Youth Justice: Where Does It Begin?

Kim McGill was only 12 years old when she was first arrested and incarcerated for grand larceny. At 13, she was charged with a felony for the second time and imprisoned again in a juvenile detention center for shoplifting over $1000 worth of merchandise; She would take orders for people and then resell the products. Afterwards, she was prosecuted for several misdemeanor cases as both a youth and as an adult.

As a former inmate and the lead organizer of the Youth Justice Coalition, McGill is against confinement. “It's not about fixing the system so people re-enter with more resources. It's about knowing that you can't get well in a cell, you can't grow in a cage,” she says.

Having been locked up in both New York City and Los Angeles County, McGill was most recently at LAPD Van Nuys, 77th Street jails and LA County women’s jail in Lynwood. Thinking back to the several times that she was detained, McGill recalls shared memories that still gnaw at her till this day. She describes experiencing sleep deprivation due to extreme air conditioning, lack of sufficiently warm clothing, and fluorescent lighting. She recollects the absence of any external stimulation from the lack of windows, the inability to see the sky, and the deficiency of engaging activities.

The walls were all one color, usually either beige or white. Steel cells, tables, and beds decorated the interior unless a concrete slab protruded from the wall as a makeshift frame. Sleeping on the floor was not uncommon, and neither was watching people who were physically the most vulnerable forced to sleep with their heads next to the toilet in an overcrowded cell. She remembers how inmates were talked at, and not spoken to; and how the explicit use of her last name made her fail to feel like a human being, let alone like a child.

The United States leads the industrialized world in the number and percentage of children it locks up in juvenile detention facilities, according to Human Rights Watch. Juvenile imprisonment is a failed strategy for addressing youth crime due to confinement conditions, racial biases, and detention disputes.

Over 60,000 children were detained in such facilities in 2011, as stated by data compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In its report, the foundation demonstrated that America’s, “heavy reliance on correctional confinement exposes incarcerated youth to widespread maltreatment and recidivism.”

In California alone, 71,923 juvenile were arrested in 2015 according to a report from the California Department of Justice. Meanwhile, improvements have been made. Lawmakers unveiled a list of bills in March 2017 in an attempt to divert children from a school-to-prison pipeline and to keep children out of the juvenile justice system. “We have made really big progress, we just have to do a lot more. Because we still incarcerate the most vulnerable population in this country…. More than any other country in the world,” says Dr. Bo Kyung (Elizabeth) Kim, assistant professor at USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

McGill reflects back to her incarceration and says that she was better off than a lot of other people who have been in solitary confinement and who were sentenced to life in prison.

She thinks back to a particular experience, saying, “As a young person you’re in cells usually with no bathrooms. So, you’re pounding on the door or a plexiglass window... in the door, to try to get someone’s attention so you could pee. [You are] especially desperate in the middle of the night when you’re locked in, and having people either know that you’re pounding and ignore you, or pretend not to hear you, and having to pee into a towel or into a corner or hold it all night. That was particularly horrible.”

Regardless of this, she says that for her, the boredom was the worst. Being in a place where pencils, pens, books, and paper are all considered contraband, you could spend hours, days, and sometimes months without the ability to read or write, let alone do anything else to stimulate your mind. “Once I had a nickel on me that wasn't caught during the search and I wrote with it into an entire cell wall,” she remarked. Although there would be dayroom time, often, it would rarely be programmed to help you grow.

Contemplating whether or not she found solace in anything or anyone during her most vulnerable moments, she said, “[I] can't think of any positive thoughts that got me through anytime.” With no childhood pictures to show, she mentioned that she has largely been on her own, having lost touch with all of her family.

McGill states that people who go into the system are particularly vulnerable. “Because of your age or because of your lack of experience, you’re introduced to people who have been much more involved in the streets. So, prisons, jails, [and] juvenile halls are also breeding grounds for violence,” she says.

She pauses for a moment before stating that strip searches were obviously another distinct experience she remembers. She would have to, “strip down naked in front of total strangers, not only the people that you’re locked up with but the guards. In [the] case of the youth system, it’s probation officers. In [the] case of the adult system, it’s usually sheriff's, sometimes police officers.”

The stench of the facilities is another feature she vividly recalls as being unbearable. “I think that anyone who’s been locked up can smell, you know, with a quick memory, exactly how it smelled, when we were there. And, you can differentiate between the facilities you’ve been based on the smells they had,” she says.

“Sounds at night are also something that never leaves you,” McGill says, “whether it’s the pounding of doors, crying, screaming, people mumbling to themselves, people rhyming… yelling, arguing with each other.”

McGill mentions that one of the most impactful things for her development was growing up in communities of color. “I think I had the benefit of seeing the obvious issues in the system from a very young age… When you’re white, and you’re going through it, it’s really obvious to you that you’re getting preferential treatment.”

“Rampant racial inequities are evident in the way youth of color are disciplined in school, policed and arrested, detained, sentenced, and incarcerated,” according to a report from Human Impact Partners. In 2015, 88 percent of juveniles in California who were tried as adults were youth of color.

“We see that the zero-tolerance policy has actually really affected communities of color,” says Crissel Rodriguez, the Southern California regional coordinator at the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance.

On the streets, McGill was treated as a victim while her friends were viewed as criminals. She recalls being taken aside by police twice and being asked if she had been kidnapped. She was constantly queried about why she was in specific areas, if she knew they were dangerous, and if she wanted a ride home. “It didn’t matter what color the police were either,” she says. She thinks that LA is a great lesson for that reason.

Kim echoes this sentiment and proclaims that youth of color are much more likely to be in touch with police negatively at every single point of contact in the system, and they are more likely to be taken further into the system than out of it. “The, justification for that for the judges themselves, is that... it’s dangerous, so we are going to detain them. It’s a way to protect them. But under the purview of protecting them, they’ve further introduced them to a system that brings them back over and over again,” she says.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that locking up children on juvenile or criminal charges be a matter of last resort. However, if there is an ingrained idea in society that these kids are just incorrigible, then what can we do to ensure that justice is actually served?

In 2012 Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 9, by Democratic Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco, to amend Section 1170 of the Penal Code. This bill supported that judges reconsider the sentences of juveniles punished to life in prison. Following the passage of California’s SB 9 in 2013, most of the state’s juvenile life-sentenced prisoners are being resentenced, according to the Sentencing Project.

Now, SB 394 is awaiting Gov. Brown’s signature. Signing the bill by Oct. 15 would annul youth offenders in the state enduring mandatory, life-in-prison sentences. This would allow California to join states that have banned the sentencing practice known as a juvenile life without parole sentence, which the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional.

The Office of Juvenile Justice, Delinquency, and Prevention have supported the need to stop incarcerating young people, to move away from the youth prison model and find a way to rehabilitate young people in communities, and not take them out of their homes.

Now, at 36 years old, Kim McGill leads at the Youth Justice Coalition, a movement which proclaims to challenge America’s addiction to incarceration and race, gender and class discrimination in LA County’s, California’s and the nation’s juvenile and criminal “injustice” systems. To her, and most people in the coalition, this crusade is personal. “The greatest feeling that myself and I think other people have got has come through our organizing and fighting back to change the system. It’s healed us more than any other single thing has,” she concludes.