[Music]
so picture a diverse group of young men
and women standing in the Virginia State
Capitol presenting a constitution that
they had crafted to guide their newly
formed democracy the Constitution lays
out the qualifications for office the
rules for elections the purposes of this
new government in the room that day as
they’re presenting are a number of state
officials and other dignitaries and
indeed the very first person who signs
that Constitution is our Governor Terry
McAuliffe a closer look at the young men
and women who are up on the diets
reveals something interesting about them
on their ankles our tracking devices and
in the back of the room our staff from
Beaumont and Bonaire juvenile
correctional centers and yet there they
are feeling justifiably proud for what
they’ve created and what they were
embarking on the very first
constitutionally based student
government inside a juvenile
Correctional Center in this country on
the wall of my office is a quote by
Nelson Mandela that was hand-painted by
my daughter Maya the quote reads it
always seems impossible until it’s done
I love the quote because it embraces a
kind of fearlessness and optimism about
human potential and human capacity it
liberates us to try to do hard things we
can do more than we think we can we just
need to try my boss the Governor Terry
McAuliffe has a related view of
governing and he continually exhorts his
cabinet members US agency heads to think
outside the box to go big he tells us
it’s ok to make mistakes when we’re
doing this if what we’re trying to do is
to improve the lives of the people of
Virginia at the Department of Juvenile
Justice where I’m the director we took
governor McAuliffe’s message to heart
and today I’m gonna tell you our story
but before I get into that
I want to say that you might not think
of our story so much as thinking outside
the box you might think about it as one
of our staff described it to me as
thinking outside the fence but even
before I get into the story I want to
tell you a little bit about my own
background because when Governor
McAuliffe appointed me to be the
director he was thinking outside the
fence a bit as well you see I had never
worked for state government before I had
never worked in public safety before the
most people I had supervised before I
took this job was ten and the Department
of Juvenile Justice has close to 2,000
employees which explains a lot probably
to the people who work at the department
more than that I was the founder and
legal director of the just children
program of legally justice center here
in town and I spent my entire
professional career to that point trying
to keep kids out of the very facilities
that the department operated I appeared
in the press in the legislature critical
of the workings of the department and on
more than one occasion threatened to sue
the very agency that I was now being
appointed to run the very last thing I
would have wanted in the world or the
very last thing I would have thought
would have happened would be for me to
be the guy whose picture is in the lobby
of the juvenile correctional centers
that I worked so hard to keep kids out
of and yet after I got appointed there I
was the guy whose picture is on the wall
in the lobby when you go into the
facilities instead of sticking it to the
man which I had long prided myself on my
ability to do I had suddenly become him
now it’s important to understand that
the department is more than just locked
facilities in fact that’s a very small
fraction of what we do we have probation
offices across Virginia we run treatment
programs I shouldn’t say fun treatment
programs across the state on any given
day we have approximately 4,000 kids
under some kind of supervision more than
90% of whom are in the community but
when I started as director and I got a
point in April of 2014 we were not
doing very well we were spending about
40% of our budget on the less than 10%
of kids who were in those big oversized
adult-like facilities most of the kids
in there our kids who’ve been exposed to
trauma have mental health issues have
learning challenges we’re spending
almost 40% of our money on that small
percentage of kids almost 80% of whom
were getting really thin three years of
our release thinking about the numbers a
different way if about 20% of the kids
in Virginia are african-american more
than 70% of the kids in our facilities
are children of color but the numbers
only tell you part of this story and
it’s important not just to get
distracted by data on my second day on
the job I had to watch a videotape of
staff and some young people at Beaumont
juvenile correctional center pulling the
lifeless body of a young man out of his
cell where he had hung himself the
incident had happened a few weeks before
I started but it was part of my job to
figure out what to do and I was watched
the videotape I was overwhelmed by a
range of emotions not least of which was
the thought that what do I do now but
also the realization that these places
that were in many ways supposed to be
rehabilitative and places of opportunity
and new starts had to often become
places of despair I want to assure you
that the staff at the department then
and the staff of the department now are
hard-working people who care about kids
but they have incredibly hard jobs and
when you put people behind a fence in a
facility that’s really built more for
adults and the kids have multiple
challenges and the staff don’t have
resources or direction it’s hard to do
good work
so we said about to make a change and we
brought in lots of people to help us
figure this out and our plan to
transform the agency consisted of three
primary activities number one was
reducing the population of kids in those
facilities primarily by shortening the
length of time where they were there we
did some research
Church that showed that the longer the
kids were in the facilities the more
likely it was they were gonna get in
trouble when they went home so that
didn’t make a lot of sense we created
alternative placements so not everybody
had to get sent upstate we started
changing probation practices so we could
get the the right kid the right program
at the right time so hopefully they
didn’t have to enter the system or
penetrate that deeply but we also
realized we had to do better work in
those facilities and so we had a plan to
dramatically transform the way we worked
with kids and provide more opportunities
for education and rehabilitation and
growth and success but we also realized
that wasn’t enough either that
ultimately did to do the work we needed
to do we need to replace these old
institutions with something that would
work better with programs in community
so that kids could get what they needed
where they lived and with their family
and for those small group of kids who
had to be confined building new smaller
treatment oriented facilities that
weren’t obstacles to rehabilitation but
were tools for rehabilitation to do this
last part to replace the system also
involved getting authorization to close
old facilities to keep our money to
spend on these treatment programs and it
required not only getting the buy-in of
Governor McAuliffe who was all in from
the beginning it also required getting
the buy-in from our
republican-controlled General Assembly
as if the work wasn’t hard enough we now
had to get Democrats and Republicans to
work together imagine that now a plan is
just words on a piece of paper or words
on a whiteboard
unless people fuel it and people support
it and people give it momentum and
that’s exactly what happened with us
people saw that we were now playing to
win and try to do good things for kids
instead of just keeping bad things from
happening and our staff who in many ways
had to suffer the most through all the
changes have embraced this our
stakeholders judges and community
members and service providers they
these young people have embraced this
our governor has embraced this
hour-by-hour
you know bipartisan group of legislators
Republicans and Democrats have embraced
this and fueled with all this support
we’ve been able to accomplish actually
quite a bit with Governor McAuliffe took
office in April of 2014 we had about 600
kids in our large facilities today I’m
happy to tell you that we only have 217
[Applause]
[Music]
in terms of what’s happening with the
kids in the facilities we’ve done a lot
of work there too we’re creating many
more educational opportunities for those
young people who have to be confined for
example when I started in 2014 we had no
college classes even though we could
hold kids till they were 21 we recently
had two young men leave us having her in
twenty four college credits during the
time that they were with us historically
the agency and folks who work in the
field have looked at parents in many
ways as obstacles to rehabilitation that
they’re part of the problem not part of
the solution but we realized that if we
really wanted to do good work if we
wanted to keep kids with their families
or allow kids to return home to their
families we had to include families now
Virginia is a very big state and
Beaumont and Bonaire were both clustered
around Richmond making it very hard for
families to visit their kids so we came
up with the idea and said well why don’t
we provide free transportation so any
weekend now there are shuttle buses
leaving from some point in the state
taking families to visit their kids
people who were skeptical about that –
well parents don’t care they’re not
going to do this in our very first year
of doing this we had 1,200 people take
advantage of this service we had parents
who hadn’t seen their kids for two years
finally get a chance to visit now that
all sounds good and it’s incredibly
important but really the main work we’re
doing in the facilities is trying to
transform the work of our staff with the
kids we had juvenile correctional
officers whose job was primarily to
maintain order and maintain security and
we had and they were told explicitly not
to engage with kids but they’re there
all the time they’re the adults who have
the most contact with the kids in the
facility so we had to change that we
reclassified their position we included
new responsibilities we shortened their
work days from 12 hours to 8 so they’d
be on the
hopper their game as much as they could
but in state government it’s not so easy
to do that you can’t just flip a switch
and say you were a correctional officer
one day and these were your job
responsibilities and now you’re what
we’re calling a resident specialist we
literally had to lay everybody off
redefine their jobs and have them
reapply to the reapply for these new
positions we had folks who’d been in the
agency for 20 or 30 years who had to go
through this process and it was scary
but I’m pleased to tell you that we’ve
done it and everyone has converted to
this new way of doing work it’s been
hard because as if that wasn’t enough we
also got approval to start closing
facilities and keeping money so people
were learning new things at the same
times they were worried about their job
and we closed Beaumont juvenile
Correctional Center in June of this year
and with the money from that closure
we’ve been able to create new treatment
programs across Virginia to give you an
illustration of what that’s like at the
beginning of this year only two
jurisdictions in Virginia had access to
this highly regarded evidence-based
program that was really effective at
working with high-risk kids in their
communities with their families kids who
might otherwise get locked up by year’s
end with the savings from the closure we
will have that service available in a
hundred jurisdictions across the state
the work is ongoing and these structural
changes wow they’re huge only tell part
of the story this thinking outside the
fence this trying to do good work
instead of just keeping bad things from
happening this way of looking at it has
cascaded throughout the agency we have
staff now thinking on their own about
new ways of doing the work we had a
group of probation officers in Norfolk
who instead of just as they had
traditionally had done saying I’m here
to monitor compliance with the courts
rules and make sure you’re doing what
you’re supposed to do said let’s do
something different and they took a
group of young men from Norfolk up to
Washington to go to the National Museum
of african-american history and culture
they did it to expand those kids view of
the world of themselves of their society
in so doing some of the kids who went on
the trip got to go outside of Norfolk
for the first time one of the kids who
went on the trip got to ride an
escalator for the first time we had a
family day at Bonaire juvenile
correctional center which is our last
remaining place we invited hundreds of
family members to have kind of a fun
normal parent kid experience we had
picnic we had ice cream and cotton candy
and kids played games and got to sit at
picnic tables with their parents and
their siblings and it was a beautiful
day but to make that work we had to call
volunteers in because there were so many
people and it was a Sunday so not always
easy to get volunteers on a Sunday we
had hundreds of volunteers we had two
staff who drove up from Abingdon
Virginia they didn’t have any kids in
the facilities but they drove up from
Abingdon Virginia to volunteer and be
part of this amazing day that’s a five
hour drive and they weren’t getting paid
people are embracing the work in the
facilities people are doing all kinds of
different things there they’re taking
kids outside the fence to go visit
colleges so they start to think about
that as part of their future in one
instance recently the staff had a young
man who wanted to be an artist
so they took
outside the fence to go visit the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where he
could get inspired and think differently
about what his future might look like
but the Cascade the investment it’s also
not stopping with our staff its
cascading down to the kids as well I
told you about the student government so
how that came about was young people in
the facilities they wanted more say and
more of a voice and we wanted them to
have more of an opportunity to learn
about civic participation and to be
engaged in the community in which they
lived
and governor McAuliffe got wind of this
and invited the founders to come down to
meet with the governor and members of
his cabinet and staff to talk about
governance and so our kids did a
PowerPoint presentation and and talked
about what they wanted to do and the
governor is chief lawyer carlos hopkins
said well if you want your government to
last you need to create a constitution
now our kids and our facilities don’t
come with high rates of educational
success they all too often don’t come
with a lot of confidence about what
they’re able to do and it would have
been so easy for them to say I’m not
going to do that that’s too much work
but instead they embrace the challenge
and not only did they write what again I
am sure is the first ever constitution
crafted inside a juvenile Correctional
Center in this country but they’ve
embraced the role of leaders and they
are actively working with the leadership
at Bonaire and indeed with the agency to
help us understand our work better to
help us think about working with the
young people and their families better
they are becoming partners in the
process instead of just objects of our
work it’s not to say that everything’s
perfect it’s not to say we don’t still
have work to do lots of people have
gotten on board but not everybody some
people criticize us for going too far
some people criticize us for not going
far enough and although we’ve
dramatically
Douce the number of kids in our
facilities there’s still too many
children of color but we have done a lot
but if Governor McAuliffe had told me
when he appointed me said Andy this is
what I want the agency to do I want you
to lay off everybody in the facilities
and rehire them I want you to create new
college classes even though you don’t
have any new money I want you to create
the first-ever constitutionally based
student government and create free
transportation for families from across
the state I want you to close facilities
and persuade the Republicans in the
General Assembly that you should be able
to keep your money I want you to do all
that within the time of my governorship
which hopefully everybody knows there’s
only four years and there’s an election
next week if you had said that to me I
would have said governor you’re crazy we
can’t do that
but because we had so many people
working supporting partnering joining
we’ve been able to do as much as we did
but it’s important to remember as I tell
this story I might be up here by myself
but I’m truly not alone I’m here with
the amazing people at the Department of
Juvenile Justice who have literally shed
blood sweat and tears to do what we’ve
done so far I’m here with the governor
and I’m here with members of the
legislature and I’m here with people in
communities across the state who are
supporting what we’re doing people in
various roles in the system and people
outside the system most importantly I’m
up here with my family with my wife
Kelly and our kids
sage Maya Eden and RIE who’ve also been
part of this whether they want it to be
or not this social change work is hard
it’s left me tired it’s left me stressed
it’s left me less than the father I
would always want to be or the husband I
should be and my wife in particular had
to pick up all that slack
and there was a lot and I say this not
to just say thank you to you but also to
let the rest of you know that this work
is hard it’s hard not just on the people
doing it it’s hard on the people they
love which is all the more reason we
need to be involved when we see good
things happening as we’re discovering in
our country right now progress is
fragile but as we’re hopefully also
coming to understand that we can’t let
the problems of the day whether it’s
mass incarceration or anything else be
other people’s problems they belong to
us too and the solutions to those
problems must as well and when we do
come together when we approach each
other and our work with courage and open
hearts we can become like alchemists
but instead of turning straw into gold
we can turn inmates into college
students we can turn prisons into
treatment programs across the state we
can maybe even turn a traumatized
community into a resilient and loving
one it always seems impossible until
it’s done thank you
[Applause]
so picture a diverse group of young men
and women standing in the Virginia State
Capitol presenting a constitution that
they had crafted to guide their newly
formed democracy the Constitution lays
out the qualifications for office the
rules for elections the purposes of this
new government in the room that day as
they’re presenting are a number of state
officials and other dignitaries and
indeed the very first person who signs
that Constitution is our Governor Terry
McAuliffe a closer look at the young men
and women who are up on the diets
reveals something interesting about them
on their ankles our tracking devices and
in the back of the room our staff from
Beaumont and Bonaire juvenile
correctional centers and yet there they
are feeling justifiably proud for what
they’ve created and what they were
embarking on the very first
constitutionally based student
government inside a juvenile
Correctional Center in this country on
the wall of my office is a quote by
Nelson Mandela that was hand-painted by
my daughter Maya the quote reads it
always seems impossible until it’s done
I love the quote because it embraces a
kind of fearlessness and optimism about
human potential and human capacity it
liberates us to try to do hard things we
can do more than we think we can we just
need to try my boss the Governor Terry
McAuliffe has a related view of
governing and he continually exhorts his
cabinet members US agency heads to think
outside the box to go big he tells us
it’s ok to make mistakes when we’re
doing this if what we’re trying to do is
to improve the lives of the people of
Virginia at the Department of Juvenile
Justice where I’m the director we took
governor McAuliffe’s message to heart
and today I’m gonna tell you our story
but before I get into that
I want to say that you might not think
of our story so much as thinking outside
the box you might think about it as one
of our staff described it to me as
thinking outside the fence but even
before I get into the story I want to
tell you a little bit about my own
background because when Governor
McAuliffe appointed me to be the
director he was thinking outside the
fence a bit as well you see I had never
worked for state government before I had
never worked in public safety before the
most people I had supervised before I
took this job was ten and the Department
of Juvenile Justice has close to 2,000
employees which explains a lot probably
to the people who work at the department
more than that I was the founder and
legal director of the just children
program of legally justice center here
in town and I spent my entire
professional career to that point trying
to keep kids out of the very facilities
that the department operated I appeared
in the press in the legislature critical
of the workings of the department and on
more than one occasion threatened to sue
the very agency that I was now being
appointed to run the very last thing I
would have wanted in the world or the
very last thing I would have thought
would have happened would be for me to
be the guy whose picture is in the lobby
of the juvenile correctional centers
that I worked so hard to keep kids out
of and yet after I got appointed there I
was the guy whose picture is on the wall
in the lobby when you go into the
facilities instead of sticking it to the
man which I had long prided myself on my
ability to do I had suddenly become him
now it’s important to understand that
the department is more than just locked
facilities in fact that’s a very small
fraction of what we do we have probation
offices across Virginia we run treatment
programs I shouldn’t say fun treatment
programs across the state on any given
day we have approximately 4,000 kids
under some kind of supervision more than
90% of whom are in the community but
when I started as director and I got a
point in April of 2014 we were not
doing very well we were spending about
40% of our budget on the less than 10%
of kids who were in those big oversized
adult-like facilities most of the kids
in there our kids who’ve been exposed to
trauma have mental health issues have
learning challenges we’re spending
almost 40% of our money on that small
percentage of kids almost 80% of whom
were getting really thin three years of
our release thinking about the numbers a
different way if about 20% of the kids
in Virginia are african-american more
than 70% of the kids in our facilities
are children of color but the numbers
only tell you part of this story and
it’s important not just to get
distracted by data on my second day on
the job I had to watch a videotape of
staff and some young people at Beaumont
juvenile correctional center pulling the
lifeless body of a young man out of his
cell where he had hung himself the
incident had happened a few weeks before
I started but it was part of my job to
figure out what to do and I was watched
the videotape I was overwhelmed by a
range of emotions not least of which was
the thought that what do I do now but
also the realization that these places
that were in many ways supposed to be
rehabilitative and places of opportunity
and new starts had to often become
places of despair I want to assure you
that the staff at the department then
and the staff of the department now are
hard-working people who care about kids
but they have incredibly hard jobs and
when you put people behind a fence in a
facility that’s really built more for
adults and the kids have multiple
challenges and the staff don’t have
resources or direction it’s hard to do
good work
so we said about to make a change and we
brought in lots of people to help us
figure this out and our plan to
transform the agency consisted of three
primary activities number one was
reducing the population of kids in those
facilities primarily by shortening the
length of time where they were there we
did some research
Church that showed that the longer the
kids were in the facilities the more
likely it was they were gonna get in
trouble when they went home so that
didn’t make a lot of sense we created
alternative placements so not everybody
had to get sent upstate we started
changing probation practices so we could
get the the right kid the right program
at the right time so hopefully they
didn’t have to enter the system or
penetrate that deeply but we also
realized we had to do better work in
those facilities and so we had a plan to
dramatically transform the way we worked
with kids and provide more opportunities
for education and rehabilitation and
growth and success but we also realized
that wasn’t enough either that
ultimately did to do the work we needed
to do we need to replace these old
institutions with something that would
work better with programs in community
so that kids could get what they needed
where they lived and with their family
and for those small group of kids who
had to be confined building new smaller
treatment oriented facilities that
weren’t obstacles to rehabilitation but
were tools for rehabilitation to do this
last part to replace the system also
involved getting authorization to close
old facilities to keep our money to
spend on these treatment programs and it
required not only getting the buy-in of
Governor McAuliffe who was all in from
the beginning it also required getting
the buy-in from our
republican-controlled General Assembly
as if the work wasn’t hard enough we now
had to get Democrats and Republicans to
work together imagine that now a plan is
just words on a piece of paper or words
on a whiteboard
unless people fuel it and people support
it and people give it momentum and
that’s exactly what happened with us
people saw that we were now playing to
win and try to do good things for kids
instead of just keeping bad things from
happening and our staff who in many ways
had to suffer the most through all the
changes have embraced this our
stakeholders judges and community
members and service providers they
these young people have embraced this
our governor has embraced this
hour-by-hour
you know bipartisan group of legislators
Republicans and Democrats have embraced
this and fueled with all this support
we’ve been able to accomplish actually
quite a bit with Governor McAuliffe took
office in April of 2014 we had about 600
kids in our large facilities today I’m
happy to tell you that we only have 217
[Applause]
[Music]
in terms of what’s happening with the
kids in the facilities we’ve done a lot
of work there too we’re creating many
more educational opportunities for those
young people who have to be confined for
example when I started in 2014 we had no
college classes even though we could
hold kids till they were 21 we recently
had two young men leave us having her in
twenty four college credits during the
time that they were with us historically
the agency and folks who work in the
field have looked at parents in many
ways as obstacles to rehabilitation that
they’re part of the problem not part of
the solution but we realized that if we
really wanted to do good work if we
wanted to keep kids with their families
or allow kids to return home to their
families we had to include families now
Virginia is a very big state and
Beaumont and Bonaire were both clustered
around Richmond making it very hard for
families to visit their kids so we came
up with the idea and said well why don’t
we provide free transportation so any
weekend now there are shuttle buses
leaving from some point in the state
taking families to visit their kids
people who were skeptical about that –
well parents don’t care they’re not
going to do this in our very first year
of doing this we had 1,200 people take
advantage of this service we had parents
who hadn’t seen their kids for two years
finally get a chance to visit now that
all sounds good and it’s incredibly
important but really the main work we’re
doing in the facilities is trying to
transform the work of our staff with the
kids we had juvenile correctional
officers whose job was primarily to
maintain order and maintain security and
we had and they were told explicitly not
to engage with kids but they’re there
all the time they’re the adults who have
the most contact with the kids in the
facility so we had to change that we
reclassified their position we included
new responsibilities we shortened their
work days from 12 hours to 8 so they’d
be on the
hopper their game as much as they could
but in state government it’s not so easy
to do that you can’t just flip a switch
and say you were a correctional officer
one day and these were your job
responsibilities and now you’re what
we’re calling a resident specialist we
literally had to lay everybody off
redefine their jobs and have them
reapply to the reapply for these new
positions we had folks who’d been in the
agency for 20 or 30 years who had to go
through this process and it was scary
but I’m pleased to tell you that we’ve
done it and everyone has converted to
this new way of doing work it’s been
hard because as if that wasn’t enough we
also got approval to start closing
facilities and keeping money so people
were learning new things at the same
times they were worried about their job
and we closed Beaumont juvenile
Correctional Center in June of this year
and with the money from that closure
we’ve been able to create new treatment
programs across Virginia to give you an
illustration of what that’s like at the
beginning of this year only two
jurisdictions in Virginia had access to
this highly regarded evidence-based
program that was really effective at
working with high-risk kids in their
communities with their families kids who
might otherwise get locked up by year’s
end with the savings from the closure we
will have that service available in a
hundred jurisdictions across the state
the work is ongoing and these structural
changes wow they’re huge only tell part
of the story this thinking outside the
fence this trying to do good work
instead of just keeping bad things from
happening this way of looking at it has
cascaded throughout the agency we have
staff now thinking on their own about
new ways of doing the work we had a
group of probation officers in Norfolk
who instead of just as they had
traditionally had done saying I’m here
to monitor compliance with the courts
rules and make sure you’re doing what
you’re supposed to do said let’s do
something different and they took a
group of young men from Norfolk up to
Washington to go to the National Museum
of african-american history and culture
they did it to expand those kids view of
the world of themselves of their society
in so doing some of the kids who went on
the trip got to go outside of Norfolk
for the first time one of the kids who
went on the trip got to ride an
escalator for the first time we had a
family day at Bonaire juvenile
correctional center which is our last
remaining place we invited hundreds of
family members to have kind of a fun
normal parent kid experience we had
picnic we had ice cream and cotton candy
and kids played games and got to sit at
picnic tables with their parents and
their siblings and it was a beautiful
day but to make that work we had to call
volunteers in because there were so many
people and it was a Sunday so not always
easy to get volunteers on a Sunday we
had hundreds of volunteers we had two
staff who drove up from Abingdon
Virginia they didn’t have any kids in
the facilities but they drove up from
Abingdon Virginia to volunteer and be
part of this amazing day that’s a five
hour drive and they weren’t getting paid
people are embracing the work in the
facilities people are doing all kinds of
different things there they’re taking
kids outside the fence to go visit
colleges so they start to think about
that as part of their future in one
instance recently the staff had a young
man who wanted to be an artist
so they took
outside the fence to go visit the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where he
could get inspired and think differently
about what his future might look like
but the Cascade the investment it’s also
not stopping with our staff its
cascading down to the kids as well I
told you about the student government so
how that came about was young people in
the facilities they wanted more say and
more of a voice and we wanted them to
have more of an opportunity to learn
about civic participation and to be
engaged in the community in which they
lived
and governor McAuliffe got wind of this
and invited the founders to come down to
meet with the governor and members of
his cabinet and staff to talk about
governance and so our kids did a
PowerPoint presentation and and talked
about what they wanted to do and the
governor is chief lawyer carlos hopkins
said well if you want your government to
last you need to create a constitution
now our kids and our facilities don’t
come with high rates of educational
success they all too often don’t come
with a lot of confidence about what
they’re able to do and it would have
been so easy for them to say I’m not
going to do that that’s too much work
but instead they embrace the challenge
and not only did they write what again I
am sure is the first ever constitution
crafted inside a juvenile Correctional
Center in this country but they’ve
embraced the role of leaders and they
are actively working with the leadership
at Bonaire and indeed with the agency to
help us understand our work better to
help us think about working with the
young people and their families better
they are becoming partners in the
process instead of just objects of our
work it’s not to say that everything’s
perfect it’s not to say we don’t still
have work to do lots of people have
gotten on board but not everybody some
people criticize us for going too far
some people criticize us for not going
far enough and although we’ve
dramatically
Douce the number of kids in our
facilities there’s still too many
children of color but we have done a lot
but if Governor McAuliffe had told me
when he appointed me said Andy this is
what I want the agency to do I want you
to lay off everybody in the facilities
and rehire them I want you to create new
college classes even though you don’t
have any new money I want you to create
the first-ever constitutionally based
student government and create free
transportation for families from across
the state I want you to close facilities
and persuade the Republicans in the
General Assembly that you should be able
to keep your money I want you to do all
that within the time of my governorship
which hopefully everybody knows there’s
only four years and there’s an election
next week if you had said that to me I
would have said governor you’re crazy we
can’t do that
but because we had so many people
working supporting partnering joining
we’ve been able to do as much as we did
but it’s important to remember as I tell
this story I might be up here by myself
but I’m truly not alone I’m here with
the amazing people at the Department of
Juvenile Justice who have literally shed
blood sweat and tears to do what we’ve
done so far I’m here with the governor
and I’m here with members of the
legislature and I’m here with people in
communities across the state who are
supporting what we’re doing people in
various roles in the system and people
outside the system most importantly I’m
up here with my family with my wife
Kelly and our kids
sage Maya Eden and RIE who’ve also been
part of this whether they want it to be
or not this social change work is hard
it’s left me tired it’s left me stressed
it’s left me less than the father I
would always want to be or the husband I
should be and my wife in particular had
to pick up all that slack
and there was a lot and I say this not
to just say thank you to you but also to
let the rest of you know that this work
is hard it’s hard not just on the people
doing it it’s hard on the people they
love which is all the more reason we
need to be involved when we see good
things happening as we’re discovering in
our country right now progress is
fragile but as we’re hopefully also
coming to understand that we can’t let
the problems of the day whether it’s
mass incarceration or anything else be
other people’s problems they belong to
us too and the solutions to those
problems must as well and when we do
come together when we approach each
other and our work with courage and open
hearts we can become like alchemists
but instead of turning straw into gold
we can turn inmates into college
students we can turn prisons into
treatment programs across the state we
can maybe even turn a traumatized
community into a resilient and loving
one it always seems impossible until
it’s done thank you
[Applause]
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