Juvenile Justice Information Exchange:
“By: ELLY YU |
JONESBORO, Ga. — Of all the birthdays Julie Kisaka remembers from her childhood, one clearly stands out among the rest.
“There’s nothing worse than celebrating your 15th birthday in jail,” Kisaka said.
Kisaka, now 29, recalls being confined at a youth detention facility in Clayton County, Ga., for stealing her parents’ car. On her birthday, Kisaka’s parents brought her a chocolate cake, and the three of them sat quietly in the detention center’s small cafeteria. Behind bars, Kisaka tasted bitterness.
“I think that I was like ‘OK – I need to chill,’” Kisaka said.
She decided she never wanted to spend another birthday in detention. But today, Kisaka is back in the courtrooms where it all started 15 years ago, this time, as a law clerk for Steven Teske, chief judge of Clayton County Juvenile Court.
Kisaka is now finishing her last year of law school in Jacksonville, Fla., at Florida Coastal School of Law, where she has been specializing in corporate transaction law. Up until January, when she started working for the court, Kisaka had largely put her juvenile delinquent past behind her.
But as she sat in on juvenile court hearings and saw a young offenders sitting in front of a judge who could forever change their futures, she said she couldn’t help but relate. And her ambitions have now changed.
“I have a soft spot for this type of law and this practice,” Kisaka said.
Kisaka, who immigrated with her parents from Kenya when she was 4 years old, is petite and soft-spoken. But when it comes to juvenile-justice law, her passion speaks loudly.
“I think the only negative thing [that came from my experience] is how I ended up feeling how a lot of youth are being treated,” she said.
A juvenile record
Fifteen years ago, Kisaka stood in front of a judge, wearing a light brown jumpsuit with handcuffs on her arms and shackles around her ankles.
Days earlier, she had taken her dad’s car while her parents were out, and, not knowing how to drive, immediately crashed it into the side of their apartment building. When her parents came back, they had to call the police to file a report for their insurance claim.
“When they asked what happened, we had to tell them the truth. From there, then she got a record,” said Kisaka’s father, Donald Mwawasi.
Kisaka, who had been on probation due to missing school, was now facing greater punishment.
In court, Kisaka felt defiant and confident. “All I heard was 30 days to disposition, and I think I’m going home,” Kisaka recalled.
But she had misheard. The judge called for 30 days in detention before her disposition hearing. She was put back in her holding cell. Up until that point, she had felt invincible.
“I cried. You’re scared and you’re 14,” she remembered. “I relatively wasn’t, I don’t think, a bad kid.”
Her parents were the only adults with her at the time of the hearing. They didn’t have any legal representation at the time, a condition now required in Georgia.
Her father said he never expected the court to send her to a youth facility. “They said it was just detention and not a prison,” Mwawasi recalled.
“They said that’s the best way for her to learn.” But he said not having his daughter in his home was stressful. He didn’t know how she was being treated, what she was being fed. “You’d wish that nothing of that kind would happen, as a parent.”
Read the rest of the article here.
