The Youth Justice Coalition and three other group held a sit-in Wednesday outside the Board of Supervisors office in downtown Los Angeles. The groups were there to demand that action be taken to protect kids incarcerated in the county’s juvenile detention halls.
“Young people are suffering inside,” said Emilio Zapien, communications director for the Youth Justice Coalition, a group that advocates for incarcerated youth and adults. “We know this.”
Posters with “Stop the Violence,” “Free the Fifty,” and “Shut Down Juvenile Halls” written on them surrounded the crowd.
“We know they’re not getting programming,” Zapien said. “We know that they’re not getting the resources. We know that they’re not getting good access to food and access to the restrooms. We know this because we work directly with their parents.”
Occasionally everyone shouted “Free the fifty,” referring to a campaign demanding that the county release 50 girls and gender expansive youth inside local juvenile halls.
“It’s very important for me that Black girls get the support that they deserve, because a lot of the times, we’re disproportionately affected,” said Marshe Doss, who was there as an organizer with the Students Deserve Coalition.
Doss said she believes that kids who rebel and struggle with emotional and social regulations need more support than they receive. She added that she was almost incarcerated as a teen, and credits her community for supporting her.
“I need someone to look at me and like, see me as a human who’s like crying out for help, and not as someone who is like a troublemaker,” Doss added.
Organizer Jahzara Halliday, also with the Youth Justice Coalition, said the coalition supports young people by offering anger management and transformative justice counselors, legal clinics, gardening, arts and music classes.
“The main thing it’s like keeping the young people educated, giving them resources to employ them so they won’t fall into the hands of the system, and just continuing to create awareness,” Halliday said.
The groups went on to present public comment at the supervisors’ meeting. They’re asking that the board take several measures, including declaring a state of emergency to release all girls inside local juvenile halls, and to fulfill a 2021 Board of Supervisors pledge to move toward decarcerating girls and gender-expansive young people.