This letter came today and I’m pleased to share it.

The Amendments for the JJ Bill are problematic. In particular #1, #5 and #11. Take ONE MORE STEP:  PLEASE call your senators and ask them to Vote YES on S.2417 and NO on amendments #1, #5, #11 (as most harmful).  Explanations are below

Amendments #1 and #11, filed by Senators Brownsberger and Tarr, would do away completely with the expungement provisions of this bill.
Amendment #5, filed by Senator Tarr, would strike out reforms to exclude very young children (7 to 10 year olds) from juvenile jurisdiction
Please call again today and ask your Senator to REJECT these three amendments:

Find Your State Senator here.
Call the State House Switchboard at 617-722-2000 and ask to be connected to your State Senator’s office.

Sample script:
My name is __________. I am a constituent of the Senator and I live in__________. The Senate will debate S.2417, an omnibus Juvenile Justice bill and I ask that s/he vote YES on this bill.  I also ask that the Senator reject three harmful amendments to this bill:

Amendments #1 and #11 will deny reasonable efforts to allow young people move on beyond their past transgressions.  These amendments would prevent the expungement of juvenile records, even if the case was dismissed, or was years or decades old.
Amendment #5 would keep very young, elementary school age children subject to delinquency proceedings.  These Processing very young children is a waste of court’s limited resources, as they will highly unlikely be found competent to stand trial.
Thank you!

EXPLANATION

Amendment 1 – Removal of certain sections (Brownsberger)
OPPOSED 
Strikes out the entire section on expungement
Strikes out the entire section on youth status and DOC/HOC young adult programming
Strikes out language prohibiting the prosecution of child victims of sex trafficking
Removes the intra-family victim exception to parent-child privilege

Amendment 2 – Prohibiting Juvenile Solitary Confinement (Chang-Diaz and Eldridge)
SUPPORT
Bans solitary confinement for prisoners under age 18 (but only in prisons and jails)

Amendment 3 – decriminalizing non-violent and verbal student behavior (Jehlen)
SUPPORT
Disturbing public assembly and disorderly conduct offenses for students

Amendment 4 – further defining the role of school resource officers (Jehlen)
SUPPORT
School Resource officer MOU bill

Amendment 5 – Jurisdiction (Tarr)
OPPOSE
Strikes out language that would exclude very young children (7-10) from delinquency proceedings

Amendment 6 – Youth Mitigating Factor (Tarr)
OPPOSE
Strikes out youth status language for juveniles, but keeps language authorizing DOC/HOC to provide programming for young adults

Amendment 7 – Habitual Offender (Tarr)
OPPOSE
Three strikes language for adults

Amendment 8 – Finding of Delinquency on second and subsequent (Tarr)
OPPOSE
Specifies that offenses that are only a fine for the first offense will have a delinquency finding for the second or subsequent offense

Amendment 9 – Addition of a district attorney to the juvenile justice data taskforce (Lovely)
NEUTRAL

Amendment 10 – Court discretion (Lovely)
OPPOSE
Changes expungement for misdemeanor from automatic to discretionary

Amendment 11 – Expungement (Moore)
OPPOSE
Strikes out expungement

Amendment 12 – Task Force Members (Moore)
NEUTRAL
Adds the president of the Massachusetts District Attorney’s Association; the president of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police to data collection task force

Amendment 13 – Corrective Amendment
SUPPORT
Clarifies that “restraints” not the “child” shall be removed from the court
Clarifies that youth status and adult sentencing is only for juveniles subject to adult sentences not for delinquency cases
Clarifies right to counsel with better grammar
Adds MDAA and Mass Police Chiefs to data collection task force

Last week I posted the first radio interview on my new book and Karter Reed was kind enough to join me and talk about the pain and hope he lives with every day. The tragedy of Jason Robinson’s murder never subsides but Karter’s dedication to building a new life in honor of the families he harmed is ever-present. You can listen to him below in my last post.

This week some excitement for me begins on Tuesday, April 12, with the #twitter launch of Boy With A Knife. After seven years! Join me 8:30-11:30 am or pm to ask a question about my book or make a comment of justice for juveniles.  I take to heart James Baldwin’s famous words:”For these are all our children. We will all profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.” Use the hashtag #BWAK and I’m at @justicewithjean.

Also, Amazon will have a low price that day if you want to buy my book–no proceeds go to anyone involved in the crime.

I had a very important interview about the book with Bentley professor Marc Stern on April 10. A history prof, he asked important questions and had read the book with intense interest. You can listen to “Room With A View” here at WMBR, April 10, about 30 minutes in, and the HTML5 link worked perfectly for me. From that interview, my favorite question was when Marc asked to to explain what I meant by “justice” in the book title.

Caroline Leavitt’s very cool blog will feature her cool brand of Q&A about Boy With a Knife on Monday, April 11th.

Also incarcerated writer Christopher Zoukis is reviewing my book on Huffington Post this week. How, you ask, does that happen from prison? He writes it behind bars and send it to someone who submits it to him. One of the most dedicated prisoner writers I know.

This week I’m talking to students about BWAK at Merrimack College and at Wheelock College, and have my first reading at the Andover Book Store!

My first article on Huffington Post is co-authored with prisoner Chris Zoukis, “Kids Can Change: Stop Sending Juveniles to Adult Prisons and Jails.” It begins:

“In a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision is a deceptively simple line that :should affect, and in many cases, transform the way Americans think about juveniles who kill.

At the heart of the 2012 groundbreaking case, Miller v. Alabama, said the Court, is the idea, proven by neuroscience and behavioral research, that “children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change.” In other words, when we think about kids convicted of murder, this is the truth: a 16-year-old who kills is still a 16-year-old.”MORE

Photo by Rxasgomez on en.wikipedia – Originally from en.wikipedia; Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=738097

I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a German Jew, never explicitly taught but always implicitly believing that I was safe. Somehow, because my family had come here in 1830, and somehow, because they had assimilated into the predominantly Christian culture, I was not Jewish in the ways of those Jews who talked fast, drew attention to their Jewishness, and hung together come hell or high water. What a shock it must have been to many German Jews, at first, when Hitler didn’t discriminate. Education couldn’t save you; money guaranteed little unless it helped you get out of Europe quickly. If you were Jewish, you were the enemy. But today, more than 70 years after the Holocaust it might be surprising to discover how many German Jews still struggle with their heritage and the illusion that Antisemitism won’t happen to them.

Two plays I saw this past weekend touched deep chords in me, but from the reactions of everyone around me in the theatre, I was not alone. Both pieces ask the question if we can ever escape (or should escape) our backgrounds. Laden with all the history we bring with us, can we every really fit in to another, often antagonistic, culture?

The first, a Pulitzer prize winner, Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar played at the Huntington Theatre, and sadly has finished its run, but not before knocking the socks off its audience. In the program, one of the questions posed by Huntington’s Lisa Trimmel and Phaedre Scott is “How does one’s identity fit into the narrative of contemporary America?” And the particular journey Disgraced takes us on to answer that question is the journey of Amir, a Muslim-American, played brilliantly by Rajesh Bose, who has rejected his religion and risen to success as a lawyer in a fancy New York firm. But Amir does not have enough, in spite of the beautiful white American wife who is an artist and delves into Muslim inspired art. In spite of his luxurious apartment and obvious wealth. He lives with conflict. As the play intensifies, we shift in our seats as he at one moment hates his past and at another feels proud; criticizes violence in the Koran and yet for a horrifying moment, becomes violent; refuses to defend a fellow Pakistani accused of terrorism and yet shows up at his hearing.

The play touches on what parts of oneself we can let go of and what parts of oneself we can retain. In the U.S. where we certainly have our own “toolbox of colonization” as an audience member called it, there is no way that rage cannot be a result of the suppression of self, the definition of the “other” by the colonizer. To paraphrase Cornel West, will that rage be focused through love and justice or through rage and dissent? I would say that Amir has not yet answered that question to his own satisfaction. He loses his wife and his job as he realizes how much he has not dealt with his rage. We are each left wondering about our own part in this tragedy, no matter where we come from.

Across town in Cambridge at the Central Square Theatre, you still have a chance to see another powerful piece that also raises fascinating questions, The Convert by Danai Gurira. This play takes place in Southern Africa’s Zimbabwe in 1895. A young Shona woman is taken in by a black Evangelical who she calls “Master” in order to escape a forced marriage. Jekesai, played eloquently by Adobuere Ebiama, changes her name to Ester, submits to authority frequently, learns English fluidly, and seems to swallow Christianity in total. But the strength of her traditions and the power of her heritage come into play as violence swirls around the country. Her eventual reaction to being almost totally crushed is the complex and understandable response when a people have experienced colonization and conquest. She returns, in some part, to her roots.

Most interesting is the Master, called Chilford, who has become an Evangelical, played with depth and restraint by Maurice Emmanuel Parent. He is essentially bought by the Whites to carry the gospel of the Lord to the African population. But this bought spokeman buckles when his entire world is threatened; his loyalties battle with his assumed identity.

The audience is on the edge of its seat as the story unfolds, and the acting in this small space undoes us (only occasionally a bit more than the space can handle). The history shown so painfully hits us in the character of Shona’s relative and elder, Mai Tumbai, the servant of Chilford, acted with grace and passion by Liana Asim. She takes us to Zimbabwe in heart and soul. In the first act, she and Chilford enable us to see how religion is one of the most destructive forces of Colonialism.

But all the actors shine in this production, from Nehassaiu DeGannes’s Prudence, who finds she cannot have any impression on the White regime in spite of her years of education and adoption of the most perfect British mannerisms, to the representation of the power of tribe in the form of Uncle played by Paul S. Benford Bruce.

In a fascinating pre-play discussion panel for The Convert, one of the panelists made the comment that losing pieces of your family takes away from your whole being. Another mentioned that dehumanization occurs with colonization. “No Christ, no rice,” as Haitian victims of the hurricane in 2010 were told by Christian organizations providing relief.

But perhaps, my favorite comment of all was the one that tied together why it is so necessary to have such plays today when we see police brutality, the rise of #BlackLivesMatter, and a presidential campaign in the U.S. that is as terrifying as it is important. Panelist Robin Chandler, an artist and sociologist, shared noted playwright and poet Aimé Césaire’s thoughts. Césaire was one of the founding fathers of Negritude, a black consciousness movement that asserted pride in African cultural values. It aimed to “counterbalance the inferior status accorded to them in European colonial thinking.”

Césaire’s profound words underscore why these plays speak so truly to us. He said, “Art is the only weapon we have against the deafness of history.” Amen.