- The ACLU lawsuit calls to end the use of solitary confinement,
restraints and pepper spray on juvenile at the detention
facilities.
Others want to close down Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake
altogether.
Among them, Jeffery Roman, with an organization called Youth
Justice Milwaukee, which is holding a summit on juvenile
justice issues next week.
He joins us from Milwaukee and thanks very much for being here.
- Thanks for having me.
- Wisconsin's Corrections Secretary says he cares deeply
about the young people at these facilities and is working to fix
the problems there.
What is your response to the work that has been done on the
part of the state to address concerns?
- Sure.
While we thank Secretary Litscher for the work he's
putting forward to curb some of the things that are happening at
Lincoln Hills.
Youth Justice Milwaukee believes that those are short-term
solutions and you can't put-- you can't piecemeal solutions
or put band-aids over problems
that need to be fundamentally changed.
So our juvenile justice system needs to fundamentally change
and be changed from the top down.
We believe that it's an outdated, punitive,
discriminatory system for our young people.
And to the extent that we can, we want to make sure that we are
working with the state, Secretary Litscher, our partners
at the county and community to make sure we are putting
together alternatives so we don't have to send young people
to Lincoln Hills.
- In fact, you would like those facilities to be shut down?
- Absolutely.
Yeah.
Our long-term goal of Youth Justice Milwaukee is to close
Lincoln Hills and Copper Lakes because again we believe they
are outdated systems that are punitive versus rehabilitative
for young people.
However, we believe we can't just close them overnight.
We understand that there are things politically, socially
things that are happening that will prevent us from overnight
closing Lincoln Hills and Copper Lakes.
However, we can begin to start having critical conversations
about what needs to be in place instead of sending young people
to being incarcerated.
So we are actively working with our county and partners to begin
to reimagine what a continuous support services and alternative
to incarceration for young people.
- You would like to see community-based solutions,
but where do you sentence the violent repeat offenders?
- Sure.
We understand and we know that there will be some individuals,
some young people who need to have some level of secure
placement for their own safety and for the safety of the
community.
Our stance is not that those places should not exist.
Our stance is for those young people who need to have
additional and advanced level of secure placement for their
safety and safety of the community, that there are better
alternatives to sending them hours away from their families,
from their communities.
Instead of having very large institutionalized institutions
where you have beds for 100 plus young people, we believe that
closer to home alternatives, secure placement options, where
there are no more than eight, maybe ten, maybe 15 at the very
top, and that those institutions are full of wrap-around supports
from community and that they are full of more cognitive
behavioral therapy kind of approaches, trauma-informed
approaches so that we are really working with our young people to
be rehabilitated so that they can be restored to their
communities instead of recidivating back into the
system three, six, nine, twelve months later down the road.
- Meanwhile the facilities are still in place up north and the
FBI continues its investigation.
What do you hope they find?
- Well, we hope that they find or at least bring to light more
that the system that we currently have in place for
young people is outdated and punitive.
And that the priority needs to be on restoring, rehabilitating
our young people.
We also hope that with the investigations that it really
forces our state, our governor, Secretary Litscher and our
county and our judges particularly to really start to
think about what's happening to our young people in those
institutions and what we can do here at home to better
rehabilitate our young people.
- And toward that, you are holding -- or Youth Justice
Milwaukee is holding a summit next week.
What is that about?
- Sure, so Youth Justice of Milwaukee, first we are a
broad-based campaign.
We are a coalition of individuals, young people who
have been either incarcerated or have been in detention, their
families, their parents.
And community and national advocates who are working across
the country and across the community to make sure that
there are alternatives to incarceration for young people.
So the Youth Justice Summit is really about engaging the
community and having an opportunity for these issues to
really come to light and to really organize and mobilize the
community in what the community-based response should
be to those issues.
So you'll see we have a number of national speakers coming who
have demonstrated how communities have been able to
organize and mobilize and change policy
to fundamentally transform their juvenile justice systems
in their communities and really leave us
with some lessons learned in those communities.
That's what the day is about.
We'll have a number of workshops.
I'm particularly excited that we're going to have some young
people who are going to be able to tell their stories, their
experiences and talk about things that they've seen and
they've experienced inside and outside of Lincoln Hills and
Copper Lakes.
That's really what it's about.
It's really a community engagement tool and we're
looking forward to the community really being engaged starting
next Wednesday.
- All right.
Jeffery Roman, thanks very much.
- Thank you.
Thank you so much.