Olivia Shields, ’20, recalls three different friends losing loved ones to gun violence when she was a kid. Active shooters were sometimes on the streets near her high school in Oakland, and a friend of hers was once carjacked at gunpoint on his way to first period. She also remembers harassment from police officers, including one friend getting pulled over more than 20 times in a single year. Other friends were navigating the criminal justice system—one is serving 25 years to life in San Quentin.
When Shields got to Stanford, she enrolled in Dance in Prison, a course exploring incarceration and confinement through the lens of performance. The course involved trips to the local juvenile hall to interact with incarcerated youth—an experience, she says, that “opened my eyes to the injustices of the juvenile legal system.” While majoring in psychology and minoring in African and African American studies, Shields interned for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. Through that work, she lobbied at the state capitol alongside formerly incarcerated individuals to seek improvements to confinement conditions.
In 2021, Shields joined the Urban Peace Institute, a nonprofit in Los Angeles that works, through training, organizing, and advocacy, to end the cycle of incarceration in local communities. She began as a policy associate and is now a policy coordinator, a position that involves collaborating with government officials on new legislation, advocating for and supporting young people in court, and organizing political education workshops for incarcerated juveniles. Confronting issues with the prison system can be discouraging, Shields says, but the relationships she has built with young people in her community motivate her. “The only difference between me and the kids who are incarcerated is the opportunities and resources I had,” she says. “My goal is to end youth incarceration, and I’m doing everything I can in my lifetime to get as close to that as possible.”
Photo: Courtesy Olivia Shields
STANFORD: What led you to your position as a policy coordinator for the Urban Peace Institute? How did your life experiences influence this decision?
Shields: I have two cousins who had serious drug problems, and they cycled in and out of jail without receiving any real help. I have an uncle who was in prison for most of my life, so I barely got to know him. The carceral system swallowed up family members rather than addressing the root causes of why they were struggling in the first place.
My pathway to my current position began in college. I was a freshman, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, but I was taking as many classes that sounded interesting to me as possible. And one of those classes that I took was called Dance in Prison. It was about what it meant to have your body be confined in a certain way, in the way that you had to move throughout a prison facility. And in that class, we were exposed to the inner workings of the juvenile justice system.
The realities of policing in America were not new to me, but it was not something that I had analyzed in a critical way until I got to college. In this class, we had the opportunity to volunteer at the Youth Services Center, the juvenile hall for San Mateo County, and I went there over the span of a quarter and got to know the young people who were incarcerated there. A lot of the young people there were from the Bay Area, and several of them were from Oakland. At the time, I was 18 years old, so I was around the same age as them. They would talk about their hopes and their dreams and what they wanted to accomplish. And it was heartbreaking but also very galvanizing for me to want to change a system that locks up children.
What motivated you to work in the nonprofit sector?
I wanted to work for an organization that had a mission aligned with my personal ethics and goals and interests. Nonprofits had a deep focus on putting those who are most impacted by the systems that we want to change at the forefront of the work.
I had lobbied at the [state] capitol with formerly incarcerated folks and watched policies get passed. All had to do with changing the criminal legal system. Some had to do with conditions of confinement, including AB 45, a bill that would ensure that incarcerated individuals could seek medical care without having to pay a copay. Others had to do with getting rid of sentence enhancements. The bill I was focused on, SB 136, authored by [state] Sen. Scott Wiener, aimed to repeal a commonly used one-year sentence enhancement.
Ella Baker Center also had reached out to individuals incarcerated at San Quentin and asked, “What do you miss in one year?” The folks at San Quentin mailed us pictures and stories of what they missed: graduations, funerals, weddings, birthdays. We blew up all of these images/writings and put them on the front lawn of the Capitol building, so that people could walk around and absorb how consequential a year really was. SB 136 passed, and the one-year sentence enhancement was successfully repealed.
I saw people come home from incarceration early as a result of the policy work that we were doing. That was the moment when I realized policy is the way that I want to go. I really want to create systemic change, but I want to make sure that whatever work I’m doing is deeply connected to the communities that are going to be most impacted by these policies.
What does your job at Urban Peace Institute look like day-to-day?
My favorite thing about my job is going to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in L.A. County. I’m usually there for around four hours, and I prepare a political education curriculum and bring that to the young people inside the facility. Recently, we’ve been working on statewide bills, and two of the units that I work with actually wrote bills that they wanted us to bring to the state level. One of the bills is called the Transfer Act. It’s about ensuring that young people who are incarcerated, who are waiting to see whether or not they will be tried as adults, get credit for the work that they’re doing while they’re currently incarcerated. When adults go to jail, however much time they spend in jail counts towards their overall sentence. But for young people, that’s not necessarily the case. A lot of them are doing what they describe as dead time right now, and our goal is to change that. We have some senators who are interested in picking up the Transfer Act bill in the next legislative cycle. So, I’m working on doing more education around how a bill becomes a law and how [youth] can personally get involved in county policy.
At the L.A. County level, policies are called motions and are introduced on Tuesdays during public [Board of Supervisors] meetings. As a part of my work, I meet regularly with the justice deputies within several of the board offices to discuss potential motions. Our political education work brings youth into these conversations with justice deputies—and other important county officials—and empowers them to influence motions through sharing their thoughts, ideas, and public comment. Public comment is a period that occurs during every Board of Supervisors meeting where people—youth included—typically have one minute to share why they do or do not support a particular motion, including sharing their personal experiences with the juvenile legal system.
My day also often includes court advocacy. So I’ll go to the courtroom where a young person has either some type of update from their lawyer or the check-in with a judge, or it can be something more serious, like they’re actually going through that transfer hearing where the judge is deciding whether to try them as an adult. And I’m there, usually for moral support. I talk to their family members. I learn what the family members might need to be supported throughout this process as their child navigates the legal system. And I also talk to other program providers, social workers, and even their lawyers to gather letters of support, to start to think through what a reentry plan might look like and how the connections that I have to organizations can make that happen.
What are some significant challenges you’ve encountered in your role?
One of the hardest things is when you’re working really closely with a young person and the system works really strongly against them, and they end up entangled in it again. There was a young person whom I mentored, and he was a brilliant artist. When he was out on bail, he ended up getting reincarcerated. Right before he was incarcerated, his current partner was pregnant, and just knowing that he was going to miss the birth of his child and miss his toddler growing up was extremely heartbreaking. It was one of those situations where, if he had been wealthy, if he had been white, if he had been a child who didn’t grow up in the foster system, a child who didn’t grow up with parents who also were incarcerated, he would have had an entirely different outcome.
The other very difficult aspect of my job is that the system will do whatever it can to survive. Its culture is rooted in punishment, neglect, and abuse. The juvenile hall was found unsuitable for the confinement of youth multiple times, and Superior Court Judge Miguel Espinoza of Los Angeles County ruled that young people need to be [moved] from this facility. Somehow, L.A. County Probation manages to just keep doing what they’re doing. That can be discouraging. Are we really going to win? How are we going to defeat something that’s so humongous?
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Definitely working with the kids incarcerated in the juvenile hall right now. As a part of the political education work that I’ve been doing, I’ve been bringing in county officials to come talk to them about what their roles are and what they do. I brought in Supervisor Janice Hahn, who’s one of the most powerful politicians in the county. I brought the public defender, Ricardo Garcia. I’ve loved seeing how they have really embraced these kids. I see sparks of joy from these kids. They face immeasurable stress and trauma every day, from being inside there, from not knowing what their future is going to hold, from thinking about the things that they’ve done, yet they are still so resilient. They want opportunities to change, so moments when we can just laugh, when we can do arts and crafts, when we can share a meal together, those are truly my favorite. I have gotten to know some of the most remarkable people that I’ve ever met inside the juvenile hall, and I just feel so honored and so lucky to be able to work with them on a regular basis.
Karis Chen, ’28, is a former editorial intern at Stanford. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
