It can be easy for life to get you down when obstacles constantly stand between you and your future. When you make mistakes as a child, it can hinder your ability to maintain stable housing, employment, and educational opportunities. It can be discouraging and difficult finding your voice when you’ve been told for so long that you don’t have one.
Helping youth and young adults find their voice is one thing a group called REFORM Louisville aims to do for youth and young adults who have been involved in the juvenile justice system.
About a year ago, the REFORM Louisville group formed, deciding to focus on ways to help youth see that they have a voice in their community, push for more positive opportunities and activities for youth, and seek ways to create a justice system that helps youth be ready to return to the community after incarceration. Since the formation of the group, REFORM members have used their voices to: inform legislators on issues that their happening in their community, discuss juvenile justice issues with city leadership, inform legislation that was drafted and written into law, and most recently, presented on a youth voice panel sharing their expertise and lived experiences with Kentucky’s court system.
Two members of the REFORM Louisville team – Kori Wheeler and Dequantay Smith – recently had the opportunity to share how court engagement can impact the mental health of youth. Hosted by the Kentucky Judicial Commission on Mental Health, the Mental Health Summit of 2023 aimed to provide an opportunity to discuss, develop, and implement a continuum of responses for Kentucky courts and their communities.
Kori and Dequantay, alongside Voices Of the Commonwealth (VOC) member Helana Rodriguez, took the stage to discuss how being involved in the juvenile justice and foster care system can impact a youth’s mental health and provided some solutions on ways to improve these interactions.
“Entering the justice system is like getting punished forever, it is a revolving door,” Dequantay shared as he spoke about challenges that he still faces today as an adult who made a mistake and went through the justice system. The youth went on to describe that it was difficult to know what was going on [while in court settings] because hardly anything was explained to them, and interactions with the courts as a child were intimidating and scary.
“No one ever stopped to ask me why I did what I did, or what was happening at home to make me act out, they just punished me for doing it,” said Kori. All three young adults shared the same sentiments that they felt no one cared about them during their time with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
To improve the systems and court interactions, some solutions were mentioned by the young adults to help children have positive interactions with the court including:
- getting to the root of the problem with the youth and truly understanding what made the child act out,
- committing to utilizing trauma-informed care within the court system,
- explaining and ensuring that children are aware of their options and where they are at in the process,
- And lastly, remembering that this process is scary enough, treat children as the children they are.
To close out the panel, the young adults reminded the room to simply treat people with love: “You never know what someone’s going through, what they’ve seen or experienced so just love them, even if you don’t know them.”
Before the end of the year, REFORM hopes to show youth in their community that healing and self-preservation are essential. The group is working to create a healing curriculum that the young adults will teach to youth and show them how to overcome obstacles that life throws your way, tools to practice self-preservation, and – most importantly — to show them that their voice matters!
Stay tuned for more REFORM Louisville updates and remember to make sure to use your voice by registering to vote in the 2023 election on November 7th.
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