president being an outstanding student. she was my classmate as well. and let me just tell you, she was better than both of us. she was smarter than both of us. and i can't necessarily speak -- she didn't get as good grades as the president and myself, but that's not because of her lack of intellect. it was the fact she was focused on so many things. congresswoman terry sooul. i love her. >> we started hill harper's

presentation with an opportunity for equal time. i guess we'll provide the same opportunity for the representative. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you so much, hill harper, for your beautiful introduction. said just like my mother wrote it. no seriously. i am honored to not only be a part of this program today and to support the youth promise act, but equally as proud of you and your work not only on the screen, but equally as important in our communities. you have been a role model not just for me and lots of young black boys and girls, but all youth. and for that, your work should be commended. mr. chairman, i just want to say thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this today. and also bringing attention to how important the youth promise act is. i think all of us would agree in

the days after trayvon martin's incident, all of us need to be looking at our youth in a different way and trying to do all we can do to make sure they live up to their own promises. thanks. >> thank you. thank you. john pendergrass. >> thank you, congressman scott. for your leadership on these terribly-important issues. i'm humbled to be on this panel. we can only hope we will get some par fa kneel ya from "csi new york" as a reward. my qualification largely stems from stumbling on to a life-changing path at the age of 20 years old when i was visiting a friend of mine who was working in a homeless shelter right here in washington, d.c. and i ran into this guy right here to my left, michael maddox,

who was all of seven years old. so since my experience as a mentor is why i'm here on this panel, i want to tell you about three of the ten guys i have worked with over the last 25 years and the very different trajectories that resulted from their varying access to the kinds of programs, the very programs that this youth promise act would be supporting. first story i want to tell you is about nacere. he was the biological brother of one of my boys. from a very young age though, he had an explosive temper and was constantly in trouble in school

and in his neighborhood. there were no programs that addressed the kind of needs he had, and after i moved away from philly to africa and then down to d.c., he slowly transitioned from the formal system to the streets. he dropped out of school. no one followed up on it. he entered the juvenile justice and cycled through that until he was tragically shot to death on the very street i used to pick him up when he was a little boy with a brilliant smile. the second story i want to tell you is about michael here. as i said, i met michael and his family when they were living out of plastic bags at a homeless shelter eight blocks away from the white house. we started going to the library togeth together. and i became his big brother. though not formally with the system. at one point, he and two of his siblings even came and lived

with me in philadelphia for the summer. i was 22 and had to grow up really fast. michael will tell you his story, but suffice to say from my perspective, when i left for africa and left michael hanging, eventually he dropped out of school and lots of stuff happened that i will leave to him to tell. but the formal system abandoned him. but i don't think i can ruin the ending of that story because he's right here, a husband and father of five boys, coach and mentor himself now. michael has told me many times over the last few years that if he hadn't had a big brother, someone investing and believe ing in him, particularly in his early years, he might never have made the choice to leave the streets behind. for years michael had someone who challenged him and cared about what he was doing. that's what mentors do. the third story i want to tell you is about jamal.

he was from right here in d.c. on georgia avenue. when i met jamar, he was extremely withdrawn and very volatile. he couldn't play more than a few points in a basketball game or have a touchdown scored in a football game before he's end up in a fight or on the sidelines quitting because of some slight. his grades were poor and his conduct in school was worse. jamar was different than the first two stories in so far as his mother was enrolling him in every program out there she could find. so besides big brothers and my relationship with jamar through that, he was also part of the boys and girls club and other after school programs. now five years later, jamar is in ninth grade with a scholarship to one of the best high schools in d.c. his grades are good and plays on both the football and basketball teams at the school.

none of the programs he participated in cost much. all were neighborhood-based and they worked. small investments with huge payoffs and lives saved. that's what i found over and over again with the kids i coached and mentored over the last 25 years. the most part, the formal sys m system. rarely did they have access to the kind of alternative programming that's proven to make a difference time and again. children possibly fall through our nations tattered safety net as they leave or are pushed out of segregated schools or suffer abuse and trauma and enter the juvenile justice system. serve time for a felony, eventually become second class citizens, face discrimination in their atems for housing, employment, and schooling. after doing so little for the kids while growing up, our government finally steps in and

starts really spending money on these kids once they make a big mistake to prosecute them and put them away in prison for a long time. all kinds of evidence -- there's all kinds of evidence that big brother/big sister mentoring programs have a remarkable effect over time on kids developing self-esteem and there are countless other school and community-based programs that have made a difference in preventing crime and dropout rates, the kind of things hill was talking about. but they are chronically underfunded. so in conclusion, mentoring and mentorship, i have seen firsthand how mentoring can really make a difference in young peoples' lives mostly because it addresses that critical missing ingredient for so many young people from difficult backgrounds. self-esteem, self-worth that they experience. without it, there's no foundation. mentors can help develop that.

and mentors come in many forms. big brothers, teachers, coaches, camp counselors, all the kinds of programs that the youth promise act would support. most importantly, mentors in the programs they are apart of provide a light that helps a young person navigate through difficult waters. and sometimes that light can make the difference between freedom and incarceration or even between life and death. thank you very much. >> i'm here to tell my story about, you know, how mentoring is so important. and i had a brother on the

washington, d.c. streets. he basically fell through the cracks. the school system let us suffer. we didn't drop out. they didn't come around and see what was going on with the school thing or nothing. and if we had programs in the school that really cared then, we wouldn't have been been out there doing the things on the streets that we was doing. there came a time when john was in africa. he wasn't there to mentor us, but if he was there to mentor us, we wouldn't have fell through the cracks. it was really important for males and females to mentor the younger kids. i have five boys of my own. i mentored them real good. i even have a little brother. i got me a little brother.

you know, and just saying the way that things happen, you know, i basically was on the streets at the age of 11 years old, you know, when i should have been in school, but didn't nobody care at all. nobody you need to go to school. no teachers came to the house or nothing. but like now these days for me doing a lot of things that i do, the teachers really know the kids in school need the help. a lot of the teachers know that these kids need help. some kids don't need the help, but there's a lot of kids out there that need the help. i just wish that, you know, like the young guy who did shoot my brother, if there was programs

out there that help serve the community a little better, the guy probably never would have shot my brother. you know, i had another little brother fell through the cracks too. he ended up dying himself. you know, if it wasn't for john half of the time, i wouldn't even be here from him mentoring me. i've known john since i was seven years old. he could tell you the stuff i have been through in life. when i needed him in life, he was there to mentor me. my life was a sad situation, but now i'm proud of myself. we really need these programs out here for these kids. you know, the kids is the future.

you know, they need help. there's a lot of kids out there that need help. we can help with the programs. and i do my helping too. me and my wife, we run a football program with like 300 kids. and i never dreamed i would be running a football program. my wife is the president of the football program. that's amazing. i think i'm a good role model to my boys. they watch everything i do. i would love to see more programs out there for the kids. i would love to see way more programs out there for the kids. that's very important. very important. that's all i got to say.

>> thank you, michael. dr. gallagher. >> good afternoon and as always, thank you, congressman scott, for your great leadership on these issues. i'm thrilled to be in this really, really esteemed panel. it's very exciting for me as an academic. so you'll have to forgive my enthusiasm over here. my job, i think, is to bring the evidence to bare on the issues surrounding the youth promise act. so i titled my presentation "evidence" which hopefully won't be as boring as it sounds. for any of you that have seen the briefings i have done before, forgive me. it's part of our seven-minute

graduate seminars and i will review what we covered last time and move into some new territories as well. i have also never been a big brother, but i have spent quite a lot of time in facilities, and i think that experience has really shaped my research how i understand the problems and the complexitie complexities, but also what these kids are asked to persevere and to survive in. so with that, i will move ahead to the evidence at hand. so i promised a review of our last lecture, and i will keep these to less than three minutes total, but in previous discussions, we have covered things like the organization, the oversight, and the youth who are involved in the juvenile justice system. sometimes we forget that not everyone is familiarized with the complexities and the irregularities with the system.

we also talked about costs and what it actually does cost to keep kids in the system versus prevent kids from getting in the system and also what happens when we fail them at each level. we talked about that in terms of taxpayer burden and we talked about it in terms of a cost effectiveness study that we're in the process of conducting with the center for the states. we also went through the evidence surrounding the youth promise act, and in some of the briefings, we have gone piece by piece on the components and there is significant evidence. today i'm going to be talking along a different vein. considering the company we're keeping here, i thought it might be interesting and important to remind ourselves about not just about prevention and cost, but what the human rights and the human loss is when we fail to do our job in the juvenile justice

system. so i'm going to bring in some evidence that our group has compiled about the dell tearhouse effects of crowding and what we see in terms of health care and also avenues of relief for youth who are in facilities and who are failed when they are there. and i'll conclude this bit of our lecture, and i don't know what our next lecture will hold, but with the risk of maintaining our status quo and some action items i hope that will help us move forward. the next few slides i'm going to go over in rapid speed. they are available elsewhere, but it's just a reminder about major milestones in juvenile justice. what you see on the screen is a lot of different stripes. the blue stripes represent major court interventions in juvenile justice policy. what you see in yellow is

legislative interventions in juvenile justice policy. and considering it spans over a century, you can see there haven't been many major interventions. one of them, of course, is the youth promise act. another is what the supreme court is considering at the moment, which is the cases of miller, alabama, and jackson hobbs, which considers life without parole. we also talked about what the system looks like. even if you could read the slide, you'll know that it's very complex, hard to understand its organization and processes. despite being an academic who loves concept chul models, it's hard to depict it in a meaningful way. it's hard to imagine people who are unfamiliar with the juvenile system trying to navigate it and

manage it and especially people who don't have the resources or the constituency to manage it effectively to get their children safely through to the other side. we also talked about the numbers of kids who go through these systems. these facilities, is not to mention probation and parole systems, but facilities process over a million kids a year. this is a lot of potential lost and a lot of lifetime spent for these kids. and we see most of our kids who are passing through our detention centers where security is extremely high and services are very low. we also talked at a different briefing about some costs. we looked at it in terms of firearm injuries. we thought, well, if we can't put a dollar figure on how much it costs to keep a kid in the system, we can begin to chip

away at the costs for what happens to kids when we fail them. and one way in which we fail them is if they are a victim of a firearm injury. what you can see from this graph, you don't really need to be able to read it to see the top, the blue stripe is -- sorry. firearm injuries for black males between the ages of 13-19. the red stripe is for hispanic males of the the same age group the white stripe for white males of the same group between the years of 2001 and 2010. what is alarming about this in addition to the gross despairties is also the fact that it's not evident necessarily from this picture, but these rates have remained stable over the last decade. many of us have celebrated reduced crime rates, but this is an area in which we have not seen a reduction.

i can talk more about this at a different time. we have resources available for you. but we moved along and considered what the firearm injuries mean in terms of costs not just to these kids, but to their families and societies as a whole and we've used as a benchmark measure, the entire federal budget spent on the offices of juvenile justice, the sole arm mandated for r guiding the states and providing funding for prevention and for some minimal standards and productions and what we came to realize is we spend more on hospital bills for adolescents who have been shot in a year than the entire federal budget combined to support these programs. and if we consider not just kids who have been victims of firearm injuries, but victims of other violent injuries, we can make

that almost quadruple the amount of the federal budget from 2012. so, we also conclude in this, sorry, i'm going to not overstep my time boundaries, but even the hospital bills do get passed back to the taxpayer. through medicaid billing, through the reab sorks of unpaid bills. whatever we have spent in the federal funds, but through being charged again for treating these injuries. so, what we came up with was once again, i used a lot of analogies to help here because that's really our area of expertise. in terms of the true cost of the juvenile justice system, we're still aways away from understanding a per kid cost

across all systems and providers. we're working on that with the pew center for the states, but the same analogy as we don't understand what it costs to treat a patient across all systems of care and all provider types for a specific condition. moving along, i'll just say crime's complex. it's entangled with other social, health, educational, economic problems and it's impossible to disentangle it. we covered at the end, this summarizes our prior lectures that the youth promise act really provides a rational structure for local leadership and it also conforms to a scientific understanding about what the best mean of intervention is, at what point, with great local discretionary

decision making and lot of variation to support what the local community's assets and strengths are. as we mentioned, i have more detail on this, but i'm going to move along to keep on time. today, i just wanted to talk a little bit about what happens when we fail in prevention, which clearly, we have in many, many, many cases. and i thought i would speak a little bit on human rights protections and risks that are faced by these kids. really what happens at the deep end and i've used three examples here. we're going to talk a little bit about crowding, health care and seeking relief through the courts for violations of rights. first of all, and i'll do this in rapid fire happy to give you more information in a separate form, but we first look at the issue of crowding. so, crowding first of all, we have between 5 and 7% of

facilities in the united states crowded on a given day. that amounts to about 20,000 young people housed in crowded conditions. if you have spent time in a facility, it's not just it's a little crowded. you know that it smells. it's noisey. there's no privacy. and it's degrading. sometimes, anecdotes show kids are put in bathrooms, in hallways and other public places and to beyond all of these different really inappropriate ways to house children, there's the issue of the fact that violence is directly linked to crowded conditions and so one of the studies we conducted was the relationship between crowded conditions and subsequent violence in a facility and what this table shows and it's a little hard to explain, but it basically shows that we have a

flesh hold effect in the amount of crowding and how much violence we anticipate on top of the crowding conditions cht so, as soon as a facility reaches one point over capacity, meaning they move into a makeshift bed or sleeping arrangement, we see an increase of 129% in the odds that a violent event will occur. not just any event, but one that requires emergency hospital care, which is a significant step for a facility to take given what it needs in terms of staffing and yoef time and the like. moving on to health. this chart shows that across many conditions, some are related to behave risk factors, youth in our facility populations are on the whole, about 25% more likely to have any of these conditions.

so obviously, these people are underserved when they arrive and in need of health care interventions. well, the courts say you're legally required to provide youth with some form of health care, but the form of that health care, the standard at which it's provided and the extent to which it's provided is not really made clear. basically, we can agree there's a basement terms of the standards and that basically is to check in, make sure that your youth is mostly alive and is going to stay that way until the general population. and here, we see using the lowest level standards possible, whether or not facilities in the united states meet these lowest standards. what we see in the red column, the dark blue column, are facilities that are partially or fully noncompliant with the very basic health care requirements making sure that the youth is

not suffering for example from an injury or trauma or is intoxicated or at risk of suicide as they walk in the door. both unsurprisingly then, we see in this chart, that the death, the risk of death in a facility is on average three times greater than that in the general population of youth. we can argue that the general population of youth is the appropriate comparison point. i feel that of course it is, but others feel you should look at the highest rick youth. youth in the system are more likely to die than kids on the outside from suicide and illnesses. th they're not only more likely to die, but more likely to die upon release. that's a strong finding found around the world. i'm going to skip that slide and try and keep up with time here.

one of the things that occurred to us when we were looking at these issues is if there are no real strong guidelines about how to provide health care, about how to protect youth, about how to relieve crowding, about how to bring court cases, what's the court doing and how are they responding to these issues? as you can imagine, the burden of proof is rather high in litigation, the place of relief for youth who have suffered some bad outcome in particular death from suicide, the courts are the way to go. so, we've looked at every reported case that was a case related to a family or a youth bringing a charge of either negligence or failing to treat and the outcome in each case, either a death from suicide or a serious irreparable damage from a suicide attempt.