Kristin Henning

Youth today are experiencing record levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma. Approximately 72% of children in the United States will have experienced at least one major stressful event, such as witnessing violence, experiencing abuse, or suffering the loss of a loved one by the age of 18. For many young people, policing helps relieve trauma. Police might arrest an abusive parent, break up a fight, or respond to crime in the community. But for some youth, policing itself is traumatic. Kristin Henning explores the devasting and long-term impact of racial bias and over-policing of children of color.

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing young people in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational and manufactured fears of Black youth and makes a compelling case that the nation’s obsession with policing and incarcerating Black America begins with Black children. Unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and denied the privilege of healthy adolescent development. Weaving together powerful narratives and persuasive data, Henning examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, the demonization of Black fashion, hair, and music, and the discriminatory impact of police in schools.

For many people of color, the daily surveillance and discriminatory encounters with police are overwhelming and traumatic. In an engaging and interactive style, Kristin Henning helps the audience understand how racial bias and trauma affect every stage of a criminal case including search and seizure, police interrogation, pre-trial detention, prosecutorial discretion, mens rea, sentencing, and post-conviction proceedings.

Henning explores the “reasonable person” standard in the criminal law and considers its impact on racial disparities within the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Kristin Henning pays special attention to the unique interplay between race and adolescence in a typical police-youth encounter and considers how race and adolescence affect every critical question in Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) analysis and beyond. For example: to what extent does a child’s race affect the court’s objective inquiry about whether a police-youth encounter is a seizure? To what extent does the child’s race affect the voluntariness of the child’s consent?  How does a child’s race impact the officers’ interpretation of a child’s behavior on the street as suspicious? Henning explores these questions and more in this powerful analysis.

In this workshop, Kristin Henning examines racial bias as a real and lived experience for Black and brown people involved in the juvenile and criminal legal systems. She teaches systems’ actors to recognize their own biases and develop strategies to counter them. Her workshops identify dehumanizing language and attitudes that drive the criminal system and give participants concrete skills to interrupt bias as it occurs.