(chime music) (upbeat electronic music) - [Narrator] Listen MKE is a community project in partnership between the Ideas Lab of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WUWM 89.7 FM, Milwaukee's NPR, the Milwaukee Public Library, and Milwaukee PBS.

- Good evening everyone, and welcome to a Black Nouveau Listen MKE Special: Youth Incarceration Dilemma.

Earlier this year, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Projects reporter, James Causey, wrote about a teenager involved in a mob beating death of Charlie Young Jr. 20 years ago.

Marlon Dixon was 14 at the time and received the harshest sentence for his involvement, 18 years in prison and 22 years of extended supervision.

Dixon's story was part of a day-long community forum that addressed problems and solutions to youth incarceration that was held during the summer.

Milwaukee PBS and Listen MKE streamed most of that forum live that day.

James Causey planned the event, and he's here right now to tell us about what we're gonna see on this shortened version of the forum.

James, always good to see you.

Hate it's under these circumstances, but still a very important conversation to have.

What did you want to get out of this event?

- Well, what I wanted to get out of the event was bringing people together to really have some real deep solutions about how we treat our youth and the state of the trauma that our youth are going through.

Typically, we don't really talk about our youth until they do something wrong or until they really commit a serious crime.

And what happened in this case, is the beating of Charlie Young Jr. 20 years ago that sparked this big outrage.

And people wanted these kids locked up and the keys thrown away, but nobody talked about mental health at that time.

- So why is it important?

Why is the conversation around mental health and around our youth so important in this context?

- Well, it's important because we keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Not much has really changed since then, how we incarcerate our youth, the way we treat our youth, and how we address mental health.

A lot of people talk about mental health, but I don't think a lot of people know how to deal with mental health and how to really treat our young people and really get them the help that they need.

- Talk about those breakout sessions and what they were about.

What did folks get out of that?

- Well, the breakout sessions were great.

We had a lot of people come out.

They had a lot of energy.

And one thing that kept coming up is, not only do we need to get our youth the mental health treatments that they need, but that our youth needs to be heard.

They need to be a part of this conversation as well.

Because what happens too often is that we come up with solutions, the adults come up with the solutions, but we don't get the youth involvement to see what they really need.

And I think what happened at this forum is that it was a good back and forth conversation.

- So the conversation has happened, what's next?

What's the action steps that are gonna take place?

- Some of the action steps, and I think Sharlen Moore from Urban Underground put it together great.

She basically said, "Now that our youth have said what they wanted, "we have to put these things into action.

"We know what they need, "so what do we have to do to make that happen?"

So one thing that was great is that the district attorney was there.

He was on the forum.

The county executive was there, who used to live in that area, and the only reason why he wasn't involved in that was because he was evicted, so they listen and they got things.

They're starting a motion to get things done.

- James, always good to have you.

Thank you so much for all you do.

- Thanks a lot.

- Now, we have our keynote speaker.

I am going to introduce, Tessa Duvall, an Investigative Reporter for the Louisville Carrier Journal, specializing in policing, criminal justice, and children issues.

Duvall is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Peabody winner.

For her 2018 reporting project, "When Kids Kill" for the Florida Times-Union, Duvall spent 20 months examining the Florida counties with the highest rates of kids arrested for murder and manslaughter.

She wanted to know why?

So she reached out to the young people behind bars to ask.

Thank you.

Tessa Duvall, everyone.

(audience clapping) - Hi everyone.

Good morning.

Thank you so much for having me here.

I really appreciate the chance to be here and to speak with you all.

As a journalist, it matters a lot that four years later we can still talk about the story and still find relevance and hopefully for that work toward finding solutions as well, because it's not enough to just talk about the problems.

As we've heard it's also about, what are we gonna do about it?

As you heard, I am currently working in Kentucky at the Courier-Journal in Louisville.

It's my home state.

I've covered policing, I've covered a lot on the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor these last couple of years.

But before I did all of that, I was in Jacksonville, Florida, in Duval County, where I covered a lot of children's issues, specifically juvenile justice.

That was often kids who ended up in prison as teenagers, adult prison, not just juvenile facilities.

And these were huge issues in Jacksonville.

They played a big role in the prosecutor's election and the public defender's election.

And people were really engaged and passionate about understanding these young people and how they were treated in a way that I'd not seen before.

And so like you heard, I wanted to understand more, specifically about these young people who found themselves in prison for these really serious offenses.

'Cause there were so many cases that when I moved there, I was there for four years, and I just remember being shocked at how often we would hear about an arrest for a murder and it would come back that it was committed by a child, maybe not even a teenager yet.

I have just a few cases that, some you may have heard of, there's Christian Fernandez, he was 12 when the prosecutor there tried to charge him with first degree murder for killing his two-year-old brother while they were left home alone.

There was Terrence Graham, he was not even charged with murder or manslaughter, or really even a violent crime.

His case went all the way to the US Supreme Court because he was sentenced to life in prison for a non-homicide offense.

He was a teenager when a judge told him that he was so irredeemable that he would die in prison.

That went all the way to the Supreme Court.

And because of his case, judges can no longer do that.

You can no longer sentence a child to die in prison for something like that.

He's still in prison though.

He's in his mid-thirties and he is still in prison, and potentially getting out next year, but he's been in prison for about 20 years.

I also covered the case of an 11-year-old who was charged with manslaughter because he found a shotgun under an abandoned house in his neighborhood and ended up killing a 12-year-old girl because his friends at a party at a sleepover told him, "You won't pull the trigger.

You won't do that."

But he found this gun and he did.

And I also sat in the courtroom as a 12-year-old, or he was 15 at the time, but he was 12 when he committed this crime.

And I watched a judge sentence him to 30 years in prison.

At 15, I couldn't fathom being 30, let alone spending 30 years in prison.

And so just the prevalence of these cases, in a community that was already really dealing with a violent crime issue dubbed Florida's murder capital, I wanted to know why there were so many children that ended up in this situation.

And so as I've covered a lot of these cases, I was going back through the Times-Union's archives.

I was reading stories.

As men who went to children as prison were coming back before the courts to be re-sentenced because of other Supreme Court cases that followed Graham versus Florida.

And what I saw were a few things that stuck out to me, as I was reading these stories from maybe the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s, there were three things.

First, there was the language that was used to describe these young people.

This is the superpredator era, where a lot of these folks were sent to prison, that they were irredeemable, that they were monsters, that they were heartless and violent.

There was also very little about their circumstances.

We heard all about what they did, but we never heard how they ended up in that situation.

That is something that I think journalism, specifically is still grappling with, but is only telling the official narrative, only telling the prosecutor or the police side of things.

And obviously I understand that there are reasons for that.

Specifically, that it's not always wise for defendants to talk to the news media before they go on trial, but what we also never heard were their voices.

We never heard about their circumstances.

And then at no point did we ever hear from these young people.

And I thought, "Who better to tell us "why children end up in this situation, "than the young people who ended up in this situation?"

From there, I just got a database of Florida prisoners and just filtered through and found all the ones from Duval County who met this criteria.

From there, I came up with about a hundred names, and I wrote them all a letter, and I'll read part of that for you.

I said, "Hi, my name is Tessa Duvall and I'm a reporter "with the Florida Times-Union newspaper in Jacksonville.

"I hope this letter finds you well "and in good health and spirits.

"It must be so strange "to get this letter from a reporter so randomly, "so let me explain why I'm reaching out.

"I'm working on a long-term story that seeks to understand "why so many kids are committing homicide in Jacksonville.

"So I'd like to exchange letters with you "in order to learn about your life.

"My goal is to understand your upbringing, your childhood, "the things that affected you "growing up here in Jacksonville.

"I wanna understand what happens to the kids "who are most vulnerable in the community "before they are permanently tangled-up "in the adult justice system.

"I believe that if adults understand "the full extent of problems, "then they can find the necessary solutions for them.

"This is why I'm reaching out "to every single person from Jacksonville "who's incarcerated due to a situation like yours.

"Let me be clear about this.

"I don't want to label or judge you.

"That's not my goal.

"I'd like to hear your story from your point of view "and I promise to treat you with respect and dignity throughout the process."

And then I just told them, "If you have questions, reach out let me know."

And some folks did.

They immediately wrote back and just started pouring out their life stories, which to me was a sign that they had, perhaps never felt heard.

Others wrote me back and said, "All right, here's what I need to know about you.

"If I'm gonna tell you about me, I need to know about you.

"Here are my questions, I need you to answer them "before I will consider proceeding."

which I respect.

(laughs) And then my favorite was a couple even had their mamas call me just to make sure I was who I said I was.

(audience laughs) That was my favorite.

And so from there it was just all about building rapport, which is not easy to do over snail mail, and one of the reasons that the project took as long as it did.

But ultimately if they agreed, because this is all about their consent and their stories, I sent them a survey.

And I worked with child psychologists, pediatrician, with formerly incarcerated youth and others to really get at what mattered most.

And so I'm just gonna read you a few of the questions from this survey because we looked at things like adverse childhood experience, ACEs, but ACEs don't capture the full extent of the trauma that young people can be exposed to.

And so I asked, Were any of your close family members murdered?

Were you ever shot at?

Did you ever witness someone being shot?

Did you feel pressure to financially provide for your family?

Were you ever robbed?

Did you ever get seriously injured or hurt or sick as a kid?

Did you feel safe in your neighborhood?

And I remember one of the people I got feedback from said, "Well, you're asking about a lot of really heavy things.

"Let's try to give them some opportunities "to talk about strengths "and what went right in their lives."

And so I also asked things like, who is the person who was always there for you when you needed them?

What was that person and what was your relationship like?

What was your greatest strength as a child?

And the answers that really stuck out to me from that, or how often kids wrote back, I'm sorry, they're not kids anymore, they're kids at the time and talking about their childhood, how often they wrote back and said, "No one was there for me.

"I don't think I had any strengths."

Just really something intended to be positive just really ended up being some of the most heartbreaking detail to show how little support these children had.

And so from there, gave everyone this survey and we continued our letter conversation.

But one thing that also really stood out to me was, as I was getting this feedback, I remember someone writing in a letter to me saying, "Why do you wanna write about me?

"I grew up like everyone else I knew who grew up.

"There's nothing weird or abnormal about my story.

"It's just like everyone else's."

And it really stuck with me that his highly abnormal upbringing seemed so normal to him.

And obviously there are a million things that go into understanding why children commit violent crime.

We could talk about that all day, but for the sake of brevity, we tried to break it down into four categories.

The first was trauma, which was absolutely universal.

Not just ACEs, but really exposing violence outside the home, experiences with homelessness, with food uncertainty.

The trauma in their lives was constant and it was compounding.

There was no chance to recover from any of this because the trauma really never let up.

Additionally, there were family issues.

So generational trauma, abuse, substance abuse, neglect, young people feeling unloved and unwanted in their homes.

And then there was the environment that they lived in.

So these were young people who were really used to just being exposed to violence on a regular basis.

They had seen shootings and they felt the need to carry guns.

And that was something that a lot of adults couldn't wrap their heads around, was why does a 16 year old feel like they need to carry a gun?

Because would you wanna be the only 16 year old without a gun if everyone else around you does?

Would you feel safe in that situation?

They thought this was a way to protect themselves and to feel safe.

And those guns were easy to get.

I remember doing an interview with one young man in prison, we're sitting across the table from each other, and I asked him, "Where does a 15 year old get a gun?"

And he looked at me like I asked him what two plus two was.

This was the most obvious question, how could I not know the answer to this?

And we had to have a very candid moment.

I was like, "Look, I'm a white girl from Kentucky.

"I don't know where 14 year old boys get guns.

"I'm sorry, I just don't.

"You gotta spell it out for me."

And I think for both of us, that was a moment where we started to understand each other a little more.

That, "Oh, not everyone grows up like this."

And really, that was one of the things that also really stuck with me because it had never crossed his mind that maybe this was how some people didn't grow up.

And these guns were also shockingly inexpensive.

And now with things like Snapchat and Facebook groups, they are very easy to trade and for kids to get their hands on for very low costs as well.

And then also a really common factor with these young people and their crimes are that few of them get in trouble alone.

They are not setting out with the intention of killing someone, ending someone's life, but maybe they're bored and they decide, "Okay, we're gonna play some dice, "we're gonna go play ball."

And it doesn't go well.

As we talked about, a lot of these 16 year olds have guns, so it's pretty easy in that situation for things to escalate, or maybe they set out to rob someone and the robbery goes wrong.

These are the situations that led kids down this path.

So often what just starts as teenage antics ends up in death.

And these are young people that had very little constructive things to do in their neighborhoods.

You drive through some of these communities, the parks are in complete disrepair, there are no community centers that they can access.

Or if there are programs, they're not programs that teenage boys, 'cause it is predominantly teenage boys, wanna take part in.

No teenager wants to spend their whole summer in a literacy program.

These kids were not being given opportunities to do something that they wanted, which was to either make money or to learn something fun, like how to put together a beat or how to rap or spoken word poetry.

These are the kinds of things that kids wanted access to that they just were not getting to scale.

And so this project was not an attempt to excuse anyone's actions.

I wanna say that again, the story was not an excuse, but I wanted it to be an explanation because while you're all here and you're plugged into events like this and you read coverage like the story that started this all, there are people out there who have no clue.

Jacksonville, for example, is a deeply segregated city.

And there are people who live on the south side of Jacksonville in Mandarin or maybe in Orange Park or out at the beaches who have no clue what it's like to be a kid in Northwest Jacksonville.

Kids who live in the same county as a beach, but have never seen the ocean, they don't know what it's like.

So they're like me, they don't know how kids get guns.

And so really it was about sort of waking people up and getting them to understand that these are your children in this community and they need help.

They need more than what we're giving them.

And so these children, what I wanted people to understand was that before they victimized others, they were all victims.

All of them endured repeated persistent trauma.

And so the goal is that if we can maybe help the next kid, that they don't end up in that situation.

Because again, we're not talking about superpredators or psychopaths.

We're talking about normal kids from hard circumstances with little support.

And so when I did this story, you've always gotta talk about the cost for things 'cause maybe you can't pull at everyone's heartstrings, but money talks.

And so when I did this story, it cost about $20,000 to house a prisoner in Florida for one year.

So if you take into consideration a 30 year sentence, that's over a half million dollars.

So think about it, what could be done with an extra $20,000 a year into schools, into stable housing, into family support, into wraparound services, into trauma-informed and culturally responsive therapeutic services, programs that teens actually wanna be a part of.

Summer jobs.

So we know why kids end up in prison now is the point where adults have to do something.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) - Thank you so much.

(audience clapping) Now we're gonna start off with a panel discussion.

It is my privilege to introduce these panelists.

The first one up is going to be James Causey, award-winning reporter for the Journal Sentinel.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) Next up, David Crowley is the Milwaukee County executive.

He grew up on the city's north side and discovered his love for politics after becoming a member of Urban Underground, a grassroots organization that boosts youth political awareness and turns them into leaders.

David Crawley, everybody.

(audience clapping) We also have with us, Please give a round of applause for John Chisholm, Milwaukee County District Attorney.

(audience clapping) Thank you.

And lastly, but certainly not least, a co-founder of Urban Underground, we have Sharlen Moore.

She's an outspoken advocate for youth rights.

Please give a round of applause for Sharlen Moore.

(audience clapping) (James laughing) And then we also have on the panel, we're going to hear from Marlin Dixon.

Please give a round of applause, Marlin Dixon.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) (James laughing) We're gonna have this conversation with the panelists.

It's gonna be moderated by Tessa and James Causey.

- Thank you.

Everyone, it's a pleasure to have you here and it's just a pleasure to have such a well-rounded panel up here to talk about something that impacts us all.

So I'm just gonna get started.

So I wanna start with the man who really opened up to me and allowed me to share his story, Marlin Dixon.

Marlin, one of the things that I keep getting over and over again is what can I do to help someone in your position?

What's the hardest thing that you've faced since you've been released?

- The hardest thing that I have faced since being released is making reconnections with my family.

Now, I do know that there was a victim and he would never be reconnected with his family and it's just a tragedy all over, but that's been the hardest thing.

But I'm looking to possibly be the good thing that comes out of this tragedy for I know what it's like to grow up the way we did.

I know what it's like to live a life where you have crime around you and you think it's normal, but like she said, it's very abnormal, and I'm learning that, and the expectations of society.

Soon as I get released, I have to get a job, I have to get car insurance.

I have to rekindle my relationships with my family and my daughter and it's been hard, but I have hope to reconcile things to be the hope that comes out of this tragedy.

I was just saying to my friend Vicki, that I can't believe I'm out because I spent so much time in prison.

I spent more time in prison than I've been a free man.

And so it's hard but it's a challenge that I embrace though, because I remember sitting in them cells countless nights, lonely nights, dark nights, and my life was very much controlled what I eat, when I can wake up, when I can take a shower.

And I remember just doing countless years in the same cell and I didn't have nothing going on.

And I'm appreciative of taking on this challenge of doing the hard things, doing the right thing.

And it's hard, but I embrace it.

And I'm glad I'm here to share it with y'all and talk to you a little bit more about it.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) - Marlin, thank you for sharing your story.

I can tell you from a journalist side of things, that it matters.

It matters to hear from people who are directly affected and have lived experiences.

People connect to stories and they connect to the experience of others.

Numbers and data are one thing.

They tell you the scale, but they don't tell you the heart of it.

And so thank you for opening up and opening up to all of us here today as well.

We have two men sitting next to each other here, grew up in the same areas, but (laughs) lives have taken different paths.

And the role that an eviction perhaps played in all of this is something that really stood out to me when I read this series.

And so can you talk about how your experiences have shaped both of you and how that informs where you are today starting back in your childhood?

- I think you should start.

- So I have a girlfriend that I talk to about everything.

And I was just telling her how the life that we grew up in, how normal I thought it was until I met other people who's from different walks of life and they like, "What?"

My life was being... First it started from home.

My home was not a good, stable, balanced home.

I had a father that was addicted to drugs and I had a mother who was long suffering with him and who she had six kids by.

So it wasn't easy to leave even though he inflicted so much pain and agony, especially upon me, I want to change that, but I come from a place where you do see people getting shot, you do see people, kids stealing cars.

Some people say these kids these days they steal, I remember being that kid.

(laughs) I remember that kid that was stealing cars because I saw a car stolen.

I remember the peer pressure of trying to fit into the neighborhood, but they're trying to get you to be something like them.

And when you have a tendency to say, "No, I'm going a different direction."

How hard that can be.

And it formed me into a young man.

I had a bad temper.

I was angry at the world.

I was hurt because I was being hurt.

And I felt like there was no one that could listen to me, I had talents.

I love basketball, I love music, but I didn't see nobody pushing that.

But what I've seen from police officers to the people I grew up with, to the people that's in my family, who I grew up in the home with, I seen nothing but things to distract me from that, to take away from that.

And as a result, you spend enough time out there on the streets, then you hearken and get into some pretty major trouble, which happened to me.

And so now I'm this new reformed person because of my experience.

It wasn't me just being in prison that changed my life.

First, it was some divine that changed me first and that motivated me and inspired me to, "Okay, now I have to learn how to read.

"I have to learn a vocational, "I'm about to put my head into the books.

"I'm about start showing more love."

I'm about to clean up my language, which I did.

And as a result of that, of putting in them countless moments, putting them countless years of just travailing, I have learned how to do all that in some, and now I am now this new person, but it all came from...

This person that I am came from tragedy.

And now I'm just hoping to, in the words of my good friend Shannon, change the narrative about how we go about doing things as an individual, as a community, as a society.

And hopefully by doing a little bit more different things that maybe there's a possibility we can change the world.

(laughs) And so I'm hopeful on that.

- Thank you.

(audience clapping) Thank you for sharing.

(audience clapping) Growing up 2208 West Vine definitely shapes your life.

I mean, we were almost being taught to be violent.

Remember we used to bring boxing gloves out in the middle of the block and have literally boxing matches, flipping on different mattresses ourselves.

But even when you think about people who are addicted to drugs, I mean, some of our friends would just sit on the corner and wait for 'em to come by and actually just beat up 'em.

And so when you think about how it shaped me before I came to Urban Underground, I was a angry young black man.

My parents were struggling, were addicted to drugs as well.

We had issues with mental health.

But I always say that, a lot of the times the difference with my parents, they were functioning crack heads, right?

And I say functioning because my father, both of them are clean now, but my father was a master electrician addicted to drugs, had his own business, right?

And my mother she had to become a Jane of all trades because once they split up she had to figure out how to make it happen.

And so when you think about growing in a neighborhood like that, and it's not to say that everything was all bad because you can also say that all the young people, we were tight knit.

I probably didn't know anybody's last name.

Sometimes you didn't know somebody's first name, but you was definitely at Brown Street Park playing basketball or doing different types of stuff.

But I would say that one of the things that being in some of, when we think about marginalized neighborhoods, when we think about the challenges that happen in these neighborhoods, in some of these neighborhoods, it's the tightest knit community as well.

You stick together, and when I say you stick together, meaning that you're not gonna snitch on one another.

But when I think about my own upbringing, because I always say that God blessed me by evicting us two months before this event happened because I would've been there myself.

And so when you think about the upbringing growing up, whether we talk about 22nd and Vine and Brown, or being on 23rd and Burleigh and moving to these different places because of evictions and moving every year of your life between the ages of 13 to the age of 25, all of that shapes you.

But I would say that now being a policy maker and also working in politics, I have utilized my experience to actually push to change the narrative.

And so for me, when we talk about housing, when we talk about mental health and drug addiction, these are some of the things that are the top list of my platform based off of what I've seen in my own household and what I've seen happening to my own neighbors.

And so when we think about trauma, and I would say that Urban Underground taught me this, my first day with Urban Underground, we were taking a trip to Lake Geneva and I'll never forget this.

We took a trip to Lake Geneva.

We had high schools all over southeastern Wisconsin, going to Lake Geneva for a college tour.

And I thought I was real cool.

I had my little pink Polo shirt on, I had some pink and black Air Force ones.

And I apologize for my dress now.

The Brewers need some help so I figured I'll throw my jersey on.

- No, no.

You good, you good, you good.

I wish I would've did.

- But that day, it was doing like a Q&A and I answered a question, I got the question right.

And almost got into a fight with a guy from Racine.

And for me back then, I was like, if there's smoke, I'm ready.

And I'll never forget it because it was the time that I thought I knew what love was, but I didn't realize what love was until this day.

And I'm getting ready to get into a fight and everybody that I've met within the first 24 hours had my back more than anybody that I've ever met before.

And so they had my back, they stopped the fight, they stopped everything from going on, and Sharlen piped up and got on all of us, but one of the things that she started off with was like, "This is the type of relationship "that we want people to have."

If you think about young people having that tight knit bond, understanding there's a level of accountability and having people's back.

But the second thing she said is, "But not like this.

"This isn't the way to do this."

I don't even know if she remembers this story, but that was my first experience, understanding what love was, understanding that, you know what, I don't have to do things necessarily to fit in anymore.

And it changed my life forever because it set me on a path to give back.

And so I started to get involved in community organizing and politics because I think that when I had a group of not only adults but young people who wrapped their love around me to where the only way to give back to those same people was to run for office and focus on those same type of resources that we're always fighting for on an everyday basis.

And so my experience growing up in this city has really shaped my politics and really focusing on how we make sure that when the tide rises, all the boats rise.

Because when you think about many of the neighborhoods, right?

You can be in the poorest neighborhood and three miles away you're in the richest neighborhood.

- [Sharlen] Yes.

- [Marlin] Yeah.

- And we have to recognize that.

And so once we started building a bigger table and bringing more people to the table, telling the story, 'cause I'll tell you that when James called me about this, he was just like, "Hey man, I heard you talking about "you grew up in that neighborhood."

I was like, "Yeah."

He was like, "Well, let me interview you about this."

And when you're in these types of positions, you do want everybody know all your business.

(James laughing) But I recognize that particularly as the first African-American elected to this seat, as the youngest person elected to this seat, and literally growing up in the 53206 ZIP code or 212 ZIP code and moving all across this city, it is my job as a leader to help other young people understand that I have had my own trials and tribulations.

And when they go through their own trials and tribulations, it doesn't define who they are and what their future should be.

But there's nothing wrong with utilizing those trials and tribulations to be the fire in your belly, to move things forward for the better, for not only you and your family, but the rest of this community.

So it has shaped me in those ways.

(audience clapping) (indistinct chattering) - You both spoke about being angry young men, but we know now you're not born angry.

That's trauma, that's the result of what you go through.

That's how trauma, especially at a young age, physically changes your brain, it rewires you.

Your fight or flight is is activated all the time.

And so we know now that is what you were experiencing, but 20 years ago we weren't talking about trauma and PTSD like that.

PTSD was still something that was reserved for veterans of war.

And so I wanna bring you in to talk about how you work with youth who have been through situations like this and how you sort of get them to turn off that fighting instinct and you work with them and you connect with them in a meaningful way.

Can you speak on that for us?

- Yeah, yeah.

First of all, thank you so much James for the invite.

And I'm gonna speak for me and John, we feel a little absolutely, 'cause we can hear you guys speak all day and just listen.

- We'll just sit back.

- We'll just sit back and have you all take the stage, but I'm so honored to just be in the space with you.

He's still my baby.

Listen, with these young people growing up so quickly and really assuming their role, to answer your question, it takes a village.

And we are so blessed to have been a part of not only David's, but hundreds of young people that grew up in this city to be a part of their village.

And I think that's what we've gotten away from.

We've gotten away from each one teach one, how do we figure this out?

Because what we're dealing with right now and what you all have talked about, thank you, It's a societal issue that we're dealing with today, right?

We're dealing with trauma in the form of bondage in a way that we're not giving people what it is that they need to survive and to thrive.

We've created atmospheres where it's the haves and the have nots.

And we're moving in a place where we can shift things by making sure that we have the right people in the right positions to make the right decisions.

And what that means when I say the right decisions, what we're talking about is how do we make communities that are whole, whether you have a lot of money or whether you have a little bit of money?

What we did at Urban Underground wasn't out of the ordinary.

We didn't do anything magical.

What we simply did was provided young people with love and support.

We infused that every single day that we saw them.

And unfortunately with some of them, they had to go back into environments where they weren't met with that, but when they came back to us, we reminded them of how important it is for them to make the right decisions, how important it is for them to work toward being their best self and finding their passion and finding what brings them to life every single day.

And it's not about pointing the finger, "Oh my mom, oh my dad."

Yes, they have been a part of that, but they won't be the only part, it's about you.

So we began to be a part of that village and pulled other people to be a part of that village, to support them because it isn't just about us because they grow up, they go on, they have families, they go on to live meaningful lives.

Some more difficult than others, but what we have to remember is as a society, we have to begin to shift the narrative.

It's not just about money because we know money exists and money is there to do what we need to do.

It's about the leadership and it's about our community standing up and saying, "You know what, we deserve different."

We have to fight for what that difference is and allow these young people to know that it's not normal to grow up hearing gunshots.

That's not normal.

It's not.

So we gotta begin to change the narrative to say, you know what, these differences, how do we pull people together in order to shift that?

- So this comes to District Attorney John Chisholm.

You're in a very tough position where you have to make sure that society, the city is safe, and you also have to issue out punishment, I guess.

How do you weigh that when it comes to this narrative that we're being too soft on crime?

How do you make that balance and determination and what factors in and what role does trauma play into those decisions?

- Here's what I'll go back to, and Tess sparked this in my mind with her presentation.

And that is back in 1999, there had been a dramatic uptick in shootings, homicides.

And many of them were centering around young people that were committing those.

And my boss at the time, Mike McCann, came to me and said, "We gotta do something about this."

And what we did back then was like, let's create a deterrence model.

And that was called Operation Ceasefire.

So that was gonna be a joint federal, state, local operation focused on people that were using firearms to commit harm in the community and to deter that behavior by giving them very lengthy federal, state, or local sentences.

And I was the hotshot young prosecutor at the time who was asked to put that together and I had no problem with that.

I saw the harms that were being committed with firearms in the community and I was more than willing to take on that challenge.

And just as we were getting all geared up, a guy named Stephen Hargarten from the Medical College of Wisconsin was starting the Firearm Injury Center at the medical college.

And he'd heard that I was putting this task force together.

And he invited me to join a consortium of people from the full spectrum.

Some people that were hardcore Second Amendment people, some people that were the Brady Center folks.

You just had the whole spectrum.

But he wanted just to convene people to get them to think in terms of more of a public health approach.

Set aside your ideology and think about what could be done to prevent, to intelligently intervene, to when necessary suppress.

So he challenged me.

The first thing he said to me is, "What are you gonna do to prevent it?

"What are you gonna actually do to prevent it?"

And I was just sort of like, "Well, put guys in prison and deter it."

That was actually the model I had in place.

But I took 'em seriously.

And the reason I say Tess sparked this is, I know I now missed my chance for a Pulitzer because in like early 2000, I went out to the Secure Detention Facility as a young ADA, and I came prepared.

So I went and because there were about 90 young men in detention at the time, I broke it up over a couple days and what I did is, I wanted to meet with these young people that were in detention for really serious offenses and I wanted to talk to 'em about the issue of guns.

So I came prepared and I had four questions too for them.

And I came prepared with maps and I had pictures, 'cause in the army they told us, if you can't read, we got pictures.

So I was ready.

So I went in there with this group.

These are young men, 15, 16 years old, and many of them are there for really serious offenses including firearm offenses, and I did the same thing.

I started off with, "How many of you know somebody that's been shot "and somebody that's been killed?

"Just somebody in your life."

And of course, at least 75% of the hands were raised.

And then I said, "Okay."

Next question is, "How many of you actually recognize firearms?"

And then I pulled out the MPD's most commonly recovered firearms pictures.

Those were the pictures.

And they were lit up, right?

They were excited.

They knew every single gun make, model, caliber, they knew it in practical terms.

And then I said, the third question, "Could you get your hands on these?"

And they all laughed and joked and it's like, "Yeah, we can get our hands on these in a minute."

And the final question is, "Where do you live?"

'Cause I had come prepared with what were considered the sort of those thermographic hotspot maps showing where all the shootings took place, where all the homicides took place, where all the robberies took place, where all the assaults took place, and I wanted 'em to point out where they lived.

And then my very final question was, "How many people were killed "in the city of Milwaukee last year?"

And what would you guess the answer was?

In reality, it was probably, I'm just gonna say, it was somewhere in the range of about 120, at that time, about 120.

You wanna guess what the young gentleman told me at the time?

- Well, thousands.

- Thousands.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

- Thousands.

They thought that there were thousands of people that had been shot and killed.

And so then that's when I knew that deterrents alone wasn't gonna penetrate that, right?

That there had to be more to it than that.

And so that's been the struggle from, and I know I'm short on time, so I'll just wait for follow up question, but that's taken me on a path where yes, I understand that as part of my job, my obligation is to secure public safety.

And when people take acts that's so harm the social compact and so harm other people that sometimes the only alternative left to us is to remove them from the community, then the question becomes how long and what do we do with them while they're removed?

And how do we bring them back into the community in a way that allows them to live lives that contribute to the community and support their families and reintegrate in a meaningful way?

So that's been a challenge.

But all I can tell you is that you're absolutely right, James, the dilemma is always that.

And that is that the tools that I am given are generally geared towards just the short term easy solution.

Remove somebody, do it now, and take the next one in line.

That's pretty much the way the system is geared.

I'll talk a little bit more later about things that we're trying to do to really implement that public health perspective.

Community prosecution or now community partnership is what we call it, all of our early intervention efforts.

The work we do at the drug treatment court out at children's court and the family treatment court, all of the things that are really predicated on the issues that you're hearing about right here, which is the trauma.

The final thing I'll say is that, I was also prompted to look up October of 2010 I wrote an article with Ken Strait, UW law professor, about changing Wisconsin's laws as it related to people 16 to 24 years old.

So that we would give courts more flexibility to take into account brain development, trauma, we're an all or nothing state.

That's just the way it is.

We are an all or nothing state.

And that means that if you commit an offense and you're charged and you're convicted, there's very limited options for what we can do for you, particularly as a young person.

And what I believed in and I still believe in, and Ken Strait, the professor believed strongly in as well, was that we had to create more options that allowed us to see how, if somebody has to be removed from the community, then let's see how they are a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, and are they now a different person and are they ready to come back in?

So I point that out as well as, by the way, nobody ever changed any of the laws the way we suggested yet.

So that was 12 years ago.

So that doesn't surprise me either.

We still haven't fixed Lincoln Hills and that was eight years ago, but anyway.

Sorry, I talked too long.

- No, you're fine.

I promise I did not steal his idea.

I Promise.

(panelists laughing) Marlin, how old are you now?

- I am 34.

- And you spent how long in prison?

- 18 years.

- Okay, and you have supervised release.

You've got this time on paper?

- Yes, I do.

- Can you tell us about what are the requirements for that and how does that still affect you?

And how long, yes, that's the other important part of this.

- Well, what that means is when they gave me 18 years and 22 out, they really gave me a life sentence.

Because now I am walking on thin ice once I get out because of my rules.

Like for instance, I have one rule that say I can't be around no one with firearms, whether they have them legal or illegally.

I have a brother, he got licensed to carry, conceal.

So I asked like, "Okay, how do I resolve that situation "if I'm with my brother and he has his legal firearm?"

I was told that if my brother have his firearm, he has to leave it somewhere else.

I asked, "Well, won't that be "kind of like infringing on his Second Amendment "right to protect himself at all times "just because I'm a felon and I'm on paper?

And they tell me that you have to stay away at all cost.

So I even asked, "What if I accumulate stuff, "a house and a home and a family, how do I protect them?

"What do I do to protect them?"

What was said to me in literal words was, "You just have to take it."

So now-- - And how long do you have to just take it?

- 22 years.

Anything can happen in 22 years.

- So I can add, Wisconsin's truth in sentencing state.

So that means he had to do every second of his 17 years.

And now if he gets revoked he could do those 18 years and if he gets revoked, he could potentially have to do 22 years every second.

- So as much as people support me, I just won't let everybody know it could be taken away from me like that.

And these rules are put in place, I just wanna make clear, these rules are put in place, they are not to make you better.

They are to contribute to the recidivism rate.

That's what it is.

(audience clapping) And so right now I have a lot of odds against me.

I'm three to five times more likely to go to prison within my first three years of being out.

And it's because of certain rules.

They tell me, you can't be around felons.

(laughs) Well, the neighborhood I moved to, they got plenty felons.

(panelists laughing) How do I tell them, (panelists laughing) "Hey, y'all gotta move out the neighborhood "'cause y'all felons and I'm on paper."

- [Narrator] Listen MKE is a community project in partnership between the Ideas Lab of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WUWM 89.7 FM, Milwaukee's NPR, the Milwaukee Public Library, and Milwaukee PBS.

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