Youth Justice Reinvestment

The YOUTH JUSTICE COALITION/FREE L.A.! is working to build a youth

and community-led movement - mobilizing youth in lock-ups and on the

street, their families and formerly incarcerated people - to challenge race,

gender and class inequality in Los Angeles County’s, California’s and the

nation’s juvenile injustice system. The YJC’s goal is to dismantle policies

and institutions that have ensured the massive arrest, detention,

incarceration and deportation of people of color, widespread police violence

and corruption, consistent violation of youth and communities'

Constitutional and human rights, the creation of a school-to-jail track, and

the build-up of the world's largest network of jails and prisons. We use

direct action organizing, advocacy, political education and activist arts to

agitate, expose, and annoy the people in charge in order to upset power and

bring about change.

Organizing Campaigns: 1. Impact conditions of confinement at juvenile halls, camps, county jails and prisons, including challenging LIFE WIHTOUT PAROLE and other extreme sentences. (Including Senate Bills 9, 260, 61 and Welcome Home L.A.) 2. Challenge the County’s War on Gangs including ending the use of gang databases and gang injunctions. (Including Senate Bill 458.) 3. Reduce L.A. County’s over-reliance on incarceration and increase community based alternatives to arrest, court, detention and incarceration, with a goal of reducing lock-up by 75% in ten years, including closing CYA/DJJ youth prisons. 4. Dollar for Dollar - Move law enforcement dollars to youth jobs, peace workers/intervention workers and youth centers. (Just 1% = 100 Million.) 5. End the school-to-jail track (no truancy tickets/truancy sweeps, free metro passes, replace police in schools and school push-out with intervention workers and Transformative Justice.6. S.T.O.P. Police Violence.

YOUTH SEEN AS

SATAN1600s

ORIGINAL SINThe Puritans believe that children are born close to the Devil, and the role of society and family is to wrestle Satan from within the child.

FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Massachusetts’ Old Satan Deluder Act of 1647 establishes first public school system. Since, Puritans believed that children were born with the “original sin,” they had to be raised in an atmosphere of fear, strict discipline, hard work, and a strong knowledge of the Bible to delude Satan.

YOUTH SEEN AS

SAVAGES1800/1900s

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONAs the Nation’s first well-known State Secretary of Education, Horace Mann argued in 1837 that public education’s goals are to create an “industrious class of women and men” who obey the law and are diligent in their work.” For factory and mining work, only basic literacy was required. By 1860, there were no more than 300 high schools in the United States, less than 100 of them free. The public education system designed by Franklin and promoted by Mann is still the standard public school curriculum today.

ClassroomManagement

With strict discipline, “one who studies educational theory can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom, the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature fit for law and order, fit for the life of civilized society.” - 1907

William Chandler Bagley

YOUTH SEEN AS

REBELSRADICALS

&REVOLUTIONARI

ES1960s - EARLY

70s

OUT OF L.A. CAME THE BUILDERS OF SCHOOL DE-FUNDING AND MASS INCARCERATION

’65 Watts Rebellion in response to police brutality in South L.A. FBI and police surveillance, infiltration and bombing of Panther headquarters in L.A. and Pasadena; leads to United Slaves shoot out with Panthers at UCLA. (US leader Karenga goes on to found Kwanzaa and teach at Cal State Long Beach.) Geronimo Pratt (now Geronimo Ji Jaga) is framed by LAPD and FBI. Crushing of prisoners’ rights movement at Soledad; guards assassinate George Jackson and his brother. (Jacksons are from Pasadena.) Angela Davis teaches and organizes at UCLA. LAPD riot on Chicano Moratorium and assassination of L.A. Times reporter Ruben Salazar. CIA floods L.A.’s neighborhoods with drugs.

IN L.A. :

U.S. POLICIES THAT COME OUT OF L.A.:Nixon’s Law and Order backlash after 60s movements leads to mass incarceration of poor people and people of color. The prison population increases 300% in 20 years. Cali and L.A. lead the world in incarceration and harsh sentencing, including creation of JLWOP, Three Strikes, Prop 21 and Prop 9 - all are written and financed from L.A.. Reaganomics including anti-tax movement and Prop 13., the “war on drugs” and war on welfare, and mental health de-institutionalization without community services, all lead to massive increase in homelessness. L.A. creates “planned Skid Row” to force homeless into downtown isolation. U.S. fuels wars against rebellions in Central America. In the 1980s, LAPD and Sheriffs work with U.S. military to teach counter-guerilla tactics, interrogation and torture against civilians. In the 90s and 00s, they return to teach gang suppression when people are deported - (the greatest number from L.A.) Chief Parker introduces military-style policing and brings National Guard into Watts in ‘65. Gates takes militarization further by creating SWAT and CRASH (first gang units).’92 Uprising once again reflects L.A.’s anger over entrenched police brutality. Gates also created DARE.2007 - Jordan Downs is first community in the U.S. to get GPS surveillance system. L.A. and Riverside first to use GPS monitoring to track people with gang convictions returning home from prison.

THEN CAME L.A.’S “WAR ON GANGS”

YOUTH SEEN AS

SUPER

PREDATORS

1980s - 1990s

Los Angeles County built the nation’s first comprehensive gang suppression policies:

[1] Gang injunctions - first in 1983, the ability to lock down a neighborhood and arrest people if they are on the street with another alleged gang member, out past a curfew, or carrying a cell phone.

[2] Gang databases in 1987 - computerized lists that label people as “gang members” without their knowledge, without any chance to appeal, and without a clear way to get off. (3) The statewide STEP Act in 1988 that provided the nation’s first law

targeting street gangs, first gang definition, first language referring to gang members as

“terrorists,” first gang enhancements in court, and took database statewide [Cal Gangs

Database].

[4] In 1985, L.A. established CLEAR I[Community Law Enforcement and Recovery].

THAT WAS FOLLOWED BY THE SCHOOL-TO-JAIL TRACK

PRESIDENT REAGAN APPOINTS WILLIAM

BENNET AS U.S. SECRETARY OF

EDUCATION.

Zero Tolerance

policies include requirements for suspension, expulsion and

arrests; the takeover of school discipline by police

departments; and relationships in schools replaced by metal

detectors, locker searches, drug-sniffing dogs, and security

gates.

1. Police Departments take over school security

2. More Probation Officers than Counselors

3. Schools look and run like prisons; some have the same architects

4. Searches, metal detectors, gang profiling

5. Leads to massive push-out and arrest

CALIFORNIA’S

ADDICTIONTO INCARCERATION

IN 1980, CALIFORNIA ALREADY HAD 12 PRISONS. AND THEN, WITH THE MASSIVE DEMAND FOR CELLS THAT CAME WITH TOUGH-ON-CRIME POLICIES, THE STATE STARTED TO RAPIDLY EXPAND THE BUILDING OF PRISONS AND CUT THE BUDGET TO EVERYTHING ELSE.

DURING THAT SAME TIME, CALIFORNIA BUILT TWO CAL STATES AND ONE UNIVERSITY.

BY 2010, CALI HAD 176 THOUSAND STATE PRISONERS.

40% FROM L.A. COUNTY.

2010

With realignment, 135,000 people in prison. The question remains whether we will just shift bodies from

state cages to county cages.

California used to be #1 in school spending and had one of the best school

systems in the world.

Now, California is #1 in prison spending, and with this year’s budget cuts,

dropped from #47 to #50 in school spending!

South and East L.A. lead the nation in school overcrowding,

low test scores and drop-out/push-out rates

with only 40% of students graduating.

The YJC investigated the budgets for all 57 law enforcement departments within LA County, interviewed youth on their experiences with the police, and surveyed more than 2,000 residents on a 50 mile march across LA County.

Job and Cost Comparisons Between Law Enforcement and Intervention

Intervention Savings: Each Murder Costs $1 Million to Investigate and averages $16 million more in Jail, Court and Incarceration. With drastic decreases in homicide, should the saved money be reinvestment in our schools and communities?

Just

1%

of L.A.’s Courts, Police, Sheriffs’ District Attorney’s, Probation’s and City Attorney’s Budgets would pay for: 500 full-time intervention workers/peacebuilders; 50 youth centers open from 3pm - midnight, 365 days a year; and 25,000 youth jobs!