Social Rehabilitation Through Collaborative Education
Justice Ambassadors as a Transformative Programme for Youth Development & Policy Consideration
Jarrell Daniels, Brooke Burrows, UniQue C. Starks-Tanksley, and Geraldine Downey
Introduction
Laws and policies that govern our society are frequently promoted under the basis that they help support the development of everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, class, creed or gender identity. Yet, there are few opportunities for most individuals to inform and directly shape the rules and structures intended to create social order and foster pathways toward success. Government officials who may be distant and disconnected from the everyday lives of under-resourced communities have the authority to develop and enact laws that impact marginalised individuals. Simultaneously, there is an absence of platforms for developing policy by proximity: underserved communities have few opportunities to advocate for the development and implementation of policies and practices that are intended to serve them best in light of their life circumstances. Instead, scholars have noted that “negative interactions with legal authorities [can] erode public perceptions of police legitimacy and trust in government or ‘the system,’” more broadly (Fagan & Davies 2000; Soss 1999; Sunshine & Tyler 2003).
For disadvantaged New York City residents, particularly Black and brown communities, crises such as lack of resources, inequitable housing, food insecurity, income instability, incarceration and over-policing have persisted as normal across generations (Zhao et al. 2019; Truong & Asare 2021; Pettit & Gutierrez 2018). For young people born with the odds of living a healthy life stacked against them, there is a continuous war raging on two fronts. On one hand, there is the constant uphill battle to overcome family instability, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), community neglect, and the lure of harmful peer influences like gang and street culture (Narayan et al. 2021), as well as the viral violence that is promoted through social media platforms (Irwin-Rogers et al. 2018). On the other hand, there is the intergenerational plight of ethnic minorities who continue their fight for society to recognise them as wholehuman beings whose lives matter under the code law and society’s governing policies (Graf et al. 2021). Both battles have placed disadvantaged people into vulnerable social positions that many spend a lifetime trying to overcome.
The collateral consequences of punitive policies and failed legislative interventions coupled with the lack of community investments has generated lifelong cycles of police contact, arrests, detainment, prosecutions and incarceration (Weaver & Geller 2019). To be born into a marginalised family or a community where adverse family and community experiences are common makes transitioning to adult roles more difficult. Opportunities to reconcile negative and often traumatic experiences are rare, as are opportunities for the young people to have meaningful positive encounters with justice system actors to jointly consider processes of system change (Wray-Lake & Abrams 2020). Compounding these system harms, the complex roles and job requirements of justice system representatives are not well understood by the general public, even including those who have had firsthand contact with the courts (Grisso 1997). Furthermore, justice-impacted or formerly incarcerated people, in particular youth, are often excluded or estranged from legislation action, policy advocacy and governmental processes overall. The exclusion of individuals most directly impacted by the legal system from policy conversations, especially those from under-resourced and marginalised communities, reinforces cycles of harm and incarceration (Smith & Kinzel 2021). Conversely, fostering dialogue and collaborative education between justiceimpacted young people and government representatives around important personal, community and social change ideas allows for the possibility of breaking out of such negative cycles.
Across the United States, there are many programmes designed to cultivate youth leadership; some that even empower youth to advocate for communal change or system reform alongside government officials and other key stakeholders (Balsano 2005). However, what it takes to help youth achieve personal growth from trauma, acquire the skills for community transformation, and understand their own role and agency in policy co-authorship is less-charted territory. Hence, the current chapter outlines a framework of personal, community, and social change for system reform and community investment by considering the programmatic structure of the Justice Ambassadors Youth Council (JAYC), as well as insights from its implementation. JAYC brings together justice-impacted youth and government representatives to hold honest and intentional conversations about their own social identities and experiences in relation to systems (for example, the criminal legal system, education and so on). Justice Ambassadors leverage this approach in various youth development contexts, such as middle and high school workshops, college seminars, community presentations and for-adult professional trainings. Here, we describe interactions taken primarily from the fourth cohort of JAYC that was unique in its specific and intentional representation of legal system actors. Examples of the curriculum’s transformative power are described.