Growing up in a predominantly Black and Latino community on the West Side of Chicago, Candice Jones witnessed many of the people she loved arrested and imprisoned. She had a cousin whom she viewed as a gentle, loving father who cared deeply for his special needs child, but to the police, Jones said, his criminal record and participation in the “illicit economy” made him “public enemy number one.”
“Those things, even as a child, felt really incongruent,” Jones said.
From a young age, she recognized her desire to protect the people she cared about. To achieve this, she decided she needed to understand the criminal justice system. Jones obtained her law degree from the New York University School of Law, worked in criminal justice roles and later became the director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, leading the efforts to reduce the number of youth in the system and closing the Illinois Youth Center in Kewanee, which signaled the state’s move toward smaller and less-restrictive facilities.
Since 2017, Jones has served as the CEO of the Public Welfare Foundation, overseeing the philanthropic organization’s $556 million in assets and shaping its grantmaking strategies and vision for reforming the adult and youth criminal justice systems.
Under her leadership, the foundation has focused on funding organizations led by formerly incarcerated people; this November, the foundation launched its GIVE LOCAL campaign to raise money for local organizations led by people with direct experience with the criminal justice system.
The conversation
What juvenile justice issues has the Public Welfare Foundation focused on this year?
This last year we’ve been looking at our youth justice work and how to reframe the narrative away from a resurgence of tough-on-crime rhetoric. The spike in violent crime got some people wringing their hands and talking about “these kids,” which is often not supported by numbers or data. We worry that this tough-on-crime rhetoric is signaling a return to the super predator era of the 90s. We’ve been thinking a lot about how we and our partners might strengthen our narrative work to combat this rhetoric. We are also thinking about how to refine and increase support for harm-reduction strategies that support community violence intervention programs as alternatives that would make us less reliant on policing and carceral systems.
Can you talk more about this rhetoric? Where do you think it is coming from?
In 2020, we had a moment when we were talking about policing and racial equity. But pretty quickly — late 2020, early 2021 — we started to see a shift. We were ramping up to the 2022 midterms, we were coming out of the pandemic, and we were having spikes in crime in certain jurisdictions in the country. All of a sudden, there was a lot of conversation about kids being the principal drivers of violent crime. It’s really interesting because, in most places, the data shows that the average age of violent crime is close to the late 20s, or early 30s. For gun violence, the average age is 27 years old. We saw the mayor in D.C. standing up and saying, it’s the kids, it’s the kids, but the data doesn’t support that.
What is the Public Welfare Foundation’s strategy for youth justice?
In 2019, we began focusing our criminal and youth justice strategy on driving money to the ground to support justice reform and violence intervention programs in eight select sites across the country — a combination of states, cities and hyperlocal jurisdictions in Washington, D.C., which is our home base, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Colorado, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Michigan.
What is the approach taken when working with coalition partners, and how do you determine the specific youth justice issues to address in each community?
We don’t tell our coalition partners what to focus on. We ask them what youth justice issues are ripening in your community. In D.C., the issues that folks said were ripening were the incidences of policing schools. Another big theme for the District was emerging adults, who are 18 or over and considered adults in the criminal system but not based on brain development research. The district coalition was trying to get those kids out of the adult system and place them under the custody of the youth justice system, and to build a better continuum of care of programs and services that allow the youth and young adults to transition and be a part of the reform that was happening. We funded the collective action tables that brought those groups together to work on these issues, some of the programs and services and some of the leadership development initiatives for those individuals coming home.
How does your past work as Director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice inform your approach to youth justice today?
When I came to the US justice system in Illinois we had — I’ll never forget this number — 805 kids in custody the day I started, which was still down from the early 90s when it had been, like, 2,000 kids in custody. And we had 1,500 youth on post-release supervision. As a result of the changes we were making, in under three years, we cut the number of youth in custody in half, to about 400, and there were 600 youth on post-release supervision.
What were some of the changes that impacted the decrease in youth in the system?
In the first reform package, we had an omnibus bill that said misdemeanor offenses couldn’t come to custody anymore. That was our front-door reform. On the back door, we restructured post-release supervision from an indeterminate sentence, which allowed probation to follow a youth up to age 21, to a six-month determinate sentence for low-level felonies. That way if a 14-year-old came in for a low-level felony — smoking weed, missing school — the kid wouldn’t be tracked until 21.
In the second big reform package, we said that offenses that cops like to sweep up kids in — particularly in communities of color — such as disorderly conduct, were noncommitting offenses, and you couldn’t go to prison for that kind of offense. We also restructured the parole board in Illinois, which was responsible for the adult and juvenile justice system, so that it was no longer responsible for the youth justice system. It took years to outline the changes needed to unclog the pipelines of youth going through those systems.
Why did you leave the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice?
I’d done my tour of duty. These are not easy jobs. I was up 24 hours a day seven days a week — could get calls any time, including on the weekend. I felt like I couldn’t take vacations. It’s a lot of work if you want to do it right. After we closed a youth prison, I told the administration that was the last thing I was going to do for them. I shepherded them through that closure, which can draw a lot of stings. Illinois is a big union state. It was with a Republican administration at the time and we closed a prison in a Republican district. I told them after that I was going to step down and take other opportunities. And that’s exactly what I did.
The details
Title: President & CEO, Public Welfare Foundation
Recent reads: I’m currently reading a science fiction novel. “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead is next on my list.
In service: Our team recently spent the day cleaning up invasive species in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. More and more, I find myself gravitating to service to our planet.
Words to live by: “Keep livin’.” This one came from my mother, who got it from her mother. No matter what comes, we’ve got to keep living.
Education: Juris Doctor. from New York University School of Law and Bachelor of Arts from Washington University in St. Louis.
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Brian Rinker is a Pennsylvania-based journalist who covers public health, child welfare, digital health, startups and venture capital.
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