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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004Inhumanity of California youth jailOakland, Cal.--The group Education Not Incarceration celebrated this year's May Day by holding a teach-in. Several hundred people, including many youth, attended the various workshops. Venus, a young Black woman representing Let's Get Free and Books Not Bars, led a workshop on the California Youth Authority system. In the wake of scandals following a video tape of youth being abused in the facility and two youths dying there, there is a call to shut down CYA altogether. All 10 facilities are a total failure. Over 90% of youth who graduate from CYA end up in adult prison. Within three years 5% are dead and only 4% are in school or working. But the real crime of CYA is not its dismal statistics or even the individual scandals. It is its inhumanity. The facilities are called "gladiator schools." They train for no jobs, provide no education or drug treatment. It is not run by teachers or counselors but by prison guards with guns. Children in the facilities, some as young as 11, are kept in cages--literally. Classrooms, mandated by the state, consist of desks placed in individual cages. The teacher is only able to pass materials to the students through a slit in the otherwise completely locked cage. On non-school days, the children are locked 23 hours a day in their cells. The large muscle exercise area is just a bigger cage. The ostensible reason for such treatment is gang affiliation and the threat of corresponding violence. And if you did not belong to a gang when you went into the facility, CYA will "assign" you to one. One graduate said that if you do make something of yourself, it is because you worked on it yourself, not because CYA helped you in any way. When you are in there, you have to work to recollect who you are, who you were to your family, remind yourself who you are to those people. Darlene, a young woman in the facility, was not helped by the drug treatment program they assigned her to. The gang prevention program she was assigned to did not even meet. Most children are on strong psychotropic medications such as thorazine. She described sexual harassment happening every day: guards asking you to flash them, watching you closely when you take a shower, commenting on your body. Yet she was very scared to leave CYA. She was sure she would mess up and end up in adult prison. Missouri Department of Youth Services has replaced its equivalent of CYA with rehabilitation centers. Those have just a 10% recidivism rate. We talked about the need to humanize people, not de-humanize them. The people most in need of humanization are the politicians, who set up this system. It cannot be allowed to go on! --Urszula Wislanka |
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