Then the child can be removed from the home, and then it becomes a life cycle of foster care, court, when this child was just trying to say, I need healing, I need help, I seen something. So what we have to do when we're having a conversation of restorative justice, we need to add a protective component to that.

And honestly, when we say making something a safe space, be true about making it a safe space. Let those children know it's okay to tell me what you seen and then get the parents to wrap around services that they need to address the lack of services that this child requires.

Because the missing that component is when the children act out, when they go and get the gun because they want to defend their mother who's being beaten by their, her paramour, what have you. So when we talk about restorative services, restorative justice, let's make sure that the unintended consequences does not destroy and break down the entire component.

Thank you. Thank you. Yes. You know, I heard a lot in this from this panel that we have to take back and make sure that we get some funding for. I love what Michelle said about the schools because I was just thinking about, I'm sure we don't even have our psychologists in schools anymore, where we have, where we see something happening with a five year old kid, and we pull them in. Right. They want a police. That's not what we need.

Well, we could pull the five year old in, give them some services. I love what you said. Then give the parents some wraparound services. And what you said about football. You don't, we see a young man and gang, we shouldn't kick them out of school because we're just putting them on the street and getting rid of them instead of trying to help them. So I thank you guys so much for giving us yourselves and being so vulnerable with us and giving us this information. And believe me, I'm going to take it and use it. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

So our next panel, we have Susan Burton, Pastor Eddie Anderson, and Kevin Orange, who will discuss the community perspective. Oh, Kevin couldn't make it. So it'll be pastor Eddie Anderson and Susan Burton, who, both of these guys can handle this panel. Welcome, and thank you guys for participating. Again, I'm also asking the public to be courteous, which we have had no problems here. And let's get going, you guys. We'll start with Ms. Burton. And Ms. Burton, I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you so much for having this hearing. I want to stop and take a moment and just a moment of silence for Sonya Massey and Adrienne Boulware, who recently died in the California State prison.

And where's your other Committee Members?

I'm going to leave that one.

All right. When you get back up to SAC, tell them Miss Burton said they truant.

You know, we know what happened with truancy, but anyway, you know, we continue to have to do the heavy lifting, you know. But thank you for this panel to think about, you know, and this hearing to think about and talk about restorative justice.

60% to 70% of the women in prison right now today, were victims prior to their incarceration. I myself was a victim in the way that I didn't choose. It was the only option that I had to deal with my victimization. And my harm was illegal drugs. And for those drugs, I was incarcerated.

I was not incarcerated one time, but six different times before I found help, the help that the former, the previous panel was talking about, therapy, drug treatment. You know, I'm a solid member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

When I found out that, you know, I wasn't a bad person, I was a sick and harmed person. And that there was treatment for me, there was therapy for me, there was services for me, but I only found those services in Santa Monica, where those people were sent to rehabilitative services and got court cards and was diverted from incarceration.

I couldn't understand for the life of me why it didn't happen in South LA, where substance use was so rapid and harm and stuff was happening at the rates and levels that it was. But nonetheless, I received those services. I began to heal and I came back to my community.

So 60% to 70% of women incarcerated in state prison were victims of violence prior to incarceration. And now we call them perpetrators and offenders. What a flip. So how do we actually give services, give supports, give an opportunity for those women to begin to heal, to begin to come back to our community better?

I need to let you know, every time I was released from prison, I was released a little worse off than I was when I entered. So at the end of those six prison terms, I was a mess. Thankfully, I found Santa Monica.

But then I tried to create, or I am creating, what I experienced in Santa Monica, in South LA for women coming back. Before I leave here, so I want to say I brought an article for you and all the other members who ain't here. They missed they article.

So I'm kind of diverting from the restorative justice, because there's some justice that need to be happening right now for those folks that are locked up not only in women's prisons, but across California and all the prisons.

So recently there was a California workers, California finally approved indoor heat rules for all workers and people except the ones that are working in prisons and that are held in prisons. And we have people dying from heat in California prisons and falling out from heat in California prisons.

And this is something that we can do administratively or right now. So this article. So you gonna take it back to him, Tina? Assemblymember McKinnor, I mean. You gonna take it back to him?

You know I am.

So it says, help us, help us. We can't breathe. And again, a woman died recently.

And when this hit, I was like, really? The other thing I want to talk about in regards to women is women who are going through menopause inside of prisons. Prisons were created for men. Women are held there. Fastest growing segment, and there's no recognition, accommodation or medical services for women who are going through menopause.

If I'm in prison and I go to work and I can't go to work, I get another day added onto my sentence. And I know when I experience menopause, there were days that I just could not go to work. So I know we got the exception, Proposition Six on the ballot to remove slavery from our constitution.

But right now, these are medical and administrative actions that can be taken. 33% of women incarcerated are in the menopause experience. There are 175 women incarcerated, Assemblymember McKinnor, who are serving life without the possibility of parole.

I would love to go up to the prison and sit and visit and have a conversation with these women to actually talk about what happened to them prior to them committing their offense.

The last thing I want to say, I know the restorative justice folks don't mean no harm, but when we are repeatedly called offenders, it does cause harm.

So if there is language that we can identify that more humanizes people who have been harmed and then their harm not even recognized, and they go on to cause harm, that would be really, really probably helpful to that person and to their work, I think I'm done.

Thank you so much, Ms. Burton, Pastor Eddie.

Thank you, Assemblymember McKinnor, for allowing us to be here. My name is Reverend Eddie Anderson. I'm the senior pastor of McCarty Memorial Christian church, and I worked for LA Voice for over eight years. Before I just talk about restorative justice. I just want to give some context because we've heard a lot of stories today.

I grew up on the south side of Atlanta, and my neighborhood was much like a lot of black neighborhoods. It didn't have a lot of healthy food. Everyone in my school was part of a gang because you need to protect yourself. A lot of my friends got killed or locked up.

And so that trauma is what we know as the breaks. It's what it means to be black. It's what it means to be brown. And I think the state has to recognize that restorative justice, yes, it's about the conversation, but it's also about a community. And for me, the reason why I got into this work is because I didn't want to lose another generation.

I grew up doing the three strikes rule.

So that meant that if me and my friends went to the store together and the cops didn't like us that day we went to jail. That meant that if we got in a fight, because fighting with our fists instead of with guns, then my friends said, you know, why don't you get guns? Right?

And then I became a pastor. I served as on the board of an organization called Crossroads of Women, which helped women who were doing LWOP, life without parole. Some of them got out. And the main definition for us, restorative justice.

The LA Voice, is, how do you bring dignity and abundance for everyone if we're all created in the image of God? No matter if you committed a crime or if you've been hurt by a crime, how do you bring restoration to that person, to that community?

I've been able to do funerals for people who were killed by violence. And I've also been doing funerals for people or met with families who have had violence or harm to them. The same scenario exists. Everyone wants to be whole. And so the advocacy work I've done is around saving a generation, people who come after me.

And that's what LA Voice have been focused on as well. So we did ATI at Turnstile incarceration. We came with 114, with a bunch of community advocates, 114 intersections that we could do at the LA County level to make sure that people don't have to be a part of the criminal legal system.

We worked with folks to create Measure J. Measure J, Care First Community Investment, was about how do we fund to make sure that we have money to have those hard conversations through the restorative justice circles, the healing circles, but also how do we create trauma centers in our community as well.

And then after being an organizer and advocating and shifting work. And I brought two reports for you. One is 100 pages, one is 20 pages for you all to look at with all the data so you can make sure we don't lose it another generation. I went and created a partnership with Growth Los Angeles.

And we created a program called Project Jubilee because we noticed in our community, young people, as a previous speaker, Tim said, had injury of harm starting as young as 5, 6 years old. And there was nowhere for them to have the outlet. So what did people do to create more harm?

And so then I got tired of sitting in courtrooms. And if you're talking about state, just the courtrooms are more like a cattle system. They just bring people in. You get five minutes and then you go back to jail or get a sentence. It's kind of like plantation capitalism on a high scale.

And I got tired of sitting in those courtrooms and writing letters to judges saying, don't send that person to jail. Let's have a conversation, let's give them a program, let's get some diversion. And so we created one called Project Jubilee. And we just had a cohort, we've done over 70 young people through the state, that partnership.

And we had a moment where we draw a line in the middle of the classroom. We ask everyone who's been affected by violence to come to the line. It doesn't matter, black or brown, everyone comes to the line. We ask them, everyone who's lost a family member to violence, come to the line. Everyone comes to the line.

And now this is a room where people, some people have been in juvie, some people have not. Some people have committed crimes, some people are victims of crimes. But we all got the same experience around violence. So restorative justice is very, very important to make sure that we understand that all of us deserve dignity.

All of us are better than our worst day.

And that healing is nothing, something that you get when you make a lot of money if you're white, it's a guaranteed human right that God gives all of us, that we serve a God that cares about redemption and restoration, and that if we're not seeking that in our communities, what we're actually doing are creating appropriate victims in our community.

And nobody deserves to be an appropriate victim, and that harm has to be remediated somehow. So those are some things that I want to just bring up. What LA Voice was working on and what a whole group of organizations, a New Way of Life, Sentinel Youth Services, all of us have been advocating because we need funding.

And funding is, why do you need funding? Let's talk about it. You need funding because if you're going to do complete services, what you're going to find is as you unpack people's harm and trauma, there's other things that need to be taken care of. People still need food.

People still need to be able to make a living, that the conversation may begin the healing process, but therapy costs money on the back end, churches, and mosques, and synagogues. We do what we can, but we need funding to help make sure people can continue moving forward and not have to do crimes of poverty in our community.

Then you also need care. Wrap around care. The state can provide more services, but it also can make sure that people that are providing services can provide at a scale. Too many times people are doing the work for half the cost to make sure people are coming home. And that's not good for the model. Right?

We know the model works. We know you're saving money on the state prison incarceration system. We can close on these jails, but if people are doing it for half the cost, it's not an attractive career and quite frankly, it's the burnout. And so those are things we have to address.

We talk about restorative justice and how do we make sure we bring it to scale on a state level. And I'll stop there.

Thank you guys so much. You are right, because I keep hearing about the programs and people are servicing 100 and some odd people. We know that's not enough. We know it needs to be at scale.

And since we're saving money on these beds, we should make sure that this money is going back into the community where it's needed. One of the most important factors in reducing recidivism is access to housing. Ms. Burton, can you elaborate on your work to provide housing to formerly incarcerated women?

Yes. So we have 12 safe homes across LA County, and we have to keep buying more and more homes. The numbers of women who are returning to our community and the number of senior women who are returning to our community, there's a need there to really expand those senior services.

And it takes a lot of resources because, you know, women have been incarcerated 30, 40, 47 years, and they've been in those concrete hard. I don't want to be harsh, but it's really harsh where they've been in those concrete almost like tombs. And they're coming home on walkers.

They're coming home in wheelchairs, they're coming home with canes, with high medical needs, where it might take 300, upwards of 350,000 to house them in a prison. They're leaving prison. They've worked for 30, 35 years. They have no Medicare. They have no quarters in their Medicare system. There's high needs and there's nowhere for them to go.

And the board of prison terms calls us and we want them out. So we say send them home. But we're overwhelmed with the amount of resources we have to put towards that woman. We need resources for seniors coming home out of prison. And I see this on the male side also.

We need to make sure those people working in prisons for 11 cent an hour gets quarters in our Social Security, Medicare and unemployment system because they are working for the state, you know, so we keep expanding. You know, we house women.

We have a model that has primary reentry services and then we have, they go on to independent living in the homes. So we need designated housing, permanent housing for folks that are coming out of prison. We just bought some land.

We want to build on that land and I'm going to ensure that that is for formerly incarcerated women and their children. Not many resources go to women. We got to change that. So we need more housing. We need more opportunity for expanding our services. We actually have taken our model and we have taken it across the world.

We are in 26 different states. We have about 50 homes that are replicating a new way of life model. Three of them are in African countries, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. And we're going to keep ensuring that women have a place to go.

We need resources to scale our model across the entire State of California and close down those prisons. So that's about the housing and we, and the other thing you talked about, can the state do counseling? No, the state cannot do counseling.

No, I want them to pay for it.

They can give us the resources and not make the reporting too heavy, you know? You know, we do, we are accountable and we do report, but sometimes those state agencies are really ridiculous in the level of I's and T's that they want dotted and crossed and the way, zero, no, don't, don't slant the t this way, slant the t that way, you know, so to speak. So anyway, yeah. You know what I mean?

Thank you. I do. Tell them about it. So, Pastor Eddie, I want to go back to a little bit of what you said about the youth. How does your organization gather and respond to feedback from the community members about restorative justice, about your restorative justice program?

Well, so our program has a 92% retention rate. We get that through community conversations. So we respond one, through listening, calling together, community-like groups and focus groups, but also through other referrals and agencies. So we work with Youth Build USA, we work with Janet Kelly's organization, Sanctuary of Hope as well.

And then we work with other congregations in schools to see who they refer. And we also, we also get young people from probation. We intervene, we step in and help people get free.

And so because the gentleman said that his probation officer said, go talk to your pastor. At some point he said, go talk to your pastor. So are faith-based organizations able to access grants from the state?

So not really. Because the state has such a high bar, as Susan said, around reporting, and a lot of the state grants are reimbursable. So if you don't have liquid capital to put forward, you really can't get a state grant. Even for agencies like mine. Once you get the grit, you gotta be able to fund the costs.

So one thing the state could do is lower the bar for proven messengers and proven programs to scale without having to reimburse the funds.

If you gave us the funds at the front end and care, you know, a care first budget type of model, then I believe through reporting you will be able to see the results that you want to see. A lot of faith institutions don't have that kind of infrastructure to do that.

Although we are on the front line, if someone gets harmed or shot, they do call the pastor at all times, a 24-hour job, but the services are limited because then we call other folks and try to outsource the services and people just don't have capacity.

Thank you. Ms. Burton, what have been the outcomes for the women that you've, that's been in your homes?

Assemblymember McKinnor, we just checked, we have a 2% recidivism rate. You know what I mean? And that doesn't mean that everyone hasn't relapsed on alcohol or something, because we are not a housing first or a model of harm reduction.

We have a drug and free alcohol, drug and alcohol environment because people coming out of prisons can be violated. Although, I mean, I don't have anything against harm reduction. I don't have anything against housing first. But we need an environment that people are striving to develop the next level of their lives.

So we have a 2% recidivism rate. You know, we meet people where they're at. This morning I was sitting with a woman who has been really, really resistant and harsh on staff. And I sat down with her and asked her, did she want to know, joy, that she didn't have to be mad and angry all the time.

It broke her open. She started crying. But this is the type of stuff. And then I'm like, do you want to meet with our therapist? You know, it's your choice. We got it for you if you want to go, if you want to get it.

You know, all of us as community, we know, we know our people, we know what our people need. And, you know, you were talking about the high bar from the state and state grants. You know, they could front-load them. You know, they could trust us.

You know, I mean, I think trust-based philanthropy and trust-based dollars allow us the freedom and flexibility to do what it is we need to do. But my question sometimes is, do you really want to see me be my best?

You know, because given the opportunity, we can be our best, and we can show our community, lead them to be their best, too. So sometimes I don't even need to ask the question. I just have to go on and be my best. But did that answer your question? I think I went off on a rant.

No, no, no. You answered well.

Before I will end this session, are there any questions from the audience before we move on? Thank you. Tim first and then Michelle. I do. I want all that that you guys gave me so I could share it with the absentee.

I got a question from Ms. Burton. She said something that's kind of scary, and that's the fastest-growing prison population is women. I'd like to know what the age range is for those women that are entering prison nowadays.

18 to 19, 3%. 20 to 24, 6%. 25 to 29, 14%. 30 to 34, 19%. 35 to 39, 18%. 40 to 44, 14%. 45 to 49, 9%. 50 to 54, 7%. 55 to 59, 5%. 60 to 64, 2.9%. 65 plus, 2.2%. There were some points there, too, but I didn't go through the points, but those are the whole percentages of the folks that the women who are incarcerated.

Well, thank you for being amazing, and thank you for coming prepared with those stats. My other question is, how many of those women are mothers?

Let's see here. Got it here. 54%, 54.3% of women incarcerated in the California State prison system are mothers of minor children. And we do provide housing for women with children. There is a need to incomprehensible to increase our capacity there. Also, our women and children homes stay full.

And in our other homes, there's women who are waiting to reunite with their child and get into that home. So there's a need to repair the separation of our families, you know, and so we have a family reunification legal department that works in all three courts.

You need a whole hearing on family separation and family reunification, because when you dig into that, it is horrifying what counties, cities, states, and Federal Governments are doing, you know, in separating children. And Michelle really, like, coined it. Well, she opened it up.

It's like if a five-year-old goes and said, this happened, then they run to the house and snatch the baby and sometimes charge the mother, instead of having a way to help mitigate what's happened and repair to go forward, and then it just cascades into so much harm and distress for that family and for our community.

You know, I'm a board member with Alliance for Safety and Justice, and we are working to create trauma centers not connected with police departments, where a five-year-old, their mother, can walk into that trauma center and begin to get attention to repair whatever's happened in that community, in that family, for that child, for that mother.

You know, something happens to you, and you got to go to the Police Department. Shit. Poor Sonia Massey. Poor Sonia Massey. And that's what happens in our community. But had there been a trauma center or a place that we can go and resolve with our community, with our therapists, with our specialists, with our incredible messengers?

So, another rant.

Well, thank you for being a champion for those who are often forgotten.

Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Susan. Michelle?

I just would like to ask a question for Assemblymember McKinnor. Thank you again for hosting this important conversation. We are aware that Governor Newsom has released a portion of the Proposition One monies in the 3.3 billion.

Would there ever, can that also be included, as we know, those who are coming home, returning home from incarcerated facilities are a lot homeless. A lot of their mental health has exacerbated being incarcerated. We know these funds are dedicated to homelessness, addressing our unhoused community members and those who are mentally challenged.

Is there a space? Because I haven't heard the conversation.

For those organizations, such as Ms. Burton, who is doing the work to help receive some of those fundings, to continue to give care to those who are coming home from incarcerated facilities, and also addressing the needs of those suffering with mental health and substance abuse issues so that we can lower recidivism.

But I just haven't heard the returning those in incarcerated facilities not being part of this conversation on a broader scale. And I just think that would be very helpful to our communities, especially those who are doing the work.

Yes, there are opportunities to access these funds and contact my office and contact my Chief of Staff here, Terry Johns, and we will help with that. But I don't know. Ms. Burton sometimes doesn't want to mess with us in these funds.

I have to, I got land. It's vacant. And I feel like at some point I have a responsibility to the people I serve to go beyond sometimes what I might think I tell them to go beyond, but. So I got to go beyond, too.

That's good. So we're going to push. We're going to push you to go a little beyond and see if we can access some of these. Yeah, some of these funds to get to help you help us. Thank you guys so much for coming.

You know, I tried to do the parent reunification this year, too. The political climate at home has not, at home in Sacramento has not been welcoming to these two. But we're going to keep fighting it. I'm going to go back and try them again and try these bills again as we continue to push.

But I thank you guys so much for coming today and for participating.

Yeah, I hear there's some new excitement in the Democratic Party, so maybe they'll, you know, like move some stuff.

I can't talk about that, but thank you for bringing it up. And can all the panelists please wait, stay for a minute if you're still here so we can get a picture. And this hearing is adjourned. Thank you.