Select Committee Hearing Remarks

Written by:

Writers Name

Feb 27, 2026

Our systems should model the behavior 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 the margins that they’ll never be able to come 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 aren’t enough, and an unlawfully operating facility according to our Board of State and Community Corrections.

Photographer Credit 2

1/1/2026

We had a moment 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 court rooms, 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 person’s life. Specifically, power through remaining in the good graces of law enforcement. And by law enforcement, I do mean Probation. Probation representatives have repeatedly noted that their designation as peace officers make them brothers with the sheriff, with local police agencies, with corrections 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. 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 their incarceration. I implore you to acknowledge that we have devalued the lives of these young people, by investing in more police and their training, by limiting their access to quality healthcare, by offering them a sub-par 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.

Finally, as a closing thought. The 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.

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 in the name of public safety are really just attempts to abandon them.

While you might sit on your perches and claim that Probation is a service provider, a rehabilitator, an attempt at protecting young people from entering prison, I’m pretty sure the young folks incarcerated in our juvenile halls, you know, the ones directly impacted, would tell you the exact opposite.

One of the most important metrics in evaluating the democratic health of a society can be found in how it treats its youth. All of our youth. So I’m asking you to do better, to be bold, and to stop prioritizing politics over people. And I’m footnoting SB 357 if you need more context or an example of how Sacramento chose to leave our young people behind in the name of politics.