One night last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods, and said, “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”

Price was talking about her childhood. She described how she was arrested as a teenager, how she spent time in foster care, and how the criminal legal system might have been her future if things had gone slightly different.

Price—battling a recall attempt that kicked off just months after she took office as Oakland’s first Black female DA—had shown up to the town hall to defend her vision for the office, which included an unwavering refusal to over-criminalize young people. She ran on a 10-point plan to reform criminal justice. And since taking office, she has instituted policies to keep 16- and 17-year-olds in the youth justice system instead of transferring them to adult prisons and reevaluated how the county treats young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. These issues, Price said, were what had inspired her to run for DA in the first place. She told the crowd, “When I looked at our racial disparities for our young people in Alameda County, I could not look away.”

Price was making this appeal in enemy territory. Montclair, whose location abutting a freeway may have made it a target for theft, had not voted for her. Neither had the rest of the Oakland Hills, where handsome Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets perch high above the much poorer city with which they share a chief prosecutor. And so, after the DA spoke about racial disparities in youth justice—87 percent of children in the county’s juvenile system are Black or Latino—and emphasized her belief in redemption for young people, a member of the neighborhood association that hosted the event took the mic and asked about “one of the elephants in the room”: a series of recent robberies allegedly committed by teenagers. Rumors had been going around that Price’s office had let the young people go without so much as a charge.

The issue of youth crime has become a flash point in Oakland politics. Local news stories of retail theft, robberies, and a small number of serious crimes have captured public attention. People grimace over the news that more than half of Oakland’s students are chronically absent from school, double the national average. This spring, The Berkeley Scanner, a local paper that has been relentlessly critical of Price, broke the news that the DA had decided to keep in the juvenile system a young man who was 17 when he opened fire at a birthday party, killing teenage brothers Angel and Jazy Soleto. This outraged members of the Soleto family, who later held a press conference supporting the recall.

Citizens at the town hall—and especially those backing the recall effort—are looking to the DA to use her prosecutorial powers to halt what they see as a crime wave. “It has gotten out of hand,” one attendee told local news outside the event. Violent crime was up in Oakland in 2023, sparking talks of a “crime surge,” though homicide numbers were lower than in 2022; overall crime is now down 33 percent this year, with reduced rates of homicide, assault, and burglary. Only robbery numbers are up. Still, residents are frustrated at the feeling that nothing is being done to stop young people who commit crimes from developing into violent and unaccountable older people.

Price, meanwhile, wants people to see how the system’s traditional response often forges broken adults as well. With her invocation of her younger self, the DA was asking the town hall attendees to consider an alternative path for young people who have committed crimes. Given the right guidance and resources, she argues, someone they see as a threat now could grow up to become someone like her. In these differing visions lie the fundamental problem: How should the state meaningfully intervene in a young person’s life? What is the line between doing nothing and sending a kid to prison?

At one point, Price made a request to the audience in Montclair. She asked people to volunteer with the organizations and advocates who work with young people—plenty of whom went through the criminal legal system as teenagers themselves.

These youth justice workers are Price’s partners in trying to enact a system of youth justice that prioritizes care over criminalization. For the most part, they argue that the inflamed rhetoric around youth violence bears little resemblance to the teenagers and young adults they see in their daily work. “It feels like young people are being scapegoated,” Dieudonné Brou, the youth advocacy and program coordinator for the nonprofit Urban Peace Movement, told me.

“We’re hearing things like this is as bad as we’ve ever seen it—without any mention of the pandemic” and how it affected young people’s mental health and development, said Vamsey Palagummi, the managing director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ). Palagummi spent time in juvenile hall and on probation as a teen and now works on several county initiatives that focus on juvenile justice. The recall, he said, “has absolutely consumed our work daily, whether we’re in the commission spaces, whether we’re on the streets talking to folks.”

As recall proponents argue that the county’s approach toward youth crime has become too lenient, people who work on juvenile justice point to a complex mix of issues—legislative changes, resource allocation issues, trauma and mental health needs—that shape the system long before the district attorney comes into play. Ultimately, Price’s position, influential as it is, represents just one point in this matrix of courts, probation, youth services, and school.

“We also have to work in collaboration with many other actors who are able to intervene in many other points in this complex arena,” Cynthia Chandler, the Alameda County DA’s senior assistant policy chief, told me. “The DA can only intervene in a very small subset of harm.” And by definition, by the time the office is poised to intervene, that harm is almost always already done.

Palagummi said he appreciates that the DA’s office seems to be considering how to “provide the support that this young person needs, thinking outside of the box, working more with community members.” But he added, “Quite frankly, it’s not too different and drastic from the previous administration.” The problem, advocates argue, is not that the system has changed too much or too swiftly—it’s that it hasn’t changed enough.

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In theory, at least, the juvenile justice system is predicated on the notion, backed by extensive scientific evidence, that young people are both less culpable for their actions and more capable of change than older adults. In this sense, it’s arguably the most compelling place to make the case for criminal legal reform, because it’s where the connections between societal and personal adversity—poverty, discrimination, disinvestment, abuse—and crime are the most obvious. “I don’t think that punishment is often, if ever, the answer for young folks,” said Celsa Snead, the executive director of Oakland’s Mentoring Center, whose work on violence prevention puts the organization into contact with adolescents caught up in the criminal legal system. “Rehabilitation, support, recognition, accountability—all those things are important.”

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With youth crime rates broadly declining since the mid-’90s, many states have tried to overhaul their youth justice systems, with varying degrees of success. Hawaii has touted its investments in community-based alternatives to youth incarceration; in 2022, the state announced that it no longer had any girls in juvenile detention. Maine, meanwhile, has attempted to transform its own approach to juvenile justice, but failed to provide and fund the services necessary to do so, leaving the state a “cautionary tale about the path to reform,” as a joint investigation by the Bangor Daily News and The New York Times put it.

In recent years, California has sought to overhaul its youth justice system, but its efforts at improvement have had mixed results. For a long time, young people convicted of serious offenses and kept in the juvenile system—in Alameda, about five people a year—would be sent to youth prisons run by the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, which were rife with abuse, violence, and neglect. But a “realignment” law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 closed down the remaining facilities and put youth custody in the hands of counties—specifically, their probation departments. Now, teenagers from Oakland who would have once been sent to state facilities that could be hundreds of miles from the Bay Area are housed in juvenile detention centers much closer to home.

“While that’s a great thing, because DJJ [facilities] were essentially gladiator schools and really horrible places, and young people now have an opportunity to be closer to home, from my perspective, we’re replicating a lot of the harms that we worked really hard to rally against,” said Palagummi.

Since the realignment law, Palagummi and Brou have both remarked that judges are sending more kids to juvenile hall’s “secure track”—essentially, long-term confinement—causing them to worry that judges are expanding their criteria to determine which young people deserve this comparatively punitive outcome (their observations are borne out by Probation Department data).

At the same time, Palagummi said, not enough investments are being made in rehabilitative services. The problem is not in overall criminal legal funding levels, he said, but in how the money gets allocated: “We firmly believe that there are enough resources as it exists right now to provide robust therapeutic services.” On the realignment commission, he tries to advocate for using state juvenile funding “to focus more on diversion and community-based solutions” rather than things like overtime for probation staff, a significant chunk of the current budget. Palagummi also cited a therapist shortage combined with a higher level of need after the pandemic’s total disruption to kid’s school routines and mental health. “We do not have 24/7 clinicians—we don’t even have clinicians that can work regularly on the weekends,” he said.

Groups like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) now have contracts to send “credible messengers,” formerly incarcerated adults who can act as mentors, into the juvenile detention facilities to work with young people. But these types of offerings are still a small part of the overall system, and they’re up against a daunting level of need. Teiahsha Bankhead, RJOY’s executive director, told me that RJOY ends up essentially providing critical post-release services for kids—holding welcome-home circles within 24 hours of release, helping them out with groceries, or calling them a rideshare so they can make it to a new job—without a formal contract. (RJOY is currently in the process of applying for one.) “I get kids who are from juvenile hall calling me, my staff telling us that they’re hungry,” she said. “I don’t care who’s funding us. We’re going to respond to that.”

Today, Brou is in his mid-30s, a UCLA graduate who runs a footwear company in addition to his work with Urban Peace Movement. The organization is a member of the Alameda County DA Accountability table, a coalition of local organizations that has pushed Price to, among other things, end the practice of transferring youth to the adult system in her first 100 days in office.

Brou knows intimately the harms that can befall a young person in an adult prison. After first coming into contact with the criminal legal system in middle school, Brou was arrested again at 18 and entered the California prison system about a year later. In total, he was incarcerated for seven years—an eternity for an 18-year-old, but a far shorter sentence than the average young person receives who has been transferred into the adult system, who, depending on the severity of their crime, might be incarcerated for multiple decades.

Soon after his arrival at High Desert State Prison, about 250 miles away from home, Brou was stabbed in his sleep during a riot. He remains traumatized by the experience. “When I’m sleeping, my family has to be cautious about the way they wake me up,” he said.