Just imagine you're a teenager, angry at the world, told all the time you're not worth shit.  Maybe your teachers tell you straight up that you're stupid, so you stop asking questions in class.  Maybe you get mad at another young woman just like you who disrespects you in some type of way... you feel like you can't be seen as weak—respect is all you have.  So you fight, you brawl and get busted. 

But instead of being treated like a person worthy of respect, the pigs, the judges, the courts all treat you like shit, like an animal.  When you reach Juvenile Hall, instead of getting caught up on classes, given a chance to read or learn, they put you in a box, take away your phone... and you stare at the wall, day after day after day.  When you have to use the bathroom, you knock on the door repeatedly to be let out... and nothing.  So you have to squat, over a milk carton if you're lucky, or just on your towel so it doesn't get all over the floor.  So now you're locked in a box that stinks of your own piss. 

When you get angry, when you lose patience at being treated like dirt, the guards—with fear in their eyes instead of compassion—use pepper spray to attack you, to subdue you.  The guards are cruel and brutal, laughing at you when you cry or complain.  With all these lockdowns, you can't see your mom or your lawyer, you don't know what's happening with your case. 

And it goes on like this—chaos, hunger, anger and boredom.  Even being convicted of a crime so you get out of the Hall starts to feel like hope, so much that you consider taking a plea deal and spending time in youth prison over this nightmare.

These are the conditions for hundreds of youths in the Juvenile Halls in Los Angeles which right now imprison several hundred young people—from children as young as 12 to 18.  One-third of these children are Black, and almost two-thirds Latino.  The youths there are awaiting trial (before they're even convicted of a crime); they're fighting their court cases (which could sometimes take years); or waiting to be transferred to a longer term prison after a conviction.  For days, months or sometimes years, children and young people are caged in these hellholes.

Last week, while members of the Revolution Club were forming up to protest this and organize for revolution, someone stopped their car to tell club members that he spent years in and out of that building.  He told us: “they should give you a lifetime of mental health treatment for how bad they fuck you up in there.”  A mother visiting her son said, “however much you might misbehave when you go in there, you come out worse.” 

“Youth Justice” In America = Genocide

These are the workings of a “youth justice system” that should not exist one more day—a “youth justice system” that is enforcing a white supremacist genocide of the millions of Black and Brown youths that this capitalist system has no future for.  Yes, genocide!  Look at the accompanying box on what’s recently come to light and tell us it’s not.  Multiplied year after year, city by city, with whole generations shuttled in and out, there’s no other word that captures what this system is doing.¹  This system needs to be overthrown through an actual revolution and replaced with a radically different, and liberating, society and system.  Not only is this possible, but the very people ground up by this system can be part of the backbone and driving force of the revolution to end this system.

This is the message the Revolution Club took to these youth, and their loved ones, in actions taken at Juvenile Hall and Twin Towers Jail over the holiday season—connecting people with the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) in a recent series of Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show.  We held a press conference to send this message—getting coverage in the Spanish language newspaper La Opinión, and local TV news.  And we reached people at visiting hours on the way in to see their children and family—showing clips from these interviews, and distributing a flyer asking them to “Give The Best Gift You Could Give, A REAL Way Out Of The Madness.” “...there IS a way out, real hope. Not by looking to heaven but by making revolution right here on Earth. There is a way to do that, out of the conditions today. And there is leadership for that way, in Bob Avakian.”

All throughout these Interviews, BA speaks directly to the section of youth that are being brutally suppressed by this system, and who are too often caught up in fighting and killing each other.  BA sees, and speaks to, their potential in a way no one else does—not for one or two people to make it out of the meatgrinder, while the vast majority get ground up—but to become emancipators of humanity.  Becoming part of a force that is not just putting an end to their own oppression, but putting an end to all oppression for everyone all over the world.  This is possible through an actual revolution to bring a radically different system into being—a system based on a whole different economy to meet people's needs and become fit caretakers of the Earth, a system based on ending the exploitative and oppressive divisions among people.

Because this system cannot provide a future for the vast majority of Black and Latino youths, they cage them, demean them, and set them up to fight and kill each other off.  When the youth lash out, they are brutalized even more.

This is what's visited upon the young people who are the most precious thing humanity has.  Decades ago, this system—with white supremacy woven into its every fiber—found it more profitable to send most large scale industry to places like Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, exploiting people over there even worse and leaving generations of young people here without work.  Locked into neighborhoods robbed of resources and flooded with drugs, these youths were channeled into gangs—the only way to “be somebody” on the terms of this system.  A genocidal policy took hold with police terror and violence, mass incarceration to warehouse and control an entire population, and setting them up to kill each other.  This is what we see in the Juvenile Halls, and this is why this nightmare won't be ended through reforms, review boards or exposing reports.

So, we say again: this system should not stand for one more day!  It needs to be overthrown through an actual revolution, and replaced with a radically different system.  The vision and framework for this is spelled out in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by BA.  This Constitution provides the foundation to deal with the complexity we'll face in building a new economic and social system that is uprooting oppression and exploitation.  But it also sets a foundation for what will be incredibly simple—providing a life fit for the children and young people—for critical thinking and education, with love and attention.  It won't be that fucking hard not to terrorize and torture the youth—youth who won't just have a future, but will be part of forging that future!

There is a strategy to make this revolution—in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible because of the crisis throughout society, and the rulers fighting amongst themselves.  There is a scientific understanding to be taken up and applied in the new communism that BA has developed and there are forces to join in the Revolution Club in cities across the country. 

Right now, all the youths who are hardened by the jails and the city streets, by the brutality and bleakness of this system, need to connect with BA—and need to be invited and struggled with, ferociously if need be—to raise their sights, to tap into their deeper down aspirations, their desire to live a different way, to channel their anger and frustration into the most meaningful thing there could be: a life worth living for themselves and future generations.