UCLA Community Collaborators
Building relationships, leadership, and research agendas for decarceration
Since 2020, a remarkable group of community members have walked towards each other to incorporate their experiences in California’s regimes of youth incarceration into the policy effort to establish ‘Youth Justice Reimagined,’ a road-map adopted by LA County to decarcerate juvenile justice. Our goal is to contribute to these efforts by supporting the public to understand the decarceration process in LA County and to equip the participants in our program to shape the transition from youth incarceration to community health in a just and equitable manner.
We believe that combining the voices of people who the State detained in youth prisons, camps, and halls, with people that the State recruited to work in these facilities, produces deeper knowledge, unique insights, and opportunities to heal from the harms of youth incarceration. These participants have insisted on centering ‘healing justice’ in their efforts to define a Just Transition from youth incarceration to community health. Healing Justice in this context refers to activities that promote truth-seeking and dialogue, relationship-building, and repairing harms and systems.
Centering Formerly Incarcerated Youth in the Transition from Youth Incarceration
During the era of Mass Incarceration, California’s practice of caging children ensnared thousands of young people in the criminal justice system. We are grateful to have people who have survived juvenile halls, camps, and state youth prisons, involved in our project. Hear from them here.
Akeila Jefferson
“It’s not okay for adults to sleep with children, that’s my life mission.”
Brittianna Robinson
“I see how my testimony can be a vessel for other girls who went through the same abuse as I have.”
Carlos Sauceda
“I know how important the healing part is, because for me,
healing saved my life.”
Emiliano Lopez
“I’m hopeful that people will start to see that incarcerating youth in these dungeons doesn’t make the public safe.”
Gonzalo Alvarado
“In order for me to negate helplessness, I feel very strongly about finding ways to heal and to help others heal.”
Kanaka Luna
“When I finally made my transformation it wasn’t just to be free from prison, it was to be free from my own internal demons.”
Stephanie Lane
“The type of individuals that we are, we’re supposed to be throwaways but there’s people who are not going to throw you away and once you know that it’s contagious.”
UCLA Just Transition Community Fellowship
The community participants above were selected for the UCLA Just Transition Community Fellowship. It provides a scholarship to individuals with lived experience in the youth carceral system to engage in participatory action research activities with former workers in the youth correctional system. Fellows are invited to join based on scholarship fund availability and based on their demonstrated leadership in the areas of defending human rights and dignity, nurturing youth voice, community-building for racial and gender justice, or social justice advocacy.
Elevating Worker Voice in the Transition from Youth Incarceration
Very little is known about the impact of working in a youth detention center on individual workers. We are grateful to the people with work experience in these youth carceral spaces for sharing their stories with us and building space with formerly incarcerated youth to shape the transition away from youth incarceration to community health. Hear from them here.
Yalonda Wade
“I believe there are ways to advance the growth of people without incarcerating them.”
Eduardo Mundo
“I hope this project will be shared with policy makers and anyone involved in trying to reimagine our county’s juvenile justice system”
To hear extended oral history interviews with former staff of youth carceral spaces,
visit our oral history archive on Decarceration and the Future of Work.
System-Impacted People
Family members, including children of incarcerated parents, and other loved ones, are crucial to understanding the human impact and breadth of incarceration. Community members – including student and faculty researchers from UCLA – who are system-impacted in this way have been crucial to the inquiry about the state’s transition from youth incarceration to community health. Hear from them here:
Ariel Moore
“I’m hopeful abolition is possible because the way incarceration resembles slavery demands we have the same solution.”