Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Hi, my name is Dianne Skrigry. I am a social geologist at the Baldwin University of Carleton College. This is great. This is really great. I love learning. When I was a little kid, I absolutely knew I wanted to be a lawyer for Dr. baseball club. Because baseball is great, law is great, and I really wanted to change the world. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to help people. So when I was in high school, I spent a summer at Indiana University saying Neurology. And I was there where I learned about a part of the brain that would forever change my life. So situated right here is the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex controls decision making. However, unfortunately for us, it doesn’t quite return to the 24, 25, meaning they got to go through middle school, in high school making bad decisions, and messing it up, because you can’t really control what you’re doing fully. And so I thought to myself, hmm, maybe I can marry my love of law and my love of biology, my love of being a doctor, and bring them together, and create a legal reason why youth shouldn’t be trans adults. So maybe having a brain that’s not fully developed is a good reason why youth should be kept separate. Now, turns out that you can’t do that. That’s not really the thing I’m trying to do. But when I was a senior in high school, I wrote my senior thesis on the neurobiological reasons, nonetheless, why children should not ever be trans adults. So it brought us to this destiny for me to become a carol fellow and spend the summer working with the campaign for justice. Now the campaign for justice is a group of people who are dedicated to ending the practice of trying, sentencing and incarcerating youth under the age of 18 as adults. And when I was there, one of my first days, I got to sit down with all these young adults, youth who had been tried and sentencing and incarcerated as adults at very young ages. And I sat down at this big, big hopping table, and one by one they went through, they told me their stories, and they told me what their time was like in prison, and what led up to them going to prison. And I’ll never forget this was one young man’s story. He said, you know, this one day I came home from school, right? And my mom was there in the living room, and she said, son, take a look at this piece of paper. This is how much I owe every month. These are my bills. And son, take a look at this piece of paper. This is how much I make every month. And it turned out that her salary was not even close to how much she owed every month. And so the young man thought to himself, he said, I really don’t want my younger sister not to be able to eat, and I really don’t want my younger brother not to be able to wear shoes. And so she said, I’m going to take it up my own hands, and I’m going to go out into the street, I’m going to hustle, I’m going to sell drugs. I’m going to do what I know around my community to help my family survive. And so eventually he was caught by the police, and he was tried at a sentence and incarcerated as an adult. And so what I think you can see for yourself is what we found about youth in prison in these adult facilities is that they are quite vulnerable. And so youth in prison are very likely to report high rates of sexual assault or rape. And because, as earlier mentioned, their brains are not fully developed, they have high rates of suicide. And so we think to ourselves every day, we say, how can we change this? Well, in the prison system, they came up with a quick, easy response. They put children in cells like these. This is a solitary confinement cell. It is very, very small. In fact, in many countries in Europe, it’s considered torture and it has been completely outlawed. But children spend years in these cells. And in these cells, they will spend 23 hours a day in here reading, doing whatever that they can, in one hour outside the cell, having time to maybe stretch their legs to do what they want. But they will be in these cells for years and years and years. Now, we thought to ourselves, we said, well, it is quite clear to us that youth don’t belong in cells like these. They don’t belong in these places with animalistic violence. They don’t belong with hardcore predators, with hardcore violent offenders. And so how do we get the message out that there’s better places? And so in Washington, D.C., where the Camping of Justice is located, there’s a place called New Beginnings Youth Correctional Facility. And it is a beautiful place. And in fact, it looks more like a college than a correctional facility. And there, youth have the ability to get their GED and many of the youth there actually go on to go to college and make great, great use of their lives. And so we thought to ourselves, how do we get the message out? How do we tell people that this is the place where we want our youth to be? And so they said, public interest communications intern, that is. To ask you with this, we thought to ourselves, we said that we should set up a tour of the facility. People know a lot about jail. It’s in the media all the time, but they don’t know about you jail. And so we got a group of people together and we drove them down to this youth correctional facility. And they toured. They talked to the people in charge there. They looked at what the facility was like. And at the end, they came up to us and they said, wow, I didn’t know that youth who had committed crimes could go to college. I didn’t know that these kids who had had such trouble to pass could have such bright futures. And so we learned that by having people actually go out into the field, having them touch the bars, having them be in this environment and having first-hand experience about what it’s like to be in certain situations, you can really change their minds. You can go out and create the change that you really want to see. And so here I’m talking to you and I’m trying to say that what we need to do is have people experience things first-hand. We need to show people by giving them their own experiences that change can happen and that what we want to see is what is best for the world. Now, one of the first days I was at Campion of Youth Justice, I was walking around a little bit lost, in fact, and a simple upon this quote. And it says, there can be no keener revelation of society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. And so many of us either have children or are very young or plenty of having children. And we have to think to ourselves, what do we want our future to look like? Do we want to have this group of young people that have been incarcerated, that have been put into this terrible place, and that have very, very little hope for the future because we have not let them have the chances that they need? Or do we want to put them in a place where they can go out and make good of their lives, go out and go to college, get a good education and succeed? And so I really want everyone here to think about how we want the future to look for everyone, how we want the future to look for our children. I really want to thank the friend conference. I want to thank Brunesse Communications for all the help. I want to thank the fellow CRL fellows and everyone here. So have a great day today and enjoy.