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The YOUTHJUSTICECOALITION/Free L.A.! is a youth-led movement to challenge race, gender and class inequality in the Los Angeles County juvenile injustice system. Our goals is to tear down a system that has ensured the massive lock-up of people of color, widespread police brutality and corruption, vast disregard for youth and communities’ Constitutional and human rights, and the build-up of the world’s largest prison system. We use direct action organizing, advocacy, political education and activist arts to agitate, expose, and annoy the people in charge in order to upset power and bring about change.
YJC members, ages 7 to 24, are the young people L.A. has labeled as criminals, gangstas, thugs and hoodlums — in other words, we’re basically considered trash. To most people, we are invisible and forgotten, locked away in dusty corners of LA County, behind barbed wire and concrete — in juvenile halls, county jails, camps and youth authorities. We’ve been pushed out of the school system into Continuation Schools and Probation Schools where the teachers are overworked and under-trained, the books and materials are in short supply, and there are more Probation Officers than guidance counselors. We report to Probation and Parole on the regular, and have gotten use to routine police searches and peeing in a cup on demand.
