NASW Social Work Talks - EP 144 - End False Confessions Amongst Youth

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Representatives from the #Right2RemainSilent: Children's Early Access to Counsel campaign join Social Work Talks to discuss groundbreaking youth justice legislation aimed at protecting young people during police interrogations. The coalition, made up of more than 150 organizations across New York State, is advocating for passage of the Youth Interrogation Bill, which would require that anyone under the age of 18 consult with an attorney before waiving their constitutional right to remain silent during law enforcement questioning. Leading the discussion is José Perez, Program Strategist at Children's Defense Fund – New York and an impacted individual dedicated to criminal justice reform and systemic change. This important conversation explores: The history and urgency behind the legislation The impact of false confessions on youth Racial inequities within the legal system Adolescent brain development and decision-making Why youth access to legal counsel matters

This episode of Social Work Talks is sponsored by the University of Cincinnati Online. Hello, social workers and allies. My name is Amanda Rodriguez, Policy Coordinator at the National Association of Social Workers, New York Chapter. And welcome to our third episode of the NASW New York Power of Social Work podcast, hosted through the NASW Social Work Talks series. Our mission is to equip social workers in the nation and the state with tools to support vital and trending advocacy issues. Today, we are sitting with Jose Perez, Program Strategist at the Children's Defense Fund New York. He is an advocate, an individual with lived experience, and a strong voice in this movement

to protect youth from waiving their Miranda rights during police interrogation. Jose, please introduce yourself to the social workers who are listening today. Hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me here, Amanda. So my name is Jose Perez. I'm a program strategist at the New York office at the Children's Defense Fund. And I use my lived experience in both the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system, as well as the adult criminal legal system to uplift my story, to affect change. too. I consider myself an honorary young person. So I speak, I want to speak and be the voice for young people today. And in my experience, having come home, coming home for after 20 years of prison, I realized how, you know, a lot of the injustice that was going on back when I was a kid is still going on today. And it's something that I would, that my life, I am, I'm dedicated my life to, to affecting change in my community. And in this way, this is how I give back by using my

story, using my platform to uplift and recognize and center the voices of young people. Thank you so much, Jose. I'm Gideon Mossa. I am also a policy coordinator here at the National Association of Social Workers, New York. And let's just get started. The first thing I really want to ask is when it comes to Right to Remain Silent, give us a 30-second elevator pitch on what y'all are doing, what you guys are fighting for, the big things you want to get done. So the big things that we want to get done is like plain and simple. We want children under the age of 18 that come in contact with the police. We want young people to not waive their Miranda rights. The Right to Remain Silent Act is also known as the Children's Early Access

to Counsel, and it would require a consultation with the lawyer before police interrogations for young people under the age of 18. And anything obtained in violation of this rule would be admissible in court. Thanks, Jose. And so now we'll back it up a little bit for our listeners and go a little bit into the background of this issue and how we got to this part. And so some statistics on national wrongful convictions and false confessions. In 2024, of the 147 exonerations that occurred, 35% of them were no crime cases. And these 551 exonerations included wrongful convictions for drug possession, murder, child sex abuse, and 78% of exonerations last year, 115 out of 147, were people of color. So that is nearly 60% of these exonerations were Black individuals. And so when we look at this conversation, it is mostly a racial equity issue.

And it is really important to note that this is happening in New York State, New York City, but also in the whole nation as there's fatigue around police interrogations, especially since the Black Lives Matter movement occurred in 2020. and people are losing years to being wrongfully imprisoned over committing a crime that they did not do. And especially youth, when you're developing between the ages of 14 to 18, you don't understand that you have a right to remain silent. And so could you just speak a little bit about the effect across the nation that this issue has, that youth don't have their rights protected and also narrow that down to then how that is applied to New York? Just off the top, like, you know, I think of Washington state, right? Who has some of the strongest protections in the country. So since 2021, police must provide a juvenile access to

an attorney before questioning them or any kind of detention based interrogation or even request for searches. That consultation cannot be waived, not by a child, not for a child under the age of 18, and not by a parent. If the police fail to do that, then those statements that were made during that interrogation can be suppressed. And when we talk about this, even like California, for example, California also requires legal consultation before many of the custodial interrogations of minors, particularly the younger youth, Illinois as well, Maryland, Nevada, Utah, like all of these several states have laws in place to protect children during police interrogation. Now, when it comes to New York, right, New York is not leading in this place, right? It's trying to catch

up right now in most places in the U.S., right? Children can still technically waive their Miranda rights on their own. But in New York in particular, a young person can waive their Miranda rights, and they're waiving it at a 90% rate, right? 90% of young people who are getting interrogated by police are waiving their Miranda rights, which tells us that they don't really understand the the benefit of having that right. They don't understand the ramifications of having their right to remain silent taken away from them. And as a result, young people are three times more likely to falsely confess for something that they don't do. We know the science that young people's brains are not fully developed, especially at an age in which they are in that

developmental stage, right? And because of police tactics, police are lawfully required or lawfully able to lie to a person during interrogation, right? And to lie to a young person who's in a difficult situation and cannot fully understand the consequences of their actions, you know, it pits them against each other, right? And that's why we have these false confessions happening at a rapid rate. Yeah, it's honestly super interesting to hear about New York State and how it compares in general to the nation, because obviously we're so used to being quite progressive, I guess. But this sounds like one of those situations that New York is still a little bit behind the ball in comparison to some other states. Outside of that, though, the Central Park

five cases, one of the most well-known cases and examples of youth being coerced into false confessions. So firstly, I'd just like to ask you to give a brief rundown of that case. And then also, how much does that case still resonate with the work you're doing today? Before I talk about that case, just to give you a framing of why that case in particular is important to me personally, as well as this campaign, is because when I was arrested in 2001, when I was 16 years old, two months after my 16th birthday, and I ended up being charged as an adult and being given a sentence of 20 years to life for the crimes that I committed. Now, I did what I did, what I what I what I what I was accused of being.

And I'm not I'm not proud of that in any shape, form or fashion. However, there were things that happened to me during the police interrogation that that required me to admit that I was that I did when I did it. I didn't do any of those things. Right. And it was because of those police tactics. Right. So so before my case happened in 2001, we know about the Central Park jogger case where five black and Latino children drag were dragged into interrogation rooms and they were psychologically coerced into falsely confession, publicly demonized and robbed of their youth. These kids were 16 years old. They were called animals before they were ever called children. Right. The world watched their faces splash across the television screen on newspapers everywhere. And they treated these young kids from a position of power with fear and confusion. these kids were vulnerable. And because of that, that was their evidence of guilt rather than the evidence of their childhood, right? They were afraid. And they were forced to admit to something that they didn't do. So now, 30 years later, right, we have DNA evidence that showed that

they weren't even linked to that crime at all, right? So we don't call them the Central Park five anymore. We call them the exonerated five. They are the exonerated five because they didn't do what we were accusing them of doing. And what disturbs me is that it happened in a state that failed to pass a law strong enough to ensure that that doesn't happen again. This happened to children, to children. And yet we live in a state where laws are often named after victims of tragedy, right? We have the laws created because collectively we agree that certain harms should never repeat themselves. We have systems like the Amber Alert, for example, right? The Amber Alert is something that was named after a young boy, right? Whose last name was Amber, right? And a

young boy or young girl, if I'm not mistaken, I'm sorry if I misspoke on that, but this law was passed as a result of a travesty happening to a young child. And now we have that in place, right? And we have several laws like that, that we named after the victims in which they were hurt and were harmed. We don't have that for the exonerated five. These were 16-year-old black boys, black boys who were dragged across media, and we still don't have any protections to prevent an exonerated five from happening again. I truly love bringing power back to the five by relabeling them, the exonerated five. And I'm sure what you just spoke to resonated with a lot of the audience as, you know, you're taught in school to tell the truth if you do something wrong,

because if you tell your teacher, then you're being honest and you're more likely to then move past that incident. However, when you're dealing with the police, it's a much different setting that, you know, youth, they can't apply what they're learning in school to a police interrogation. And there's nothing their parents, the school, or their community can do to prepare them for that instance when they're sitting in an interrogation room with none of their loved ones and a police officer that is using manipulative tactics to just solve a case. They are not looking to necessarily provide justice to the full extent of the law, which is obviously what the goal is most of the time, but they want to solve a case. And that can sometimes come in

between finding the real perpetrator to then just accepting a false confession from a young person that was anxious in that moment, that didn't necessarily understand their full protection under the law and also didn't understand their legal right to counsel before they speak to a police during the interrogation. And I understand that you had a situation where you overshared to the police and you didn't fully understand your Miranda rights as, you know, when you're 16, you're just a baby, you know, you're not in the world yet. And that's not something that you can fully comprehend. And so could you just walk us through your process when you were speaking to the police if you can remember um you know it was many years ago i understand but what was your

mindset looking like when you walked into that interrogation with the police so that wasn't the first time in 2001 wasn't the first time that i was interrogated by the police and was you and fear tactics was used right like i walked into the interrogation room thinking uh like like i didn't walk in there thinking like a lawyer right like or thinking like an adult uh like like or even like someone fully capable of understanding what was going on and what was going to happen after this talk that i was going to have with police officers right i walked in there thinking about survival i was also a foster care child so our young people have these uh uh these these contacts with other systems you know um and and for me i had my contact was with the family policing

system also known as the child welfare system and like i was thinking to myself like how did i get here even though i'm the one who was arrested for the the i was arrested you know uh it's like how do i get home uh how do i make these adults stop pressuring me you know like these are the type of questions that, you know, I was kind of like thinking about and being vulnerable to authority figures, right? In class, in school, they teach you, listen to the police, right? They teach you that the police officers are good. But in a lot of instances, because police officers, like you said, are like so eager to solve a case, right? They have these tactics to kind of like pit me against other folks. So they will say, I already know that you did it. I already know that you did

that. I already know that you was there because such and such was saying that you were there. And I'm like, oh, wow, someone is lying on me. But now I got to confess to saying that I did it just so that I can get out of trouble. You know, at the time I was living with a foster care parent, with foster care parents, my first time getting arrested was when I was 13. At 13 years old, I was sent to the boat, right? I was sent to the barge.

I was sent to what is known today as the, well, it was, there's a new spot for this, Crossroads. So I was in Crossroads when I was a young boy. Being in that place, I got myself in that place because I couldn't, I didn't know how to keep my mouth shut as a child. As 13 years old, I was saying anything and anything that I can to get myself out of trouble without getting other people in trouble. So whatever they said that I did, I was saying, yeah, I did it. Yeah, I did it. I'm sorry. I'm not going to do it again. Just let me go. Please just let me go. Yeah, I did it.

But that mentality that I had was in the mentality of protection. It wasn't a mentality of being lawful or anything like that. You know, it was a mentality of survival. And I end up confessing to things I did not do. Right. Like I wasn't there. So like young people are especially vulnerable in these situations because police are trained interrogators.

Right. And children are not trained to navigate coercion or intimidation or deception. Like even adults have a hard time navigating during these interrogations. Now, I'm not saying that we should like, you know, go and like change this whole dynamic. But a young person who does not understand fully the consequences of the action for them to waive a right that can protect them is an unjust thing. Right. We can that that's that's a big problem that we have and we shouldn't allow it. We shouldn't allow it because 90 percent of folks are being interrogated and waiving their rights. and they are three times more likely to falsely confess.

If this is a problem, a systemic problem that we know for a fact, right? Why are we continuing on this systemic injustice? For me, it's like, all right, you want this. You want this to happen. You want this system is working exactly the way it should By making our neighborhoods these carceral, having carceral systems in our neighborhoods, being over surveilled, cameras everywhere, police stopping people, different forms of stopping frisk today that we see in our neighborhoods. And it's a repetitive nature where we are pitting law enforcement against our young people. And as a result, we put in law enforcement against families. And as a result of that, we put in law enforcement against whole entire communities that they are supposed to be designed to protect, but they're not.

Yeah. And getting into that, I mean, there are obvious consequences to having the system build as it is right now, right? And so I guess the next question I really have is kind of two-pronged, but that would be what are the long-term impacts on the young person's life after a false confession? And then also just talking about the long-term impact societally, when you don't have these safeguards for our youth, how does it affect a society in general? Even if they're eventually exonerated, there has to be these long-term impacts that I'm talking about, right? For me, it reshaped my identity. As a foster care child, I always was dreaming about having a family one day. And because I was sent to prison at a very young age, it kind of reshaped my way of thinking and identity. And it also fractured my dreams to ever be a part of a family, to ever be a part of a community. And I think that that weakens society's trust in justice itself. Right. Like like for children, the consequences can be lifelong. A young person who is pressured into confessing, especially when they didn't do anything, often experiences deep psychological trauma. And I think that many, many folks carry a long, long-term anxiety like myself, depression, hypervigilance, shame, distrust of institutions.

You know, imagine being a child and realizing that the adults who were supposed to protect you instead manipulated you, manipulated your fear against you. You know, that changes how a person understands authority, safety, and even their own voice. So for children who are incarcerated, as a result, the impact becomes developmental, right? Like adolescence is supposed to be a time of identity formation, right? This is the time where we're absorbing everything that we're seeing. We're enjoying the music. We're learning how to grow emotionally, you know, but instead, right, what happens is that we learn about survival more than we learn more about self-discovery. Right. And you lose critical years of social development, of family relationships and educational opportunities, emotional stability. So like I came home decades later after having spent most of my life in institutions. And I'm one of the lucky ones because not everybody my age, not everybody that went through what I went through came out, was able to come out of prison with a master's degree, educated and be able to come and work for Children's Defense Fund and advocate for young people.

Like I'm lucky. I'm so lucky and I'm blessed to be in a position that I am in now. but a lot of my peers weren't able to do that. So the impact on society is equally profound when children are wrongfully convicted, the actual harm remains unsolved, right? Like you can't even reconcile the actual act with the community because the real perpetrator often remains free. So like false confessions distort investigations rather than strengthen them. And beyond that, You know, these these cases, it also arose the public interest, the public trust in the legal system. Right. Communities begin to see constitutional rights not as guarantees, but as privileges that are uneven, that that if you were in a if you were in a different neighborhood, your rights probably would have been affirmed, you know, as opposed to an over surveilled urban community. Right. Privileges are unevily applied depending on the race, class, age or the neighborhood that you're in.

So and there's also a moral cost, man, like a society willing to coerce children into confessing in order to secure conviction convictions like that begins normalizing punishment over truth and also cases over children. Right. Like and when it happens repeatedly to black and brown youth, entire generations grow up understanding that the legal system is is is not protective, is used as surveillance and control. So ultimately, for me, the question is not only what happens to the child in the interrogation room. The question is, like, what kind of society we become when we fail to protect our own children. This episode of Social Work Talks is sponsored by the University of Cincinnati Online. Are you looking to advance your impact in social work? The University of Cincinnati's Online Bachelors of Social Work is designed for working professionals ready to take their next step. Learn 100% online with opportunities for field education in your local community.

Build skills and advocacy, case management, and community support. Prepare for professional social work roles and future graduate study. Explore the online Bachelor of Social Work from UC at online.uc.edu slash BSW. Thanks, Jose. And social workers understand for far too long what happens when trust erodes in the system. And we see that a lot in the mental health space as well, as social workers are taught through their training and licensure to understand trauma-informed ways to approach situations. And I'm sure that, you know, a youth that has gone through such a traumatic event will have to then

eventually seek care to, you know, deal with the different repercussions of the atrocity that occurred in their life. And social workers understand far too much how people are less likely to seek care if they don't have a trust in the system as well when it comes to mental health specifically. And, you know, I just want to quickly plug in, you know, Cielo Baino, the senator from Long Island, has been working to put social workers in libraries. And, you know, this is definitely a very interesting notion that the New York chapter has been supporting in the budget this year because there are a few community staples that people trust, that they're more like to be connected to their community with and to have social workers be in libraries where people

go for community events, to learn, to have a safe and healthy environment. People are more likely to access resources through that way. And I do want to keep talking a little bit about youth specifically and why they are so likely to waive their Miranda rights. Your one pager for advocating for the bill states that 90% of young people interrogated by police actually waive their Miranda rights. And so why do you think young people are so likely to waive their Miranda rights when it comes to these instances? So young people are more susceptible to waiving those rights because they just do not fully understand the protections that a Miranda right is it's hard for a young person to navigate um consequences of of trauma of family separation

incarceration um um fear uh it's hard for young people to respond in a protective way when they're going through all that emotional instability um because their brains are not fully developed Right. Like they are using more of their frontal lobe, which they use in more of their frontal lobe uses more of their impulsive ways as opposed to their consequential thinking. Right. I'm not no scientist, but like scientists have this, you know, the science out there. And we've we've actually changed laws due to the scientific studies and the scientific testimonies of those practitioners that have testified in court. That's why they're so susceptible. But not to mention, not to mention that is happening mostly in over surveilled communities. Right. It's more black and brown young people being the ones interrogated for these these these alleged crimes. So we also know that social workers often work directly with court-involved youth. What role do you see social workers supporting this movement in helping youth fully understand their rights, but also advocating for this movement in general to bring more awareness to youth that they have their Miranda rights available and in passing this bill as well?

Well, first of all, social workers, right, especially clinical clinicians, clinical social workers, right, are often among the first professionals to witness the emotional development to consequences of policing and and family separation, incarceration and trauma. trauma, right? They see how fear and surveillance, instability can shape a child's nervous system, right? Identity, their relationships. They see how it affects their ability to trust the world around them. So to me, that means that like social workers, they occupy a unique position, not only to support healing after harm occurs, but to advocate against the conditions created the harm in the first place, right? Social workers in particular understand something the legal system often struggles to recognize, that behavior does not happen in a vacuum, right? Children respond to fear and authority and isolation and coercion developmentally and emotionally.

A lawyer may focus on whether a confession was legally admissible, but a clinical social worker can help society understand why a child may confess falsely in the first place. They can explain the psychological realities of compliance, attachment disruption, suggestibility in adolescent brain development. So this distinction really matters. Lawyers are trained to defend the rights within the framework, while social workers are trained to understand human behavior. And that's just the bottom line. Systems, environments, and healing is what social workers really have priorities on. Lawyers can ask, was this legal? Right. And, you know, social workers can ask, was this humane? You know, was this appropriate? Social workers should not see themselves as separate from justice work. In many ways, they are like frontline witnesses to the structural violence that's happening in our community. You know, if clinical social workers only treat the aftermath of systemic harm without challenging the systems themselves, they risk like becoming managers of trauma rather than the advocates for transformation. We don't need social workers to be our lawyers, but we need them to bring something equally necessary in a justice movement. You know, and that's being able to give the courts the language of healing, the language of dignity, of treating someone with respect and care and understanding that, you know, lawyers and social workers can work hand in hand and help a society understand the lifelong emotional consequences of convicting someone after they don't falsely confess to something because they were too young. To understand that a Miranda rights gives you the right to shut up, to keep your mouth shut.

But to just to just your right to remain silent. Right. You have that right to say nothing and allow a lawyer to do their job. I absolutely understand that. And I'm going to go into something that this might be a narrative that I just have. But when I imagine a youth or a child being arrested by the cops, I have this picture in my head of that interrogation room. And often in that picture, I think of a parent being there with the child and the parent even giving pressure sometimes to the child to just start talking to a cop, et cetera, something like that. Firstly, I don't know the statistics well enough to say if that's commonplace. There's a parent in the room always or not. Love for you to get into that with us.

And then also on top of that, though, when there is a parent in the room, I'd like you to go a bit into detail about how that's not the same thing as having your Miranda rights, is having the right to remain silent, right? Why isn't having a parent present during questioning considered enough of a safeguard in general, that being in the nation, etc.? And please also elaborate on on my narrative of I feel like there's always that parent in that room or something like that. I know I've seen videos of stuff like that happening in interrogation rooms and that can lead to negative effects. Definitely, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parents are emotionally connected to their children. They are not necessarily equipped to protect the child's constitutional rights. You know, especially inside an interrogation room where police officers are literally lying and and saying things that that that that excite fear in a parent. That's one of the common responses to this proposal, you know, for our right to remain silent act is why can't a parent just be present during interrogation? Right. Why? Why? Why? You just why? She's an adult. He's an adult. They can help. Right. But the question is misunderstood because the pressure of police interrogation and the role of parents are two different things.

You know, police hold institutional authority in those spaces, you know, in my house, my mother or my father owns the authority, you know, like they say what goes in the house. But when it comes to a police precinct, a place or wherever where the police decides to start an interrogation, a parent is intimidated as well, you know, and they may feel powerless and overwhelmed or pressured to just trust law enforcement. Right. Some parents fear being viewed as uncooperative, you know, like if I'm not doing what they're saying that my child is going to get in trouble. police know this police know that right they they're gonna work that they're gonna work that to the most especially if they see a way in which they can get uh some you to say something that will blow the case up open and will allow them to like you know get a win you know that's what they live for that's what they get paid for right so like that's something that you know like others may not realize that police are legally allowed to use deception during interrogations uh in many

jurisdictions. So while parents may be physically present, they are not functioning as trained legal advocates that can really tell a child what they should be saying or what they should be doing, what to answer, what not to answer. What's an unfair question? What's a fair question? You know, lawyers serve a fundamentally different role. You know, a defense attorney is ethically and professionally obligated to protect your legal rights. A parent doesn't even know what rights to protect. A lot of folks don't even know what the Miranda rights is. So imagine a child. So what we want is that to be an unwaverable right for young people. If a young person doesn't understand what they're doing, we're not going to allow them to do it. We don't allow young people

to buy cigarettes uh tobacco products weed alcohol we don't allow our children to vote we don't allow our children to enter in the military we don't allow our children to do any of these things even if they told us that they wanted to do it because we know that they can they they don't even understand the the full consequences they can't even appreciate appreciated, right? So we say do not. We say do not allow young people to waive their Miranda rights because they have no clue what it is. And a Miranda right is something that protects you in a court of law. So even if you did something or you didn't do something, it's best as a young person just keep their mouth shut so that they can be able to have a better chance at fighting

their case right um and that's something that's something that's very very important yes and and we know that parents have their best interests of their children in minds but often don't know the law as you said or maybe a child doesn't have parents in their lives um to call on for help and in that situation of course they're alone in that room let's not forget at the exonerated five they had their parents present. Some of them had their parents present during those interrogations. And at different stages, they falsely confessed after hours and hours of exhaustion and manipulation and coercion. You know, the presence of a parent alone just does not protect them from the machinery that is this system. Right. And I think that I think that that

heads us towards our conclusion. But just as a brief last question, this is getting into right to remain silent in general, but you already touched on it a bit, but how did this coalition really come together? And you've grown to over a hundred organizations now, which is huge. That's great. And what can everyday New Yorkers do to support the bill right now? I think we're really hoping to get this stuff passed, right? And y'all have already done great work so far, but we're just here to help, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what folks can do now is contact your your local representative contact your local legislature you know if you live in new york state uh uh and let them know that you are for the passage of the right to remain silent act

um you can contact us i don't know if we're gonna put you know our contact information um um but we are on um um x at right to remain uh uh si1 um um and we also have a gmail account that you can email us to get involved uh the right to remain silent um 2022 gmail.com you can contact me at jay perez at childrensdefense.org uh uh so like you we would love for you to get involved uh we have different ways and you can where you can get involved with where from you can get right letters uh uh to your representative we'll write them for you all you got to do is just Senate. And you can also get involved in our public advocacy days. You can get involved. And if you want to come up when we do our public advocacy days, you can get involved and come up

on a bus and we'll pay for your transportation and your food to get this passed. Senator Jamal Bailey is our main sponsor on the Senate side and Assembly Member Hevesy is our main sponsor on the Assembly side. So we want to protect young people's lives. So I hope that, you know, you can get yourself involved. What was the other question again? Sorry. I was just I was just discussing. Y'all got the ball rolling.

You have a hundred, over a hundred organizations you got going on. So what do you think was the key factor in that? What do you think was the key factor in your ability to growth and how did it come together at the start? To tell the truth, I can't answer that question. I wasn't here at the beginning of the, when the coalition first started, just, just like off the top. Like, I think that people are just, they care about what's going on with our young people,

right? When organizations like the Children's Defense Fund, Youth Represent, Bronx Connect, like we come in contact with young people every single day and we see how amazing they are. We see how important their lives are. And we also see the surveillance and we also see the travesty of communities just getting lack of funding, removing funding. We see the reasons why young people are getting pit against law enforcement and pit against these nasty consequences that results in them being either in crossroads or horizons, which are juvenile detention centers in New York City, or just being lost in a system where it's just a cycle of recidivism. And it's because we are not supporting them. And what we need to do alongside, because we also have bills to try to bring more money into our communities to help our young people get into these spaces. But we need to do something where we can protect those who are most vulnerable, protect those who are getting in trouble the most, who are coming in contact with the police. We need to protect those young people as well. And our, you know, organizations and our partners are truly, truly dedicated to that fight. You know, yeah, they're truly, truly dedicated to that fight, especially in our neighborhoods.

Thank you so much, Jose. And you heard it here today. New York must pass S-878C with Senator Bailey and A-2620B, sponsored by Hevesy and the Assembly, children's early right and access to counsel. And social workers, it is your ethical duty to get engaged and active in politics. If you are looking to join the right to remain silent, we are advocating as coalition partners with the NASW New York chapter. You can join our Advocacy and Government Relations Committee, or AGR, or our Political Action through Candidate Election Committee PACE to get involved in advocacy at the National Association of Social Workers New York, and to use your voice as a social worker to not only give an experience on what you see happening within the system, but also to give your experience to shape our systems, to be for people and not against people, and to help trauma-informed systems be created to be able to help our young people develop into full and thriving adults

and to not suppress their growth before the age of 18 and before their most vital years in their development. And so thank you so much, Jose, for being with us here today. Our email to get more involved in NASW New York is info.naswny at socialworkers.org. You can also find us on Instagram at naswnewyork and on TikTok with our new TikTok at nasw.new.york.

So please stay engaged. Please reach out to the right to remain silent and get engaged in passing this bill as it's already passed the assembly. So we just need to pass through one more house. We got to get the Senate on board with this. And then on to the governor, Kathy Hochul, to hopefully put that pen to use and sign this bill into law, because we already have the right to invoke counsel. However, we need to ensure youth are not waiving that right. And so thank you so much, Jose, for all your work you do to advocate on behalf of your communities and on behalf of your younger self to then see this into fruition in New York. And we hope that other states across the nation will follow this lead, as we know that this bill has already been adopted in several other states. And now it is time to have this be on the same page across the nation. Thank you so much for listening to our episode today, and we hope to get engaged more with you social workers.