Pacific Juvenile Defender Center

Brooke Harris is the Executive Director of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center. Brooke has over 14 years of experience in the criminal and juvenile justice field as a defense attorney and educator. Prior to joining PJDC as Executive Director, she was the Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Visiting Clinical Faculty at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. At Loyola, Brooke taught Juvenile Delinquency Law and Procedure and Advanced Criminal Litigation Skills, in addition to supervising clinical law students representing youth in delinquency court in Los Angeles County. Before her work at Loyola, she served as a public defender in Contra Costa County for five years and held a fellowship in Post-Disposition Reentry with the Gault Center, focusing on the civil legal needs of youth returning to the community after a local or state commitment in a juvenile facility. Brooke also serves as faculty with the Independent Forensic Gang Expert College, a project of the Center of Juvenile Law and Policy at Loyola Law School, which trains people in the community with former gang involvement to become independent forensic gang experts for at-risk youth charged with gang offenses and gang enhancements. Brooke has trained attorneys in California and nationally on issues racial justice, youth gang involvement and detention. From 2018-2020, she served on the Executive Steering Committee with the Board of State and Community Corrections for the Youth Reinvestment Grant. Finally, Brooke is a certified juvenile law trainer with the Gault Center.

Abraham Medina is transitioning Director of CAYCJ and the day-to-day lead of the OYCR CBO Capacity Building Initiative. Prior to these roles he served as Executive Director of the National Youth Alliance on Boys and Men of Color (NYABMOC). Abraham left Mexico City when he was seven years old with his mother and younger brother as a result of domestic violence. During the ordeal, he and his brother were separated from their mother and crossed the U.S. border experiencing family separation. Abraham grew up an undocumented person of color in the U.S., impacted by and organizing with others to challenge and transform the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline and systemic approaches to justice as we know it, through Black and Indigenous concepts, approaches and models of justice. Abraham started organizing as an undocumented high school student and has almost 20 years of organizing experience in cultivating transformative collective power for personal, community and systems transformation. From 2014 - 2016 he partnered with SAUSD, OCDE and Project Kinship to lead a team of Community Violence Intervention Workers and a team responsible for the pilot implementation of restorative practices, violence prevention programming, and RJ at a continuation school adjacent to a gang injunction zone and at the community day school, now REACH Academy. Abraham earned his B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. In 2018, he also earned a Master of Legal and Forensic Psychology from the University of California, Irvine studying under the guidance and direction of Dr. Elizabeth Cauffman and Dr. Ray Novaco.