Youth Rights Media
Making Media, Making Change: An Activist’s Story
By Hiram Rivera
New Haven, Connecticut is the birthplace of George W. Bush, the home of Yale University, and the headquarters of Youth Rights Media (YRM).
The day of my interview for a youth organizer position, I witnessed a typical day at YRM: a group of teenage girls were practicing a dance routine, boys were yelling at each other, and the 24-year-old executive director was running around frantically trying to turn off the fire alarm. I didn’t know it at the time, but that day was the beginning of an incredible learning process.
Youth Rights Media is a non-profit organization that teaches high school aged youths, primarily those who have been involved in some way with the juvenile justice system, how to produce video media productions and use them as tools to create change in their community. At our Media Lab, youth learn how to use video cameras, audio equipment, and editing machines in order to make documentaries and public service announcements. We also provide Youth Organizing workshops where they learn the ins and outs of community organizing: how to facilitate coalition meetings and organize events and rallies.
VICTORY!
In June 2004, the youth of YRM premiered their documentary, CJTS: At What Cost? It was an on-camera tour of Connecticut’s $57 million maximum security facility for boys ages 11-15, known as the Connecticut Juvenile Training School. Built amidst a financial scandal that forced the resignation of former Governor John Rowland, CJTS became the last stop in the Connecticut juvenile justice system. YRM’s documentary exposed the real reasons the facility was built, the abuse of the children by CJTS staff, and demanded that it be shut down. For almost a year, the youths traveled all over Connecticut and even as far south as Georgia screening their film, trying to get justice for the kids on lockdown.
April 1st, the same day Governor Rowland served his first day in prison for the crimes he committed as governor, the current governor, Jodi Rell, announced that she wants the Department of Children and Families to find a new use for CJTS and to close the facility down! This is the biggest youth victory ever at YRM and for the state of Connecticut. “Pound for pound, YRM is the best youth organization not only in Connecticut, but in the country,� says Karl Gray Jr., a youth staff member at YRM. He added “It’s very successful at teaching youth about their rights and how to enforce them.�
What I’ve seen in my 10 months here has exceeded anything I could ever have imagined. I’m convinced that what we do here at YRM is helping these kids become aware of their own potential. I am amazed everyday at just how much they learn, and I don’t think the world knows what’s about to hit it!
LEARNING TO LISTEN
I originally viewed my job as a chance to enlighten kids about what was ‘really’going on in the world, the history of social justice movements, and the importance of activism. I thought that all I would have to do was teach them about great historical leaders like Albizu Campos, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X. But I had a lot to learn about working with youth, especially youth who have been harmed by the system.
I’ve learned that creating change in your community can’t happen until you’ve created change within yourself. Many kids who walk through the door at YRM have given up hope that anything in their lives will ever change for the positive. And while I had envisioned training an army of young activists to take on oppressive people and institutions, I wasn’t prepared to help kids deal with mothers addicted to drugs, domestic violence, running away from home, and going to jail.
Sometimes I would ask myself and my executive director if we were spending too much time on personal issues and bad attitudes and not enough time on political education and direct action. But taking on the system is impossible to comprehend when home is a lot scarier than anything The Man can ever do to you. Now, I find myself listening more than I do indoctrinating. It’s the only way I can learn to understand the youth here, and the only way they will come to trust me.
Hiram Rivera is 28 years old, from New Haven, CT. He attended Southern CT State University, majoring in Political Science. He has been active in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement since 1994, and will be representing the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party- NY chapter at the World Youth Festival in Venezuela.
GOT RIGHTS? Defending the Hood in Harlem
By Joselina Fay
Throughout U.S. history, a complex relationship has developed between law enforcement agencies and communities of color. Beginning with slavery, and the implementation of policies such as Runaway Slave Laws, the legal system regulated the lives of people of African-American descent. Today, laws and legal practices restricting freedom and movement continue to shape the same communities. Policies such as the Quality of Life Initiatives in New York City, which monitor and regulate peoples’ lives, are highly enforced within African-American and Latino neighborhoods.
The impact of these policies manifests itself in many ways throughout communities of color. The high rate of incarceration of African-American and Latino people is one result of the extensive police surveillance. Together these two groups make up over 80% of the New York State prison population. With the continued growth of the prison population over the past thirty years, these high rates have had far reaching effects on the economy, culture, and lifestyle within the prisoner’s communities. As a continuation of the historic precedence, law enforcement and police presence have developed into a common and influential reality for these groups.
The Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS) was created to specifically handle these issues within Upper Manhattan. NDS, founded in 1990, is a communitybased public defender agency that addresses the root causes that lead individuals to encounter the criminal justice system. NDS provides free criminal and civil legal services, in-house investigation and social work support, as well as re-entry advocacy to residents of Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood.
NDS created the Students Taking Action Towards Empowerment (S.T.A.T.E.) Program in 1999 in an attempt to better serve its large youth client-base. S.T.A.T.E. is a youth leadership development program that uses a civil rights curriculum to teach conflict resolution and criminal law. The goal of S.T.A.T.E. is to empower youth by educating them about their rights when interacting with the police and the legal system. As Harlem youth have the second highest arrest rate in all of New York City, there is a great need for the resources that the S.T.A.T.E. Program provides.
S.T.A.T.E. is currently expanding its program activities to include a community campaign aimed at improving the relationship between youth and the police. The campaign will be developed and run by S.T.A.T.E participants to strategically address the specific issues they feel are most important.
NDS, along with S.T.A.T.E. staff, is also attempting to develop a Cop Watch Program to deal with illegal stops and arrests within the Harlem community. The Cop Watch Program would monitor and record police behaviors, to place pressure on officers to act lawfully during these routine street encounters.
The long-standing issue of unjust police presence within communities of color is a complex and challenging problem to solve. S.T.A.T.E. has begun to address this situation within the Harlem community through education, community involvement, and youth mobilization.
Joselina Fay graduated from Fordham University, with a B.A. in Urban Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies. During her time at Fordham she was a tenant organizer with West Bronx Housing and Development, as well as a teachers aid at Crescent School 57 in the Bronx. After graduating, she worked as a Field Organizer for the John Kerry/John Edwards Campaign in Miami, FL. Joselina is currently the S.T.A.T.E. Program Coordinator at the Neighborhood Defender Service.
Killer Coke in Colombia & India
By Camilo Romero
Hundreds of high schools, colleges, and universities around the country have exclusive contracts with Coca-Cola to provide unhealthy food and beverages to students. Yet, as students and faculty are “obeying their thirst,� Coke is teaming up with paramilitaries in Colombia to threaten, kidnap, and murder workers for trying to form and strengthen a union in their bottling plants. At the same time, Coca-Cola is depleting and polluting ground water in communities throughout India. Over the past 2 years, students around the world have stood in solidarity with workers in Colombia and communities in India and have begun kicking Coke off of their campuses. With historic victories over corporations like Nike and Taco Bell, the student social justice movement continues to grow and is poised to bring down “The Real Thing� unless they clean up their act. This article shares some background and invites you to get involved to “Stop Killer Coke!�
Why Target Coca-Cola?
Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most powerful and profitable corporations. In 2002, Coca-Cola earned nearly $4 billion in profits, enough to pay its Chairman, Douglas Daft, $105 million in compensation. Yet, despite repeated pleas for help, Coca-Cola has not found the time or resources to insure the most basic safety of the workers who bottle its products or prevent massive environmental devastation in the communities where it does business.
Death Squads in Colombia
Colombia has long been the most dangerous country in the world to organize a union. Since 1986, roughly 4,000 Colombian trade unionists have been murdered. In 2000, three of every five trade unionists killed in the world were Colombian. The vast majority of these murders have been carried out by right-wing paramilitary groups (aka death squads) on an ideological mission to destroy the labor movement. These groups often work in collaboration with the official U.S.-supported Colombian military, and in some instances with managers at plants producing for multinational corporations. In the case of Coca-Cola, according to numerous credible reports, the company and its business partners have turned a blind eye to, financially supported, and actively colluded with paramilitary groups in efforts to destroy workers’ attempts to organize unions and bargain collectively.
• Since 1989, eight union leaders from Coca-Cola plants have been murdered by paramilitary forces. Dozens of other workers have been intimidated, kidnapped, or tortured.
• In Carepa, members of the paramilitary murdered union leader Isidro Gil in broad daylight inside his factory’s gates. They returned the next day and forced all of the plant’s workers to resign from their union by signing documents on Coca-Cola letterhead.
• The most recent murder attempt occurred on August 22, 2003, when two men riding motorcycles fired shots at Juan Carlos Galvis, a worker leader at Coca-Cola’s Barrancabermeja plant.
• There is substantial evidence that managers of several bottling plants have ordered assaults to occur and made regular payments to leaders of the paramilitary groups carrying out the attacks.
These ongoing abuses have taken their toll on Coca-Cola workers’ efforts to organize. Their union, SINALTRAINAL, has suffered a dramatic loss in membership, as worker leaders are intimidated or forced into hiding. SINALTRAINAL has appealed for solidarity and allies in the U.S., labor and social justice movements have answered their call. The United Steelworkers and the International Labor Rights Fund have filed a lawsuit against Coca-Cola on behalf of the union and victims’ families in U.S. federal court. Other unions including the Teamsters and many community groups have launched public campaigns targeting Coke. If history is a guide, students could be the needed force that finally moves Coke to stop denying responsibility and take action to protect its workers’ lives.
Environmental Devastation in India
In India, the rallying cry is “Somebody drank my water!� Communities in regions where Coca-Cola has opened factories are launching grassroots campaigns demanding that Coca-Cola stop its pattern of draining common water resources and polluting the scarce water that remains.
• At Coca-Cola’s factory in Plachimada, Kerala, the company extracts more than 800,000 liters of ground water free of charge each day, as the local community thirsts for drinking water because their wells have run dry. Because the factory has drained the local groundwater table, agricultural fields on which thousands of local people subsist have been destroyed.
• In Mehdigank, Coca-Cola is accused to spewing toxic chemicals into the agricultural fields surrounding its factory and illegally occupying a portion of common community property. When community members staged a protest at the factory in 2002, they were beaten severely by 200 police personnel sent to “protect� the plant and 50 gun-wielding private security guards.
• In late summer 2003, authorities in West Bengal, Punjab and Rajasthan banned the sale of Coca-Cola products based on a New Dehli research group’s finding of dangerous levels of pesticide residue in a sample of locally made drinks.
Campaigns to hold Coca-Cola accountable for its practices are spreading quickly throughout India and the campaign has garnered significant attention. But activists complain that Coca-Cola has assigned the entire “problem� to its public relations department rather than addressing the serious issues that are being raised.
What Can Students Do?
As students, we have a great deal of power to pressure Coca-Cola to stop its abuses. This is true for at least two reasons. First, as anyone who has seen Coke’s TV commercials and advertisements may have noticed, Coca-Cola views young people, and particularly students, as its highest priority demographic target. To the company, young people are potential “customers for life� – if they can win our loyalty before their competitors do. Thus, young people hold more sway than we might think when we publicly attack the company’s image and spread the message to our peers.
Second, students have a powerful leverage over Coca-Cola through our universities. As we have found with collegiate licensed apparel, food and beverage companies like Coca-Cola are eager to develop relationships with universities, both to access a profitable institutional market and associate itself with the prestige of colleges and universities. In the past several years, Coca-Cola has stepped up its efforts to negotiate major contracts with universities. These contracts go beyond simply installing vending machines on campuses to include sponsorship of sports teams and unique marketing relationships. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, recently entered into a 10-year contract with Coca-Cola that, among other things, lets the company create specially designed UC Berkeley-themed vending machines and marketing materials. The university will receive a million dollars a year in return.
Hasta La Victoria!
In recent weeks, students have been able to cut significant contracts in the U.S. such as Rutgers University in New Jersey and globally such as in Ireland and Venezuela. Coke is certainly taking notice and has seen itself forced to address the campaign in public and internally as well. Recent developments have lent even greater momentum to our campaign.
Camilo Romero is a National Organizer at United Students Against Sweatshops & Campaign to Stop Killer Coke
Locking Up Innocent Immigrants: How prisons profit and the rest of us lose
By Bob Libal
The detainment and deportation crisis in immigrant communities is set to intensify in the next several years. The passage of the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) added an additional 40,000 new immigrant detainment beds by 2010 – a move that will triple the already burgeoning immigrant detention system.
The bill also signals a boon for what has quickly become an immigrant incarceration industry: a network of private prison corporations and state and local jails that have turned immigrant detainment into big business.
The Human Face of Immigrant Incarceration
Only a handful of the current 22,000 immigrant detainees are suspected of any connection to terrorism. In fact, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, before the 1996 Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was passed, as few as 4,000 immigrants were detained on a given day. Most of the newly detained are either asylum seekers or “criminal aliens� – immigrants convicted of crimes, anything as low as shoplifting or minor drug possession charges – who are awaiting deportation hearings.
Aarti Shahani from Families for Freedom, a New York-based immigrant rights organization, says the addition of 40,000 immigrant detainment beds will put added strain on detainees and families already struggling with long detainments.
“There is a financial effect on families of the ongoing costs of telephone calls, commissaries, and travel, as well as the emotional effect of knowing your loved one is behind bars,� Shahani said.
Take, for example, Linden Corrica and Carol McDonald.
In 2003, Corrica, a legal resident from Guyana, was arrested and pled guilty to possession of marijuana in New York. Corrica expected to be returned to his family after a few weeks in jail. Instead, immigration screeners at Rikers Island whisked him off to a federal detention center in Louisiana where he has been held, awaiting deportation hearings, for well over a year.
Carol McDonald, Corrica’s wife, says that his detainment has created a strain on the family. “It’s been really, really hard,� she says. “Right now I’m doing three jobs, number one to support me and my daughter who are here, and to support him and the telephone calls and the lawyer’s fee.�
McDonald says that most policy makers do not seem interested in how long detentions affect families. “They just want to deny that it’s affecting families,� she says. “They talk about family values, well here is real suffering.�
Incarceration for Profit
Sadly, what is bad for immigrant families has become very good for business.
Notorious private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Aprison in South Texas. Private corporations have turned immigrant detainment into big business. Corrections) have been major benefactors of immigrant detention increases. The Department of Homeland Security contracts out for nearly all of its detention beds to private companies which are likely to receive substantial contract awards if the new legislation receives necessary funding.
“This is pork at its worst,� says Judy Greene, a policy analyst with the Justice Strategies. “[The 40,000 additional immigrant detainment beds] will be a massive new bailout of the private prison industry.�
And Greene isn’t alone in such predictions. MSN Money’s Michael Brush, in a glowing analysis of prison industry stocks, writes that the legislation “makes it likely that more illegal immigrants will be caught.� He continues, “Lawmakers estimate that by 2010 the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will need another 40,000 prison ‘beds,’as they say in the business.�
Actually, Brush is a bit mistaken. While the increased border patrol does make it more likely that undocumented immigrants will be caught, this alone does not create a need for detention beds. Proven alternatives to detention exist.
Just ask the Vera Institute: From 1997-2000, they operated an Appearance Assistance Program for immigrant asylum seekers and “criminal aliens� to attempt to demonstrate that alternatives to detention exist. The program used a series of check-ups to ensure that immigrants would show up to their hearings, where an immigration judge will rule on their fate. Over 90% of people appeared for their immigration hearings in this program, a rate substantially higher than that for people released on bond or parole.
So, why the need for 40,000 new beds now? Shahani, of Families for Freedom, fears that the end result of this bill is that more people will end up spending longer amounts of time in detention centers. When there are an excess of beds, she says, there is little incentive for immigration courts to expedite hearings or practice alternatives to detention.
In addition, incarceration culture runs wild on Capitol Hill. Anation that locks up over 2.2 million people, the large majority for nonviolent crimes, is more likely to refer immigrant detainees to jail cells than to other, more cost-effective solutions.
Private prison corporations will not be alone in looking to profit from the expanded detention system. Public entities, such as county jails and even state corrections departments may try to win the lucrative federal detention contracts.
Dana Kaplan of the National Resource Center on Prisons and Communities says the intelligence bill will further a growing trend of local jail expansion even at a time when many states are scaling back their state-controlled prison systems.
“When word is out that the government is looking to house 40,000 new detainees, that puts a huge incentive on local jail systems to expand, especially when there is no funding for other services (that provide jobs) in the region,� Kaplan says.
New York is an example of the way that local jails can lead to a sort of back-door expansion to the prison system. According to Kaplan, while New York’s state prison population has slightly decreased in the past several years, the local jail system has expanded by nearly 16% in the past 10 years.
This trend is especially troubling because when prison expansion is decentralized, enormous political and economic pressure is expended to keep prison beds full.
Texas: Ground Zero for Immigrant Incarceration
In 2003, Reeves County, Texas built a 960-bed expansion to its 2,000-bed jail. The county, located in sparsely populated west Texas, built the expansion with the hopes of obtaining a federal contract to house detainees.
The only problem is that the contract never came. Even after desperate measures like hiring majority whip Tom Delay’s brother to lobby the federal government for prisoners, the expansion was still sitting empty after nearly a year. Eventually, the county privatized its jail and began importing prisoners from Arizona.
Reeves County represents an interesting paradox in the immigrant incarceration industry. On one hand, federal legislators have justified tripling the current detention system by claiming that the system is badly overcrowded. At the same time, many of the recently built immigrant detention centers are not full.
The answer lies in the “if you build it, they will come� mentality that prison operators have taken to heart. Greene, Kaplan, and Shahani all agree that if the detention system is expanded, even when it appears that there is not an excess of detainees, the system will find people to warehouse in these facilities.
And Texas has become ground zero in this immigrant incarceration boom. The Lone Star state is home to at least 7,000 proposed or recently built prison beds – all of which are intended to house immigrant detainees, and all of which are to be housed by a private prison company.
Where’s the Hope?
According to Shahani, hope to stop immigrant detention expansion lies in a combined effort between immigrant communities and rural communities where the detention centers are sited.
There is a growing sense that prisons, jails, and detention centers are not the economic boon for small towns promised by jail developers.
A study from professors at Washington State University and Ohio State University published in Social Science Quarterly last year studied 3,000 communities that built prisons in the past 30 years. The study found that those communities actually ended up with slower economic growth than similar communities that did not build prisons. The study has been used by community activists to derail several jail proposals.
Shahani recounts the story of taking families from New York to Louisiana to visit their loved ones in detention. In several of the detention facilities family members were not allowed to be in the same room; they were instead forced to communicate via a closed circuit television system. Many of the family members refused to make a return trip because they didn’t want to see the detainees in such inhumane conditions.
If IRTPA is funded, it will create 40,000 more of these heart-breaking stories. To drive back the damaging effects of this bill on immigrant communities will be a long process, but one worth fighting.
Bob Libal is a student/youth organizer with Grassroots Leadership's Not With Our Money! campaign which seeks to involve students and young people in the fight to stop for-profit incarceration. He is a graduate of the University of Texas and lives in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at
bob@notwithourmoney.org
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