“My grandma and grandpa are old tradition. They’re rooted,” Jocelyn Mati says. “When they saw me with handcuffs on they started crying. I felt ashamed. I felt like, ‘Damn, they really got me looking like a criminal. They got me looking like someone who’s a bad person.’ ”
Mati was arrested as a teenager for participating in a fight, part of a group of her friends and family members who police swept up and transported to San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall. Handcuffed to a bench for six hours, she and the others didn’t know what was ahead of them. One by one, they were taken into Juvenile Hall and locked up in single rooms with heavy doors. When Mati’s turn came, a guard took one look at her — beaten and exhausted — and said “You probably deserved that black eye.”
“I didn’t even say nothing, because in that moment I was under the law’s supervision,” she says. “It made me intimidated to say anything, so I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to speak up for myself.”