Teens Gain in Fight Against Jail

Rocio Nieves is a shy teenager from a blue-collar family in east Oakland, a struggling single mother not used to exercising her political voice.

But there she was at a state Board of Corrections meeting this summer, poised beside others from her Bay Area youth group, the hip-hoppers, skateboarders and would-be street poets who had come before the shirt-and-tie crowd to criticize a proposed 540-bed juvenile jail.

In a tense scene, the minority youths stormed the meeting--adopting protest tactics their grandparents used during the civil rights movement. One by one, sometimes shouting over board members, the teens argued that California already had too many “superjails” for young people and that the money would be better spent on prevention programs.

“I told them the new juvenile jail in Alameda County was gonna be built right across the street from the adult jail--so all the young offenders could just look out the window to see their futures,” Nieves recalled. “What kind of message is that to send our kids?”

Using nonviolent rallies and sit-ins at which some group members have been arrested, their “Books Not Bars” campaign has blasted officials for fast-tracking a “monstrosity” that would be, relative to the county’s population, one of the largest juvenile halls in America.

Organizers say the campaign shows how a generation of inner-city youths has found that it, too, can play politics.

The youths call the Alameda project racist. While African Americans comprise only 17% of Alameda County residents, they argue, 59% of the roughly 250 youth offenders now housed at the existing juvenile hall are black.

They accuse officials of preferring to deal with troubled minority teens by simply putting them behind bars. They say many places have opted for home supervision and emergency shelter programs in lieu of building new juvenile jails. And counties larger than Alameda have built smaller youth jails, activists say.

And they have publicly chastised county officials, saying the study used to justify replacing the county’s aging 299-bed facility was conducted by the same architectural firm that stood to design the new jail.

As a result, state officials voted in May to withhold $20 million of $50 million earmarked for the project. Supervisors have also scaled down their jail expansion plan from 540 to 420 beds. On Thursday, the youths will return to Sacramento to further question state corrections officials on youth jail funding they call a “big failed government program.”

Politicians say the youths--organized by 33-year-old Van Jones, a San Francisco civil rights lawyer--have brought a fresh voice to the debate over juvenile crime.

“These kids have held a big mirror up to the county officials and said, ‘You need to look at yourself in this. . . ,’ ” said Bart Lubow, a senior associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit agency advocating the rights of disadvantaged children. “They’ve made the dialogue on this jail very public.”

Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson said the youths convinced him that building such a large jail “was wrong. Until these kids got involved, this jail was a foregone conclusion, but no more.”

Rather than being the product of a local university with a reputation for student activism, the protest has its roots in the East Bay’s toughest neighborhoods.

Most group members are under 21. Many have spent time behind bars themselves. Others have friends or relatives who entered juvenile hall as children and emerged from prison as adults decades later.

“This is the hip-hop generation finding its political voice,” said Jones, founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “They’re working-class kids of color who’ve already been written off by society. They’re told they can’t fight city hall but they’re doing it anyway.”

At public rallies such as the “Not Down With the Lockdown: Super Jam to Stop the Super Jail,” members have met in public locations around the East Bay to watch hip-hop and break-dance performers.

In speeches, they highlight figures that show how high school dropout rates are soaring, a disturbing trend they say explains why 100,000 children are in custody nationwide.

While California ranks first in the nation in prison spending, the youths say, it places 43rd in funding public education.

“The source of the juvenile jail overcrowding isn’t the actions of young people--it’s the inaction of adults to listen to creative ways to solve the problem,” said 23-year-old Rory Caygill, project director for the East Bay’s Youth Force coalition.

Emil DuPont knows more about the goings-on inside the juvenile jail than most teens.

“Juvenile hall taught me nothing but bad habits,” says the 16-year-old Books Not Bars activist, who recently served four months on a misdemeanor charge. “It’s a vicious place. I leaned more about ways to return to jail than to return to society.”

Activists say that not only is the new jail project too big, it is also too far away, and its site one hour east of the Bay Area would create a hardship for parents and remove troubled teens from supportive environments.

They support programs such as those in Portland, Ore., and Chicago where officials use home surveillance, day and evening reporting centers and emergency shelter beds for youths without homes.

“The best bed for a kid getting into trouble is a bed in his own home, not in some juvenile prison,” Jones said. “These kids need coaches, not guards.”

Seeds for the demonstrations were sewn in March 2000, when several Bay Area youth groups met to protest the passage of Proposition 21, which promised stiffer sentencing for youth offenders.

After venting their anger, the youths settled on a course of action. They studied the civil rights protests and a plan began to emerge. “We went to the library and blew the dust off the old books and videotapes of the civil rights marches,” Jones recalls.

“Jim Crow segregation was around for decades before young people got involved in the 1960s. They got it thrown out within five years. We saw hope in that, that youth protest could have an effect on the public consciousness.”

Idealism With a Hip-Hop Flavor

But that 1960s idealism soon took on a more modern bent. “We gave it a hip-hop flavor,” Jones says. “We didn’t put on shirts and ties and speak the King’s English to battle these politicians. The kids did the same thing they do at a weekend house party: They called their friends--the hip-hoppers and break-dancers--and pointed their energies toward a good cause.”

Their rallies didn’t persuade enough voters to block the proposition. But this March, another issue emerged that drew their ire: a new juvenile jail in Alameda.

From its west Oakland warehouse headquarters, the Books Not Bars campaign developed another modern flair: a slick Web site--https://www.booksnotbars.org--and an aggressive courting of the press.

The tactics have irked Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele, who supports the juvenile jail project.

“I love activists who are committed to positive changes,” she said. “But I loathe sound-bite politics. If I hear those kids one more time chanting ‘books not bars,’ I’m going to scream. Mere slogans do not bring about political change.”

Some Alameda supervisors have dismissed the youths not because of their message, but because of their clothes. “They look at these young people of color and they can’t even see them,” Jones said.

“All they see are dreadlocks, baggy pants and baseball caps worn backward. They don’t see that this is the future of this county standing in front of them, one that’s not going to go away.”

Caygill said the youths vowed not to change their look even if different clothes would mean a better reception by the board. “These young people knew they had to stay real to their identities,” she said. “When you have 150 high school teens appearing before the Board of Supervisors, what are you going to do, get them all a new wardrobe?”

Still, Rocio Nieves recalls her anger at being ignored by supervisors. “They looked at me like, ‘You’re just a single mother from the streets, what have you got to say?’ Well, I finished school. I’m trying to better my community. I want in on this debate.”

The debate has taken its toll.

Nine protesters were arrested for disturbing the peace in July after Alameda County supervisors voted to decline an offer from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to conduct an independent study free of charge on a need for the new jail. “Instead of a legitimate study, the county decided to merely reduce the size of the jail,” the foundation’s Lubow said.

The supervisors said the three-month study would bring needless delays to a project they believed was already long overdue.

“If I had been one of those supervisors, that vote would have embarrassed me,” Lubow added. “It’s clear the decisions are being made arbitrarily.”

Supervisor Steele says the Alameda jail would be designed in pods, which would be opened only as needed. If the numbers of offenders don’t require use of the entire center, officials can use the extra pods to house training programs, she said.

“There’s not an anti-kid person on this board,” she said. “We have juveniles at risk coming into the system every day. I call them broken wings, neglected by so many systems. They need guidance, but we have so little funding.”

Protester Caygill says getting arrested, even for a good cause, was unsettling. “At first when they handcuff you, you feel like a hero,” she said. “The others cheer you on. But you don’t know where you’re going and when you’ll get out. And when the jailers separate you from your peers, it gets scary.”

The protesters have won the support of area unions, religious groups and even some former political opponents.

“These kids are saying to the adults, ‘Do the math. . . ,’ ” said Joe DeVries, field director for Supervisor Nate Miley, who now supports a smaller jail. “If you’ve maxed out on your credit card limit, you don’t just increase the limit--you need to fix your spending patterns. We need to change the patterns in the way we deal with juvenile justice.”

Youths’ Pleas Sway State Board

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the state Board of Corrections, is also impressed. He said the youths’ impassioned pleas at a meeting this spring convinced him to scale back on state funding for the project.

“I wouldn’t have given 10 cents for their odds to change the minds of the Board of Corrections, but they did it,” he said. “After hearing them speak, the board decided ‘Let’s take a second look at this.’ I was a protester when I was young, and I never got these results.”