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Voices from the Trenches
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Chief Jesse Williams is at the helm of San Francisco's juvenile probation department as the city begins its Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative, intended to reduce the population of youth in custody and to correct disproportionate confinement of minority youth. As head of probation, Williams is also helping oversee the replacement of San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center, the city's more than 50-year-old juvenile hall. |
Williams on the disproportionate confinement of African-American youth:
"We had a report recently conducted documenting that there is roughly a 12 to 16 percent population of African-American youth in San Francisco, but roughly 50 percent of youth detained in our juvenile hall are African-American. This was the most startling result of the report -- as well as the lack of availability of appropriate placements for youth. And so, in a word, everything is at stake for our African-American youth. Some of what is at stake are life and death situations. How do African-American youth get into the system? Why do they remain in the system? And how do we prevent what is essentially for some youth a fast track to the California Youth Authority [the last stop before adult prison] or to the adult system?
"One of the things we are looking at in our [Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative] process is how we screen young people who come into our detention facility. Understanding how we make decisions about who gets into detention is a key piece of reform. And in terms of placement resources, we just hired someone as a placement coordinator to spend time exclusively focusing on coordinating existing placements, but, more importantly, trying to establish additional placements for young people who present special challenges. There is not a sufficient array of those kind of services.
"Somehow San Francisco youth are perceived as more troubled, more difficult to manage and more problematic to serve than [those] from other jurisdictions. Well, when I worked in Maryland, they said the same thing about Baltimore kids. When I worked in Washington, D.C., where the juvenile justice system was almost 100 percent African-American kids, they said the same thing; and when I worked in Pennsylvania, they said Philadelphia kids were more difficult. And the only common denominator is that we are talking about largely African-American kids who have some troubled histories.
"Race is an undeniable factor [in the challenge to create new alternatives for delinquent youth], and we shouldn't pretend it is not a factor. That is the challenge we are facing in San Francisco -- is how do we spark the interest and develop some individual contracts with providers who are willing to work with kids who I don't believe are significantly different than any other jurisdiction's kids, other than a lot of them are minority kids?"
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