“I Am the School-to-Prison Pipeline”: How Terrance Roberts Plans to Fight Violence in Denver

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An unlikely mayoral candidate wants to audit law enforcement and change the way the city talks about crime.

Last Wednesday, less than two weeks before the city’s mayoral election, Denver’s East High School experienced its third shooting of the school year.

Almost immediately, Terrance Roberts was getting dozens of texts. The 46-year-old mayoral candidate posted to his Facebook page: “I just heard there was just another shooting at East High School while at Denver Elections,” he wrote. “Check on your babies.”

Austin Lyle, a 17-year-old East High student, had shot and injured two school administrators while they were conducting a routine safety pat down (a daily search prompted by Lyle’s past behavior). His body was found Wednesday evening, 50 miles away from Denver, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In February, a few weeks earlier, 16-year-old student Luis Garcia was shot in a car outside East High; he died 17 days later. Last September, just two weeks into the school year, 14-year-old student RJ Harding was shot outside of a recreation center next to the school. With Denver Public Schools closed for a “mental health day” last Friday, East High students and teachers rallied outside the state capitol for the second time this year, calling on lawmakers to take immediate action on gun violence.

Out of the 17 candidates on the ballot, Roberts is probably the most familiar with youth violence in Denver. The conversation that is now at the forefront of the Mile High City’s mayoral race is one he’s been a part of for decades.

“I am the school-to-prison pipeline,” Roberts tells me. “There’s no political candidate with this kind of experience.” 

Roberts was shot in the back in 1993 during the city’s infamous “summer of violence,” when local media’s nonstop crime coverage led to punitive legal and policy reforms for juveniles and, according to The New Republic, created “an express lane for children into adult prisons.” As TNR explained, “Those most affected were Denver’s Black youth, who made up a disproportionate share of the 46 people sentenced to life in the ’90s for crimes they committed as children.”

In 1990, at age 14, Roberts had joined a gang in Denver’s Northeast Park Hill neighborhood, which led to his incarceration, on-and-off, for 10 years. His two years spent in solitary confinement, reading Malcolm X and studying the Black Power movement, inspired him to return to Park Hill after his release, where he founded Prodigal Son, a youth violence intervention initiative. His work is also the subject of a recent documentary, The Holly, that follows Roberts’ activism in the midst of the rapidly gentrifying section of Denver. The film won the audience award at the Denver Film Festival.

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