{"id":83188,"date":"2009-12-15T10:39:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T15:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:criminaljustice.change.org:\/\/00a254c9cb49f3df1b7407828b90fd82"},"modified":"2009-12-15T10:39:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-15T15:39:00","slug":"how-the-juvenile-justice-system-failed-me-and-how-to-fix-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/83188","title":{"rendered":"How the Juvenile Justice System Failed Me and How to Fix It"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I was 5\u20196\u201d tall and only 125 pounds.\u00a0 This is what I tell people when they ask what was it like being in prison at 16.\u00a0 Even before I pled guilty there was no real consideration given to my size, my immaturity or the prospects for my survival as I was placed in jail cells and blocks with adults. I hadn\u2019t won a fight in years and couldn\u2019t imagine be locked inside a cell with men as violent as reports about prisons in Virginia said.\u00a0 The court process was concerned with whether I was guilty or innocent; my family was lost, trying to figure out how I\u2019d gotten myself in handcuffs.<\/p>\n

An eight-year sentence left with me time to piece together what led me to pick up a gun and carjack a man, searching for the answers I couldn\u2019t give the judge and dealing with what it means to live in a place that is governed by violence.\u00a0 More than that, however, I spent time believing that I could get an education to craft my life into something more than a series of jail cells.\u00a0 Often, years passed and I found myself in prisons so far away from my family that I couldn\u2019t get a visit.\u00a0 Phone calls were so expensive that I only heard the voices of guards, other prisoners and the sounds that came into my head as I read books and letters.\u00a0 I thought my release would be a way to end the nightmare of living with a mistake, but I was wrong.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A prison sentence, no matter the amount of time given, is a life sentence.\u00a0 I would need both hands to number the opportunities I lost because of my felony, because people chose to define me by a moment of insanity.\u00a0 There is no way to truly measure the impact of being released from prison only to find closing doors.<\/p>\n

I came home began working toward a college degree.\u00a0 After two years at community college, I found myself graduating with a 3.85 grade point average and a full tuition scholarship to Howard University \u2013- except Howard University decided that my felony conviction made me unworthy to be a student.\u00a0 I could talk about the employers that passed me over and how moving from one day to the next became a challenge.\u00a0 You get released from prison and want to be a citizen. Instead you find that people aren\u2019t only skeptical, but most are unwilling to give you a chance. I must admit, however, that I did find a number of people who went against the grain and gave me an opportunity.<\/p>\n

In May 2009, two years after receiving a scholarship from the University of Maryland, I graduated and had the honor of being the student commencement speaker.\u00a0 That night was a far cry from the afternoon my family watched as the Honorable Judge Bach sentenced me to nine years in prison.\u00a0 That day, no one in the room believed I would survive prison, let alone graduate from college.<\/p>\n

When I was incarcerated, the Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act (JJDPA) offered measures that should have protected me.\u00a0 There was the measure prohibiting adults and juveniles being confined together during pretrial detention and other rules that would have given my family hope that I wouldn\u2019t be physically threatened daily.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the legislation wasn\u2019t enforced.<\/p>\n

Today, we have the opportunity to pass a stronger JJDPA, and I hope that we come together and do so, because this is a bill truly designed to protect those among us who cannot protect themselves.<\/p>\n

Today, 13 years after my incarceration, I am a husband and a father, a college graduate and a published writer. In my memoir, A Question of Freedom<\/a>, I wrote about what it was like to be in an adult prison system, about the violence and the lack of programming. I wrote about the astonishing way men discover their lost humanity in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. The JJDPA should be reauthorized, because it can be a part of keeping young people who have run astray of the law from inheriting the nightmares that ruin men as they pay their debt to society.<\/p>\n

Take Action!<\/strong> Tell the Senate: Pass Juvenile Justice Reform Now!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was 5\u20196\u201d tall and only 125 pounds.\u00a0 This is what I tell people when they ask what was it like being in prison at 16.\u00a0 Even before I pled guilty there was no real consideration given to my size, my immaturity or the prospects for my survival as I was placed in jail cells […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}