Families, youth, human rights groups hail Gov. Brown's aim to close youth prisons for brighter future with safer communities and more peaceful families
California families and youth along with human rights groups, such as Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, are hailing Governor Brown's proposal released Thursday to close the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) youth prisons and make the state the nation's first to reform youth justice statewide. To end human rights violations permeating youth prisons and save the state money, Brown’s 2012-2013 budget proposes that the DJJ stop taking youth beginning in 2013, eventually eliminating the state’s youth prisons.
“The state simply cannot afford to prop up its expensive, failed youth prison system at the expense of schools, hospitals, and libraries,” said Sumayyah Waheed of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
If the Legislature approves Gov. Jerry Brown's plan released Thursday, "California could become the first state to entirely eliminate prisons for youthful offenders, juvenile crime experts say," according to Mercury News.
The responsibility for jailing all youths would shift to local governments, already proven in trial programs to be effective and help restore broken homes and communities.
"Acknowledging that counties will need help adjusting, the Brown administration has proposed giving them one year and $10 million to prepare." (Mercury News)
"California is at the front end, cutting edge of what is going to be the huge trend going forward," said human rights defender Bart Lubow, director of the national juvenile justice reforms for the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
"And that is the policy embrace of the fundamental truth that kids do better when they are near their homes."
Mercury News reports that Santa Clarita's 18-year-old son has spent the past year in the state's youth prison system for robbery after getting into trouble from age 13, attracted by gangs in his low-income neighborhood.
"Sanchez said the state prison experience has left her son battered. During visits, he has limped, sported a black eye and showed her bruises on his ribs, she said."And he has spent 23 hours a day in his cell for as long as four months at a time, she added, emerging for a recreation hour shackled at the hands and feet.
"'He actually told me that it is a school to become more professional -- to become criminal," Sanchez said."
For almost a decade, the Ella Baker Center, through its award winning Books Not Bars campaign, has highlighted such abuses of the DJJ to the California public.
Books Not Bars organizes the largest network of families impacted by California’s youth prisons and empowers youth with special needs.
The state has spent over $1 billion in the last three years, $200,000 per ward per year, on the dysfunctional youth prison system that maintains an appalling 81% recidivism rate, further wrecking families and communities.
"California has been nursing an expensive addiction to prisons that starts with unnecessary lockup of our youth," says the Ella Baker Center.
Restorative justice programs a 'boon to public safety'
How have other states and locals kicked the habit and restored family and community life for many youth needing support?
"Learning from our Mistakes," is a documentary that is not just a film. The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights says it's a blueprint for model juvenile justice practice.
Community-based programs have been proven to work in other states.
(Watch "Learning from our Mistakes" YouTube video on this page, left.)
Mercury News reports that Matthew Cate, California's corrections chief, predicted Brown's plan would be a boon to public safety.
"The biggest benefit is it keeps wards close to home," Cate said.
"The evidence shows, especially with young people, that it eases the return to communities and reduces victimization."
“Today, I rejoice,” said Laura Talkington-Brady of Fresno, whose son was imprisoned in DJJ for six years.
“My joy is bittersweet--the Division of Juvenile Justice did nothing for my son except damage him.
"He still suffers to this day from years of DJJ’s violence, abuse and neglect.
"However, a California without the DJJ promises a brighter future for its sons, daughters and families.”
"Restorative justice programs have emerged over the past 20 years as an increasingly influential world-wide alternative to criminal justice practice. They are based on compassion, courage, accountability and healing," reported Deborah Dupré in July.
"The restorative justice theory of justice is a community learning process that emphasizes repairing harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior, rather than punishment. It best succeeds through a cooperative community processes including all the stakeholders - including perpetrator(s) and victim(s).
"Restorative justice is a peaceful conflict resolution tool being used so successfully in various parts of the world, it has become a movement."
California close to becoming first state to end torture in America's youth prisons
Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez, a UN expert on torture, declared that all countries should ban solitary confinement.
Isolation causes mental damage in adults after only a few days.
Méndez specifically called for an absolute ban on solitary confinement of youth.
Recently, a youth locked up in Ventura youth prison, "Tony," told Books Not Bars that he was again put on 24-hour lockdown. Tony and several of his peers at Ventura youth prison were locked up in solitary for 8 days.
Documents filed by litigators in a Farrell lawsuit against California’s DJJ last summer indicated "youth were routinely locked up in their cells for more than 23 hours a day and denied their education hours."
Since DJJ refuses to change its ways, human rights defenders advocate shutting the state juvenile prisons as the only way to end the severe human rights abuses that youth have suffered for too long.
In 2011, when the Governor made a similar proposal, over 2,500 Californians joined the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights to support DJJ closure.
Eventually, Governor Brown caved to pressure from special interests, and kept the youth prisons open.
Waheed stated, “Now is the time to reverse the reality of too much money wasted and lives harmed by the abuse, neglect, and violence of the Division of Juvenile Justice.”
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has launched a petition calling on the Governor and state legislative leadership to not back down on this opportunity to reform juvenile justice in California, and save taxpayer dollars.
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