Published by InfomaniaHub
Today, Pamela Price is an accomplished civil rights attorney, but her earliest interactions with the law were unfailingly negative. Devastated and enraged by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she organized student demonstrations as a teenager—and was tossed in jail for it. After running away from home, she bounced between the foster care and youth justice systems. “My juvenile experience led me to think, ‘Oh, these lawyers, this is all bad,’” she recalled. “I didn’t want to be part of a legal system, or even a political system. It took years for me to actually get back into being active.”
Julia Arroyo, the co-executive director of Young Women’s Freedom Center, criticized the complicated network of DAs, agencies, and community organizations that try to respond to issues of abuse and exploitation as both paternalistic and ineffectual. “You just kind of get entangled into this system, and it creates this hyper-focus and supervision on your life, but often people are still needing to get connected to housing or different resources,” she said.