The United States stands alone as the only country in the world that sentences children to die in prison. In March of 2023, New Mexico joined half the country in banning the practice. With this hard-fought victory in the rear-view mirror, I am now reflecting on the campaign and the things it taught me about this work and about the world.
I was still in law school when the campaign to end juvenile life without parole in New Mexico coalesced. It began with a handful of people across the state who had loved ones serving life and long prison sentences for crimes committed when they were children. The alliance was then joined by a couple of lawyers, other legal professionals, and law-student me.
As has been true everywhere, the proposal to end death by incarceration for children in our state was contentious and highly politicized. It didn’t take long for us to realize we were in over our heads. Early in the campaign, someone forwarded me a YouTube video that was being circulated on social media. I pressed play and watched video footage of myself and others giving legislative testimony. The footage had been leeched of color, and a sepia-toned version of me spoke as a caption warned that killers would soon be set free thanks to our efforts. Watching how easy it had been to be caricatured as villains made it obvious that something needed to change, but it wasn’t yet clear what that something was.
Up until that point, our campaign had followed the standard playbook for legal activism in New Mexico. When faced with opposition in this adversarial system, you dig your heels in; you push ahead. You ignore nuance and choose moral certitude. Midstream in the campaign, I graduated from law school and became a newly minted criminal defense lawyer. The parting wisdom I received was much the same. In the criminal defense arena, we call this moral certitude “zealousness,” and it is literally our sworn duty.
As a lawyer, I chose to focus on post-conviction litigation, trying to free people serving life and other long sentences. These cases inevitably involve violent crimes, mostly homicide. In the name of zealous advocacy, lawyers accept that it is our job to tell our clients’ stories in the most favorable light. This often means we talk as little as possible about the crime. We talk about everything around it, before it, after it, under it, and we avoid it where we can. The conventional strategy of criminal legal policy advocacy calls for a similar dance. Our focus is on the humanity of people in prison, of the life that’s been robbed from them.
Watching the video and hearing my own words played back over sinister music made clear this approach left something important out. I started to wonder if our avoidance of the underlying crimes actually affirmed the idea that the harms people had caused were so horrid they were actually unspeakable—that acknowledging the harm would also require acknowledging they do not deserve to live free.
The campaign in New Mexico continually tested the limits of these old ways of doing things. The changes being proposed struck at tender parts of New Mexico’s community fabric—families and communities devastated by the violent acts of young people, and families and communities ruptured by the life-long incarceration of those same young people. Not too long ago, a rural New Mexico town was shocked and devastated when a young boy took his father’s gun downtown and killed multiple people at random, injuring others. This case was exceptional in many ways. Almost all of the cases that would’ve been impacted by our efforts to end juvenile life without parole involved serious violence—but the majority were felony murder or other accomplice liability convictions. (This is true nationally, as well.) This means the child sentenced for life had not been the primary perpetrator of the crime, and may not have even been present at the time someone was killed. However, in the recent tragedy, that was not the case: a child had himself killed people, people who’d never done him harm. He had been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Just two years later, under our instigation, the legislature was considering reform that would eventually allow him a chance at release. Many members of the impacted community were shocked and hurt. Like the death penalty, life in prison is sold to grieving people as justice, as certainty, and as finality. And for some people, it is some of those things. But it’s never that simple. With our campaign, this boy’s future again hung in the balance, and the immense pain of that still-recent tragedy was reopened for many. It was that rage and fear that turned someone from that rural town into the amateur YouTuber whose video I watched.
It can feel righteous to be hated by people you think are wrong about the world. Here is where the distortions produced by the logic of opposites meet: to be hated by people we believe to be wrong can feel almost the same as being revered or loved. If we’re lucky, by some grace we realize instead that many of the people we want to think of as wrong are just incredibly hurt and afraid.
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Inquest, finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
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How do we simultaneously honor the humanity of people who cause harm and of those who suffer it? And how do we do that in institutions that seem designed to strip away the humanity of so many?
The “opposing side” of the campaign included a mother whose son had been killed by another child. At the start of the legislative session in 2023, I saw her in the capitol: this mother on the opposite side of things. I awkwardly called her name, and she turned to see who it was. When she saw that it was me, she looked confused. To be honest, I was also shocked by my audacity. By that point, we had spent years pitted against each other in the reductive us versus them narrative the press had spun. Any parent, including this mother, is right that I could never imagine or understand what it is like to lose one’s own child. Appreciating this with sudden new depth, I offered her my sincere apology for having let the gulf between us grow so wide, for having waited so long to reach out.
After our encounter, the energy of it all shifted dramatically. This mother was never going to support the changes to the law we proposed, and she didn’t. But a space now opened up for exchange and mutual understanding. She even met with mothers whom we worked with, whose children had been sent to prison for life after being involved in serious violent crimes. The mothers had spent years on the opposite end of public comment. Though they remained on opposite sides, they shared a moment of understanding—they were mothers in pursuit of a world in which no other mother would find herself in either of their shoes.
This was the start of us adjusting our approach. We began to reach out to other people who had experienced youth violence and who had appeared in legislative committees and engaged in other ways. We offered to be available to hear their concerns. In some cases, this opened the door to months of engagement that led even to facilitated restorative dialog between people who were hurt and the people who had caused it.
In March of 2023, reform proposals passed the legislature and were signed into law. A lot more took place to make that happen, but this shift in our approach was no small part. It also transformed me individually and transformed the way I approach this work.
As lawyers, we are quick to jump at opportunities to share the ways we’ve been transformed by our clients and the connections we have built on a fight for freedom. These are undoubtedly transformative moments that we should continue to share. But this work also offers us invitations to see the world and ourselves through the eyes of people who hate us for fighting for people who have irrevocably shattered their lives. If we accept the logic of the adversarial arrangements we operate in, we will look away. We will continue to feel righteous and energized by the contempt of others. By doing so, we close the door through which another world might be entered.
It is easy to close that door. With few exceptions, lawyers like me are people chasing validation. I suppose this might describe most people alive in the world. There are few who have fully let go of the pursuit of outside assurance that we are worthy of our own lives. Among lawyers in movement spaces, this trait is notably more pronounced. I suspect that quite a few of us ended up here via the well-worn path from “gifted” kid to do-gooder, from young activists to law students ready to “make a real difference.” How many of us would never have endured the demands of law school, or even pursued it at all, without telling ourselves it would make us worthy?
When working at the nexus of police and prisons, our inner conflicts are projected back to us through the lens of state violence. What then are we to do when this work inevitably leads us to realize that the everyday violences of police and prison are only made possible by the belief that worthiness is something possessed by some but not by others?
This work invites us to untangle ourselves and our identities from the grip of limiting beliefs that fuel a world of punishment and shame. It invites us to expand our view of worthiness to make room to hold everyone inside, including ourselves. And when we speak the truth of the inherent dignity and worthiness of people who have caused harm—when we speak it because we believe it—we step closer to a world without prisons.
Last week, New Mexico adjourned from the first full legislative session since banning juvenile life without parole. Since the law changed, nine people who were once condemned to die in prison have been released. Together, they served nearly 250 years behind bars. Their freedom offers a chance to witness the hearts of those who were thrown away—to see that no one is more motivated to disrupt violence than someone who has caused it.
This is a chance that many in power seem ready to decline. Like so many other places right now, New Mexico just endured a legislative session full of stubbornly recycled proposals calling for new crimes, harsher sentences, and tougher treatment of children in the criminal system. These efforts threaten to undo protections that took generations to build. And while some of the most harmful proposals were defeated, it feels less like progress but like holding the tide. But as advocates who move between the worlds of those divided into “victims” and “offenders,” we must be committed to creating bridges rather than walls between them. To do that, we must act with vulnerability and with softness. We must commit to speaking directly and honestly about harm in our work—naming plainly the harm that violence has caused while affirming, in the same breath, the dignity and humanity of those who caused it. We must step lovingly into spaces that are as tender as they are charged, to confront not only the challenges outside us but the ones in the shelter of our own hearts and minds.
We must be open to what this work shows us, including what it shows us about ourselves. It is only by being transformed by this work and by the world that we can, in turn, transform it back.
Image: Studio Pizza / Unsplash
