Annie Kuo Becker (AKB): Welcome back to Discovery, the podcast where we explore groundbreaking ideas shaping law, policy and justice. I'm your host, Annie Kuo Becker, and today's episode dives into a topic that is both urgently and deeply misunderstood. How should our legal system respond when children, especially children of color, become involved with guns?
We're joined today by Teaching Professor Kimberly Ambrose at the University of Washington School of Law, who is also director of the Tools for Social Change, our Race and Justice clinic. We're also joined by Aaron Faletogo, a client of the clinic, who worked with Professor Ambrose and our students in 2020 and 2021. He was released from incarceration in 2021 and works now with young people who have been impacted by gun violence.
Professor Ambrose has spent her career advocating for young people in the criminal legal system, and her newest article “Making Youth Matter”, published in the Washington Law Review, takes an unflinching look at how our legal system treats children, especially black and brown youth caught at the intersection of adolescence and the gun violence epidemic.
Aaron Faletogo is a father, son and organizer who is rooted in culture, spirituality and community. He has endured a lot, overcome a lot, done a lot of healing, and strives to help others, especially the youth. Professor Ambrose and Aaron, thank you so much for being here.
Kim Ambrose (KA): Thank you for having us.
Aaron Faletogo (AF): Yes, thank you.
AKB: I want to start at the beginning of your piece, Professor Ambrose, because you open with a heartbreaking sentencing moment, a judge talking to a 15-year-old, telling him that no one protected him when he was eight, and yet sentencing him as if he were an adult. It's chilling. We widely accept that children are different from adults. They're more impulsive, more vulnerable to influence, less able to assess risk, but courts still struggle to apply that understanding when sentencing youth involved in gun cases when judges are given all this discretion. How does the presence of a gun change judges’ perceptions when they sentence youth for crimes?
KA: I did not start this project thinking that I was even going to write about guns. I was merely going to just write about this issue of sentencing young people considering their age, right? And I had some data to see if judges would do something differently, but when I looked at the data, I saw that it was predominantly gun crimes. I mean, a super majority of the cases are cases that involve guns.
That's also why I included that quote at the beginning of the paper, because I've seen this with judges, is that there is something about the presence of a firearm that in many judges’ minds, makes them seem older. And I think there's something about that that turns a young person into an adult, which doesn't, it doesn't, right? I mean, in many ways, I think it's a sign of immaturity. To take such a risky weapon and to arm yourself, right, without any training, without knowing what you're doing. It's a very immature act, but I think for many judges, they see it as turning somebody into an adult. So, the judge in the case that I quote from says, “You took a gun like an adult would” and that's just not possible, right? A child can't just become an adult because they're holding a gun in their hand.
And I think the other thing that I wanted to point out is that we have a responsibility to children in all of our communities, and the fact that we've allowed them to have access to weapons, to these dangerous, life-threatening objects, is on us too, right? So, we're not going to be able to punish our way out of the gun violence problem that we have, and I understand the frustration when judges don't have tools, when all they have is a young person who's committed a lot of harm using a gun, and victims and survivors who've been severely damaged. And all that our society, all our legislature, all our laws have given them are jail cells, adult sentences, and that's what they've gotten used to. That's what they've been doing for years. And so, to try to get them to shift out of that, it's a heavy lift, and we all need to take part in that. We all need to understand the real costs of gun violence in our communities, and what the real pass out of that violence is going to be, and it won't be through extreme sentences,
AKB: That argument really stopped me was that children who use guns are less culpable, not only because of developmental science, but also because adults have failed to keep them safe from guns in the first place. It would really look different — this profound reframing for courts and policy makers and communities — if we truly acknowledge the shared responsibility and invest it differently in youth safety or prevention.
So, with that, I’d love to shift over to Aaron Faletogo, who is working today with youth impacted by gun violence through his role in an organization called Restorative Community Pathways. Could you tell us how you first connected with Kim Ambrose and her students? How did you find each other?
AF: My brother, my older brother, actually, who was incarcerated as a juvenile at 16, and he received, I believe it was a 67-year sentence as an adult. Kim represented him, brought him home. Thank you, Kim, again, as always. After that, he asked her, you know, “Hey, can you go help out my brother?”
AKB: I did a little research, Aaron, and I know that you lost your father as well by gun violence.
AF: We have a long history in our family of violence, being victims, causing harm in the community. It's sad. I explained it to some of the youth that I engage with that when I go up to visit my family at their burial sites, I have to take two dozen roses to hand out single flowers to our family members, and only two of them, which is my grandparents, have died from natural causes.
AKB: Okay, so there is a long history of gun violence that has affected your family line, and so this is part of your story, it was in your environment, this access to guns. Could you tell us about what people most misunderstand about youth and guns?
AF: If you look across the country, we have eight-, nine-, 10-, 11-year-olds that are constantly having access to guns. That is completely unsafe, unstable. There are some huge things going on in the household. And then you think about the community-wise, that youth are eligible to get their hands and have access to guns. These nine- to 10-year-olds ain't driving south of the border, as they like to say, to go pick up a gun.
And then also, I like to say that, you know, there's so many other things that are factoring in — conditioning, right, of our environments, in our households. I would use myself and my brother as an example. The household in the environment that we were brought up, we were conditioned. You know, you have this, this right or wrong sense that society believes so strongly in, but you know, say, so many different families in these areas have a sense of how you're supposed to react to things, the way you're supposed to deal with things. And we're seeing it around us every single day, right? And we're conditioned, and it becomes ingrained to think that, hey, if this happens, this is how you're supposed to act.
So, when you're going to this court and they say, oh, right and wrong, well that's not the right and wrong that I was conditioned and ingrained to know and believe. You know, we're talking about a completely different society from yours in this court system. And then, as well as, right, you think about emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, of the households that we're being brought up in. You know, it's these generational and intergenerational traumas, and it's just a cycle that continuously happens.
I wasn't given no coping skills in any way, shape or form. My parents weren't given no coping skills. They weren't even given parenting skills to let alone give to me. So, how do I deal with hardships and emotional things that I'm going through? And you look at the science and what the science says, I'm not developed enough to be able to deal with that, and I don't have parents to help me, teach me or show me how to deal with that. I don't have a community and environment that can show me that.
So, what do I do when I'm going through these things and I'm processing, and I don't have any way, shape or form to identify, assess, address? Then I resort to the conditioning that I know, that I've been taught, that I've watched. How do kids learn how to talk? How do kids learn how to walk? How do kids learn how to eat? They watch and they copy and they mimic, they do the same thing.
So, there's so many factors to this, and it's very upsetting watching youth go through the court systems and how they talk and how they deal with them, and how they decide these things.
AKB: These kids that are coming for the space that you have created on that weekly basis, I'm guessing you must identify with the backgrounds that they have, that they that they're coming to, and what are they doing when they're coming together?
AF: So, we give each youth a journal. We allow them to take it home, and in between the week that they're away from us, we ask them to write a thought. It could be a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a lyric, anything that they were just thinking about throughout the week. And then when they come back, we ask them to share that with us and process through that. And it's amazing when you just give them that little bit of space to sit down and just write single things. And sometimes these guys come in, and they've got lyrics and poems and just long thought-out thoughts of all the hardships and feelings that they're dealing with. And not all of it's negative. There's positive things as well, right? And they're writing about their future and what they would like to have and what they would want to be. And we just sit there, and we just let them speak that with us, and if they want to process it in that moment after speaking, then we process it as a group, right? Some of that culpability, them skill sets that they're not being given and then we weren't given, right? How to identify these things, how to process these things, and how to make choices based off of these things. And then, you know, the rest of the space is basically we just let the youth, kind of, like I said, organically, lead it.
KA: I just want to jump in here because the work that Aaron and his colleagues are doing is so important. And one thing that I teach my students, that my theory of change, is getting people free. And that's getting people like Aaron, and Aaron and I can name a ton of other folks that have been released and have given back to their communities and made a huge difference.
And I did want to note that in King County last year, gun violence went down, and I don't think that a lot of people know that. I was actually just with our elected prosecutor last weekend, and she was again telling us that this is in fact true. It's hard to get the public to believe it, but it is in fact true. And I don't have the data to say that it's because of the work that Aaron has done, but I do want to say that the community work that Aaron and many others have been doing directly with young people, I believe in my heart that that's what's making the difference, right? That it's creating these spaces, these very important spaces, where young people can be with Aaron, a person that they trust, a person that they know has been through what they're going through, right? Where they can be just very real about what they're experiencing without judgment. It's really important for adolescents, right, to be in a judgment-free place. And that Aaron and his colleagues are providing, that it's critical.
And I just want to say this right now, during this time, because I think in 2020 after the uprisings related to George Floyd, we had a lot of people in our communities and our government giving money to organizations like in fact, that's pretty much where Restorative Community Pathways — the organization that Aaron works for came from, was through these investments in community, recognizing that the impacted folks do have answers for a lot of these entrenched problems in our communities.
You know, there's been setbacks and there's been political winds that blow each way, and we're kind of in a really critical time right now where I've seen some sort of backpedaling a little bit on that. There's been some people that want to lean back into the old system that we've had, right, that just revolved around incarceration, incarceration, right? Judges, professional probation counselors, right, like this old system. And I guess I just wanted to uplift and for others to hear sort of the real work that's going on and while we may not have been able to measure it in a way that suits sort of the powers that be in our communities right now, I think for anybody that can hear and Aaron and see kind of the difference he's making in young people's lives, that's the difference that we need to make. That's making youth matter. That's what I'm trying to point us toward as we think about how to respond to this very real problem in our communities of gun violence.
AKB: What was your original sentence?
AF: About 34 years.
AKB: Thirty-four years. Okay. Kim, what would you say would be a more appropriate sentence, like, what are you advocating for now, when something like this happens? Aaron, how old were you?
AF: Sixteen.
AKB: You were 16?
KA: Yeah, so this is kind of the million-dollar question. Like, how much time is enough, right? And I sometimes ask folks, in fact, I might ask Aaron, right? Like, how much time does he think that he should have spent in prison? I don't believe that prison is rehabilitative, right, but I also know that there are people, young people, who need their patterns disrupted. And I'm sure that Aaron would say that he was doing a lot of stuff that nobody was stopping him from doing, right? He mentioned his community was not able to kind of rein him in. And so, I think he would say that — I won't speak for Aaron — but a lot of folks, that they need to have that disrupted, right?
So, what would that look like, and how much time would that take, and what should we be doing with that period of time? I will say that just looking at folks’ records that spend time in prison, it really does track the brain science, right? So, even with Aaron, if I were to look at what we call his infraction history when he goes into prison. And how much does he get into trouble? Right? So, now that I've been doing this work for some time, and I've seen a lot of folks like Aaron, and actually, if you look at the parole board, the juvenile parole board, they will say the exact same thing is that they see a pattern of infractions that pretty much stop when young people turn about 25 or 26. Like, it's this kind of weirdly magic number where, you know, we incarcerate, they aren't able to kind of control their behaviors. They're involved. There's a lot of gang violence in prison, and young people go in, children go in as adolescents, and they just keep engaging in that.
So, that's the sense that I'm saying. There's no rehabilitation going on at that point, right? They're going in and they're fighting in prison. They're getting put in solitary confinement, which has been cut back a little bit. So, all that's going on. So literally, when their brains kind of develop, that's when we see kind of changes in their behavior. And so I would say that we need a system that responds to that, right, that gives folks a chance to either have a second look at what's happening, how they're doing in prison that allows them to have an early release, or to just acknowledge that more than 10 years is too much time, probably, right? I mean, it's just a lot of time.
Even 10 years is a lot. If you've ever been in a prison, you'll know that it's, again, not a productive place for people to be, particularly during their developmental years. So, I think we also have to rethink that. What are we giving to young people, people with means like me, their parents send them to college to contain them and help, allow them to have a structured developmental period, right? And that wasn't available to Aaron.
So, I think the other thing worth discussing in the context of making youth matter is that there's this hard cut off on your 18th birthday. So, the reason why Aaron was able to have a second look and go before the juvenile parole board is because he wasn't 18. But I've had other clients — Anthony was one of them — who was two months past his 18th birthday, and that wasn't possible for him. So, even though we know 18-year-olds are not mature either, they struggle with the same, maybe slightly less, impulsivity and impetuosity, they don't have those opportunities. So, there's still a lot of work to do with respect to how we think about youthfulness and how we think about punishing and rehabilitating people who are very young when they commit serious crimes?
AKB: Just curious, do you think that they should move that 18-year-old benchmark?
KA: Yeah, there is a lot of talk. There's even some states that have raised the age of their juvenile court system. Vermont, I think, has been going through that process. And there's also a lot of discussion right now in the legislature about providing the opportunity that Aaron had to have an early release hearing to older individuals. Right now, there's a bill pending that would allow people who are up to the age of 21 when they committed their crime, to also have this chance at a second look and an early release.
So, that's one of the things that are on the table. And our court has also said that judges can consider usefulness, not just 17-year-olds, but for 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds, that their usefulness also can be taken into consideration at sentencing.
So, there is some movement as we're trying to align our laws with what the science is telling us, right, what we know about juvenile brain development, but it's taking a while, and it's a heavy lift, right? When a lot of messaging in our communities can be around othering and focusing on so- called bad people, and so it's a lot of work. And so that's why, again, my theory of change about getting people free, because the more folks that can get to know Aaron and Anthony and many of my other clients that are now out and doing so many good things, I think it will help change the narrative in a way that we need in order to bring more sanity and justice and equity to our criminal legal system.
AKB: Yeah, and you end the article with recommendations on how judges can make youth matter in gun cases. It sounds like you've outlined some different options for making change that courts and lawmakers could adopt. But if there's one change that you could pinpoint, that they could adopt immediately and realistically, what would it be?
KA: Well, I think the one thing that has not been established in our law yet, but that is that there is a presumption that youth are less culpable. And I think if judges could approach that with the baseline that children are less culpable, right? That is just the starting point. So, age is always going to be a mitigator. And right now, our law doesn't necessarily align with that. It does allow judges to still disregard a lot of the evidence, if they so choose. And so, I think that if judges would approach that responsibility.
And then I guess the other thing, and I try to bring this out in the recommendations is to be brave in terms of being willing to step out with the discretion that they have, right? And to really live into the opportunity that they have, to really craft individualized sentences that really do reflect the individual, and again, to acknowledge that there's harm, but also to acknowledge that it was a young person. As Aaron had described, somebody with very little control over their own environments, somebody who really needed to be parented and cared for and told the right way to live, and they never had that. So, I think for judges to recognize that and to recognize too that, again, what we're doing just by sending these folks away for a very long time to a very not productive carceral system is really not going to get us to a safer society.
AKB: Aaron was, like, shaking his head, absolutely not that the prison system is rehabilitative. Did you want to add anything about your lived experience there for, you know, 25 years plus?
AF: Yeah, just hearing Kim, when you asked her the question about, you know, how long folks should be incarcerated, I get mixed up because I speak about this all the time with folks, and I'm a realist, right? I understand reality. I understand, you know, saying what's real, right? We know just not dealing with this, right, is not the solution. Because I'm abolition. I'm abolitionist at heart, and always like to get the definition in there, and that's doing away with systems of oppression. This system, this law court, is based off of that. That's what it's rooted in. That's what it was built for. That's what it's meant to do. Our carceral systems, and we talk about rehabilitation, and some of the places even have the name of correctional facilities. It's none of the above, in any way, shape or form. It's not meant to rehabilitate folks.
And I think about what it means and what it looks like going through that as a juvenile into an adult facility where you sent me to Washington State Penitentiary as a kid. What does that look like? When I come in, I get a GED, which is mandatory; I get anger management, which is mandatory; and I have to go through chemical dependency, which is mandatory. That's it. There's utterly nothing else, unless an individual decides to search and look and, you know, say, self-educate. And I think about where I was at and, you know, you spoke about earlier, about the death of my father. And this is one thing that you don't find in the articles because I was only 14 at the time, but I was with my father when he was shot and killed, and I held him till he bled to death in my arms. What does that look like for a 14-year-old to have to go through that? Live through that? Deal with that? And have absolutely nothing around them, and then you put me inside of prison, right?
And I've never, ever, by any means, ever excuse the harm that I committed. In any way. It was wrong. At that time, I didn't know that, I didn't understand that, I didn't even think about that. I was wrong, and I dealt with things the way that I was taught and conditioned and believed to do, and it was wrong.
Going into prison, there's absolutely nothing there. And I'm continuing with these patterns. I'm continuing with these thoughts, I'm continuing with these emotions, and I acted out even more, just like their science says. I acted out even more. The first time I went to the juvenile parole bill, I got denied because I had caught new charges while I was in prison, because I was still continuing to act out. At some point in time while I was in prison, after years and years of sitting in segregation — I mean years and years, not just days, but years. At one point in time, I sat in there for 22 months. I was put back in general population for four days, and I went right back for 12 months, and that was just two of the times that I sat for my long durations in segregation. And it doesn't do nothing but make you crazier.
But at some point in time, I was sitting in there, and I was just thinking to myself, why? Why do I keep doing this? Why am I continuing to going through this? And I'm fed up with this. I'm tired of this. What is causing this? Why do I keep doing this? And I had to self-educate myself to figure out what I was going through emotionally in order to be able to identify all these things that were triggering me nonstop and why I was choosing to make the choices and the behavior that I continued with. And it still took me years after that to work through all of that, to where I would no longer instinctively just chose to be like that. Instinctively, just gave in to the feelings that I was going through — depression, anger, hurt, you know, whatever it was. And then, as soon as I feel like that, I'm just choosing to act out. It took years, and they don't give you that. It's deeply rooted, and they don't give you any sort of access to that. And so, when I hear Kim — and I think about, what do we do with our youth, but what do we do with our adults as well that has this arrested, delayed development, and are stuck in the same thing, and are continuing the same behavior. We don't do nothing in any way, shape or form about that.
So, I think about, like, what do we do before we send them to an adult facility, you know? Because obviously we need to disrupt what's going on in their lives. But when we do what are we doing to support them? What are we doing to give them access? What are we doing to help and rehabilitate in a way — I was sitting on a panel with Kim last year where I had a prosecuting attorney said, “Well, if I can just lock him away and keep him away from the community for seven years, I'm fine with that.” So, wait, you can send them into prison and make them a better, you know, saying, more harmful individuals, so they come right back out. That makes utterly no sense. We need to support our youth, our adults, everybody that's incarcerated as they're coming in, as they go through that and all the — what's the word? — metaphysical ways that we possibly can so that when they come home, it makes them safer, it makes them more healed, it makes them more mature, more developed, which in turn was the goal. How do we make our community safe?
AKB: And you're doing it now.
AF: I'm trying.
AKB: You're doing your part. You're doing your part so that the cycle of violence is not perpetuated and we're not retraumatizing the traumatized. Some of what Aaron shared, I assume, was part of the arguments that you and your students made to the court for resentencing. How many students were there on your case?
KA: Yeah, so let me jump in here. So, in my clinic, we do a variety of cases. Some of them are actually the resentencing cases. That's what I'm discussing in my article. And then other cases are like Aaron's, where he's appearing before a parole board because the law changed after the Miller v. Alabama to allow him that opportunity. And so those cases can take a while to work up, right, because Aaron will get six months’ notice of the hearing, and he has to have an evaluation. They evaluate him through an expert psychologist. We have to get all of the prison records, so I don't remember exactly how many students worked on Aaron's case, but it was more than two or three, and it takes a lot.
I mentioned all those support letters that we're gathering and that Aaron's doing a lot of that work from the inside too. We're usually talking to him every week on the phone, kind of just update him and get ready for this really critical time, and it's very impactful, right? For my students, they come to learn and come to care deeply for Aaron in the same way that I do now, when they see all that he's been through and just the man that he's become, in spite of what he's been doing at the Department of Corrections.
So, it's a long process. It's forward looking, the process that Aaron went through and our courts also have started to say we have to be forward looking when we are sentencing young people and also when we're trying to figure out how long they should be held, right? And so, it's a great opportunity to be able to talk about how much it will mean to us as part of Aaron's community, to have him back.
AKB: Thank you both so much for the education, Aaron and Professor Ambrose. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your research, Kim, and both of you for your commitment to young people whose stories are often unheard. “Making Youth Matter” it's an essential contribution to the ongoing conversation about youth safety and justice. And Aaron, your work is contributing to making things better for youth and our whole society. So, thank you for doing your part. It's been wonderful to talk with both of you. I appreciate your vulnerability, Aaron, and you know, taking the lid off of your lived experience for our listeners. And to our listeners, thank you for joining us on Discovery. If you’d like to read Professor Ambrose’s article, we'll link to it in the show notes. Stay curious, stay engaged, and we'll see you next time.
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