“Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old,” said a state representative in a room full of legislators, youth advocates, and colleagues. Gasps from the audience echoed through the committee room of the Louisiana House of Representatives.
It was the Fall 2024 legislative session and Republican Rep. Tony Bacala (R-Prairieville) was making the case for Amendment 3 – a bill seeking to send more youth to adult prisons.
I was at a complete loss for words – a rare instance for a writer and storyteller. I was present as the Strategic Storyteller at Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, where my role utilizes narrative change to combat the harmful narratives surrounding Black youth. It was evident to me that Bacala’s statement hinted at a larger, false narrative: that a child who has not yet developed signs of empathy will never have the capacity to empathize in adulthood and, therefore, should be discarded and incarcerated.
The false narrative echoes far beyond the State Capitol and twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, our children still do not live in a city that models empathy and humanity. As the adults who are responsible for the young people in New Orleans and “The Village” tasked with raising children, we have collectively failed to support their needs.
Learning empathy
Contrary to Bacala’s statement, empathy is both an emotional and cognitive response learned over time. Just like learning to read, empathy can be fostered at any time in life.
The life experiences, social interactions, and behaviors that adults exhibit shape children’s empathetic responses. Young people who feel loved are more sensitive to the emotional needs of others, studies show. “Emotionally responsive, caring relationships between adults and children act as a buffer—protecting them from the harshest effects of adversity. That is the power of The Village when it shows up fully,” said Dr. Danielle Wright, executive director of Navigate NOLA.
Instead, our responses to the needs of young people are rooted in criminalization, rather than care. “We have failed our children by allowing incarceration to become an acceptable option. The children are ours. Every single one of them,” says Kristen Rome, executive director of Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. “Whether they succeed or fail lies in how we support, nurture, and respond to them.”
Our comfortability with locking up and throwing away the youngest and most vulnerable in our city demonstrates that certain youth are disposable to us: 95% of all kids arrested are Black. Incarcerating Black youth isolates them from The Village – from their family, schools, friends – and disrupts their relationships, health, development, and opportunities for employment. Incarceration does not straighten or correct their path for success. It worsens it.
Impacts of poverty and trauma
I reflect on my K-12 experience growing up in New Orleans, where the kids who “couldn’t keep still” or pay attention, who had outbursts in class or easily resorted to anger were disciplined for their conduct rather than humanized for their circumstances.
Maybe the boy who was often unprepared without school supplies could not afford them. The girl who was always falling asleep at her desk might not have been able to rest in her disruptive home environment. The kids who were always combative may have been irritable because the only meal they ate consistently was the lunch provided at school.
These instances are symptoms of the conditions that we have accepted. We have allowed for a New Orleans where 43% of all Black children live in poverty and 60% of children have PTSD, paired with racial disparities in education, health, housing, economic prosperity, and displacement that characterize the city post-Katrina.
Youth living in poverty or struggling with PTSD can exhibit trouble with memory and attentiveness, problem-solving, conflict resolution, managing emotions, or lack of social cues and school readiness–all of which shape a young person’s ability to succeed inside and outside of the classroom.
Black youth experiencing poverty do not experience childhood or adolescence in the same way as their peers.They are often adultified at an early age. Some are sent to the juvenile system as young as 10 years old. Others are expected to care for siblings or bring in supplemental income to support their household. Poverty forces a state of survival rather than one of freedom, intensifies the conditions that breed crime, and exacerbates young people’s exposure to violence.
Neighborhoods with reported high violent crime rates–such as Central City, 7th Ward, Pines Village, Desire, Florida, Tremé/Lafitte–all include sections experiencing over 40% of concentrated poverty. We must acknowledge that people experiencing poverty are not criminal; the conditions we have allowed them to experience are.
The experiences of Black New Orleans youth are often a footnote to the media sensationalism that occurs when they are the perceived offenders arrested for violent or non-violent crimes.
They are forcibly battling the narratives surrounding them, while simultaneously fighting to survive the conditions they live in.
Youth crime has plummeted, but narratives and disparities persist
Youth crime has dropped in New Orleans. Voters overwhelmingly rejected Amendment 3 in the March 2025 election. But the problematic narratives that propelled these topics in the media and at the legislature continue to plague ongoing policy proposals, headlines, social media commentary, and everyday conversations.
The narratives lead us to ask: why can’t Louisiana see Black children as children? Because if the state saw Black children as children (or human beings), it would not treat them this way.
Daryl V. Atkinson explains the concept in Vera Institute of Justice’s “The 30 Year Project” podcast. “Narratively, before this country could do really bad things to a group of people, it always had to deface their humanity–in language, depictions. They did all of those things so they could create a rhetorical, narrative justification for what we’re about to do. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense to do other human beings that way.”
This narrative justification, Atkinson says, helps to explain the roots of the “superpredator” lie of the 1990s.
That lie – that some children were hardened predators – was used to justify the 1994 Crime Bill that targeted Black youth and accelerated the mass incarceration of Black people.
Today, similar narratives ignited by national, post-COVID reports of youth crime have prompted tough-on-crime laws, like the rollback of bipartisan Raise The Age legislation in Louisiana and Trump’s federal takeover of Washington D.C., that seek to aggressively incarcerate away the so-called “new juvenile’” that has emerged.
If truth be told, the state of our youth is merely a reflection of where we have collectively failed them.
New Orleans’ success is dependent on the wellbeing of our children
If we want to see our city thrive, our children have to thrive. The Village’s community investment efforts create positive impacts.
Kids ate free all summer at Chicken’s Kitchen, where owner Marlon “Chicken” Chukumerije fed numerous children more than 2,800 meals as part of the restaurant’s summer program. The City of New Orleans’ Guaranteed Income Program provided 125 young people with monthly payments that were used to address financial hardship, by helping to buy their own school uniforms and contributing to household expenses. ALAS’s Aspire Fellowship equipped young people impacted by the criminal legal and immigration systems with internal healing, interpersonal relationship building and institutional change making.
We all have a responsibility to young people in our daily lives, through the roles we live and work in and the narratives we consume and share.
The next time that you read a negative news report or social media comment about Black youth, I challenge you to examine what is actually being said and the systemic factors at play. Interrogate your biases and use the lens of humanity. Those of us who experienced Hurricane Katrina in 2005 know how easily realities can be misperceived.
The narrative of Black New Orleans youth portrays them as criminals, rather than in crisis. We view their behaviors as acting out, rather than crying out. For solutions to that, we need to look to the strength of our communities, not our jails.
I recall a similar narrative during Katrina, when national media reports criminalized Black New Orleanians searching for food as “looters,” rather than “survivors.” People across the country debated whether or not post-Katrina New Orleans was a city worth rebuilding.
Many said no–that New Orleans was “a lost cause” and an “unsustainable” city due to our position below sea level and vulnerability to environmental threats and societal issues. Locally, some questioned whether neighborhoods such as The East and Lower 9th Ward should have the opportunity to rebuild and offered proposals to shrink the footprint of the city instead.
In our hearts, we knew the truth. We rebuilt anyway.
Twenty years later, the city is at a pivotal moment of dire opportunity for narrative and systemic change and has upcoming elections for mayor and city council, followed by juvenile court judges in 2026. As The Village, we must pursue a new, truthful narrative for the next generation. We must demand that elected officials finally prioritize the needs of young people.
After Katrina, New Orleans decided that, despite tragedy and trauma, our home was worth investment and that our vulnerability did not make us disposable; it meant that we needed additional protection. The same is true for our children.
##
Cierra Chenier is the Strategic Storyteller at Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights and a writer and historian. This article is a part of the #ItTakesAVillageNOLA campaign led by Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. To join The Village, sign the community pledge and learn more at www.ittakesavillagenola.org.