From “An Address on Prisons” in Ramparts Magazine (1968):

“When you focus on the adult penitentiaries, you’re looking at the end of the line, trying to see where a process begins. But if you really want to understand and see what’s behind the prison system, you have to look at Juvenile Hall. You have to do down to Juvenile Hall. That’s where I started my career, at about the age of twelve, for some charge. I don’t know what it was, vandalism. I think I ripped off a bicycle, maybe two or three bicycles. Maybe I had a bicycle business. I don’t remember. But it related to bicycles. They took me to Juvenile Hall, and it took me about six months to get out again. While I was there I met a lot of people. I met a lot of real, nice, groovy cats who were very active, very healthy people, who had stolen bicycles and things like that. Then I moved up the ladder from Juvenile Hall to Whittier Reform School for youngsters. I graduated from that one and they jumped me up to the big leagues, to the adult penitentiary system.

I noticed that every time I went back to jail, the same guys who were in Juvenile Hall with me were also there again. They arrived there soon after I got there, or a little before I left. They always seemed to make the scene. In the California prison system, they carry you from Juvenile Hall to the old folks’ colony, down in San Luis Obispo, and wait for you to die. Then they bury you there, if you don’t have anyone outside to claim your body, and most people down there don’t. I noticed these waves, these generations. I had a chance to watch other generations that came behind me, and I talked with them. I’d ask them if they’d been in jail before. You will find graduating classes moving up from Juvenile Hall, all the way up. It occurred to me that this was a social failure, one that cannot be justified by any stretch of the imagination. Not by any stretch of the imagination can the children in the Juvenile Halls be condemned, because they’re innocent, and they’re processed by an environment that they have no control over.

If you look at the adult prisons, you can’t make head or tail out of them. By the time these men get there, they’re in for murder, rape, robbery and all the high crimes. But when you look into their pasts, you find Juvenile Hall. You have to ask yourself, why is there not in this country a program for young people that will interest them? That will actively involve them and will process them to be healthy individuals and lead a healthy life. Until someone answers that question for me, the only attitude I can have towards the prison system, including Juvenile Hall, is tear those walls down and let those people out of there. That’s the only question. How do we tear those walls down and let those people out of there?

People look at the point in the Black Panther Party program that calls for freedom for all black men and women held in federal, state, county, and municipal jails. They find it hard to accept that particular point. They can relate to running the police out of the community, but they say, “Those people in those prisons committed crimes. They’re convicted of crimes. How can you even talk about bringing them out? If you did get them out, would you, in the black community, take them and put them on trial and send them back again?” I don’t know how to deal with that. It’s just no. NO! Let them out and leave them alone! Let them out because they’re hip to all of us out here now. Let them out. Turn them over to the Black Panther Party. Give them to us. We will redeem them from the promises made by the Statue of Liberty that were never fulfilled. We have a program for them that will keep them active — 24 hours a day. And I don’t mean eight big strong men in a big conspicuous truck robbing a jive gas station for $75. When I sit down to conspire to commit a robbery, it’s going to be the Bank of America, or Chase Manhattan Bank, or Brinks.”

If you didn’t know that this was written in 1968, you would think that it was tailor made for the time that we are currently living in. No? The main thing that we are missing in 2012 is our own version of the Black Panther Party (with some improvements).