Seattle: Two Stories About The Central District Juvi

From Tides of Flame
We firmly believe that the well-being of our children and families requires this action.
- King County Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard McDermott

King County representatives have a great new plan to fix the decrepit, foul-smelling Youth Services Center*: bulldoze it, rebuild it with new and improved “urban design,” and add some condos. Problem solved!

To pay for this, County leaders are currently working to get a $200 million property tax levy on the primary August ballot. If it passes, home-owners will be expected to pay 7 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, or about $20 per year for a home assessed at $350,000, for 9 years.

According to The Seattle Times, this is how they intend to spend that heaping pile of cash: “The county would move some buildings back from their current locations near street fronts and concentrate them closer to the center of the campus. County officials would then sell to developers nearly 3 acres at three corners of the property. The idea is that developers would pay about $16 million for the land, which would help to offset construction costs and enliven the area with retail and residential projects.”


The history of development in Seattle shows exactly what “enlivening an area with retail and residential projects” means: condos, cupcakes, and cafes. And more police trolling the streets for petty “quality of life” crimes like graffiti and pissing in alleys. There couldn’t be a more perfect example to show how the justice system, capitalism, racism, and gentrification are interconnected. While kids endlessly cycle in and out of developer-subsidized jail cells, wealthy condo-dwellers will be enjoying the view from their rooftop sun decks.

Proponents are attempting to sell the plan by appealing to voters’ empathy for the poor kids locked up in a such a run-down facility. Cienna Madrid, writing for The Stranger, recently advised voters to “approve the levy—the facilities are about as safe for kids as an electric eel fishery. In some hallways, it perpetually smells as if someone took a shit in their hands and then clapped.” She goes on to quote Judge Helen L. Halpert saying, “It’s filthy, it’s decaying, and it sends an evil message to the primarily poor people who we see: ‘You just don’t matter.’”

According to these fools, imprisoning children under such shitty conditions shows them that society doesn’t really care about them. Well, news flash, “society” doesn’t really care about them. Halpert’s idiotic logic contends that a fancy new facility (no doubt a much more secure, higher capacity facility) with upscale condos and shops next door will somehow change this.

Um, what the fuck?

Obviously it is horrible to imprison children and teens in a rickety old building. But it’s just as disgusting to imprison young people in a new building with an aesthetically pleasing urban design. The problem is incarceration, period. Oh yeah, and rampant racism, a completely fucked economic system, psychotic cops, politicians... One could go on and on.

To anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s no secret that the US criminal justice system is fundamentally racist and operates in accordance with the needs of capitalism. The statistics are easy to find. There are 2.3 million people locked up in cages throughout this country. Judge Halpert admits that most of them are poor. With only 5% of the world’s population, the US boasts a full quarter of the world’s prison population. US prisoners are disproportionately black and Latino, and the prison population has sky-rocketed over the past thirty years largely due to the War on Drugs.

These statistics are alarming, but they seem to suggest that if the excesses of the justice system were scaled back, then the basic functioning of the state’s court and corrections apparatus would still be desirable. This analysis ignores that the primary purpose of laws, courts, and prisons is SOCIAL CONTROL and not the prevention of things like interpersonal violence and drug addiction.

Prison captures surplus populations—the poor and the restless—that might otherwise create real problems for the smooth functioning of capitalism. Meanwhile, the cage extends beyond the razor wire in the form of surveillance, even working its way into our minds as we police ourselves and each other. Above all, prison serves as a looming warning for any who wish to destroy this cold and disturbing reality.

The cops and courts have shown themselves to be perfectly incapable of stemming the tide of so-called crime. This is because it is this sick culture and its laws that create and construct the criminal. On the one hand, pervasive alienation reproduces the abusive sociopathy of capitalism in individuals. Television, pop songs, and our own experiences of being treated as worthless and replaceable teach us to regard each other as objects be be used and thrown away. This results in abusive behavior, in rape, in pointless murder. On the other hand, capitalism creates the economic and social conditions—poverty, necessity, vapid materialism—that fuel theft and the drug market. The state, in turn, criminalizes the things the excluded do to survive.

As long survival is tied to money, as long as there are rich and poor, as long as land is property, there will be criminals. As always, some will choose their targets wisely from the long list of individuals and institutions that profit from our exploitation and the destruction of the natural world. Others will continue to prey on people not so different from themselves. Prison has not and will never change this. The only way to stop broke, broken people from cannibalizing each other is to destroy the system that breaks us and to create new, nourishing worlds. That, not coincidentally, is also illegal.

For all of these reasons, we reject the County’s plans to “fix” the Youth Services Center. The new complex might make liberals sleep a little easier, but it will still function as a node in the network of capitalist domination. That it will be integrated with upscale gentrification only makes it that much more repulsive and offensive to all those who love and struggle for freedom.

The only way to fix the Youth Services Center is to burn it—and every other exploitative institution—to the ground.

-------------------------------------------------------

I stumble out of the paddy wagon, handcuffed and tired, and am politely dragged by an asshole cop through the front doors of the King County Juvenile Detention Center. There are two people standing at the front desk ready to meet me.

Penal Institutions are fun things to be thrown into. As a Washington State Youth, I try to live out my days of numbered naivety under a blanket of carefree bliss and unthinking “revolt” inspired by That 70’s Show and all those terrible video games I play whenever I’m not shooting heroin behind the school dumpsters, or plotting ways to drop out of school so I can infiltrate the insane clan below the widely recognized “Bridge.” When harassed by cops I shout obscenities and fight back and go wild and become uncontrollable not because I hate everything they are and everything they protect and their disgusting desire to please Master just for another slice of bread and a pat on the head, no, it’s not because I think anything dumb and romanticized like that, it’s because I’m a lost child and I need to be better trained in how to deal with the Adult World. The people in the Juvi really, really, really, want me to succeed. They want me to thrive and they understand that I can only reach my true full potential through formulated conditioning. I disagree, but if they show they care about my personal well-being enough, I’ll eventually understand and love them for what they’ve done to me.

They place us in little cement cages with bright halogen lights that turn everything a revolting shade of vomit yellow, and they give us food that makes us wish for the mashed Gerber products of our abusive childhoods. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner they make us recite lines that are meant to instill a sense of community and camaraderie between us and our jailers. They line the walls of our communal den with shelves full of books that tell us what life is really like.

During my short stay I read 13 Boxcar Children books and never felt so terribly alive. The walls of my cell were lined with sketches of AK-47s and raging fires and a plenitude of foul words and calls for revenge and promises of solidarity that
were probably written in moments of a very dark rage. I thought someone would have painted over them by now, but perhaps they think they’re taunting us in our solitude.

It was nice to leave at last, but it was soured for
me almost unbearably because I knew that there are
millions left behind in those horrible things, slowly
watching their lives drain away.

FIRE TO THE PRISONS
A CURSE ON THE GUARDS
A POX ON ALL WHO STAND
IN THE WAY OF TOTAL FREEDOM!


--http://tidesofflame.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/tof17read.pdf