Little Frankensteins

Since the passage of proposition 21 in 2000, California’s youth offender population has been shrinking. Prop 21 was a tough on crime law passed which enabled juveniles as young as 14 years old to be tried and convicted as adults, and sent to adult prison. Since its passage, most violent juvenile crimes have been prosecuted under prop 21, and many youth now fill California’s adult prisons---many with absurdly long sentences, including life sentences.

The gutting of the California youth prison system has been spun as a success by the Division of Juvenile Justice. But the real story is that prop 21 has effectively reduced the role of the juvenile system to that of serving only those juveniles convicted of lesser crimes—like property crimes. The whole top-tier of juvenile criminals have now, for all intents and purposes, become adult offenders.

This has created a curious new juvenile prison environment---ironically, one characterized by increased violence, chaotic living environments, and the birth of a brand new youthful offender prison mentality.

My time in the system has coincided with this transition from the old youthful offender mentality to the new, leaner and meaner version. When I entered the system in 2003, the average age for youthful offenders in the older institutions (housing offenders between the ages of 18-24) was 21 or 22 years old. This majority set the tone for the older institutions, which was for the most part ordered and relatively mature. These older guys exerted a controlling influence over the younger guys, and kept them from running amok---which was the status quo in the younger institutions (housing offenders under the age of 18).

But as these older offenders went home, and as the new generation of younger offenders with less time moved into the majority, the environment became increasingly chaotic. Before, while the population still affiliated along race lines and gang membership was standard, there existed a chain of command that enabled conflict to follow ordered channels and manifest itself in predictable patterns (staff would work with the older offenders to address conflict, many times preventing prison riots). In this environment, non-affiliated people like myself could do their time with much less worry—could go to college and school without fearing random outbursts of violence, and count on a consistently stable living environment.

But as these older guys became a minority in the system, they could no longer exert the kind of control necessary to restrain the younger, more violence-prone generation. This younger generation began to exert its majority influence, and lacking the maturity and organization of the older more seasoned offenders, chaos began to become the defining characteristic of youth prisons. Racial tension, once checked by older, more rational offenders, began to spill out in chaotic spurts. Riots occurred at random, staff assaults increased, and the youth prisons became extremely violent---much worse because of their chaotic nature.

Now the transition from the old to the new is pretty much complete. And living in this brave new world is everyday becoming more and more impossible. Utterly random acts of racial violence are the norm, and one cannot exit their room without feeling in some degree of peril. It’s nothing like the streets of Baghdad, where such random acts of violence are usually fatal; but the stress that such constant fear produces has taken its toll on many of us---and the worst affected has been the non-affiliated offenders (like myself), who absolutely deplore the racial divisions, the violence, the gangs, etc. We’ve become easy prey in this new environment where it no longer matters whether you simply want to get your education, complete your Parole Board orders and get on with your life. Now, just the color of your skin can mark you as a target.

It has truly become the jungle.

The prison authorities have tried to reign in the chaos by segregating the units, school, and prison work positions by race, and staggering institutional movement so that offenders have only minimal contact with one another if they are of a different race. It has become commonplace to hear the staff on the other end of the phone ask when I move out from my living unit to work “What race is your ward?”

This segregation has only exacerbated things. Now tension builds up to a critical mass in multiple areas all at once---and when it erupts the prison descends into a kind of chaos I never thought was possible.