presentation with an opportunity for equal time. i guess we'll provide the same opportunity for representative terri sowell. >> thank you so much, mr. chairman. first let me just say, 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. 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, just bringing attention to how important the youth promise act is. and i think that all of us will

agree that in the waning days after trayvon martin -- the incident with trayvon martin, all of us need to be looking at our youth in a different way and trying to do all that we can do to make sure they keep and live up to their own promises. thanks. >> thank you, thank you. john pender grast. >> thank you, carson scott, carson conyers, congressman sue will for your unswerving leadership on these issues. i'm humbled to be on this panel and we can only hope we'll get some paraphernalia from csi: new york at the end of this for our reward. this isn't my primary profession just like it isn't in hill's. my qualification largely stems from stumbling onto 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 7 years old. 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've worked with over the last 25 years. and the very different trajectories which resulted, i would argue, 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 nasir. he was actually the biological brother of my first formal little brother the in the big brother, big sisters program in philadelphia. i worked intensively with nasir's brother kyrie but we'd often bring nasir with us on the various outings and adventures with go on in philadelphia. from a very young age nasir had

an explosive temper, was constantly in trouble in his school and neighborhood. there were no programs that addressed the kind of needs that he had. 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 system and cycled through that until tragically he was shot to death on the very street i used to pick him up when he was a little boy with an unforgettablely brilliant smile. the second story i want to tell you is about michael here right to my left. as i said, i met michael and his family when they were living out of plastic bags, literally out of hefty bags at a homeless shelter at 14th and n street, eight blocks away from the white house. we started going to the library together and i became his big brother. though not formally with the big brother, big sister program. at one point, he and two of his

siblings even came to live with me in philadelphia for the summer. i was 22, had to grow up really fast. michael will tell you his story. but suffice to say from my perspective that when i left for africa and sort of left michael hanging, eventually he dropped out of school and lots of stuff happened that i will leave to him to tell. but in effect, again, the formal system abandoned him. but i don't think i can ruin the ending of that story because he's right here, sitting here. a husband, a father to five boys, a coach and mentor himself now, if i tell you this. michael's told me many times over the last few years that if he hadn't had a big brother, someone investing and believing 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 cdoing. that's what mentors do. the third story is about jamar,

from right here in d.c. on georgia avenue. when i first met jamar through the big brother, big sisters program, he was extremely withdrawn, very volatiler. 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 either in a fight or on the sidelines quitting because of some kind of perceived slight. his grades were poor and his conduct at school was worse. jamar was different than nasir or michael only insofar as his mother was enrolling him in every possible alternative or supplemental program out there she could find. so besides big brother, big sisters and my relationship with jamar through that, he was also part of the boys and girls club and other after-school programs and even the aau football league. now, five years later, jamar's in ninth grade with a scholarship to one of the best high schools in d.c. his grades are good and he 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, huge payoffs, lives saved. that's what i found over and over again with the kids i coached and mentors over the last 25 years. for the most part, the formal system abandons them. rarely did they have access to the kind of alternative programming that has proven to make a difference time and again, the kind of youth promise act is going to support. children constantly fall through our nation's tattered safety net as they leave or are pushed out of segregate schools or passed around foster care, suffer abuse and trauma, enter the juvenile justice system, cycle through that, serve time for a felony, eventually become second-class citizens, face discrimination in their attempts to get employment, housing and schooling. after doing so little for these

kids, when they're 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 as the story hill talked about. there's all kinds of evidence that big brother, big sister-type mentoring programs have a remarkable effect over time on kids' development and their self-esteem and there are countless other school and community-based programs that have made a difference in preventing crime, preventing dropout rates, again the kind of things hill was talking about. but they are chronically underfunded. in conclusion, back to what i know. mentorship, mentoring and mentorship. i've seen firsthand how mentoring can really make a difference in young people's lives mostly because it addresses that critical missing ingredient for so many young people from difficult backgrounds. self-esteem, self-worth they experience. without it, there's no

foundation. mentors can help develop that fundamental requirement in-. mentors come in many forms. big brothers, big sisters. teaches, coaches, tutors, camp counselors. all the kinds of promise the youth promise act would help support. most importantly, mentors in the programs that they're part of provide a light that helps a young person navigate through difficult waters. sometimes that light can make the difference between freedom and incarceration or even between life and death. thank you very much. >> thank you. i'm here to tell my story, you know, how mentoring is so important. i had a brother who got shot on washington, d.c. streets.

and he basically fell through the cracks, you know. i mean, the school system let is like suffer. we didn't drop out. they didn't come around and see what was going on with school, enough. if we had programs in the school that really cared then we wouldn't have been out there doing things on the streets that we was doing. there came a time with john, he was out in africa, he wasn't there to mentor us. if he was there to mentor us, we wouldn't have fell through the cracks. it's really important for males and females to mentor the younger kids, you know. i got five boys of my own and i mentor them real good. i even have me a little brother, you know.

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

there that help serve the community a little better, the guy he probably never shot my brother. you know, i had another little brother fell through the, you know, cracks too where he end 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, you know. i been knowing john for since i was 7 years old. he can tell you the stuff that i been through in life. you know, when i really, really needed him in life, he was there. to mentor me. my life was a sad situation. but now i'm proud of myself. from john comprehender fast machine forring me. we really need these programs out here for these kids. the kids is the future. you know, they really, you

know -- they need help. there's a lot of kids out there need help. we can't help, we can help with the programs. and i do my little helping too. me and my wife, we run a football program. with like 300 kids, you know. and i never dreamed that i would be running a football program, where my wife is the president of the football program, where she'd be running a program with 300 kids. and that's amazing, you know. and 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. and that's very important. very important, you know. that's all i got to say.

>> thank you, michael. >> good afternoon. 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 bear 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 those of you who have seen any of these briefings that i've done before, forgive me. it's part of our seven-minute

graduate seminars and i'll review what we covered last time and move into some new territories as well. i've also not ever 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 complexities. but also what these kids are asked to persevere and to survive. and so with that, i'll move ahead to the evidence at hand. so i promise d a review of our last lecture and i'll keep these to less than three minutes total. but in previous discussions we've covered things like the organization, the oversight, and the youth who were involved in the juvenile justice system. sometimes we forget that not everyone's 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 about to conduct, actually in the process of conducting with the pew center for the states are we also went through the evidence surrounding the promise act and in some of our briefings we've gone piece by piece through the different components and conclude on the whole that there is significant evidence supporting the premises. 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 prevention and costs but what the human rights and the human losses, when we fail to do our

job in the juvenile justice system. so i'm going to bring in some evidence that our group that is compiled about the deleterious effects of crowding, what we see in terms of health care, what we see in terms of avenues of relief for youth who are in facilities and who are failed when they're there. and i'll conclude this bit of our lecture, and i don't know what our next lecture will hold. but with the risks 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're available elsewhere but it's just a reminder about major milestones inoff nile justice. when 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 that there haven't been many major interventions. one of them of course is the youth promise act. another is what the supreme court is hearing or considering at the moment, which is the cases of miller v. alabama and jackson v. hobbs, which considers life without parole. we also talked about what the system looks like. and even if you could read the slide you'd know that it's very complex, hard to understand this organization and its processes. and despite being an academic who loves conceptual models it's still actually very hard to depict it in a meaningful way. so it's hard to imagine people who are unfamiliar with the

juvenile system trying to navigate it and manage and it especially people who don't have the resources or the constituency to manage it effectively to get their children safely through to the on the reco other side. we also talked about the numbers of kids who go through these systems. these facilities and not to mention probation and parole systems but facilities process over 1 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 and we looked at it in terms of firearm injuries. we thought, if we can't put a dollar figure on how much it costs to keep a kid in the system, how we can begin to chip

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

graph means at a different time and we have resources available for you. but we moved along and we considered what the firearm injuries mean in terms of costs not just to these kids but to their families and to society as a whole. we've used as a benchmark measure the entire federal budget spent on the office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention which is the sole arm mandated for guiding the states and providing fundings for prevention and for some minimal standards and protections. and what we came to realize is that 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 victimth of other violent injuries, we can make

that almost quadruple the amount of the federal budget from 2012. so we also conclude in this -- i'm going to not overstep my time boundaries, but we also concluded that even the hospital bills do get passed back to the taxpayer through medicaid billing, through the reabsorption of unpaid bills to community hospitals, the taxpayers are getting double-billed, not just through 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 use a lot of analogies to health care because that's really our area of expertise in addition to juvenile justice. in terms of the true cost of the juvenile justice system, we're still a ways away from truly understanding a per-kid cost

across all systems and all providers. as i mentioned, we're working on that with the pew center for the states. but it's sort of 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 and pretend as though it is a separate phenomenon. we covered at the end, and this summarizes our prior lectures, that the youth promise act really provides a rational structure for local leadership. and it also conforms to our scientific understanding about what the best means of intervention is, at what point, with great local discretionary

decision-making, and a lot of variation to support what the local community's assets and strengths are. so again, i 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 failed in prevention in many, many, many casesry i thought i would speak a little bit about the human rights, protections and risks that are faced by these kids. really, what happens at the deep end? i use three examples here. we're going to talk a little bit about crowding, a little about health care, a little about seek reg leaf 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 forum. 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 who are housed in crowded conditions. if any of you have spent any time in a facility, what you know is it's not just that it's a little crowded, you know that it smells, it's noisy, there's no privacy, and it's degrading. sometimes and anecdotes show, kids are put in bathrooms and hallways and other public places. so beyond all of these different, really inappropriate ways to house children, there's the issue, 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 threshold effect in the amount of crowding and how much violence we anticipate on top of the crowded conditions. so as soon as a facility reaches one point over capacity, meaning they move into a makeshift bed or a makeshift sleeping arrangement, we see an increase of 129% in the odds that a violent event will occur. not just any violent event but one that requires emergency hospital care, which is a pretty significant step for a facility to take given what it means in terms of staffing and over time and the like. moving on to health, this chart shows that across many conditions, some related to behavioral risk factors and many not, across all of these conditions, youth who are in our facili sicility poptations are whole about 25% more likely to have any of these conditions.

so obviously these young people are underserved when they arrive, and in need of health care interventions. well, the courts say that you're legally required to provide youth with some form of health care, but the form of that health care or the standard at which it's provided and the extent to which it's provided is not really made clear. basically, we can agree that there's a basement in terms of the standards and that basically is to check and make sure that the youth is mostly alive and is going to stay that way until the general population. here we see using the lowest level standards possible whether or not facilities in the united states meet these lowest standards. and what we see in the red column and in 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. well, 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 of the general population of youth is the appropriate comparison point. i myself feel that of course it is, but others feel that you should look at the highest-risk youth as a comparison point. but nonetheless, what we see is youth in the system are much more likely than kids on the outside to die from suicide and illnesses. they're not only more likely to die while they're in the system, they're more likely to die upon release. that's a strong and robust finding not just in the united states but around the world. i'm going to skip that slide. trying to keep up with time

here. but 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 b. 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 a civil litigation which is the place of relief for youth who have suffered bad outcome, in particular death or suicide, the courts are the way to go. we looked at every single reported case that was a case related to a family or youth bringing a charge of either negligence or family to treat and the outcome in each case, either a death from suicide or a serious, irreparable damage from a suicide attempt.

so we looked at all of these 37 court cases. granted, it doesn't represent the full universe of cases. and we found that across 37 cases, of all of those cases, just one made it through the appeals process. so four to six could make it through the first round in the court. but by the circuit court review there was only one that succeeded. and the final value for the plaintiff in this case was $34,000. it was kind of mind-boggling to realize that 37 deaths in situations that weren't simple kids just taking opportunity, there was signs and there were rules that had been violated and gross negligence, there was just $34,000. which to me, and i'm sure to you, certainly does not validate the loss of the life of this un