Not Down with the Lockdown: Youth Speak Out Against SuperJail

Mary Rubach is wincing.

"There's no need for this noise," she says in a clipped British accent. She appears to be in her early seventies, though I don't dare ask her exact age. "Shouldn't someone go up there and tell them to turn the speakers down?"

	Tracy by Samantha Liapes and Mei-ying Ho (Bold verses by Mei-ying Ho) They locked up tracy cuz her baby got scabies from the s.r.o mattress and she said fuck this and put down the want ads delivered a dime bag to get money for a crib a clean bed for her kid and she got caught and gota mandatory minimum in a central valley prison now her kids are in the system same system that refused to assist them financially readily rips apart their family see tracey couldn't get a job on the outside seemed only white folks hirin and only their kind and when employers realized where she resided eyes became wideand applications denied and besides none of the wages advertised could pay rent and childcare no not anywhere in this city forget it she had no choice but to do what she did and now she has no choice but to work for the pennies they payher what they sayher labor is worth like her great great grandmothers worth based on her capacity to birth more cotton pickin machines this system don't see Tracy as a human been but as potential profit --This poem was read by Samantha Liapes at the rally. Samantha is an organizer for Bay Area PoliceWatch.

I shrug in sympathy. After three hours of blasting protest and lyrical celebration, my own ears have certainly been ringing.

But try telling that to this crowd -- the hundreds of folks who've come to Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, protesting the construction of what may become one of the largest juvenile detention centers in the nation. Organized by Books Not Bars and the Youth Force Coalition, this "Summer Jam to Stop the SuperJail" is the biggest public gathering for the campaign thus far.

Alameda County officials have been pushing for two years to build a massive "Juvenile Complex" to replace its present 330-bed juvenile hall. The proposed structure would be the largest per-capita juvenile detention center in the country and may house 450 beds. It would be larger than the juvenile halls in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas, the largest of which has only 112 beds.

Officials argue that the old juvenile detention center is overcrowded and structurally dangerous, as it was built on an earthquake fault line. While activists agree that a new detention center needs to be built, the proposed scale seems like a wasteful way to spend money and social resources. It also has people worried that more beds will mean more arrests.

In the last decade, the juvenile crime rates have dropped consistently in the Bay Area. In a region desperate for more spending on education and social services, one might question using $131 million of public funds on a huge detention center.

"Everyone knows that we shouldn't be spending millions of dollars to put more kids in jail," said Rory Caygill, 23, of the Youth Force Coalition. "We should be spending millions of dollars to keep kids out of jail."

The clamorous hip-hop activists -- or "raptivists," as some journalists have dubbed them -- have stepped down from the stage. The volume comes down, to a less ear-blasting level, as Julia "Butterfly" Hill steps up to the mic. She wants to tell us how her two-year stint in a redwood tree is directly connected to the burgeoning prison-industrial complex. "The same forces that are making nature into a monoculture," she says, "are making humanity into a monoculture." The volume of the rally swells up again.

I look around at the swarm of faces, bodies, and t-shirts around me. Playaz. Babies. Wheelchairs. Mumia. Che. Farrakhan. Bikini tops. Hooters shirts. Big gold chains. B-Boys. Skater chicks. Unionists. Crunchy Berkeleyites. Generation Queer. El Teatro Campasino de Atlatn. Black-booted militants with gaunt faces. Grandmothers with melting ice-cream cones.