TESTIMONY
King Downing on the Impact of Program Budget Cuts on Criminal Justice and Incarceration
5:42:29
·
3 min
King Downing highlights the negative impact of program budget cuts on criminal justice and incarceration, based on his experience and data.
- Downing, as the Director of Healing Justice for the NY/NJ American Friend Service Committee, advocates against budget cuts affecting criminal justice initiatives.
- He shares personal experiences, including running a GED program and witnessing a student turn to illicit activities due to budget cuts.
- Downing underscores the consequences of reducing funding for community services, drawing on both anecdotal evidence and statistical data.
- He urges the council to consider the repercussions of budget cuts and to take actionable steps to prevent them.
King Downing
5:42:29
Good afternoon.
5:42:30
Okay.
5:42:33
Good afternoon.
5:42:34
Thank you, council person, nurse, and thank you to the council for having us here, and we appreciate the work that you've been doing.
5:42:41
My name is King Downing.
5:42:43
I'm the director of Healing Justice for the New York, New Jersey American Friend Service Committee, also known as AFSC, an advocacy group that was brought together by the Quakers.
5:42:55
We deal with criminal justice, incarceration.
5:43:00
We go into the prisons.
5:43:02
We have people who provide counseling.
5:43:05
We work with youth who have been impacted either through their families or directly by a holding camps and workshops for them We were the 1st group to create along with returning citizens, the campaign and the new Jim Crow series of organizations that formed around the country after Michelle Alexander's book.
5:43:28
I'm also a lawyer.
5:43:30
I knew that the statistics were gonna be presented here, so I just tried to take a little bit of a different take that reflects my personal experience.
5:43:39
So I had three points.
5:43:40
And so this idea of program budget cuts, we've been there.
5:43:46
We've done that.
5:43:48
So why are we going back down this road again?
5:43:50
And my second point is, now we're going to move in that same direction and The only reason why I could see doing it is we expect different results, but I don't think they're gonna be, and I'm gonna present some data.
5:44:02
And the third is that there's some actions that I hope that we take along those lines.
5:44:08
So to my first point, been there done that.
5:44:11
Before law school and before AFSC a good number of years back.
5:44:15
I ran a GED program that was right at the border of El Bario and Yorkville.
5:44:22
I brought a group of students down here who all probably fully grown and had their own families now because there were gonna be budget cuts to the summer youth employment project.
5:44:32
So we came down here and testified.
5:44:34
And if somebody said we'd be back here doing the same thing again, I'd probably tell them that they were crazy.
5:44:42
So, of course, we did not win, we did not succeed, the the cuts were made, And right after that happened, I was walking through our neighborhood, and I saw one of my students on the corner, he was a lookout for one of the drug posts.
5:44:57
And I pulled him aside and found out that he was making $25 for showing up in the morning and working until past midnight.
5:45:06
What would have happened if that summer youth job program had been there?
5:45:10
I wonder now, is he alive?
5:45:11
Is he incarcerated?
5:45:12
Is he dead?
5:45:13
What happened.
5:45:14
That one job could have taken him out of that life in whatever direction that pointed to him.
5:45:20
At that time, the only evidence I had about this problem was anecdotal.
5:45:24
Now I've gone to law school for better or for worse, and now the information that I get is more statistical and that type of evidence.
5:45:36
So just quickly, the evidence shows the alliance for educational justice show all of the statistical impacts of the budget cuts.
5:45:45
And we can't go down that road anymore, and I hope that you all will take action around that.
5:45:49
Thank you.