Senator Loni Hancock’s Senate Bill 261 will change the lives of thousands of men like me who committed crimes as confused youth but who have grown and matured into responsible men and potential role models.
When I decided to write a plea for strong support of Hancock’s bill, I planned to say that by paroling x number of former youth offenders, California would save 60,000 times x tax dollars. I thought by pointing out what it meant for your pocketbook, you’d be more likely to write your local representative in support of SB 261. Then, I realized the absurdity of asking you to have faith in youth offenders’ tremendous potential to change while writing a piece that shows no faith in you.
INCARCERATION COST
So I’m asking you to write the governor, your assemblyperson and your senator not about fiscal budgetary costs, but about incarceration’s cost to our society. I want you to stand because the U.S. comprises 5 percent of the world’s population, but holds 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. Stand because something is wrong with criminal justice in America, and SB 261 moves us in a better direction. It acknowledges that rehabilitation can work, that when a trained parole board determines rehabilitation has taken place, there ought to be laws that integrate the rehabilitated back into society where they can contribute solutions to social problems, such as urban violence, that affect everyone.
SOLUTIONS
And we do want to contribute solutions to social problems. I wish you could sit in a room with Kid CAT members. You would find incarcerated men who are deeply aware of the ways their crimes hurt their communities. One common bond among us is the weight of knowing that when we were children, we perpetuated destructive cycles that still destroy lives today. Another bond, our strongest, is our need to help stop these cycles. We watch news on TV; we see the children our nation loses to urban violence, and our hearts are screaming for a chance to return to the community and save them.
And we can save them. In a talk given at San Quentin State Prison, author Bryan Stevenson spoke about proximity, how engaging social problems personally, i.e. involving oneself with the issues, holds tremendous power to transform this world. There is no demographic more proximate to the ills destroying the youth in our communities than youth offenders who have rehabilitated themselves.
SB 261
SB 261 requires young adults to be accountable for criminal actions, while recognizing their special capacity to learn and grow from their mistakes. SB 261 mandates that a young person who was under the age of 23 at the time of his or her crime and who was sentenced to extreme terms, like 67 years to life, instead serve a minimum of 15, 20, or 25 years in prison (depending on the seriousness of the crime) — whereupon they become eligible to plead their case to the parole board. The bill will not release criminals. It will release men who have become the change their communities hope to see. Rehabilitated youth offenders can show troubled youth the kind of men they must learn to be if destructive, urban cycles are to end. We are uniquely qualified to teach at-risk youth what nobody taught us when we were confused and at-risk ourselves. I hope you write your local representatives in support of SB 261, so we will have the chance to serve the communities that we helped ruin.
