PURPOSE: The California Division of Juvenile Justice (sometimes known by its original name, CYA or California Youth Authority) is California's state-run prison system for youth. DJJ's mission is to rehabilitate youth in trouble and protect the public. Instead, it subjects young people to outrageous levels of violence, abuse, and neglect. It warehouses them in six enormous, decrepit prisons across the state. The young people stay either in massive dormitories with dozens of other youth or in isolated, concrete prison cells. The adult supervision is no better than the physical facilities. DJJ staff is made up of prison guards with no specialized training in youth development or basic mental health therapy.
CYA 'counselors' beating a young ward.
TWO THOUSAND KIDS INSIDE: There are almost 2,000 young people in DJJ. For the small number of young people who do need intensive supervision and programming, the existing DJJ prisons are highly inappropriate and harmful. Their warehouse-like design, akin to penitentiaries, makes rehabilitiation difficult or impossible. These prisons must be closed. Research and experience show that smaller, more home-like environments are best for providing safe and effective rehabilitation to youth in trouble.
RACIAL DISPARITIES AND DJJ: Due to gross racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, it is primarily families and communities of color that have to pay the cost of DJJ's abuses. Of the 1,950 youth in DJJ prisons as of July 2008, 87% are young people of color. And virtually all of the kids inside are from low-income backgrounds.
Simply put, the fight to close DJJ's youth prisons is a fight for racial justice and civil rights.
Racial disparity is not unique to DJJ. Youth of color face extra obstacles from birth. On average, children of color in California grow up with fewer services, poorer schools, more toxicity, more street violence and, as they grow older, fewer job opportunities than their white counterparts.
These disparities carry over into the criminal justice system. When suspected of the same infractions, youth of color are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, and jailed than white youth.
DJJ: just like prison
The end result is that, though African-Americans constitute an estimated six percent of California's population, in 2008, a whopping 31 percent of the kids in DJJ were black. Latinos made up 36 percent of state residents but 55 percent of the DJJ population.
Books Not Bars is fundamentally committed to racial justice and equity. We won't allow California to be a state where some kids and matter and some kids don't.
DECADES OF PROBLEMS IN DJJ/CYA: Youth advocates and policy experts have been decrying the failures of DJJ/CYA for years. Most of the time, policymakers did very little in response to the ongoing problems. That all changed in 2004. The previous year, the Prison Law Office had filed a lawsuit against what was then known as the CYA. In response, the Attorney General commissioned a series of expert reports on CYA conditions.
Senator Gloria Romero released these reports publicly in January 2004. For the first time, the horrific conditions in CYA showed up in newspapers and TV reports across the country. All of a sudden, what youth, families, and advocates had been saying for decades got official verification: the CYA is a factory of misery and child abuse. Even the CYA admits its wholesale inability to help to youth in trouble.
Here are just some of the CYA abuses that came to light:
- Young people locked in 20- to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement for days, weeks and months on end;
- Young people locked in 4'x4' cages for temporary detention;
- Guard and staff abuse, neglect, manipulation, and humiliation of the young people in their care;
- Rampant sexual assault;
- Guard/staff abuse of chemical weapons against the young people;
- Virtually non-existent care for young people with mental health or substance abuse needs;
- Shocking negligence in medical care, especially emergency care;
- Woefully inadequate educational programming;
- A culture and atmosphere of constant intimidation, isolation, fear and violence;
- Five deaths of young people in less than three years.
Four years later, violence and neglect still run rampant in California’s youth prison system. Stark and Preston youth prisons are the most severe examples of the DJJ’s continuing failures, where daily chaos prevents most youth from participating in programs. Even where programs are administered with regularity, almost no programming proven to reduce recidivism is available, and at many prisons, only a small minority of youth participates. The DJJ has so dramatically failed to comply with court-ordered remedial plans that in 2008, plaintiffs sought a receiver to take over the reforms.
