Transcribed remarks by J Vasquez, Policy Director at Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ)
I visited a brother at San Quentin the other day, and asked what he thought of their new learning center. He said, why are they building this inside a prison and not outside for our kids?
Right now, our youth are under attack. They’re trying more kids as an adult. A bill within the legislature this year that was going to make it harder to send kids to adult court died within the legislature.
There’s a movement right now trying to make it easier to send kids to adult court. There’s another bill that a lot of us are working on to end endless probation for certain youth. Because certain youth were carved out of the last bill that we championed last year. So we’re putting these kids on endless probation. There’s another bill that we’re pushing in legislature to end strikes against children. And that bill didn’t make it either.
So when I say our kids are under attack: they’re giving them strikes, they’re putting them on endless probation, they’re sending more kids to adult court. Instead of building these youth centers out here, they’re spending it inside prison. So I think you know, instead of putting our kids through the trial, it’s time we put the system on trial. I think it’s time that we strike out the system. I’m gonna go through three strikes with them, because we talk about the carceral system.
The first strike is that the system is racist. When you go inside any type prison or juvenile hall, you see primarily Black and Brown youth. I don’t need the data, I just need to walk inside of a prison or walk inside of a youth detention center or anywhere else, and the kids look just like us. Those are the kids who are under attack.
Strike number two with the system is they’re actually profiting off our kids. Some of our juvenile halls spent half a billion dollars to incarcerate one youth for one year: instead, that money could be spent in the community on schools, on education, on mental health, on housing. It’s wasting our resources.
The third strike, I want to give to the carceral system. And when I say carceral system, I’m talking about all the different dynamics that over-police, over-surveil, and incarcerate our youth. Im talking about policing, I’m talking about probation, I’m talking about corrections. I’m talking about all those systems that harm our children. So the third strike is that anybody that’s done time, especially as a young person, knows that it’s done more harm than good. So we need to invest more into community services than into seeing our kids locked up.
When I come up here, I speak from experience, because I was one of those kids that was thrown away at sixteen. They gave me a life sentence when I was sixteen. And thankfully, in spite of adult prison, I was able to come home. I’m still on my healing journey, but I’m up here because there are so many other people still in prison that’ve been down since they were kids who aren’t out here to lend their voice. So I feel it’s my duty and responsibility to uplift those voices.
I just wanna end with this: our kids are under attack and we need to fight back and stand up for our future. They’re our next generation, they’re our future. So I ask you, stand up for our youth. Protect our youth.
Leave a Reply