by Marvin J. Ramirez
Marvin J. Ramirez
Just recently, a friend of mine’s 19-year-old son was released from jail from charges of beating a man with his bodies. He spent approximately seven months in the joint. He came out clean, however, prior to getting arrested he was attending City College of San Francisco. Obviously, he lost the whole school semester. It seemed that it was more important to punish him that making sure that he continued in school.
I wrote a strong letter to San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris expressing my concern that jail would not serve any purpose in directing this young man through a path of positive future and should let him finish his school semester.
The District Attorney’s Office insisted that he was a ‘gang member,’ but apparently they were wrong. So they let him free, according to his mother.
Many youths like this young man are thrown into jails by the thousands every years, as part of money-making scheme by the prison industry, the sole purpose of its goal.
Punishment is the best recipe this industry that is growing faster that our learning institutions, while teachers are being layoff, school budget cut to the bone, and basically every year have the whole education industry beg on its knees for money.
Young people continue being warehoused like animals with the sole purpose of punishing them for their criminal behavior, which at the end is the same citizenry that they purpose to protect who is the last victimized by this blinded system of punishment.
In a released written statement, Books Not Bars says mismanaged, expensive, and dangerous youth prisons must go Books Not Bars (an Ella Baker Center for Human Rights campaign) and families of incarcerated youth throughout California call on the state to abandon the warehouse prisons’ chronic failures and build the state’s continuum of effective local and regional treatment programs for youth.
The Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), which is budgeted $518 million for 2008-09, has missed successive court-imposed reform deadlines since the 2004 lawsuit settlement. It has wasted $100 million on unmet reform goals. With a population of 2,072 youth — each costing the state $252,000 per year — the California Youth Prison System has become California’s budgetary black hole.
According to the statement, which was released on April 17, despite the money, conditions in DJJ prisons have remained deplorable and shameful for incarcerated youth: Education fails to meet state minimum levels, both mental health and medical care are inadequate and often delayed, and violence in facilities remains dangerously high. The miserable conditions have rendered rehabilitation impossible for youth in the prisons.
The DJJ has proven to be incapable of reform and has failed thousands of our youth in the meantime.
How do we expect youth to come out rehabilitated from this broken system?” asks Zachary Norris, Director of Books Not Bars. “Real change can only happen when we shut down the failing warehouse prisons. Only then can California shift to a local and regional rehabilitative system of care that allows youth to return to society with a chance to make it.”
In its recent budget cuts, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s only options to balance the state’s budget deficit has been targeting education, health and the most vulnerable sectors of our communities.
Unless everyone stand up and start demanding changes in the Constitution, where education receives a bigger share of the budget and never lose funding, we will continue losing funding to educate our future generations and our prisons industry growing.
