Community Fights Battle Against Juvenile Prison in Alameda

Books Not Bars & Youth Force Score Stunning \'Upset\' Win;
Activists Block Money To Build \'Biggest\' Juvenile Hall In U.S.

A Youth-Led Movement Against Prisons Is Gathering Steam

\"What we have just witnessed is the first solid victory in California for what is clearly a growing, youth-led movement against the prison industry.\" - Rachel Jackson, Books Not Bars

By: Books Not Bars Campaign

(SAN DIEGO; Thursday, May 17, 2001) - Chanting, waving placards and raising 70 clenched fists in the air, a colorful throng of youth and their allies marched into the \"belly of the beast\" today - flooding and overflowing the stuffy confines of a California Board of Corrections (BOC) meeting.

The youth\'s mission: to convince the BOC to deny pre-approved state funding for Alameda County\'s effort to build the biggest per capita juvenile hall in the country.

As they looked at the all-white panel of stone-faced \"suits\" who make up the BOC - a body that has presided over perhaps the largest prison boom in the world - even the lead organizers doubted whether the youth could pull it off.

But - at the eleventh hour and against all odds - the young crusaders accomplished the impossible.

Activist after youthful activist spoke passionately against spending more money on expanding the state\'s juvenile halls - at a time when youth crime is dropping and the state\'s schools are crumbling. The young advocates presented arguments, numbers and personal testimonies. One even serenaded the BOC with a \"freedom song\" about Harriet Tubman rescuing youth through the underground railroad.

The BOC members listened patiently, argued among themselves for about 20 minutes and then stunned Alameda County officials - voting 10-2 to reject their $2.3 million funding request.

In the wake of the decision, formerly smug county officials scurried out a side door without comment. Meanwhile, the youth and their allies exploded into wild cheering. One of the anti-incarceration movement\'s signature chants - \"Ain\'t no power like the power of the people! \'Cause the power of the people don\'t stop!\" - boomed like thunder in the crowded hearing room.

\"Once again, California\'s youth activists have \'upset the set-up\' and \'set up the upset,\'\" said an exuberant Fela Thomas, of the Youth Force Coalition, which represents more than 30 youth organizations in the Bay Area. \"People are gonna have to learn that you can\'t mess with California\'s youth, ya\'ll!\"

ACTION DERAILS FUNDING FOR BIGGEST PER CAPITA JUVIE IN U.S.
\"This one proposal would have propelled Alameda County into the sad position of being the per capita leader in the nation, with more kids locked up as a percentage of population than any other county in America,\" said Rachel Jackson, state field director of the Books Not Bars Campaign (BNB). BNB is the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights\' new effort to expose and end the widespread over-incarceration of youth.

\"We were able to persuade the biggest pro-incarceration state board in the country to give this monstrous proposal a big thumbs-down,\" Jackson said. \"What we have just witnessed is the first solid victory in California for what is clearly a growing, youth-led movement against the prison industry - nation-wide.\"

Alameda County officials have been pushing for two years to build a massive \"Juvenile Complex,\" to replace its present 330-bed juvenile hall. The expansion would give Alameda County, with 1.5 million people, a juvenile hall with 540 beds. By comparison, Chicago, home to 5 million people, has a smaller juvenile hall, with only 498 beds. The Alameda County hall would also be bigger than the ones in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Alameda County officials had expected the BOC to give them state money to help pay for this expansion. The $2.3 million funding request, which had been pre-approved by a BOC executive steering committee, was merely awaiting what is usually a \"rubber-stamp\" vote of approval from the full Board.

County officials had been so confident of their proposal\'s success that Probation Department Head Sylvia Johnson initially had declined even to speak on its behalf. But as the cumulative impact of the activists\' testimony began to visibly sway the BOC members, the county officials scrambled clumsily to respond.

\"I\'ve never seen anything like this,\" said Van Jones, with the Ella Baker Center and BNB. \"One kid with a magic marker and a poster board went in there and just blew away all of the county\'s experts and statistics and double-talk. Our youth had done their homework, and they left these big-time county officials stammering and looking bewildered.\"

\"We told them that the state should be spending more money to keep kids out of jails, not spending millions of dollars to put more youth in jail,\" said Adam Gold, executive director of Oakland\'s Youth Empowerment Center (YEC).

The YEC, located inside a renovated Oakland warehouse, houses the Youth Force Coalition. It has served as the central headquarters in the struggle to stop the massive expansion of Alameda County\'s juvenile hall.

\"A lot of people thought that maybe last year\'s big, anti-Prop 21 youth protests were just a one-time flash in the pan,\" said Omana Imani, of Youth Force. \"But this victory proves without a doubt that a really powerful youth movement against the incarceration industry is just getting started.\"

Proposition 21, a ballot measure passed by California voters in March 2000, pushes 14-year-olds into adult courts and 16-year-olds into adult prisons.

STATEWIDE SOLIDARITY & MOVEMENT BUILDING WAS KEY
In a remarkable show of statewide solidarity, the L.A.-area Criminal Justice Consortium, Youth Organizing Communities, Southern Californians for Youth and the Environmental Health Coalition turned out to support the Bay Area activists, along with activists from the Ruckus Society.

Also, several Chaplains from the Department of Detention Ministry of the Archdiocese of L.A. testified against the expansion of juvenile halls statewide.

In addition to demanding that the BOC not fund Alameda\'s expansion, the assembled activists also demanded that the BOC reverse its overall funding criteria.

The youth advocates say BOC should deny funds to counties that over-crowd their halls with too many youth - giving the money instead to counties like Santa Cruz, which create successful alternatives to locking up kids. They opposed the state spending any money to build bigger juvenile halls anywhere in the state.

\"This is a statewide movement, and we went down there not just to stick up for Oakland, but to say, \'Don\'t expand juvenile halls anywhere in the state, period,\'\" said Rory Caygill, of the Youth Force Coalition. \"We will not consider this a true victory until we have stopped all of the expansions throughout California.\"

But on that score, the youth-led forces were handed a defeat. Over the objections of the assembled advocates, the BOC did approve spending $130 million statewide to repair or expand juvenile halls in 10 other counties - from Yolo County and Napa, to Los Angeles and San Diego. As a result, the state will see a net gain of more than 750 jail cells for children statewide.

Bay Area activists say that\'s unacceptable, and plan to continue the fight - working with local youth activists across the state to derail these expansions at the county level.

MANY ORGANIZATIONS PLAYED KEY ROLES IN VICTORY
Youth Force and BNB can expect a great deal of continued support in the ongoing fight. Many, many organizations had a hand in today\'s win.

Youth Force\'s member organizations that sent representatives to San Diego included: AYPAL/Asian Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy & Leadership, Jewish Youth For Community Action, Let\'s Get Free 510 (formerly Third Eye Movement 510), LYRIC/Lavender Youth Recreation & Information Center, Young Women United for Oakland, YMAC/Youth Making A Change and WILD/Women\'s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights,.

Numerous progressive non-profit \"intermediaries\" also played indispensable roles. The Data Center\'s Ryan Pintado-Vertner worked overtime and fed critical, strategic research to Youth Force and BNB. The country\'s leading progressive media activist and media training organization, We Interrupt This Message, assisted with the press work. By providing political education and training for the participating youth groups, Oakland\'s SOUL/School of Unity & Liberation helped lay the groundwork for the victory.

\"This was the same alliance of youth organizations and youth-supporting organizations that produced the dramatic mobilizations last year against Prop 21,\" said Harmony Goldberg, co-founder and director of SOUL. \"The only difference is that last year, we lost. This time, we won.\"

Youth activists also borrowed heavily from the ideas and vision of adult juvenile justice reformers, like the Annie E. Casey Foundation\'s Bart Lubow and the Youth Law Center\'s James Bell. Additionally, the youth benefited from the active support of movement veterans like Fran Beale, of the Black Radical Congress and California\'s Racial Justice Coalition; Beale used the internet to mobilize support for the campaign.

\'AIRLIFT\' GETS BAY AREA YOUTH TO CHANGED MEETING SITE
Bay Area youth advocates had to struggle just to be present at the historic vote. The BOC meeting was originally set for Sacramento. But after Youth Force and BNB protested at the executive steering committee meeting there in April, the BOC decided to switch its full board meeting site to the other end of the state.

Undeterred, the groups raised money to fly 25 Bay Area activists down to the San Diego meeting. Many committed crusaders had to get up at 4 a.m. to make their early morning flights and attend the 9:30 a.m. meeting in the southern part of the state.

\"We thought it was important that the Board of Corrections not be able to escape our community input simply by changing the meeting location,\" BNB\'s Jackson said. \"So I don\'t think the BOC will try that stunt with us again. They know that they can\'t run and hide and get away from us now.\"

Both Youth Force and BNB have their strongest bases of support in northern California.

\"The BOC did us a huge favor by forcing us to reach out to cultivate more allies statewide,\" Caygill said. \"We turned out bigger numbers down here in San Diego today than we had up in Sacramento, in our own back yard. So now we are even stronger.\"

NEXT: MASSIVE PRESSURE TO KILL EXPANSION AT LOCAL LEVEL
Opponents of the expansion say they are not worried that pro-incarceration forces in the county may try to build a huge facility anyway, using money from local bonds.

Youth Force and BNB believe that they are one vote away from also stopping the expansion idea at the local level - once and for all. Those two organizations successfully persuaded Alameda County Supervisors Keith Carson and Nate Miley to vote last Monday against the county accepting any state money for an expansion.

If they can win over swing-voting Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker, an Asian-American community activist who was recently appointed to her office, the opponents of the expansion will also command a 3-2 majority on the county board.

\"I\'m confident that, if we can beat this at the state level, we can beat it at the county level,\" BNB\'s Jackson said. \"As far as I\'m concerned, any idea of building a radically expanded juvenile hall in Alameda County can now be renamed: \'Sylvia Johnson\'s Sinking Ship,\'\"

\"I just hope the forces of evil in Alameda County will have enough good sense to read the handwriting on the wall, repent and just give up this whole sick idea,\" Jones said. \"If they don\'t - the youth are just going to keep humiliating them. Something divine has gotten into this crusade for justice, and it simply cannot be stopped.\"