After settling into my hotel room, Colt and I met in the lobby. We figured we would explore the hotel while we still had time. It was amazing. It felt like home in that way when one feels among friends. There were smiling faces everywhere. Suits walking to and fro. Beauty was a fragrance worn by even the worst.
We didn't want to go too far or stay up too late, so we grabbed something to eat at an Omni restaurant and enjoyed the live music. The vibe was like nothing I have experienced before. Understandably, when you grow up imprisoned, the absence of life is known only when it is given back. Spending half my teens and most my twenties confined, I lived with a strange acknowledgement; I knew that I was missing out on life, but I did not truly know how life felt to miss. I looked at pictures of places and pined for what they may be like, but never did I know. The marriage between old wounds and new discoveries was euphoric. It was as if the experience of something I pined for for years served as a medicine to finally dissolve the sitting sorrow. Sleep came easy.
Saturday morning I rose early. I wanted to have a peaceful breakfast outside alone. Within the Omni are a few different places to get something to eat, and one specializes in breakfast. I grabbed their waffle special and ambled out to the veranda to watch the street, just one man alone in comfort.
Colt joined me soon after and we decided to practice our presentation. Our time slot was at noon, and it was quickly approaching. We had practiced many times before ever getting on the plane, but it never hurts to give it another go. We got a text from one of the council administrators telling us to meet her outside the conference room at 11:45am. We were both already dressed to the nines, so it was simply a matter of waiting in the conference room lobby.
We were shown to the room where we would be speaking. As we waited for the CJJA business meeting to break for lunch, Colt and I stood behind the podium anxiously anticipating the moment of crisis we were up against. We formed our presentation to be conversational between him and I, each of us speaking on different points.
As our audience slowly filled the room I worried about our reception. Here was a room full of people who had been in meetings all morning, and this was their time to break, to eat, and to unwind before another block of meetings. I worried that it might be difficult to capture people's attention given the circumstance. When the majority of the room was filled, the doors were shut and we were introduced by the CJJA Director, Mike Dempsey.
Within a minute my fears disappeared. People turned around in their seats and locked on to us. We held their attention for the full 40 minute presentation. We spoke on the need to make the 'juvenile waiver to adult court process' more robust by implementing mandatory processes, such as psychological evaluations, applications to long term juvenile facilities, and even reconfiguring the type of counsel a juvenile received when facing waiver to adult court. This is a strictly logical argument that we then followed up with an empathetic one stressing why these things were so important. We dropped into anecdotal evidence describing how corrosive adult prisons are to teenagers. We spoke from our own experiences, detailing what we faced, overcame, and what others had fallen to so regularly. The applaud was gratifying. It was a success. Within the hour we booked another presentation in Phoenix for January.
The big take away from the conference was receiving mentor-ship on how to proceed with our new careers. We now plan to turn that presentation into a general piece of legislation that any State could rubber stamp. In the meantime, we are forming a 501(c)3 nonprofit called Invested Youth. It is to be the banner under which Colt and I begin our new careers pushing justice reform and rallying other disenfranchised youth to find their voices.
-MMF
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