Proposition 21 Thesis

They all wanted to pass Proposition 21 so that they could put these alleged dangers to society in jail and keep their communities safe. “The ‘get tough’ legislation targets Black and Latino youth specifically and generates support by playing on public anxieties about race and crime.” Proposition 21 only made the criminalization of youth more prevalent, going as far as legalizing it. Proposition 21 used language that made Latino youth the target and kept them in jail as long as possible. It made their sentences longer and allowed them to be tried as adults preventing them from receiving any lesser punishment due to their age. The idea behind this legislation was that they should get time reciprocal to the crime, adult time for adult crime, but

State funding of these institutions results in delinquent kids become labeled and treated as criminals by teachers, community centers, and even parents. This is a community issue when the institutions that are meant to make productive citizens out of youth, rather than label them as criminals-in-the-making. This is a reason why Ruth Wilson Gilmore disapproves of funding because “the professionalism of activism has made many committed people so specialized and entrapped by funding streams that they have become effective deskilled when it comes to thinking and doing what matters.”u The government is not interested in the betterment of these youth, the community is, and they should be the ones funding the communities empowerment, awareness and accountability themselves. She continues by stating that change doesn’t stick when it happens all at once, what does create real change are “ persistent small changes that over time cause a break with the old

Community accountability and community based approaches challenge us to seriously address violence and intimate harms without reproducing the technologies of individualization, pathology, penality, protection under the authority of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy, and criminalisation, all of which continually deny and subvert our notions of safety and justice. We are asked to consider recover and build the potential of community while recognizing and disengaging from strategies that undermine the possibility of community formation. Community accountability is any strategy to address violence, abuse, or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, child protection services, or any other state