By Kaile Shilling

What do you get when you bring together over one hundred juvenile justice activists, youth leaders, artists, and representatives from major foundations?  You get a powerful couple of days of dialogue and action around the intersection of arts and youth justice reform. 

The event, held September 25-26 in Los Angeles, was the second in a series called Create Justice led by the Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network (AIYN) and Carnegie Hall. It explored the question synthesized from the first gathering:  How do we artistically co-design youth-centered communities whose outcomes are justice?

This was no abstract ivory-tower exercise.  On Monday, more than 80 of us travelled out to Campus Kilpatrick, Los Angeles County’s new youth detention facility, located atop the hills of Malibu.  We joined the young people incarcerated there in a series of workshops on theatre, drumming, poetry, and visual arts.  And in all honesty, we struggled with the tension between wanting the most supportive, restorative environment for justice-involved youth possible, and the pain at the investment that could have been made in prevention instead.

As we held this tension, we grounded ourselves in understanding how art-making itself is a way to create community across generations, and across experiences. Arts engagement can serve as both an individual healing tool and a powerful unifier to achieve social change.

A highlight of the gathering was a public reception at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts, which had justice movement artists create work around the theme, alongside work created by young people touched by the justice system. Folks wrote postcards to elected officials around three key pieces of justice legislation:  Support for the Youth PROMISE Act (federal legislation), support for a minimum age for youth prosecution (no criminal charges for young people less than 12 years old), and eliminating money bail, which disproportionally impacts women and families of color.

Day two was spent at the Armory, where youth leaders created protest signs, shared with the larger group, that spoke to the systemic challenges that push young people into the justice system in the first place.  Across all conversations was a fundamental questioning of incarceration as a strategy to respond to adolescence.  While the group sought to focus on arts engagement as a way to promote healing and restoration, our collective brain quickly moved towards advocating for arts engagement across all sectors – housing, healthcare, schools, community leadership – as a way to build healthy communities and healthy young people in order to divert young people from the justice system entirely.

Arts change how young people are seen, how they see themselves, and how others see them.  Not as troublemakers, but rather as assets, and creative individuals with something to offer. Art transforms, and our hope is that arts are a partner in transformation. The event was a powerful and moving step in that direction, and one we hope lays the groundwork for broader engagement.

To learn more about Create Justice, see photos from the events, videos of provoking instigations, highlights, and photos, please visit www.createjustice.org

Kaile Shilling is the Executive Director of the Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network, an interdisciplinary collaborative that provides exceptional arts programming in order to build resiliency and wellness, eliminate recidivism, and transform the juvenile justice system.