Good afternoon, Chairman Pinto, et al. My name is Rondell Jordan, and I am a resident of Ward 2 and a Staff Attorney for Open City Advocates, which provides legal representation and mentoring to youth who have been committed to DYRS. Open City Advocates is also a member of the Youth Justice Project Coalition, a coalition of DC-based organizations that strives to create a DC where our children, and particularly our Black and Brown children, are free to be kids and are supported throughout their transformation into healthy, thriving adults.
I am here today to testify against the Safer Stronger Amendment Act—a poorly named bill that makes us weaker and reduces the safety of the Black community in DC. It responds to a valid concern: the increase in crime, and especially violent crime. But it’s plying a failed prescription—especially for our community’s children.
We are currently reaping the fruit of our city’s failures. The last time we got tough on crime—so-called “Stronger, Safer”–we sent tens of thousands of Black DC residents to prison and ruined their employment prospects. Back then, we were fearful that we had raised a generation of Super Predators. Their wives lost husbands, their sisters lost brothers, their mothers and grandmothers lost their children, and their children lost their parents. DC’s youth are not Super Predators—there is nothing especially bad or scary about them. What distinguishes my clients is that they are poor people of color. We are not a Chocolate City any longer, but the jails sure are Chocolate–and they are going to continue to be Chocolate unless we get honest with ourselves and avoid acting out of fear.
We should start by asking, honestly, why we’re seeing more crime and especially more violent crime right now. Is it because things have gotten better for young people in Wards 7 and 8? Is it because of a lack of accountability?
I believe in accountability: but we adults need to hold ourselves accountable, first, for the harms that the systems we perpetuate have done before passing the baton to the next generation. 90% of my clients are Black. The other 10% are Latino. 100% of them are facing housing insecurity, poverty, and have themselves been the victim of violence. More than 90% have experienced the adverse childhood experiences that can destroy young people’s lives before they touch the legal system. But 100% of my clients have now had those experiences: once they’ve been imprisoned, they’ve all had yet another of those adverse childhood experiences that can ruin someone’s future.
And yet oddly, none of my clients received any support before they came into contact with the “accountability” systems of our city. I have clients who were evicted—even during the eviction moratorium—then they engaged in some petty robbery or drug dealing or carried a gun to protect themselves, and so the city decided the right response was to spend $16,000 PER MONTH to house them at YSC. Our city is, right now, saying that if you steal an $800 iPhone, we’ll spend $192,000 a year to dehumanize you. Those resources could transform Wards 7 and 8. We certainly shouldn’t double-down on that by passing this bill.
I don’t believe a white suburb would respond to increased levels of gun crime by locking up more of their children. I just don’t believe it would happen that way. And anyone who hasn’t spent a night in jail, or had their children snatched away from them, or seen their kids walking in a line with their hands chained behind their back doesn’t have the standing to demand that accountability means locking up more children.
We already incarcerate more young people in DC than anywhere else in the country. YSC and New Beginnings are already under-staffed and over-capacity, and we’re seeing the harm that does, too. Putting youth on 23 hours of lockdown in their cells, cells flooded with fecal matter, and all the time there are DYRS staff calling my clients animals.
If DC were a State, we would have the highest unemployment rate for black men in the United States, and that’s just adult men: for youth it’s out of control. Well, this bill would make a lot more jobs, but they’re really zookeeper jobs, and we don’t need more zookeepers, and we don’t need more cages, because we don’t have any animals. These are our children. And one day, if we give them the opportunity, they’re going to become adults. They’re going to come back home. And they’re going to pay us back with the love that we show them today. They’re going to pay us back for the fear that we resist today.
It’s hard right now to do the right thing with gun violence ticking up, but morally, spiritually, and for people who care about the numbers, economically, the right thing to do is to vote against this bill and to support our youth.