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Advocate Agustin Torres discusses juvenile incarceration and why “No Child Is Born Bad”

April 14, 2016

Agustin Torres, a member of the Incarcerated Children’s Advocacy Network, led a discussion on juvenile incarceration and the importance of providing effective rehabilitation policies for prisoners.

By Kathy Zhang C’17

On April 13, Agustin Torres, a member of the Incarcerated Children’s Advocacy Network, came to speak at University of Pennsylvania Law School for an event titled “No Child Is Born Bad,” a discussion on juvenile incarceration and the importance of providing effective rehabilitation policies for prisoners.

The event was co-sponsored by Penn Law’s Youth Advocacy Project, the Criminal Justice Bloc, the Black Law Students Association, the Latino Law Students Association, the American Constitution Society, the Criminal Record Expungement Project, and Pardon (Me) Project.

The Incarcerated Children’s Advocacy Network (ICAN) is a national network of individuals who were formerly incarcerated in their youth, and their mission is “to change the narrative of formerly incarcerated youth and advocate for age-appropriate accountability measures for children.”

At 16 years old, Torres was arrested and convicted for first-degree murder. He spent 20 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections not only reflecting on the consequences of his actions but also taking every opportunity he could get to become a better, more educated individual. Torres now seeks to share his experiences in order to help keep children out of the criminal justice system and also to advocate for supportive services similar to those he received that enabled his positive outcome.

In his talk, Torres shared a video from the Education Justice Project (EJP) at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An EJP alum, Torres attests to the benefits of EJP’s college-in-prison program, where professors give incarcerated men the same opportunity as any other college student at the university to pursue a higher education. According to Torres, the purpose of such programs is to rehabilitate incarcerated men — to give them a future after their sentence ends.

In the video, a student shared an important insight from one of the EJP instructors: “He always asked people to think about the worst thing that they’ve ever done, to imagine themselves being defined for the rest of their lives by the worst thing they’ve ever done. And that’s the [prison] experience.”

“If you put a juvenile in prison and throw away the key, you’re saying that that kid is incorrigible,” explained Torres. “We have to think on the purpose of prison. If the purpose of prison is to punish, there are plenty of ways to punish people. But the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate.”

Tweets from this event: