The Honorable Judges Stephanie Mitchell, Lisa Green, Shequitta Kelly and Amber Givens-Davis meet youth offenders in their courtrooms every day. Though none of the women are native to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, they all bonded over a shared desire to counteract the city's thriving school-to-prison pipeline, a problematic phenomenon wherein American schools' zero-tolerance policies push children from the classroom into the criminal system.
A group of Black female judges in Dallas County, Texas, are doing their part to keep teens in school and out of their courtrooms. The Honorable Judges Stephanie Mitchell, Shequitta Kelly, Lisa Green, and Amber Givens-Davis are also members of prestigious Black Greek-lettered organizations: Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
These sisters are breaking the Prison to Pipeline concept! The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are not the only ways women are coming together and making a difference. Four Black women in Dallas, Texas, Judge Amber Givens-Davis, Judge Lisa Green, Judge Shequitta Kelly, and Judge Stephanie Mitchell have joined forced to start the Pipelines to Possibilities ...
One hundred teenagers pack into a courtroom at a Dallas, Texas District Court. But the teens aren't in legal trouble. They are participating in an after-school program aimed at keeping them out of the criminal justice system. Some reluctant teens are unengaged, fiddling with their cellphones.
"Pipeline to Possibilities is a program committed to educating youth on various aspects of the justice system & inspiring youth to become leaders in society." The program was created by four female African-American Judges. The judges are also members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
"As a judge in a misdemeanor court, I often see first-time, young offenders between the ages of 17 and 25, many of whom have no direction, no support, and sometimes no hope," Judge Green told me recently in an email.
04/17/2018 As a judge in Dallas County (Texas) Criminal Court, Shequitta Kelly, '03, knows the challenges facing Dallas youth. In 2016, a year after being elected, the IU McKinney School of Law alumna joined with three other Dallas County judges to create Pipeline to Possibilities, an effort to change the "pipeline to prison" narrative of the American criminal justice system.
A Syracuse University Law School Graduate has helped create a program to keep young people out of the criminal justice system ... so they don't continue in a life of crime. Amber Givens-Davis is a District Court Judge in Dallas. She worked with 3 other judges after seeing a lot of young people, mostly first-time offenders in their courts.
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