In April 2012, King County has enacted plans to spend more
than $210 million on a new youth jail and family court buildings. This youth
jail is a 10-minute drive from my house and is located in the Central District
of Seattle. Construction for the expansion on the juvenile detention facility
just recently began and has been attracting many protesters to the site. The
King County website boasts that with funds, they will create restorative
justice by building therapeutic centers for the families and children which
will be trauma-informed. However, protesters confronted the failure by King
County to highlight its plans on the expansion of the actual youth jail that
included the funding of 112 more beds.
Nikita Oliver, a former mayoral candidate and legal defender
pointed out the flaws of funneling more money into plans of incarcerating youth
as a response to juvenile justice. She said,
“It reflects the same ideas of perpetuating a racist system built on the backs on black and brown bodies” (Kiggins 2018)
because as statistics show, youth of color are incarcerated
at 5.6 times the rates as white youth in King County. This is due to
institutionalized racism that Michelle Alexander claims is due to a racial
caste system in our country that has been based from the foundations of slavery
and evolved in new systems, such as mass incarceration to maintain forms of
racialized social control. In a conflict theorists’ perspectives, the incarceration
of youth of color makes sense because it allows for wealthy white elites to
uphold their current standings in society by keeping marginalized groups restricted
from opportunities and socially expelled.
An organization called “No New Youth Jail” (which is
supported by Nikita Oliver) has been pushing back against the expansion. They
gathered together to rally outside the construction site with the mission to “invest
in human needs, not more cages”. Their website explains the purpose of their
mission and tackles the myth that jails are necessary for “violent” or “unsafe”
youth. Their response is that:
“In reality, people are in jail or prison because they are poor people of color who are targeted by racist policing and/or who are put in desperate situations where they engage in criminalized behavior to get by. People in the King County youth jail are there for things like getting in a fight at school or with a family member, missing school, shoplifting, etc. They have engaged in behavior that, if they were a white child in a wealthy school and neighborhood, would not have been dealt with using jail, but would instead be dealt with through parental intervention, therapy, or support from their school.”
This concept of labeling youth as criminals perpetuates the influx
of arrests and incarceration rates in today’s society. Young people of color make
up more than 80 percent of the incarcerated population in King County. By
placing a label on children that they have inherent criminality, it creates a stereotype
threat that children will eventually end up believing to be true about
themselves. Furthermore, it feeds children into a system that rips them from
their homes, schools and communities and introduces them to the traumas and injustices
of the criminal justice system at a very young age.
Therefore, what is most powerful about the protests that
occurred in Seattle is that they majorly consisted of youth of color
themselves. They created a No New Youth Jail Anthem which was comprised of black
youth singing about the realities they face and how building more jails is not
an adequate solution to restorative justice. They also created signs, invited
speakers, and chained themselves to the construction site to express their
complaints. Though the protests ended in arrests and rejection by law enforcement,
it brought light to this issue in the media and created a larger platform to
critique the city’s use of millions of dollars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DrnNVcmzIo
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, 2011.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, 2011.
This is a really important issue to draw attention to and it relates significantly to what we have learned and read about in class, especially Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow as is stated in the blog post. It really builds on some of the points made by Alexander because it shows how the structural racism within the criminal justice system can begin to directly impact people of color at very young ages, which sets up the continuation of a cycle that keeps people of color in prisons and excluded from society. This issue in particular is very meaningful because of the direct involvement and leadership of youth of color in trying to make a change, protest against, and draw attention to what is going on in their community. I liked the inclusion of the video in the post and how it shows some of their efforts to enact change and allows for their voices to be heard.
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