Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Hopefully we've got enough seats. If we don't, there's plenty of wall. I want to thank you all for coming to the first Committee meeting on the Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color. This Assembly Select Committee has been a long standing feature of the Assembly for well over a decade.

It's got a new membership now and I'm grateful to my colleagues who are joining me from Oakland and San Jose and other parts of Los Angeles. They'll be introducing themselves shortly. I'm Assembly Member Isaac Bryan, our chair. Today's hearing is on hope and healing in challenging times, building futures for our boys and men of color.

My colleagues and I and some of you in the room spent the morning in Los Padrinos Juvenile hall meeting with young people, learning from their experience, asking questions, building on their insight and updating them on legislation that they've written that is actively moving through the California State Legislature.

Today we're going to have three panels, one focused on Youth Justice Reimagined, looking at what's happening in Los Angeles and the campaign to support youth. We're also going to hear directly from youth on our second panel Centering youth Perspectives.

And our third panel is going to be about supporting boys and men of color, hearing multi sector stories from the field. And then of course, we will open it up to public comment and have closing remarks.

And with that, for additional opening remarks, I'd like to pass it to any of my colleagues who have some words or might have some words to say. Senator Mike Fong.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. And thank you so much for convening us all here at the Youth Justice Coalition. Good afternoon. I'm Senator Mike Fong, proudly representing California's 49th Assembly District parts of Los Angeles and nine cities in the West San Gabriel Valley.

But thank you so much to Chair Isaac Bryan for your leadership and efforts of the Select Committee and for bringing us together today at the YJC for important conversations. We know that across California there's an opportunity gap amongst boys and young men of color.

While we know that this progress has made over the last 15 years since the establishment of the Select Committee, we know that there's so much more work ahead of us still.

And our work includes repairing the harms caused by systems of mass incarceration, reversing historic underinvestment in communities of color, and reshaping the economic and social structures that were built with others in mind. I'm grateful again to be part of this work with someone Bryan thank you so much again for chairing this Committee.

And I want to thank many of you out here in the audience as well. I just talked to Mr. Eric Smith a few minutes ago for supporting AB805, which increases apprenticeship opportunities for those between ages 16 and 24, many of whom are individuals experiencing homelessness or have been involved with the foster justice systems or individuals with disabilities.

We know that we need to continue to provide more apprenticeship and job opportunities as well. And we know that in order to strengthen California, we must sure that everyone in our state has the resources and opportunities to reach their full potential.

Look forward to today's conversations and thank you so much to chair Bryan for convening all of us.

Thank you, Mr. Fong. Ms. Bonta

Good early evening everyone. I am Assemblymember Mia Bonta. I get to proudly say that I represent the beautiful people of Oakland, Emeryville and Alameda in Assembly District 18. And it has been my honor to be in the Legislature since 2021.

Coming in just weeks after this wonderful human being, our Chair of the Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, did justice deferred? Is justice denied? And within the context of the status of our boys and men of color, I think that is something that we have to think about.

Truly we are going to be focused on hope and healing right now, certainly. But also the other part of this, this very challenging time is something that we need to place right front and center of the work that we do right now.

I've been honored and privileged to be able to work with many of the organizations and advocacy groups in this room who have fought so tirelessly to make sure particularly that our boys and men of color are not trapped inside our criminal legal system.

And we're very thankful to have passed AB 1376 with Governor Newsom's signature to be able to end endless probation. That was hard work that happened over a decade by many, many advocacy organizations in this room.

And our work is just still needing to be done, I think under the leadership of Assemblymember Bryan, with two bills, AB 1646 and AB 1647, of which I was proudly allowed to become a co author earlier today after visiting with the young men inside our juvenile institution, very excited to be able to support that work.

We are in a very rare moment where we have the tension in the state of California of recognizing that there is so much progress that needs to be made and dealing with a Federal Government that continues to decide to dehumanize people, particularly boys and men of color.

So I'm thankful that California gets to lead yet again to ensure that we can raise right our boys and turn them into the powerful young men that we know that they are and make sure that we never forget that at the end of the day, we need to focus and center humanity.

And our criminal legal system should, should hold that humanity and dignity for every person that has to interact with that system. And so we'll get to the bottom of it by hearing from some amazing individuals for justice today. I'm very thankful to be able to participate. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Assembly Member Bonta. Assembly Member Ash Kalra.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for your incredible leadership, not just with the Select Committee, but everything that you do every day, advocating in our state capitol on behalf of all in our community, but in particular boys and men of color throughout this state.

We know that there's always been a heavy weight on boys and men of color by this society, by this country, by this government.

When I worked as a public defender back in the 90s and early 2000s, I don't think I could have imagined the incredible amount of positive progress that has been made since that time because of so many people in this room and so many people not in this room that have been advocates and allies. And yet also.

Yet it seems as if with all these steps forward we've taken, there's folks that are still wanting to push us back, but we know that the work must continue.

I'm very grateful to so many in this room, so many organizations in this room that have been supportive of the Racial justice act and the subsequent legislation that continues to push its intention forward.

And I'm also looking forward to the incredible panels and the speakers today so that we can figure out what we need to do against this pendulum trying to swing back to make sure that we continue, continue to fight for one another and fight for justice. Thank you.

Thank you, colleagues for your comments. The format today will be after two and a half minutes for each panelist, a little bit of flexibility, depending on where you are, your points, and then questions and feedback from the Committee. And then we'll move on to subsequent panels.

With the first panel, we have DeAnna Pittman with the Young Women's Freedom Center. Joseph Williams, Students Deserve, Derek Steele from the Social Justice Learning Institute, Milinda Kakani from the California Youth Justice Project. And my twin, Justin Marks from the Youth Justice Coalition.

And before we start with Ms. Pittman, I also, for my colleagues who are not from Los Angeles, this spot you're standing in, sitting in, is special. It wasn't chosen on accident, and it wasn't always special. It was a site of harm. This is a former youth courthouse where there are still cells around the corner in this space.

And it was taken over by the young people of Los Angeles and transformed into a place of healing and repair and organizing. So I thought it was only fitting that we do our first select Committee hearing here. And with that, we'll start with Ms. Pittman. Two and a half minutes.

Can y'all hear me?

Yes, ma'am.

Hello and thank you for inviting me to speak on this panel. First, I really just want to acknowledge and say that I'm very honored to be able to be on this panel with people who I consider to be giants. My name is DeAnna Pittman and I use she her pronouns.

And the incarceration of boys and men of color is an issue that hits close to home for me. As a child, my father was in and out of LA County jails and in and out of our state prisons.

I know firsthand the heartbreak that comes with having to see the strongest man in your family, in your life that be held down by abusive and carceral institutions. Today I serve as the program manager of youth leadership and justice at the Young Women's Freedom center in Los Angeles.

And we are leading the campaign to end the incarceration of girls, gender expansive youth and trans youth in LA. We've got a rich history of doing this work in the Bay Area, but in 2020, we brought this model to LA. And since then we've launched youth internships, fellowships, consistent weekly programming. We do one on one mentorship.

And my favorite part is that we get to create advocacy opportunities for youth to take their experiences to the state and to the county level to advocate for themselves. In 2023, we kicked off the Liberation Fund.

This is a coalition of men, of women, of girls, of boys, of transgender, transgender folks, of elders and allies who have all declared that we have no interest in rehabilitating or working with probation. Probation and incarceration has done harm. These are abusive systems that have failed us and we're not waiting any longer.

Youth justice reimagined is alive and well today. I must say that because look at all of the people in the room today. What we're focused on is building power, creating and uplifting our own solutions. LA operates the largest youth detention system in this country.

And we're declaring that if we can free the 50 girls that are locked up in LA right now, then we can work with the boys, then we can do this with youth in other counties and throughout the country. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Williams.

I don't know why y' all had to put me after DeAnna. What's up, y'all? Thank you. Assemblymember Bryan, thank you to the Committee. Grateful to be here. My name is Joseph Williams. I'm the Executive Director of Students Deserve.

Students Deserve works in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the country, working to support young people to fight against the school to prison pipeline, to fight against school discipline policies that push young people out of schools and into these systems of incarceration and oppression and abuse.

I'm very grateful and lucky to say that, like some of the people y'all might have heard from already, I'm a formerly incarcerated young person who was experiencing homelessness, who was pushed into group homes, pushed out of schools repeatedly, and ended up in cells and in cages as a young person. First time I was arrested, maybe 10.

First time I was actually in a juvenile detention center, I was 13 years old. I was lucky in that I had a rich community of folks who were pouring into me even as I was being incarcerated and reincarcerated every time I violated probation for something that happened at school.

But most of the people, most of the boys and young men that I was locked up with did not have those systems of support when they went home or when they went to school.

There was too often a focus on the surveillance and the criminalization of young people and not on the support that they needed on actually helping to meet the needs. Right. And the root causes. Address the root causes of what caused young people to act out or where our systems have failed. Young people.

Here in Los Angeles, there has been a history of folks organizing against the criminalization, incarceration, and pushout of young people.

We know that so often young people's interactions with the criminal justice system, especially for boys and men of color, happen in schools first in schools right through being expelled, suspended, arrested by school police, pushed out for willful defiance and other things. Right?

And so there's a long history of folks in Los Angeles organizing to say we've got to end the criminalization and push out of boys and of all of our students and provide schools that actually support and help meet the needs of the young people that they're serving. LAUSD is 90% students of color, 85% free and reduced lunch.

It is an entirely right, poor, low income, working class district of kids of color who have again experienced decades, and our families have experienced decades of underinvestment over policing, surveillance, criminalization, incarceration.

So over the past decade, folks have been able to make really transformative policy changes and victories that have impacted hundreds of thousands of young people and their families in LAUSD. I mentioned already, shout out to Cadre and the Brothers Son Selves Coalition who fought to end willful defiance.

Shout out to the Labor Community Strategy center who fought to end truancy tickets where young people were being criminalized for missing school or being late to school. Shout out to so many folks who pushed for A through G requirements, who pushed for more resources for young people. And in 2020, students deserve Black Lives Matter.

Los Angeles and the Brothers Son Sales Coalition pulled together the Police Free LAUSD Coalition which won a $25 million divestment from the School Police Department. And let me just say, right, in a city and a county, in a state that spends so much on incarceration and policing, LAUSD also has its own police Department, right?

That they still to this day are spending over $70 million of education dollars a year on a school police Department instead of using those resources to actually meet young people's needs. What we've been able to win in LAUSD since 2020, again, a 25 million dollar divestment from the School Police Department to create the Black Student Achievement Plan.

The Black Student Achievement Plan brings restorative justice teachers, psychiatric social workers, academic and career counselors, funding for community based safety, funding for mentorships and community partnerships, funding for HBCU tours and college access, funding for

so many things, African American studies courses and ethnic studies courses and electives, where we have literally taken money that was used to criminalize and arrest and abuse and pepper spray and incarcerate young people and put that into positive resources for young people in the second largest school district in the country.

We know now that the district is being sued, right, for equitable funding policies and equitable policies that have fought again since the desegregation of public schools to actually right some of the wrongs that this country has enacted right?

And those policy victories, including BSAP, are under direct attack because folks have seen how powerful our movement is, how powerful our communities are, and the transformative changes that have come about since some of these changes have been acted. Shout out to Castle Redmond.

I saw earlier they wrote an article, I think, that came out last week that named, right, that last year LA had the lowest number of murders that it's had since 1966 or 1967. At the same time as we're seeing the highest levels of academic achievement, right, especially for black students.

Especially for boys and men of color in our schools. Now we know that the needle is nowhere near move as far as it needs to. Right? And the resources that young people are still getting or still lacking, right, are so massive.

And we have shown, we have proven with the work in Los Angeles that when you invest and meeting the needs of young people, when you invest in support systems and resources and culturally affirming curriculum in restorative and transformative justice, that we can actually transform outcomes for our young people and for the broader community.

So grateful to continue to be with the police.

Free LAUSD Coalition pushing for LA to continue to divest from policing and incarcerating young people and invest in the kind of resources that we need, including winning last year $5 million for Dream Centers to support immigrant students and families who are experiencing heightened levels of criminalization, surveillance and abuse right now, as well as $2 million for LGBTQ affirming supports for young people, queer and trans young people who are also facing attacks in our schools.

And we would like to invite y'all. Tomorrow is actually the five year anniversary of the Black Student Achievement Plan.

If y'all are still around in LA Assembly Members, but also to the whole crowd, we'll be at the Crenshaw Mall from 11am to 4pm celebrating the five year anniversary of the Black Student Achievement Plan, where we're going to be hearing from young people who went to schools before BSAP where black students, black boys in particular, were being heavily policed, heavily criminalized, pushed out of schools with zero tolerance policies and young people's experiences over the last five years with cops off campus, with a ban on pepper spray, with more counselors, with more positive adults on their campuses.

So we're going to be celebrating tomorrow and also affirming and reaffirming our commitment to continue this work even under the face of attack.

So we appreciate you all being here for this hearing and we hope that we can continue to push forward some of the transformative victories that we've been able to build and win here in Los Angeles and around California. Thank you.

So that was a solid 10 minutes, but Joseph's been my brother for a long time and took us right down memory lane. But also so much incredible work is happening, so I'm actually unlikely to cut any of you off at any point.

Just want you to be mindful of yourself because we have a limited amount of time with our Assembly colleagues. We have flights to get back north and we want to make sure we hear from all the youth too. But that was incredibly powerful. And important. And with that we want to hear from you, Mr. Steele.

I was about to say I would have yielded my time for everything that my brother was saying and he's completely spot on. My name is Derek Steele. I'm the Executive Director of the Social Justice Learning Institute out of Inglewood, California. Our mission is to improve the overall health, education and well being of youth and communities of color.

We do that by empowering them to be able to enact the change they want to see. Our flagship work is in education working starting with boys and men of color, particularly Black boys. Our flagship program, Urban Scholars started off as the Black Male Youth Academy out of Morningside High School.

Working to make sure that there's community built amongst the young people that we work with in the schools is a credit bearing class that they actually take where they're learning the fundamentals of civic engagement.

But like I said, figuring out how they can use education as a throughway towards success for their own livelihood, but also thinking about how they can actually enact change in their community at the same time. And to what Joseph was actually saying and a very important aspect that goes along with this.

There are several different organizations that work on and with, on behalf of and with young people that are helping to empower them in certain in many different ways. And SJLI alone is a part of almost 30 different coalitions and collaboratives all throughout LA County and through the state of California.

More than half of them being dedicated towards the work that is happening on behalf of young people and several of them on the behalf of boys men of color. The Brothers in Sales coalition that Joseph was talking about is one of the coalitions that we are a part of. And when you think about the.

It's not just making sure that we can create the atmosphere and the correct the systems to make sure that young people can thrive. It's also making sure that they have the opportunity to be at the table and to speak on behalf of what they want to see in the future.

The future that they're going to inherit on their own. Right. I think when you come across policies like Prop 47 that 10 years ago was brought to bear the work that many of our young people did during that time frame to help make sure that that type of policy gets ushered in.

There are now young people and families that are that have ripped the benefits of it 10 years later. Right.

When you think about the school, the police, free schools work, you know, there are young people who are there today that we're still working with now that reap the benefits of the work that young people have done on behalf of themselves and their peers and their future peers as well. Right.

So I think it's really critical to make sure that anytime we have these spaces, and I'm really grateful that it's not just the adults who get the opportunity to speak today, it's actually the young people being able to speak upon for themselves to be able to show you and tell you what they want to see in the world.

You know, the, You know, when you think about things like Measure J and how those things, how that got passed, when you think about the work that came before it, that actually establishes, you know, that establishes the opportunity for the Department of Youth Development in LA County even becoming about that work comes through with young people coming together and the youth reimagined and the report that comes out of that, the ATR report, young people were thoroughly involved in that work as well.

So I'm giving you all these different examples of things to kind of look at, to be able to hear the voice of the young people.

They're not just outside at rallies and they are at the rallies, don't get me wrong, they're outside for real and not afraid, unafraid to be able to say how they feel about what they want to see. But they are also astute enough and have the information that they need to be able to help develop policy.

You know, shout out to the alliance of boys and men of color and the work that they do in making sure that there is place and space for us to be able to come and speak to elected officials every single year around the issues and organizing around the policies that we want to see that help to get us closer and closer to a world where young people can live hopefully thriving lives.

But I guess the point I want to like really underscore, I can talk about the work and I can talk about what SJLI does and how we help to advance it, but it really comes down to the, at least from our organization, the 4,000 plus young people who didn't just come through the work at SJLI, but many of them also being in the ranks of leaders who have helped to advocate for change on the school district level, on the county level, on the city level, and even on the state level, that when you look at the fingerprints, it's really their fingerprints that are a part of the work.

So I just want to lift that up and thank you very much for you all being here to be a part of this dialogue so that we can further the work that is necessary in order to make sure that not only the young people but their families can live hopefully thriving lives here in LA County.

Thank you, Milinda.

Okay. All right. Hi, my name's Millie. I'm with the California Youth Justice Project. Former public school teacher, former public defender, mom, civil legal services advocate, and now Executive Director. Our systems should model the behavior that we seek to see.

If we don't want our young people solving problems in violent and life annihilating ways, we cannot then have systems that do just that. Shout out to Ruth Wilson Gilmore for reminding us of what it means to truly believe that life is precious.

Not just a victim's life, not just a police officer's life, not just a model student's life, but all life.

You spent the morning in one of our juvenile halls, Los Padrinos, where you got to witness the promise and potential of young people that most of our systems are perfectly comfortable, pushing so far out of the margins that they will never make their way back.

Systems that call on us to build walls and barriers so high that instead of offering our hands to these young folks, we offer barbed wire, pepper spray, an hour of fresh air on a good day, of which there are very few, and an unlawfully operating facility, according to our Board of State and Community Corrections.

We had a moment, a brief one, where we were reimagining public safety through the blueprint laid out in Youth justice reimagined here in LA County.

But what I'm seeing on the ground, in communities, in courtrooms, in day rooms at LP, is that we don't have your buy in because your colleagues seem to prioritize their power and maintaining that power over the preciousness of every single life, specifically power through remaining in the good graces of law enforcement.

And by law enforcement, I do mean the probation Department. Probation representatives have repeatedly noted that their designation as peace officers make them brothers with the sheriff, with local police agencies, with correction officers, not so much the young people in our caging facilities.

On Tuesday of this week, 273 of the 282 boys in our juvenile halls were young people of color. 273 of 282. That's almost 96%. As Members of the Select Committee for the Status of Boys and Men of Color, I implore you to stop abandoning these young people.

I implore you to stop the sanctioning of state violence through the incarceration of our young people.

I implore you to acknowledge that we have devalued the lives of these young people by investing in more police and in their training, by limiting their access to quality health care, by offering them a subpar education, by allowing them to experience housing or food insecurity, by criminalizing their survival.

I implore you to stop focusing on how we create humane caging facilities, but instead, how do we create a world where these facilities are not necessary and where every life is precious? And finally, as a closing thought, this last year has had many of us talking about fascism and threats to our democracy.

And in this state of crisis and overwhelm, it is important to remember that caging kids is fascist. No matter who the President is, we have never seen these young people as central to how we see our future.

Because the carceral institutions that surveil and control their bodies, the culture that seeps through its walls, the ability to try them as adults, the shackling of their wrists and ankles just to get them to doctor's appointments in the name of public safety, and the claim that probation is a service provider, a rehabilitator, an attempt at protecting young people from entering prison, it's just not it.

I'm pretty sure the young folks incarcerated in our juvenile halls, you know, the ones directly impact, would tell you the exact opposite, that none of these institutions serve to protect them, to rehabilitate them, to provide for them.

One of the most important metrics in evaluating the democratic health of a society can be found in how it treats its young people, all of our young people. So I'm asking each of you to do better, to be bold, and to stop prioritizing politics over people. And I'm footnoting Senate Bill 357.

If you need more context of an example of how Sacramento chose to leave our young people behind in the name of politics.

Mr. Marks, that was powerful. Millie, I'm so happy to be going after you. I want to lift up the name of Brian Diaz. Say his name. Brian Diaz. Say his name. Brian Diaz. I want to lift up the name of Tariq English. Say his name. Tariq English.

Tariq English.

Tariq English. Say his name.

Tariq English.

Ashe. My name is Justin Andrew Marks. I'm the co Executive Director of the Youth Justice Coalition. And we keep us safe. Not police, not probation. It is appalling still that the largest sexual assault lawsuit was settled here in LA County. And when I say largest in history, I'm talking about before this it was the Catholic Church, so.

And young people are still in LA County probation supervision. It's disgusting. Now we have a local district attorney, Nathaniel Hockman, looking to challenge the stories and the proof and evidence provided by survivors. So we've seen pendulum shifts nationally, here, locally, but at YJC, we operate this space.

And we welcome you all here at Chuco's Justice Center, formerly David V. Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center, as you spoke to here, we've transformed courtrooms into classrooms. We've transformed jail cells into music studios and fitness centers. We've transformed parking lots into rebel gardens. And we turn students into leaders, Right?

We recognize the power that comes when community comes together, right? Recognizing that these systems, I use the term Babylon, were never meant to keep us safe. That we are safe when we know our neighbors. We are safe when we're fed, when we're housed. We're safe when we have access to supportive adults and mentors.

Not more access to cages. Because LAPD and probation are open 24 hours a day, we have to close our doors at nine, right? So thinking about what this world that we're building looks like, it looks like a flip of that, of our priorities. YJC operates a high school.

YJC Youth Justice Coalition was founded in 2003 by incarcerated community members, youth and their families. In 2007, some of those same young people said, we keep getting kicked out of LAUSD schools. We need our own school. And so we founded FREE LA High School. We love our acronyms.

FREE LA stands for Fighting for the Revolution to Educate and Empower Los Angeles. That's what we do here. Since 2007, we've graduated over 500 students with a budget smaller than what LAPD spends on printing each year. So when we talk about abolition, we are.

And people think that we're crazy when we talk about abolition and ending these things, people say it's like it's not safe. We're not there yet. But when we talk about the abolition of slavery, they said we had drapetomania. They said that wanting to be free was a sickness. Well, I got that. Whatever that is, I got that.

That's what we have. We want to be free, right? And so, like Millie and other speakers here are imploring you to do is to put people over politics for us, to put you first, to put our future first, to put our priorities where our budget is right?

So make sure that those things line up, that we're not spending more on locking kids up. It costs over $800,000 to keep one youth locked up in a cell for a year. Do you know how much community can do with that? Do you know how much those parents can do with that? Right?

So I'm sad, I'm angry, but I'm also grateful to be here with this community at my back, right.

To be surrounded by these stories on the walls of how we got to a Department of Youth Development, where LA County spent more on animal control and stray dogs than it did on young people compared with cities like Atlanta, New York. And so in 2022, we celebrated the establishment of the Department of Youth Development.

And the contradiction still lies, is that that's another government agency. How is that the community's victory? Right. So. But the devil's in the details and implementation. And yet we continue to see probation funded. We continue to see increases in spending for the sheriffs, for LAPD, and yet we see the highest rates of student achievement ever.

We see lowering rates of crime and murder, but yet the spending doesn't match that. And so again, I implore you, like others have, to put people over politics and to fund youth development and to come back to Chuco's. We, the county owns this building. We are a community organizing organization.

And the county is both our landlord and our organizing target, which provides a unique tension. But we are launching our courtrooms to classrooms, capital campaign.

We are looking for champions who want to help us have community ownership over this building and to spread this model to other parts of the county so that we can help keep young people free, build youth centers and build youth leaders. Thank you.

I think every speaker, all of us up here are wondering who's going to top that? And it just progressively got stronger and stronger and stronger. Thank you for that testimony. Colleagues, any questions or comments from the first panel?

Mr. Carver, first of all, incredible. I'm grateful that you all are in the space. You are with the community alongside you.

When we just went to the facility earlier and met with these incredible young people and with, you know, obviously there were probation representatives and other folks in the room, but the youth were very candid because when we asked them what it is that they needed, and, you know, you always hear about all the programs they're getting and all that, they're like, we need more programs, we need more programming.

When we get something, then when we finally get something, probation says, well, we can't do it. And they keep getting excuses about that. When I was hearing some of your comments, that's really what I was thinking about, is that even when we.

Even when they do win and they fight for something and they get it, they still don't get it, you know, and so what are.

Given the fact it costs so much, I suppose all of you have expertise in this area, given the fact that it does cost so much to incarcerate, I'm of the same opinion that, you know, if you just look at the fiscal cost, putting aside the human cost, which of course in itself is justifiable enough, but even at the fiscal cost, how much you can do with that money, if you wrap that around that individual young person with services, with schooling, with food, with rent, are there concepts or practices in place that are doing that or that are showing that so that we can say, hey, instead of locking this person up, we gave them all of this.

And I'm trying to find things we can replicate, you know, take to other counties, take throughout the state. So if you have any examples of that happening, where you were able to look back and say, hey, look, county, this is what we were able to do.

If you had locked this person up, this young person up, it would have cost this much. For 20% of that, 10% of that, we were able to do this. Any thing that comes to mind or any ideas of how we could do that, that come to mind.

So I sit. Sorry, that was so loud. I sit on the Probation Oversight Commission as Supervisor Mitchell's appointee. So I have the opportunity to go inside the facilities announced and unannounced. And just plus one to your comment about the fact that young people are craving more.

And it is atrocious to me that we are not doing more with this, like, captive audience. And truly, they are captured captive. And it's important to acknowledge that if we're not doing right by them inside, then really we have no business caging Them, we never have business caging them.

But I just feel like if we're not spending this $500 million budget on actual rehabilitation, then I think there are better places that we can spend this money.

The Department of Youth Development, which is another county Department here in LA County, has started what's called a RAY program, and it is inside the courtrooms supporting young people at arraignment.

So basically, you know, the judge has the opportunity to hear the case, see the complaint, and then I guess check in with the Department of Youth Development to see if they have services to support this young person.

But it's important to acknowledge that even as we were talking about Senate Bill 357, which called for shifting some of probation's responsibilities to the Department of Youth Development, only in LA County, because the Probation Department is not only, like, flailing, it is failing. Right. The ship has sunk. It's not sinking.

And so there was so much opposition, both by your colleagues, partners, I'm not sure how you refer to them. And obviously the Probation association and their unions don't always call them partners, that's for sure. Okay, sorry, these are my partners.

But all that to say even just the simple act of sharing a case file with the Department of Youth Development raised red flags for the Probation Department.

If the Department of Youth Development could review a case file, they could step in that 48 to 72 hours when a young person is mandatorily detained pursuant to certain provisions of the Welfare and Institutions Code and actually assess whether a young people, whether a young person could be safely released, whether there are these services that we could wrap around this young person.

You have a probation Department that is requesting continuances because they don't have enough folks to do their jobs. So we have another body here that is able and capable of doing that job. But we need you all to give them the power to do that.

And that's exactly why I asked the question, because that's the function of these. These hearings aren't simply to. Even though if that was the only thing, it would still be valuable to get feedback. But it's okay, what do we do with it? What actions do we take?

And that's a very specific ask that I think we can look into. Say, okay, well, probation, if you're not going to release that, then the whole function of that, whole of having those bodies there is irrelevant. And so, anyway, I really appreciate that very specific feedback on that.

So to add to that as examples, I want to. I'll go two different examples. The first One Measure J. I have the privilege of sitting on the Care First Community Investment Advisory Committee that stewards the resources that were allocated to Measure J.

And there's a whole history of like Measure J going to court and then not being legal, but then it then being legal and like, but you know, shout out to the commitment of the Board of Supervisors in 2020 to make sure that regardless of what the legal case was, for measure J to actually get the dollars out the door by way of cfci.

I bring it up because like even more detailed and specific, looking at the third party administrator and the resources that it stewards is a great example of what happens when you can utilize dollars that are an alternative to incarceration and actually getting those dollars out to community and what type of impact it can actually make in community.

Over 400 different organizations are actually, it's more than that now, but in the first three years of the funding allocations that were allotted toward the third party administrator, which is Amity foundation is the third party administrator is actually still in the funds.

400 plus organizations that are doing work in community, several of them being doing work directly with young people. Right. The transformative nature of these dollars are impacting hundreds of thousands of Angelenos lives every single day.

Now the counterpart to this is that yes, the third party administrator is doing an amazing job and they have a dashboard so you can actually see, see all the, you know, magnificent work that's happening in community. But the county departments got the greater majority of the dollars like we're talking about since the inception of the work.

Near a billion dollars that have gone out the door are supposed to have gone out the door as far as measure J is concerned. And the departments have been slow walking their work to actually get the dollars out the door to take care of things. Right.

So you have this, if you want to look at as an example of the juxtaposition between if you just give the money to the community Members, we're going to do what we need to do versus giving it to the establishment to continue to the bullshit that they regularly do on a regular basis of like trying to figure out the contracts.

And I just, I can't get the.like it's ridiculous. And I think as a different example, you move over to BSAB in lausd, you know, you heard the data that Joseph was already espousing around the impacts that those dollars have had in, you know, for the young people in several different schools across the county.

But even those dollars, they slow walked the dollars out the door for that one too. But for the schools that actually did roll out the resources the best that they could and had community engagement, community based organizations that are impacting those, impacting those students, that's where the results come from. And who.

And who can't imagine how much more impact we could have if the bureaucracy was out the way. Right.

If you give the ability for community Members to do what we do best, for community based organizations to do what we do best, as far as how we take care of each other and take care of community, I think these are two really good examples of like how we can really get government to do the main thing that is supposed to do, which is only just to be the.

You got the money, Release the funds, Let us do what we do here in the community.

So thank you, sir. Yeah, we'll have you be the closer for this one. So we. So we can get to make sure we have enough time for all of the youth. But absolutely.

Okay. One specific example that I want to name is Beloved Village. So Beloved Village is a project that the Young Women's Freedom center created a couple years ago. Because in this work to end the incarceration of girls, one thing that we hear all the time is that there's nowhere for them to go. There are no beds.

Their family cannot support them. But Beloved Village works creatively to find alternatives to incarceration. So Beloved can actually Fund families to house youth. Sometimes we hear that, you know, parents are going through their own things, substance abuse issues, they're navigating the system on their own, so they can't support their children in the way that they wish to.

But there might be an aunt in the family who had, she had the funds and the support, the mentorship to take home this child. Then you know, that child should be with their family, not staying in probation. Because the juvenile halls in LA for girls have largely been, that is the placement.

There are no placement options for girls. So instead of sending them home, they have to wait and wait and wait in these abusive institutions. And last year, Probation announced that they wanted to move all of the girls from all of our different juvenile halls in LA County and consolidate them all into one camp in Malibu.

And Malibu and us as organizers took this as an opportunity to give them a roadmap. So we, we went to probation, we went to the board and we offered a rapid release plan where Beloved was going to review case plans. They were also going to be able to

Fund, I think, up to $1,000 for each young person coming home, but also connect the young people with a mentor and the parent gets a mentor. So there are real life solutions and alternatives that exist but they don't look at us.

That's a really great point and I think I know for myself I could ask a lot of you a lot of questions and definitely want to follow up with you, Mr. Williams about kind of the status of the BSAP program in the wake of what's going on in LAUSD right now.

We know the superintendent's been put on indefinite paid administrative leave and I know there's conversations in community about exactly what the FBI is doing because we don't trust the FBI either. And so I know that that's complicated and perhaps maybe there's a role that the state can play in that.

So let's talk offline because I want to make sure that we get room for all of these young people to be heard. Can we give it up for the first pan? For all of our next panelists please come on up to the front.