LA’s At-Risk Youth Need Community Resources & Healing, Not Punishment & Pepper Spray [witnessla.com]
WitnessLA, June 5, 2019. From juvenile hall to county jail to prison to deportation, I’ve experienced first-hand the lifelong obstacles that contact with the criminal justice system can produce. As a troubled youth in the mid to late 1980s, I found that my time in LA County Probation’s juvenile halls and camps provided few resources or guidance to change my negative behavior. Instead, I learned better ways to defend myself against other troubled, gang-involved youth. It was gladiator school,...