© 2018 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Detail, “Harlem Street Scene,” 1975 by Jacob Lawrence.
In Virginia, where a daily average of about 200 children are locked up in state-run juvenile correction centers, a remote, rural community voted in mid-April to reject a plan to allot twenty acres for a new sixty-bed such facility. The 3-2 decision, by the Board of Supervisors on the Isle of Wight, was hailed by anti-prison activists as a step forward in the struggle to overhaul youth “corrections” from the bottom up.
Following the vote, Valerie Slater, executive director of the Richmond, Virginia-based advocacy group RISE for Youth, applauded the decision, saying in a statement that both her local community and youth advocates in Norfolk, Hampton, and Newport News were “rejecting the old model” of remote, isolated prisons, promoting instead “rehabilitation over incarceration.”
Overall youth imprisonment has declined dramatically since the 1990s, yet in 2016 more than 45,000 children nationwide were incarcerated or detained each day.
State and local governments plow massive funds into juvenile detention, sometimes even building brand new facilities for a system flush with detention centers, residential facilities, or the more euphemistically named “training schools.” Children can be held for months or years, isolated from decent schooling, healthcare, and human relationships. Once released, they emerge burdened by trauma and stigma. Most return to prison within a few years. The youth are disproportionately of color, disproportionately identify as LGBTQ, and tend to suffer from poverty or homelessness.
Virginia has in recent years spent roughly fifteen times more on each child it imprisons than on each student in its public schools.
Virginia juvenile justice reform advocates envision changing where the money is spent, shifting large-scale investments from the state into rehabilitation close to home—a system in which “security” isn’t about police and prisons but about providing stability and care for children, their families and their communities. This “continuum of care” approach of intervention through community-based programs holds human rights and dignity—rather than discipline—at its core.
Overall youth imprisonment has declined dramatically since the 1990s, yet in 2016 more than 45,000 children nationwide were incarcerated or detained each day.
Slater tells The Progressive that the movement’s guiding ethos is that a carceral system must never be prioritized over family care, because youth typically end up “returning to the system on a revolving door.”
“Communities that are appropriately resourced become places where youth and families are able to thrive,” she says.
Douglas Johnson, an eighteen-year-old activist with RISE in Richmond, knows what it feels like to spin through that door. He bounced through youth detention repeatedly in his teens, sometimes due to parole violations, and often encountering other youth returning just weeks after release. In his view, the government sets kids up for re-imprisonment.
In his community, a young person might feel pressured by poverty at home to “step up to the plate” by, say, committing a robbery. But in court, Johnson says, “They're gonna say he’s a menace. He don't need to be on the outside world. And I’m talking about a black youth. That’s what they’re going to tell you. But they don’t look at why he robbed somebody.”
To Johnson, it’s cops and the courts who are on the take. “Yes, they get paid for you being incarcerated. They don’t get paid for you to be rehabilitated. They want you to get locked up . . . and come back home, and get locked back up, so they get paid again.”
Much of the momentum for this progressive reform comes from communities heavily impacted by police and prisons. RISE for Youth promotes community-based programs seeking to prevent youth from entering the system through alternative therapy and social services. Among the youth who get locked up—often criminalized for nonviolent offenses like drug possession—most exhibit signs of serious mental health issues.
Johnson says he used to get locked up just for “doing the normal stuff” that youth typically do, like smoking pot or getting into fights at school.
“They [gave me a violation] for weed,” he recalls, “but they never ever considered me [for] a drug or substance-abuse program. That’s what I didn’t understand. They never look at the why, because they don't care why.”
“They get paid for you being incarcerated. They don’t get paid for you to be rehabilitated.”
Advocates emphasize treatment systems that allow offenders to stay in their neighborhoods, including holistic reform measures that would extend well beyond cops and courts. It means replacing police patrols in schools with more guidance counselors, reaching out to communities with family therapy and mentoring programs, as well as revamping the social environment with affordable housing and job training. Interpersonal conflicts might be resolved through a peer-driven restorative justice program, which centers on dialogue and reconciliation rather than formal courts.
And any secure facility for youth, according to Rise for Youth, should be “fewer than twenty-four beds, focused on positive youth development, and regionally based,” to allow for regular family visits.
Samantha Harvell, co-author of a recent report from the Urban Institute on reinvestment efforts to reduce incarceration, said in an email to The Progressive that simply reinvesting prison budget savings “is not sufficient to resource the full continuum of care and opportunity that is required to prevent and address harmful youth behaviors.”
Additional support could be secured through other funding streams, Harvell says, if the state can form partnerships with hospitals and universities, local tax revenues, or other social programs like Medicaid, child welfare funds, or mental healthcare grants.
In Milwaukee, where black youth make up just 10 percent of the state’s young people but about 70 percent of its youth prison population, activists are campaigning for a wholesale redirection of the budget for the state’s main youth prison Lincoln Hill/Copper Lake. The facility is shutting down after a spate of abuse and mismanagement scandals, including using pepper spray and failing to safeguard the facility from suicide attempts.
“We don’t need to build any more jails,” says Sharlen Moore, co-founder of Youth Justice Milwaukee. “When we look at what a young person needs,” she adds, “we have to understand that most of these young people that we’re talking about, they’re not ‘high-risk’ young people, they’re high-need young people.”
There has been major progress in reducing youth incarceration in Wisconsin: admissions to state-run facilities tumbled by 71 percent between 1999 and 2013—following nationwide trends—while the overall youth prison population slid by 25 percent by 2014.
Yet even with the dramatic drop in the number of kids locked up, the state still manages to funnel nearly $163 million each year into the system. Lincoln Hills/Copper Lake costs over $100,000 per child annually—ten times the cost of annual in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin. The excess capacity in the system, activists say, has created a perverse incentive to keep beds full by locking up more kids, exacerbating racial inequities and perpetuating criminalization of youth of color.
Youth Justice Milwaukee enlists youth peers in a reentry service program as “credible messengers,” to help mentor and support formerly incarcerated youth as they reintegrate into society. Milwaukee's keystone Wraparound program delivers holistic therapy that allows youth to receive care without leaving home, and to engage the whole family in the rehabilitation process.
Advocates also champion the model of Ujima House, a small rehabilitative home with a program to help youth restore family relationships, engaging them in neighborhood-based work, and simply treating youth as fellow community members.
Moore applauds promising grassroots alternatives like Ujima House, but adds, “they’re not ramped up or funded at the level that they need to be. We’ve got to be innovative, and we have to be using funding more deliberately.”
According to Liz Ryan, president of Youth First Initiative, reinvestment goes beyond “reducing numbers” and rebalancing budgets. From the outset, black children require the same community resources as their white peers: communities with strong schools and resources for healthy development. While incarceration alternatives are necessary, she adds, “Just making that investment isn’t going to do the trick. You actually need to ensure that young people don't end up in the criminal justice system.”
To undertake that philosophical evolution, she says: “We're talking about elimination of the model, dismantling and closing these facilities, repurposing them for things that would benefit communities, which would not [be] caging anyone—young person or adult.”
Johnson traces the problem to a class of politicians who are “most likely white, old, and racist.” For activists, he said, “You might shut down a couple of prisons . . . might stop a couple of laws. But at the end of the day, what they say goes.”
But he’ll keep resisting, and pushing for change at the top. “Until we could do that,” he says, “we ain’t going to ever be able to change nothing.”