Editor’s Note: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is making plans to permanently close that city’s juvenile hall. The move is a victory for criminal justice reform advocates and would make San Francisco the only major American city without a juvenile detention facility. In this commentary, Kwest On Media’s Editor in Chief Russell Morse shares some memories from his time locked up in the facility that is facing its final days.
I spent a significant portion of my teenage years as a detainee at San Francisco’s juvenile hall, so when the Board of Supervisors vowed to close the Youth Guidance Center, a friend who works at City Hall reached out to me with the news. She quoted a fellow juvenile justice reform advocate, saying, “We have to burn the house down!” As a person who has dedicated my adult life to criminal justice reform and advocacy for people behind bars, I understood the significance of the announcement: A lot of people worked very hard to bring us to this point — many formerly incarcerated people like me — and I applaud their efforts. But I have to admit, I was kind of sad.
For those who spent time there, the Youth Guidance Center (or to those who were detained, the “You Got Caught”) was home. We were all young people, children, really, who had to one degree or another been rejected and abandoned by the adults in our lives. Many of us were in foster care. We’d been kicked out of every school we’d attended. We were survivors of physical and sexual abuse. We were from violent, poor and neglected corners of the city. As bizarre as it might sound, YGC was the first place that welcomed us.
Yes, YGC was a jail, and it was awful in all the ways that jails are awful: We were locked in our rooms for hours at a time, many days were marked by harrowing violence and fear, and there was no shortage of cruelty and oppression. But we were also introduced to effective community programming, and we formed meaningful relationships with each other and with many of the staff.
We were clever and knew how to have fun. There were board games on the unit, and it was only a matter of time before we dispensed with the boring real estate aspects of Monopoly and shot dice for the multicolored cash. When Monopoly was banned, an industrious peer figured out that we could make our own dice by pressing our institutional bread into small cubes, covering them in lotion, and leaving them to dry on the windowsill.
We used our breakfast juice cups as currency, playing basketball for “five juices,” or betting “next grape” on who would win Wrestlemania. Anyone who has been to jail will be familiar with these underground-economy tactics and gambling as a way to pass the time. But our camaraderie went beyond pastimes.
We worshiped together every Sunday, because atheist or not, church was the only time we got to see the girls. We sang along loudly to the hymns, giggling and clowning in the pews. And we bent our heads in earnest prayer when the priest suggested we ask God for some guidance. It seemed like a good idea.
The counselors were tasked with typical jailhouse duties: locking us in our rooms multiple times a day, breaking up fights and enforcing an elaborate, draconian rule set. But they also took their role as “counselor” seriously, offering us guidance, support and even entertainment. In my experience, the majority were genuine, compassionate, well-meaning people who wanted to help. One morning, I watched a counselor very tenderly teach a new detainee how to brush his teeth because no one had ever shown him before.
Another counselor, a very hip young black man named Burris, would announce the dinner menu every night as we stood in line waiting to be seated, using the intonation and vocabulary of a server at a Michelin-starred restaurant. “Good evening, gentlemen. Tonight we have a delightful Salisbury steak, served in a house-made powdered-gravy reduction . . .” and every night, he finished by saying, “as always, we will be serving milk, which is available in whole or . . .” and every night we called back in unison, “LOW FAT!”
YGC is also where I was introduced to Jack Jacqua and the Omega Boys Club, which came to every unit once a week to host a lively, uplifting meeting where we talked about taking control of our own destinies, avoiding the perils of gang life and finding meaning in our circumstances. It was where we started to learn about the social factors — racism, poverty — behind our childhood incarcerations. They trusted us with these complex concepts and encouraged us to stand up and testify.
My first memorable act of public speaking was at an Omega meeting in B-4 at YGC. The following week, I got into a fight and Jacqua heard about it and took me off the list for that week’s meeting. He came to visit me in my cell instead. “You’re a cool cat, man,” (Jacqua talks like a wild, wigged-out hippie) “but you gotta get your temper under control.” He reminded me that getting into fights on the basketball court was not in the “Omega Spirit.” I learned more from that exchange than any other time I’d been in trouble for fighting in my life.
Most significantly for me, YGC is where I was introduced to David Inocencio and The Beat Within, a writing program that came to our unit and encouraged us to write, publishing our work in a weekly magazine. It was the first time any of us saw our names in print, and it was empowering. People in the unit were always on good behavior the night The Beat was supposed to come because we didn’t want to miss it. I credit The Beat Within with many of my successes in life, which include a career in journalism and a spot in the Creative Writing MFA program at NYU.
The problem with all jails and juvenile halls is a societal one: We warehouse the vulnerable, poor, mentally ill, chemically addicted, abused, neglected, overwhelmingly black and Latino people of our society in violent and oppressive environments because it’s easier than trying to address the complex issues that led them there.
In that sense, it is a profound victory that YGC is closing. But here’s the real reason I’m not doing a touchdown dance: It’s easy to close YGC now because most of the vulnerable, poor, black and Latino children who used to fill its cells have been forced out of San Francisco, along with most of the people who have children.
I’m aware that crime, particularly juvenile crime, is down all over the country. The national movement against mass incarceration has grown exponentially since the time I was locked up, and a huge number of people in society now recognize that incarceration doesn’t work.
But if I’m looking at San Francisco, the city where I was born and raised, I’m wondering where all the black and Latino kids have gone. I’m wondering where all the poor families with young children have gone. Are they getting adequate care, support and intervention in the communities where they now live? Or has San Francisco’s hyper-capitalism in the tech era made those families and those children somebody else’s problem?
