Marquetta Atkins

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

DEBT FREE JUSTICE: Can you talk about how youth are criminalized for minor offenses and these labels follow them throughout their adulthood?

MARQUETTA ATKINS: So working with Progeny, one of the things we tell our young people in the communities is, “Our stories are bigger than the boxes you try to put us in,” which means there's more to the story than what we see in a news clip. There's more to the story than we see on their rap sheets. Those stories are bigger. And so when we're thinking about how our young people are criminalized, we're thinking young people are making bad decisions that lead them to be incarcerated, which is not often the truth. We don't think about the systemic issues that lead these young people to make poor decisions. And we don't also think about young people being victims and being criminalized, just because they're non-compliant when it comes to dealing with those bigger systems. And that's what we see a lot of in our young people with Progeny.

So thinking about young people that are put being put in adult situations. And it's almost like being kidnapped. They have to do and say and be at the will of the people that are in control of these young people. We can't have a system that takes young people that are victims and just because they're not being compliant, because they're not doing the things that we think they should be doing, and turn them into criminals. How is that helping young people? How is it healing them? How are we putting these marks on these young people? So they're doing things that regular kids are doing. They just haven't been caught yet. And we amplify it because they have this mark on their back of being victims. And so we harm them again by criminalizing them. We harm them again by incarcerating them. We harm them again by hurting them.

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Debt Free Justice (@debtfreejustice)

DEBT FREE JUSTICE: Can you expound on your observations on mental health supports and how young people process their early childhood traumas?

MARQUETTA: We're not giving them mental help. We're not giving them therapy. We're not even giving them a hug to tell them it's not your fault, all the things that you went through. No, instead, we make it their fault. And in an instant, like Kristen, at the end, when she's a child that is a runaway right now, and there's another young person in a harmful situation or a situation she's not happy with, she goes, "Come with me. I've run away. Run with me." How do we criminalize that? How often when you were a kid, and you did something foolish, and your parents asked you, “Why did you do that?” And you go, “I don't know.” And honestly, we don't know because young people are still learning. They're still growing, and they're still figuring life out. Too often, we want to point the finger at kids when we need to be pointing the fingers at ourselves. Are we creating an environment in a world where young people can be safe in, where they can thrive in? And when they do make poor decisions, instead of getting them help, is incarcerating a child the answer?

Kristen spoke about being dragged out of the car by her neck at 16 years old. How did that help her? A 13-year-old victim, a 16-year-old victim, a 17-year-old victim. How did that help her having that done to her? We have to do better by our young people. They deserve better from us. And when we talk about what's wrong with kids, we need to stop creating policy that harms kids. And we need to start taking a hard look at the decision we're making as adults that impact young people in a negative way. 

As kids, we're just trying to get through our childhood. And sometimes we romanticize some of the things that we went through as kids. Our childhood wasn't that bad. I grew up, and I say this with love because I love my parents and I love my father, but my father was a functioning addict. And on the outside, everything looked great. But on the inside, it was awful. It was scary.

When you grow up, you think that you have healed from the things you don't even realize that you are healing. You think that you have grown up and everything was okay. And then it hits you as an adult. “Damn, I really went through some harmful stuff, and I'm still impacted by it today.” And if it takes till you're darn near 30 to 40 years old to look back at your childhood and say, “Dang, I have really, really been harmed by some of the things I went through growing up”. What makes you think a child that's living in that moment can make the decision to say, dang, these things are harmful for me? What makes you think a child can recognize that some of the decisions they're ...