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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by King Downing, Director of Healing Justice Program at American Friends Service Committee
6:01:45
ยท
130 sec
King Downing, representing the American Friends Service Committee and the Close Rikers campaign, shares a personal narrative highlighting the ongoing issues of underfunded education and youth programs, which lead to increased incarceration. He emphasizes the need to shift funding from corrections to communities to break the cycle of poverty and imprisonment.
- Draws parallels between past and present challenges in education and youth employment
- Criticizes the approach of "locking our way out of poverty" instead of creating opportunities
- Calls for moving money from corrections to community programs and restoring budget cuts
King Downing
6:01:45
afternoon.
6:01:45
Thank you for having us.
6:01:46
My name is King Downing.
6:01:47
I'm the director of the American Friend Service Committee's Healing Justice Program for New York and New Jersey.
6:01:52
We're an advocacy group.
6:01:54
I'm a lawyer, but I'm really here as a member of the closed Rikers campaign.
6:01:59
And I wanna a lot of people gave data and statistics, but I just wanna tell a story.
6:02:05
Years ago, so far back that Wendell Foster was a city council person, I ran a GED program in El Barrio.
6:02:14
At that time, half the students that I was working with no.
6:02:19
Half the students were not graduating from high school on time, and so the overflow was coming to us.
6:02:25
My youth and I testified right here all those many years back for money for schools and money for summer youth employment programs.
6:02:34
And just like now, we're still seeing the same kind of problems.
6:02:40
We're trying to lock our way out of the problem just like those many, many years ago, and we're trying to lock our way out of poverty.
6:02:48
And instead of creating opportunities, the money is going back into prisons while everything else is being cut.
6:02:58
So where we are we now?
6:02:59
Lack of school funding.
6:03:01
Once again, still low graduation rates, no summer youth employment jobs.
6:03:06
And at that time, my students couldn't get the summer jobs, and guess where I found them?
6:03:11
They found jobs in my neighborhood.
6:03:13
They were lookouts for drug dealers, and a lot of that is still going on now.
6:03:18
So where are we now, and how are we going to make these changes?
6:03:23
So we want to see that the youth that I was dealing with don't find their own kids in the same boat that they were in when they all came here to testify back then.
6:03:34
So where does it all end?
6:03:35
We're still looking at mass incarceration.
6:03:38
We're still looking at the policing solution and cutting away the ones that are actually making another difference.
6:03:43
So we want to see money move from corrections to communities and restore the cuts and add some more.
6:03:50
The more we keep doing the same thing, the more we're going to get what we get.
6:03:54
Thank you.