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| 191 5 What Is “the Power of the Youth”? Prop 21 has been okayed again us youngstas could cast no vote, but can be sent to the Pen. What is going on in this world we live in, and why are we young being tried as adults? Explain to me, America, why you have given up hope. You’ve robbed our childhoods, surrounding us with guns and dope. You’re running full ahead on punishment but turning your back on an antidote. Are we not a republican government, governed by the people? Then why don’t teenagers have a vote? Are we not people? Why in court can we be adults, but outside the courts we are not their equal? You need to end this awful sequel or in the future there be a different reason why America’s called a melting pot: It’ll be because adults turned their back on their young, who suffered moral rot for they, the young, were suffering from gridlock. The world had changed so fast and so much that parents had no time for tutelage for their kids which left their learning up to luck. A child left with no teaching of the real world outside the classroom will wander aimlessly, and inevitably self-destruct. After wandering through these urban streets, the goodest of people are bound to be corrupt. The parents paid attention of course, but they failed to teach enough they had no time because times were rough, they had to work two times as hard as their parents and left their child’s life up to luck. —Dwayne The Knowledge, Alameda County Juvenile Hall, published in The Beat Within 192 | What Is “the Power of Youth”? On a sunny afternoon in April 2001, a multiracial crowd of 150 teenagers and young adults marched through downtown Oakland to demand that the Board of Supervisors abandon plans to build a “Super Jail for Kids.” Months before, the county supervisors had unanimously approved plans to build a new juvenile hall, expanded from 299 to 540 beds, in a far-flung suburb of Alameda County. At first this plan attracted little attention, but that changed as youth activists began a sustained campaign. At this first protest, Latino, Southeast Asian, Tongan, black, and Jewish high school students marched alongside local college students, young teachers, and nonprofit workers towards the entrance to the Board of Supervisors offices. Many dressed in hip hop styles: young men in hooded sweatshirts and sagging pants marched alongside teenage girls in tight pants flared at the ankles. The crowd slowly filed through metal detectors, and past armed sheriff’s deputies, sending backpacks and signs through the x-ray machines, as their chants echoed through the corridors—“Books not bars. Schools not jails”; “No more beds”; and the rhythmic, “Ain’t no power like the power of the youth, ‘cause the power of the youth don’t stop. Say what?” Older men and women with suits and leather briefcases leaving the county building stopped and stared in curiosity. The crowd packed into the Board of Supervisors hearing, a sea of young people surrounding a row of county officials in suits, scattered juvenile justice experts, and a few older community representatives. I marched and chanted along with the youth activists and then retreated to watch from the back of the room, sitting uncomfortably between a youth organizer and an assistant DA, both of whom I had interviewed. The DA, James Thurman, an African American man in his early fifties, insisted that the county needed the additional beds and he worried that these protests could backfire and even lead to reinstating the death penalty if a kid on probation committed a terrible crime while out of juvenile hall. The meeting began with a formal probation presentation to the five county supervisors explaining that the county needed a new, larger juvenile hall to plan for population growth. But this was not a standard Board of Supervisors meeting. Midway through the probation department’s formal presentation , a young man with coffee-colored skin and curly brown hair interrupted, “We came here to make our case.” Scott Haggerty, the president of the Board of Supervisors, repeatedly threatened to “shut down the meeting” if youth were not respectful. Shortly thereafter, youth activists were called up to testify. They performed raps and spoken word poetry, engaged in call and response with the audience, and told personal stories alongside more familiar calls for “alternatives to incarceration,” “services,” and jobs for...

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