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Legislators in Alameda County have decided that their current juvenile hall, located in San Leandro, Calif., is in dire need of upgrading. The plans for an upgrade include a possible move to Dublin, Calif., a suburban city at the eastern edge of the Bay Area. The proposed Dublin site would be adjacent to the Santa Rita Jail, and only a stone throw away from brand new houses occupied by middle- to upper-class residents. An elementary school and the Silicon Valley giant Sybase lie close by.

Some local residents, like the head of community group Stop the Super Jail, James Morehead, feel the county is simply doing damage control.

“As for the ‘jail’ v. ‘facility’ language, I look at it this way: The detainees are not allowed to leave the facility. A percentage of the detainees are maximum security — i.e., the detainees are deemed very dangerous. In short, the detainees are not allowed to leave, are held in secure custody in cells behind walls, with armed guards ... If that isn’t a jail, what is? The county is trying to obfuscate and spin the issue,” Morehead said.

Due to the hypersensitive nature of this institution, there are serious differences of opinion. For example: What to call the facility? Opposition groups like Books Not Bars call the facility a “super jail” in organizing efforts, while some Alameda County officials — like Director of General Services Aki Nakao — are furious about the facility being called a super jail, or even a jail at all. He insists it only be referred to as a “detention facility.”

At the core of organizing against the facility is the fact that a majority of incarcerated youth are people of color. While this disproportionately affects the African American community in the Bay Area, Asian Pacific Americans make up some 5 percent of incarcerated youth in the Alameda County system. Championed by everyone from civil rights groups to civic organizations, the fight against the new juvenile facility has been a one-and-a-half-year effort of coalitions, often led by youth.

The current proposal, initiated in 1992, calls for a 420-bed juvenile detention center in Dublin, with space for 450 beds planned to be completed by 2005. Future plans would possibly increase the facility to 540 beds — all this is at an estimated cost of $177 million. The present youth detention center located in San Leandro houses 299 beds.

“For quite some time, Alameda County has had plans to dramatically expand the juvenile hall,” said Lenore Anderson, director of Books Not Bars. “The public found out about the county’s plans to expand and relocate one-and-a-half years ago.”

The need for a new jail arose after years of deterioration of the current facility in San Leandro. Due to high costs, the county decided to try and renovate the San Leandro juvenile hall instead of constructing a new facility elsewhere within the county. But, the California Board of Corrections found the renovations to be inadequate. According to a recent study released by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights/Books Not Bars, the National Center for Youth üaw, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and the Youth Law Center, that the California Board of Corrections has titled “Alameda County at the Crossroads of Juvenile Justice Reform: National Model — or National Disgrace,” the San Leandro facility was “… old, outdated and difficult to maintain. The administration has attempted to offset some of the physical plant limitations by remodeling some areas, but space is still inadequate and insufficient for implementing all necessary programming for all of the detained minors.”

The county reassessed its plans in 1998 and was recommended to erect a new facility with 540 beds on top of the current location in San Leandro. After seismic and soil evaluations, major concerns arose about building on the San Leandro site, one of them being the site’s close proximity to the Hayward fault line. Following these findings, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted to change the location to Dublin. But, according to Alameda County General Services Agency’s director, Aki Nakao, the site has not been finalized.

“They are doing environmental reviews [on different sites], including the current site in San Leandro,” Nakao said. “We are looking at land owned by the port of Oakland as well. The report is due out at the end of this year, and hopefully the board can make a decision by next spring.”

The potential change of location would prove to be a problem for some Alameda County residents, while other residents question the amount of work the county has really put into finding alternate sites.

Attendees of the 2001 Not Down With the LockDown, the biggest major organizing event in the campaign against the juvenile detention facility.

Enter groups like Books Not Bars at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Stop the Super Jail and Friends of Dublin.

“Books Not Bars is a public education community mobilization organization,” Anderson said. “We have been around for not much longer than the super-jail campaign itself. We have been co-leading the campaign with the Youth Force Coalition [YFC] for a year and a half.”

In April 1999, representatives from 20 Bay Area youth organizations came together for a retreat to collectively envision the mission, work and structure of a coalition that would work on issues around the prison industrial complex. This coalition developed into the YFC, which has been a major part of the campaign against the proposed facility and responsible for organizing huge awareness events like 2001’s Not Down With the LockDown [See sidebar].

Morehead said the role that Stop the Super Jail plays is to inform the public. “Friends of Dublin, they do a lot more. They focus on alternate sites [for the jail] and the EPI [Environmental Impact Review] report. Books Not Bars represents the detainees and their families, and if there is a need for such a big facility in the first place.”

Morehead has worked to register residents within the vicinity of the proposed jail and has accumulated a large database of residents who oppose the facility.

“We did a mass canvassing,” he said. “We hit the entire east Dublin area. We went into Pleasanton, south of 580. We quickly got up to 600 people [to register with Stop the Super Jail].”

Though the main objectives of the three groups are different, Morehead said that the groups work together on major issues like the distance between Oakland and the proposed site in Dublin. Books not Bars and Stop the Super Jail are both appealing for the facility to be built closer to Oakland, where the majority of the youths detained are from. “[We are] trying to convince the county that moving to Dublin is too far,” Anderson said.

Both organizations also believe the size of the facility is of great concern. “That’s a big bone of contention,” Morehead said. “[The county] bases the amount of beds on a forecast for the use of the facility. Even [Alameda Country Supervisor] Gail Steel, when she was talking to me informally at the town hall, said there are a lot of youth at the current facility in San Leandro who shouldn’t be there. There are runaways and kids that should be in foster care, halfway houses or something. So the facility right now is housing some people that shouldn’t be there.”

Books Not Bars believes there is no need for such a big facility. Anderson says that her organization does not feel the county needs to expand beyond 330 beds. He compares the proposed facility to others in counties of the same size and some even larger.

“The county proposed to move to Dublin for a county the size of Alameda County (1.4 million people) — that’s outrageous,” said Anderson. “With the same population, counties have 90 to 200 beds. Chicago’s Cook County has 5 million people and 498 beds, to give you a sense of how big 540 beds are.

“One of our early successes was convincing the board of corrections not to give Alameda County $2.3 million to build the facility,” continued Anderson. “Another big success was getting the county to bring down the number of beds.”

Some of the many newly built homes in Dublin, Calif., can be seen from the proposed home of the detention facility. Because many of the builders did not disclose the possibility of a youth detention facility being built in their back yards, some homeowners are considering taking legal action against the county, a threat that has forced local home builders in the area to disclose the possibility of the facility to potential home buyers, according to community organization Stop the Super Jail.

The Asian Pacific American community makes up just over 20 percent of Alameda County’s youth population (ages 10 to 17), according to the Crossroads report. Slightly over 5 percent of the youths detained in the Alameda County prison system are of Asian decent.

One of the concerns of organizations like Books Not Bars is that there is an over-representation of youth of color detained in the prison system. According to the Crossroads report, over 59 percent of the youths currently held in Alameda County are of African American decent, while fewer than 14 percent are white. In comparison, African Americans represent fewer than 18 percent of the total youth population of Alameda County, while the white population makes up just under 33 percent.

“The most glaring and disproportionate arrest and detention rate is for African Americans,” said Anderson. “Youth of color are over-represented in juvenile hall as well.”

According to the Books Not Bars website, the problem continues to worsen for people of color. Though African Americans comprise only 13 percent of monthly drug users, they are arrested at five times the rate of whites, and are twice as likely to get a prison sentence after being arrested. On average, that sentence will be 20 percent longer than the one given to a white defendant. Though it is a statistical fact that African Americans are no more likely to be guilty of drug offenses than whites African Americans are filling prisons at a rate of 10 to one over whites. Latinos, Native Americans and some APAs suffer from similarly unfair treatment. If present trends continue, by the time a child born today enters college, the United States will have about 6 million people of color behind bars — a number larger than the population of several countries.

“There are two issues: one is that it seems like Alameda County is just more likely to lock youth up while youth crime rates are going down, and way more people are being detained in Alameda County than other counties,” said Anderson. “If the county goes ahead without changing the system and builds the 540 beds, [we] will just see more young people being effected and locked up.”

For more info on Books Not Bars, visit www.booksnotbars.org.