January 27, 2006

"David Utter, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana"

Welcome to Leadership Talks with David Utter, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on January 27, 2006. You may need to hit refresh periodically during the interview to see the latest responses. Read background

Leadership for a Changing World
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with David Utter of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.

David, how did you get into social justice work?

David Utter
I did not graduate from high school, instead I engaged in numerous delinquent acts for which my current clients are serving time in harsh juvenile prisons. I got my GED, attended junior college on an athletic scholarship and ended up in Atlanta, hundreds of miles away from my hometown of Miami, for college. At Emory I was exposed to brilliant people who made a life of studying the South. Unable to go to graduate school in history due to my tin ear and poor memory for language, I applied to law school at the last minute and got into 2 - University of Florida and Georgia. I went to Florida because it had a slightly better reputation.

I went to law school with the same aspirations I had for teaching history. I thought that surely the reason people in the US allowed systemic racism and class warfare to happen was due to ignorance. I thought that, with a little effort, I could change the way people looked at race and the history of racism, and its impact on the South and the US. Surely once people saw the injustice, things would get better.

Once out of law school, my first job was with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. Working for Steve Bright, suing prisons and jails throughout the South for the deplorable treatment of human beings who broke the law or were merely accused of breaking the law, I had the best possible first work experience. Steve was and is a creative genius, and he works harder at fighting injustice than anyone I know. I went from SCHR to New Orleans and represented poor people facing the death penalty, and then opened up JJPL in 1998 with Gabriella Celeste and Shannon Wight. Even though we closed 2 brutal youth prisons, eliminated for profit prisons in LA and made substantial progress, as Katrina exposed to the world, all of our work explaining the impact of poverty and racism has not done much. August 29, 2005 showed how little we have progressed in our efforts at alleviating the suffering caused by the two most serious social problems in the US.

Jacksonville, FL
How do you take something so big- closing prisons and prison reform- into something attainable?

David Utter
Small bites, small bites. It’s interesting – when we first started our work back in 1998, I came to it with a prison conditions litigator and really all I was trying to do was improve the conditions in the facilities. The difference from the traditional prison conditions litigation for us was the very conscious effort to involve the media and the public. And the thought there was that surely no one could sit by as children were being mistreated so. And so we filed lawsuits and engaged in a very aggressive media campaign and extracted a very good settlement in the lawsuit in 2000. And then we began the work of overseeing the implementation of the settlement. And what we found from 2000 to 2002 was that big institutions for children hundreds of miles away from their homes were always going to fail. During that same time period, 2000 to 2002, a parenting community group that we were working with, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) was formed. And it was the combination of the lawyers and advocates visiting the juvenile prisons on a regular basis and seeing first-hand the failure of the lawsuit to protect children and FFLIC’s advocacy had caused us to say for the first time that these big institutions hundreds of miles away from children’s homes didn’t work and needed to close. And I think that this shows the importance of community involvement, but it was FFLIC, it was the parents that first said, close Tallulah, not fix Tallulah.

Oakland California
What successes, if any, has the Survivors' Assembly for Reconstruction experienced related to the Katrina Rebuild efforts? Who are some of your main partners in that effort?

David Utter
JJPL and FFLIC have, as all New Orleans has, struggled mightily just to survive since Katrina and after many conversations and three retreats in three different cities and three or four board meetings, we decided that our efforts on rebuilding New Orleans were best focused on the criminal and juvenile justice fronts. We have a number of staff dedicated to an initiative that’s called Safe Streets, Strong Communities, and they are actively working on a campaign to ensure that the criminal and juvenile justice systems are not rebuilt in a way that resembles those systems pre-Katrina. There are many groups working to ensure New Orleans rebuilds stronger and better. The questioner mentioned just one of them. It’s a matter of being able to use your energies in the best ways possible, and so ours are focused on what we know, and that’s criminal and juvenile justice.

If you are in New Orleans working on the rebuilding effort, whether it be housing and schools and criminal justice system, it’s astonishing how much effort it takes just to survive. The energy it took to work in New Orleans before the storm, it probably takes twice as much since the storm. Everything’s harder, and there’s almost a palpable depression over the city.

Leadership for a Changing World
How has Katrina changed the context or the way you do your your work?

David Utter
The day-to-day things that one takes for granted just aren’t there or are much harder. For example, of 15 or 16 staff at JJPL pre-Katrina, we lost about 25 or 30 percent of those folks. They decided it wasn’t safe to come back to New Orleans. So there is as much work, if not more, to do with fewer people. About a quarter of our staff lost their homes, and we are now sharing houses. The first person we hired in 1998, the co-director of FFLIC, had eight feet of water in her house and is struggling to rebuild, has done everything that the government and insurance companies have told her to do to rebuild and has found out that the neighborhood is on the list of neighborhoods that are scheduled to not be rebuilt immediately. So she’s literally in the middle of a block where she is one or two of 25 or 30 houses that is rebuilding.

So at the same time that she struggles to rebuild her home with her three kids and elderly mother—she’s the sole provider of the family—she’s working with community members who lost everything and are in Houston, Atlanta, parts of Louisiana with nothing to come back to and are trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. New Orleans has the highest percentage of people living there who were born there than any other city in the country. People stay there because they have a special bond with a city, and they want to come home. FFLIC is dealing with the trauma and the day-to-day setbacks of their membership many times as they deal with their own housing issues and their own trauma. It’s very, very difficult on a personal level. And it doesn’t help when you pick up the paper, and you see the federal government’s response, and you see a willingness to spend millions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, but you pinch pennies when it comes to rebuilding New Orleans.

Washington, dc
Regarding Katrina efforts-
What's happening now?
What's most needed?
How do you recommend getting involved?

David Utter
As with any social justice or public policy engagement, there are many levels to involvement. It really depends on what each individual has the capacity to do. Individually, it’s incredibly helpful for people to just come see what the storm and what the manmade failed levees did to the city. Individually, it’s incredibly helpful to come down and help demolish houses, rebuild houses, gut flooded out houses and ruined houses. Individually, it’s incredibly important to hold President Bush to his promise to rebuild New Orleans. The single most important thing people can do is to stay engaged and not forget the city and not forget the fact that we need help. Folks can call JJPL, and we can direct them to volunteer opportunities.

Washington, Dc
How would you describe your leadership style, and how has that made you effective in working within the prison system?

David Utter
It’s been an evolution. I started out a lawyer and liked working by myself or with a colleague or two on a case, representing a person or class of prisoners in an effort to extract justice from a system completely unwilling to give it. I am uncomfortable with the title and feel that the most important thing I can do is use whatever credibility the title brings for the greatest benefit for my clients, their families, their community and my colleagues. I constantly learn every day from all of those people and the key for me is always being willing to admit I am wrong, that my strategy or tactics on any given initiative may be wrong and that flexibility is necessary to win justice.

NY, NY
How do you decide what to focus on in your work, whether directly related to JJPL or spending time with Katrina efforts?

David Utter
The day-to-day things that one takes for granted just aren’t there or are much harder. For example, of 15 or 16 staff at JJPL pre-Katrina, we lost about 25 or 30 percent of those folks. They decided it wasn’t safe to come back to New Orleans. So there is as much work, if not more, to do with fewer people. About a quarter of our staff lost their homes, and we are now sharing houses. The first person we hired in 1998, the co-director of FFLIC, had eight feet of water in her house and is struggling to rebuild, has done everything that the government and insurance companies have told her to do to rebuild and has found out that the neighborhood is on the list of neighborhoods that are scheduled to not be rebuilt immediately. So she’s literally in the middle of a block where she is one or two of 25 or 30 houses that is rebuilding.

So at the same time that she struggles to rebuild her home with her three kids and elderly mother—she’s the sole provider of the family—she’s working with community members who lost everything and are in Houston, Atlanta, parts of Louisiana with nothing to come back to and are trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. New Orleans has the highest percentage of people living there who were born there than any other city in the country. People stay there because they have a special bond with a city, and they want to come home. FFLIC is dealing with the trauma and the day-to-day setbacks of their membership many times as they deal with their own housing issues and their own trauma. It’s very, very difficult on a personal level. And it doesn’t help when you pick up the paper, and you see the federal government’s response, and you see a willingness to spend millions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, but you pinch pennies when it comes to rebuilding New Orleans.


As with any social justice or public policy engagement, there are many levels to involvement. It really depends on what each individual has the capacity to do. Individually, it’s incredibly helpful for people to just come see what the storm and what the manmade failed levees did to the city. Individually, it’s incredibly helpful to come down and help demolish houses, rebuild houses, gut flooded out houses and ruined houses. Individually, it’s incredibly important to hold President Bush to his promise to rebuild New Orleans. The single most important thing people can do is to stay engaged and not forget the city and not forget the fact that we need help. Folks can call JJPL, and we can direct them to volunteer opportunities.


The focus for us post-Katrina is, of course, going to be juvenile justice. Everybody knows that Louisiana’s juvenile justice system was the worst in the country. What they didn’t know is that New Orleans had one of the worst local systems in the state, and the storm exposed that to the country. For example, there were almost 150 children detained in two jails when Katrina hit. The sheriff didn’t evacuate the children until a day or two after the storm, when the city began to flood. Reports from the children are that they were taken from the juvenile detention centers and placed on the I-10 overpass with the adult prisoners waiting to be evacuated. There they sat for hours, and even days, with little water and little food. Kids as young as 13 and 14 tell us that because there was no supervision, adults stole their food. State officials tell us that when the children were finally brought to state custody a few days after the storm, many of the kids hadn’t eaten in days, were dehydrated, and had only the clothes on their backs. Kids report being locked in cells as the water rose to their chest before they were evacuated. State officials said that some of the kids had rashes and infections because they were sitting in the standing water for hours. And this is just one part of the system, just the detention centers.

Before the storm, Orleans Parish has one of the worst indigent defender systems, especially for kids. Young people accused of delinquent acts were represented by lawyers who had no investigation supports, no social worker support, worked part-time, and in fact, didn’t even have files or file cabinets, much less computers, to do their work. When the kids in the system were sent up into the state system in juvenile prisons hundreds of miles away from their homes, daily violence, lack of treatment, and inability to maintain contact with their families was a regular part of their world.

On the adult side, there were 8,000 people incarcerated in the affected parishes when the storm hit, 6,000 or 7,000 alone in Orleans Parish. The evacuation horrors are well documented. Human Rights Watch reports men locked in their cells as the water rose to their chests. The men were evacuated to the state prison system and are still being held with no representation and no connection to their families. There were thousands of people who were incarcerated on minor charges, such as public drunkenness, speeding tickets, low-level drug offenses, parole violations, and they were incarcerated after evacuation for months on end. Some of them are still locked up due to the total collapse of the criminal justice system. Since the storm, the New Orleans Police Department has been shown on tape beating a retired African-American schoolteacher in the French Quarter and shooting to death a mentally ill man in the middle of St. Charles Avenue. The post-Katrina actions and behavior of the city’s criminal juvenile justice system are symptomatic of a system that was broken for decades. The most alarming thing about the rebuilding discussion is the absence of any real acknowledgement of how broken those systems were and are. So JJPL and its allies are focusing on ensuring that the rebuilding of the criminal juvenile justice systems are done in a way that the human dignity of all of our citizens is respected and that our communities are actually made safer as opposed to being terrorized by the institutions that are supposed to protect them.

Seattle
What do you ultimately hope to achieve through the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana?

David Utter
I want every kid, every young person, who has trouble adjusting or making the transition to adulthood to get the breaks and second chances I did. Every adult should not be judged by their worst act, but instead should be given the opportunity to succeed and live life to the fullest as I have. The fact that the decisions about who gets a break, who serves time in prisons for mistakes, and who gets opportunities to succeed are based more on a person's skin color and financial background should make us all ashamed. JJPL's success means kids in Louisiana who break the law are treated the same way I was - with dignity.

minneapolis
You talk a little about the role of race in your work. How has the issue of race affected how you, as a white male, do your work in a predominantly African American population?

David Utter
It’s affected it greatly. New Orleans is a little different, I hope, than other predominantly African-American cities in that it’s poorer, more disenfranchised, and more dysfunctional than others. And so I was somewhat shocked at how open and eager my clients, their families, and the community was to our efforts. There was just this incredible void; the conditions in the system had been known to be appalling for years before we opened our office, and no one had done anything. The desperation and frustration these parents felt about the way their children were being treated, I think, removed any concern about the fact that I’m a white guy. They just wanted somebody to try to protect their children. It was such an awful situation that it removed some of those barriers.

Secondly, and I think this is critically important, I am not JJPL. White folks at JJPL, at least before the storm, were a minority. More of our lawyers are African-American or Latino/a than white. When JJPL is represented in court and in the community, it’s not just me, and we try to provide the opportunity for leadership and leadership development with all of our staff.

Lastly, I feel the tension or the incongruence of being a while male working in social justice with a clientele that is mostly folks of color. My goal is to hand off leadership to someone from New Orleans, someone that’s not white. I think that’s one of the most important things a leader does, develop new leadership.

Bangor, ME
Do you think it's easier to make change and reform from within a system or from the outside such as with JJPL?

David Utter
I think that both are options, but certainly, in systems like Louisiana’s or California’s, outside advocacy is an absolute necessity. One of the biggest problems with juvenile justice is the silence or the anonymity with which the system operates. It’s exacerbated by the fact that the children are mostly of color and almost all poor. But unless somebody from the outside is talking about the issues and bringing to light the injustices, the system rarely fixes itself.

The caveat with this is that there are tremendous reform efforts taking place because of what one would think of inside or foundation action. One example is Bart Lubow at the Annie Casey Foundation His work with local jurisdictions to reform the use of pre-adjudication detention has probably saved more young lives and done more good than a lot of external advocacy.

You also have a recent trend of local stakeholders selecting proven reformers, established advocates to work within the system. An example is Washington, DC, hiring Vincent Scharaldi to run its local juvenile system. That’s a trend that should be encouraged and if that happens, if more advocates are actually brought in to run systems, then I hope you will see more change in the positive direction.

Leadership for a Changing World
Thanks again for a great discussion. We have time for one more questions that we like to ask all of our guests.

How do you sustain yourself and your staff to prevent burnout?

David Utter
Believe it or not, we had a plan to take better care of ourselves before Katrina and Rita. We had just completed a lengthy strategic planning process that would have allowed for more time off, more reflection. Katrina not only caused the plan to be reevaluated, it caused tremendous stress on our personal lives, and compounded the stress on our clients. We have created a tight community here at JJPL and get tremendous energy and sustenance from each other. We are back in New Orleans and committed to fighting for our city, our clients and our community. We will do what it takes, including making sure we are healthy. Personally I have been blessed to have a happy, bright, energetic 4 yr old who reminds me everyday what I am fighting for and am supported by a partner who makes me a better person every day. Both force balance in my life and as JJPL's director I try to ensure all my colleagues create balance in theirs.

Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with David Utter of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. For more information on the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana please contact:

David J. Utter
Director
Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
1600 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.
New Orleans, LA 70113
Phone: 504-522-5437 x227
Fax: 504-522-5430
Email: dutter@jjpl.org
Web: www.jjpl.org

David Utter

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