Since Fall of last year every week I’ve walked past this construction site watching the illegal project take place. Two years ago I participated in a protest against the construction of the jail outside of Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s home. Protesters were in shock over the funding of the $210 million project after the $74 million defunding of primary education in schools throughout the city. This was not even a full year after the City Council committed to zero youth in detention through a unanimously passed ordinance. It seems as though money is pointing in the opposite direction with the massive defunding of education and the tremendous funding of incarceration, the reality of the situation sets in even more so for me as I visit students who have yet to complete high school, sitting in cells in King County’s current juvenile detention center. The ‘center’ is cleverly labeled Juvenile Court and Youth Services Center, leaving many citizens completely unaware of the reality on the inside. This is why the Family Justice Center label of the new building does little to sway me of the reality. Students as young as 11 are caged in single 6×6 foot ‘dorms’ with a metal bed frame, toilet and sink surrounded by graffiti scratched walls with locked doors. We may fall for the allusion on the outside but these young people know that they are in jail. Although many of them have yet to be sentenced they’re treated like criminals none the less. Every single young person I’ve spoken to has a traumatic past as a victim of sexual, physical or drug abuse and some as witnesses to the death of a loved one. I’ve met the most ‘famous’ cases in the city, they’ve each done their best to describe themselves through poetry as more than the monster they’re portrayed as in the media. I’ve met young people desperately afraid coming up on their 18th birthday, which should be a joyous occasion, but their struck with the fear of getting ‘sent up’ to adult facilities and more often then not they are. I’ve met some who are matter of fact about their future behind bars. I as a young black women barely making it in the city have met more young detainees than the policy makers, construction workers and company CEOs pushing this project forward combined and to each of them this is what I have to say about their ‘New’ Youth Jail.
‘New’ Youth Jail
This place
Where humanity is depressed
Officers are power obsessed
And your entire sense of being
Is reduced to a meaningless set of numbers
Sentences are infused with years
To satisfy money hunger
Cheeks are abused by tears
As children sit silent and wonder
Why am I here?
Where we count the days with fear
As we await trial.
Where officers treat children like monsters, vile.
Where mama can’t afford to take off work to see her child.
Where taxpayers who pay to imprison
Are in denial.
Why does this place exist?
To break down the innocent?
To harbor the drug abused, trauma infused misfits?
Because they didn’t tally my vote against this.
Cleverly covered by words like, “Family” “Center” and “Justice”
I’ll never trust this.
And now as companies lay down layers of brick to brick
This concrete covered modern day plantation makes me sick
So ask yourself this,
“Is it progression or succession?”
To cage the hurt and abused
Instead of treating the depression.
To never teach kids their worth
And then foster their aggression.
In segregated places
Where the mind depreciates
Filed through hallways
Treated like slaves
Walk single file, behind your back, cross your hands
No questions, no answers, only demands.
Our children are big fed mental pollution
Never taught their worth
Cycled through institutions
Funneled through systems
Committed to there confusion
So now I’m asking
Where’s the solution?
I know I’ll never find it in this county’s constitution
Their doing everything they can
To avoid wealth distribution
And then they spend billions
To maintain a sick allusion
This isn’t justice
So I’m looking for revolution.
-Amani Sawari
