Acting for Freedom
John Lewis taught us that "Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take.”
For youth justice advocates, what does acting for freedom look like right now? The federal administration has been taking aim at programs that, until recently, kept children safe and supported – dismantling the Department of Education, targeting Medicaid, limiting access to gender affirming care, deporting unaccompanied minors, and pretending that somehow inclusion and diversity undermine, rather than strengthen us.
What do the adults in this world need to do for children to be free?
When my maternal grandmother was just six years old, she and her family were chased out of their home in Lithuania because they were Jewish and forced to trudge from village to village seeking safety. Later, they took cover from bombings in World War I. Though in some sense she wasn’t free at all, she shared with me that even then, she knew she would be ok because her mother kept her close by her side, holding her by the hand wherever she went. My grandmother later came to the U.S. and became a high school language teacher, sharing her knowledge with hundreds of children.
My paternal great-grandmother came to the U.S. from Czechoslovakia on her own at age 12, also fleeing religious persecution. Today she would be called an undocumented immigrant youth. She never learned to read, but she certainly knew how to advocate. Years later, when a teacher pulled her daughter’s braids in school, she marched in and laid down the law: “You won’t put your hands on my child.” Her daughter – my paternal grandmother - became a teacher as well, dedicated to making sure all her kindergarteners felt loved and welcomed in her classroom.
The matriarchs in my life weren’t just my biological ancestors. When I was a child, the most fabulous neighbor, Mrs. Kraak, lived next door. She was warm and kind and I – and every child in the neighborhood - knew we would be safe at her house.
In the U.S., we expose children to a special kind of horrible. What happens when a child is in trouble? This is when my one grandmother would have said “stay close to me and you’ll be ok.” Or my other grandmother would say “take your hands off my child.” Or Mrs. Kraak would say “come on in, would you like a snack?” But instead, we push parents, grandparents, and those who love their children, away – both physically and figuratively. We lock up children far from their families and expose them to horrifying conditions. I have seen children in solitary confinement peering out from the slots in their cell doors. I have seen footage of clients taken down by correctional staff in riot gear. I have listened to children tell me that they were slammed against the wall, involuntarily medicated, and ignored when they tried to speak out.
Generations of structural discrimination mean that the harms of our juvenile and criminal legal systems fall disproportionately on Black and Brown youth, LGBTQIA+ youth, and youth with disabilities.
We know what works for children – and frankly for all of us. It’s love, support, and community. And we know we can pass these lessons down from generation to generation. But instead, we have built systems that fray the fabric of our connections.
So what do we do? How can we act?
We can challenge solitary confinement, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and restraints. We can advocate to ensure the state doesn’t deepen economic divides by making families pay for their children’s confinement. We can fight to keep children out of adult court. Given the federal climate, we will bring these fights to state courts and state houses to better protect our children.
These are important acts of harm reduction, but they aren’t acts of freedom; we don’t have freedom when children are confined behind prison walls.
Across the country, states spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per child each year for incarceration. By fighting to keep youth out of the system, we also free up resources that can be used for education, health care, strong neighborhoods, and families.
In this moment, it feels daunting to be fighting for kindness, compassion, and connection. But I want to turn back to John Lewis, who years ago put his body on the line to fight for civil rights that I imagine may then have seemed like a distant dream. One detail in his story has always stuck with me. When he walked out the door in the morning to join the march, he put an apple in his backpack because he knew on that long day he might need a snack. John Lewis was a legend, but, to me, the apple made him real.
Some of us will march on bridges and some of us will advocate in courtrooms, but the time is now to put our apples in our backpacks and stand up together for children, for families and for justice.
