Fredrick Dennis was walking the straight and narrow during the first half of his freshman year at Prosser Career Academy. He was a straight-A student and spent his time outside of school boxing.
“I wanted to become first in the United States so bad for Silver Gloves national boxing,” Dennis said.
Instead he placed fourth in a national competition, which made him start to lose his passion for the sport, he said. He trained less and hung out more with a friend who was in a gang. Eventually Dennis, now 26, was charged in 2010 with attempted murder and aggravated battery. He awaited trial, where he was eventually found not guilty, for two and a half years at the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center because he could not afford to post $750,000 bail, he said.
It was during this time that a neighbor put Dennis’ mother in touch with the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, which represented him. After the case, he got a job with LCLC as a youth leader and finished up high school at Collins High School, the first person in his family to do so. He went to Northern Illinois University for a few years before coming home to start his own business, Land Resolution, which coordinates landscaping and cleaning services.
“What I have found is that there are many youth just like Fredrick Dennis,” Cook County Commissioner Dennis Deer said. “All they need is an opportunity, all they need is exposure, all they need is to know that someone cares.”
Justice Rising: Project 77, whose name is derived from the group’s goal to partner with organizations from all 77 Chicago neighborhoods, is a newly founded coalition between LCLC, Breakthrough in East Garfield Park, Broader Urban Involvement & Leadership Development in Austin, and New Life Centers in Little Village. The coalition’s goal is to reduce violence by getting young people like Fredrick out of the grip of the court system through free legal representation, social services and restorative justice practices.
“This is a violence prevention, crime prevention (and) public safety initiative,” Cliff Nellis, LCLC executive director, said. “For decades we have spent billions policing, prosecuting, and incarcerating primarily Black and Latino communities in Chicago. This has led to the doling out of massive numbers of permanent, debilitating criminal records, lengthy prison sentences, and exacerbated the cycle of poverty, cycle of violence, and racial inequity in our city.”
Justice Rising bridges a gap between social and legal services, Yolanda Fields, executive director of Breakthrough, said. Breakthrough and organizations like it are able to provide support with things like education, housing and employment, but the people it helps struggle to find access to solid, affordable legal counsel.
LCLC will embed an attorney with the partner organizations to provide free legal assistance to people 25 and younger, Nellis said. Clients will be connected with a menu of social services. Lawyers will work with case managers, street outreach teams and restorative justice “circle keepers” to connect clients with workforce development programs, mentoring programs, mental health services and housing assistance programs, Nellis said.
“Too often we rely on systems composed almost exclusively of lawyers and law enforcement to do only what community (leaders) can do, and (do) best. … They are experts in holistic forms of prevention and intervention,” Nellis said.
While much of Project 77’s efforts focus on preventing crime through targeting its root causes, the coalition will also work to repair the harm done when a crime occurs, Nellis said. That will be done through restorative justice healing circles, which bring together the victim and accused as a way to humanize each party, talk about why the crime happened and how to prevent it from happening again.
“Our current system doesn’t really do much for victims,” Nellis said. “If you are a victim of a crime, you’re going to call the police, get an interview with a police officer who will take relevant information, then they’ll pass it on to the state’s attorney who will prosecute. The state’s attorney’s office will probably call you once or twice to approve of a plea deal, and that’s about it.”
Exclusively relying on police and prosecutors to solve the crime question leads to periods like Labor Day weekend, where at least 66 people — including 4-year-old Mychal “MJ” Moultry Jr., who died — were shot, which “nobody wants,” Nellis said.
The ultimate goal is to partner with enough organizations to provide legal and social services for people in all Chicago neighborhoods. The hope is to do enough research to evaluate this “alternative model of public defense,” Nellis said, and eventually turn it over to the public defender’s office.
“I heard somebody up here say a quote that I love, (by) Socrates,” Deer said at a news conference. “‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’re going to always get what you’ve always got.’ … The only way that we will deal with the violence in our communities is through projects such as this.”
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