Ending Youth Incarceration
What a present without prisons looks like
As I mentioned previously, I am going to be focusing on the criminal justice system for the next several posts. In my recent volunteer work to reform the Maryland youth justice system, I have noticed how easy it is for people to push a false narrative based on partial or misleading information about crime, its causes, and the best responses to it. What I hope to do over the next few posts is highlight examples in the U.S. where we have already seen decarceration and look at what can work across the country. I’m not here to hash out the finer points of what happens 60 years from now when we’ve finally closed most prisons. The world and the US will be unimaginably different places at that time and those who want a better world will continue to be engaged and thinking about the best path forward. I like the quotation from Thomas Jefferson found in his memorial in D.C.
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Overwhelming evidence has shown that strong and healthy communities are complex systems that can’t be policed, arrested, or executed into existence. And very little evidence was used to increase criminalization and massively expand the state punishment bureaucracy. By highlighting specific examples of states and communities that are reducing their prison populations while also reducing crime, I hope to make clear that prisons do not make a safer or more just society, particularly at the mass-incarceration level we have today. This is not to say that making safe communities will be easy. It won’t be. But it is possible when people come together and push for a more caring, less punitive future.
This topic is increasingly important to me because I have been volunteering for almost a year for the Maryland Youth Justice Coalition (find us on Facebook, and Twitter). The coalition is a collection of very smart and dedicated people; lawyers, public defenders, youth program leaders, activists, teachers, and formerly incarcerated people among many others. One thing I have noticed in this time, is that the media greatly affects people’s perception of crime and that local Fox stations specifically tend to shape the narrative around crime in favor of more policing and more punishment regardless of the rate of crime. Alec Karakatsanis, a civil rights lawyer, has many great pieces about this, including how the quantity of stories about crime that news stations choose to air greatly affects people’s perception of crime without the news station needing to lie. This is not a great environment in which to build community safety because the conversation ends up being based on flawed or partial information. Community members understandably react with fear to any potential change to policing or the justice system because the narrative that has been repeated so constantly as to seem like common sense is that the best solution to crime is more incarceration.
To hopefully start changing this narrative, I want to discuss this article from January of this year from Nonprofit Quarterly about Hawaii’s reduction of youth incarceration: How Hawaiʻi Is Ending Youth Incarceration After More Than a Century of Colonization. The whole article is worth a read, but to highlight the main points, Hawaii has reduced its youth incarceration rate by 82%, with a goal of a 100% reduction. This is great and shows there is a better response to the current social norms of hyper-individualism, a rejection of communal living (forcibly in the case of Hawaii), and the market or government overtaking all forms of community care (health, education, childcare, elder-care, etc.). The article states:
In 1961, all industrial schools and operations for boys and girls merged into the Hawaiʻi Youth Correctional Facility. Around this time, US family court systems changed how they dealt with “troubled” youth.
A movement to reform the juvenile justice system also began with the “objectives of making juvenile justice beneficial for youthful offenders while at the same time protecting society from those youths. To strike a balance between these objectives in the context of different types of juveniles in trouble has been the dilemma.” Progress proved slow.
Studies have shown that system-involved youth, especially those who are incarcerated, are three times more likely to enter adult prison later in life, compared to their peers who haven’t been through the system. The displacement of Native Hawaiians from their lands results in “higher poverty rates and lower incomes than non-Native Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi.” As a result, NHPI youth are more susceptible to substance abuse, trauma, loss of loved ones, broken relationships, depression, human trafficking, and economic instability—all worsened by confinement. With no true sentiment of self and place, many youth take to the streets to redefine themselves. Reversing these outcomes requires an equitable model of healing.
Things did not improve for quite some time because prison is a tool for punishment, with no plan for what would happen when a young person lived through several years of a dehumanizing environment and then was returned to their community. However,
In 2014, Hawaiʻi’s legislature enacted House Bill 2490 Act 201, a call for systems change to reduce the youth correctional facility’s population by 60 percent by 2019 and redirect resources to mental health, substance use treatment, and other interventions. The bill reduced court referrals, improved probation for justice-involved youth, and engaged with community-based programs for youth support. That same year, prostitution among minors was decriminalized, which meant underaged sex-trafficked victims received support and treatment rather than punishment.
Then in 2018 the state changed its youth justice model completely and worked toward educating and providing “holistic therapeutic diversion and treatment programs” to youth. They partnered with many youth-serving organizations that empower youth who have committed crimes to see themselves as part of the community, to work on themselves and helps them to understand their own personal agency, but also their part in creating a safer and better community. Youth are provided with education, can take courses on community justice, and are able to see the positive contribution they can make to their community and see that their community will support them along this path.
During the communal land tenure system, when someone committed a crime, they were seldom sent away to a prison-like environment because the absence of an individual and their role would not contribute to the community’s growth. Other means of discipline and therapeutics, like hoʻoponopono—using traditional protocol to set right what is wrong in families—allowed people to heal within their communities.
A present without prisons allows community members who have caused harm to come back into the fold of society and give back 10 times what they took away. Hawaii has achieved so much in the last five decades regarding youth justice and it is largely because they understood the value of community and saw the value of each of their neighbors. In fact, in 2022 they had “zero girls incarcerated for the first time since 1961”. They set a goal of reducing youth incarceration and continued to work for decades on that goal, recognizing that locking someone (a child no less) away from their community only makes that community weaker. Without systems of care and rehabilitation, there is very little reason for someone to repair the harm that they caused, and no reason for them to trust the community that would lock them away and prevent them from ever having an opportunity at redemption. We can change things in other states (in upcoming posts I’ll look at some other states that already have), but we cannot let fear dictate our responses, we must act out of love and compassion for the humanity of our neighbors.