Access to Justice (ATJ)

Testimony of Penelope Spain

Co-Founder & CEO, Open City Advocates

Access to Justice Initiative, FY27 Budget Hearing — May 6, 2026

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Pinto and members of the Committee. My name is Penelope Spain. I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Open City Advocates, where we provide post-disposition legal representation and reentry support to youth committed to the DC Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services or DYRS.

In 2025, the court committed 145 young people to DYRS, and on any given day, there are about 310 youth committed to DYRS. This number continues to rise each year. Youth are committed to DYRS for an average of two years, and 97% are incarcerated for at least some, if not all, of that time. The need for our services is growing because the system is growing. DYRS commitments rose 31 percent from 2024 to 2025. The committed youth population at YSC has risen 50 percent in two years. Legal representation is crucial during DYRS commitment, and less than half of committed youth have active counsel right now. Open City Advocates is swiftly increasing our capacity to help meet that need.

The Access to Justice Initiative provides 17 percent of our funding, supporting four attorneys. In FY26 we will serve 80 DC low-income and underserved DC residents through extended legal representation, record sealing, Know Your Rights sessions, our family helpline, and panel attorney training.

The power imbalance for a child committed to DYRS is hard to overstate. Legal representation protects a child’s rights, highlights their individual needs, strengths, disabilities and traumas, and advocates for each child to be seen as a human being. We are also highly effective at our job and save the city from spending even more money on harmful, ineffective youth incarceration. Our clients are 38 percent less likely to be re-arrested within two years of commitment, and 27 percent less likely to be reconvicted, than the citywide average for youth committed to DYRS.

Community-based alternatives to incarceration cost less than one-tenth the price of incarcerating a child: approximately $27,000 vs. more than $280,000 per year per child. The construction price of a single new secure bed exceeds the Initiative’s entire annual investment in Open City Advocates by nearly three to one. Every youth our advocacy diverts from prolonged secure custody, every prevented technical violation, every successful reentry produces tens of thousands of dollars in avoided public cost.

But it’s not just about dollars; this is about the lives of DC children. When our clients languish for months in detention without adequate treatment, our advocacy expedites their placement. When our clients are released, we enroll them in school much faster than DYRS is able to do. When DYRS defaults to cookie-cutter, non-rehabilitative supervision tools, we push for truly individualized—and therefore effective—services. When our clients’ families are facing a crisis such as homelessness, we connect them to any number of our partner organizations.

That is what the Initiative funds. I urge the Commission to maintain and expand that investment. Thank you.

Testimony of Joshua Miller

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Pinto and members of the Committee. My name is Joshua Miller. I am the Research and Advocacy Director at Open City Advocates. I want to tell you what OVSJG’s Justice Grants funding made possible at Open City Advocates in the last grant year, and why the cuts proposed in the Mayor’s budget should be restored, both to Justice Grants and to victim services.

In the last grant year, with Justice Grants support, we served sixty-six clients: youth at New Beginnings and the Youth Services Center, young adults returning to their communities, and formerly committed individuals now in the adult system. In the last quarter alone, five clients obtained jobs, three of them for the first time. Three clients re-enrolled in school, each citing the stipend we provide as the reason they went back. Six families were reunified. Seven clients met legal goals, including record sealing and case dismissals.

Let me be concrete about what our holistic legal advocacy looks like. One of our clients was facing up to sixteen years in a federal case. Our attorney helped the court understand that commitment to DYRS is not the same as continuous incarceration. That single explanation of DC’s juvenile justice system produced a seventy-three percent reduction in the federal sentencing guidelines. The judge ultimately sentenced our client to three years, sparing him decades of trauma in the adult federal prison system.

Another client was facing more than a year of reincarceration at a parole revocation hearing. Our attorney, who had mentored him for years, testified about his accomplishments and his character. He received twenty-eight days instead.

In two cases involving cross-jurisdictional issues in Maryland, we partnered with Maryland defenders and provided the court with detailed information about our clients. One client had his case transferred from the adult to the juvenile system. The other had his case dismissed altogether.

Justice Grants funding pays for attorneys who stay in their clients’ lives for years and who understand the full breadth of those clients’ needs. Even a small cut to Justice Grants threatens far more than the dollar figure suggests.

I also want to speak to a much larger cut in the budget. The substantial reductions to OVSJG’s victim services portfolio. Please restore that funding in full.

The history is clear. The young people who find themselves in the legal system as perpetrators were, in case after case, failed as victims earlier in their lives. They were victims of family violence, of community violence, of systemic neglect, of sexual abuse, of witnessing harm done to people they loved, often before they were old enough to read. The District’s victim services portfolio is what catches some of those children before that earlier harm hardens into the harm they later cause to others. Cutting that portfolio cuts the upstream of the very pipeline this Committee spends most of its budget addressing downstream.

Justice Grants funds the work my colleagues and I do for young people after the system has them. Victim services fund the work that might keep them out. The District should not be choosing between the two. I urge the Council to restore both.

Thank you. I am happy to answer any questions.

Testimony of Kenneth Brewster

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Pinto and members of the Committee. My name is Kenneth Brewster. Most people call me KB. In December 2024 I came home to the District after nearly twenty years in federal prison.

I was seventeen when I was sentenced to sixty-five years for first-degree homicide.

Inside, I decided to use the time. I earned my GED. I completed more than 4,800 hours of formal programming, including a Department of Labor housekeeping apprenticeship and a certificate in paralegal studies. I taught the major appliance certification program to other men. I served as Imam for the Muslim community at US Penitentiary Big Sandy. I learned to find joy in doing the right thing when no one is watching.

My attorney was Sarah Shor. Sarah took my case at the Public Defender Service, and when she joined Open City Advocates she made finishing my case a condition of taking the job. She spent months building my Second Look petition under DC’s law that lets young people sentenced as juveniles seek post-sentencing review. She argued my hearing, and the judge agreed I was ready to come home. That decision spared me forty-five more years in prison.

Earlier this spring, the federal court fully terminated my probation. I am off papers for the first time since I was about fifteen years old. The judge said that the longer you keep someone tethered to probation, the more likely they are to mess up, and that you can see someone’s success within six to nine months of release.

Open City Advocates is funded in part by the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants. I am here because that funding made it possible for Sarah to keep doing my case. Sarah kept working with me after I came home. She has helped me find jobs, written character letters when employers wanted them, and stayed in my life. The Council’s funding is what pays for that.

There are men I left inside who deserve the same chance I had. They need attorneys to fight for them. The Council’s budget decides whether they get one.

Since I came home, I have completed DC Central Kitchen’s culinary program and started working. I am pursuing my Commercial Driver’s License. This year, my son Kai’el was born.

I have come to this Council before with Open City Advocates. I work with Free Minds Book Club, where I have read my own poetry, and with Changing Perceptions to talk with lawmakers about the people we are still leaving behind.