and food trays as toilets. Almost half of the nearly 600 kids in the prisons had been on suicide watch.
The Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s prisons have been entrenched in repeated scandals of sexual abuse, physical abuse and other mistreatment for decades. But they’ve also changed significantly after such crises in the past. The push by the Finish the 5 campaign, led by the young people and social justice advocacy group Texas Center for Justice and Equity, proposes phasing out the five prisons by 2027. Instead, the prison funding would go to counties to better handle difficult youth populations, as well as implement better intervention and prevention programming to keep kids out of cells in the first place.
“I’m 16, oh wait, no, I just turned 17,” chuckled Mya Leger, her long, thin braids trailing down her back. Having grown up in public housing, Leger joined the coalition after seeing many of her peers die or go to jail. She said low-income kids weren’t given many other options. “It feels like we actually have an avenue to people that are in charge, and that feels so much more powerful than just organizing from the outside,” she added, having participated in protests with Kumar for other social justice causes.
Donning a campaign T-shirt and pigtail braids, Johnson said she joined the movement to break the cycle of incarceration for herself and for her 4-year-old brother, who will grow up to be a Black man in a world “so cruel to men of color and people of color in general.”