Will Roy describes his six-year lock up at the California Youth Authority (CYA) as a “torturous” experience. Bright rooms, 23-hour lock downs, and “nasty” food were used as methods to make youths reflect on their crimes, Roy said.

Now that Roy is out of the CYA, he said he feels adamant about giving youth a successful future that he feels cannot occur in the CYA program. In order to change CYA, the system needs to first start emphasizing the rehabilitation of teens, said Roy.

Roy said he believes that some problems begin at home and are later reinforced in the system.

“The whole cycle of kids performing what they see starts again,” said Roy. “For males, in general, it’s a lack of a male role models, communication and education. I think they need to focus more on family unification skills, instead of focusing on the crime, they need to focus on one’s history.”

Roy is a writer for The Beat Within, a magazine for youths in the juvenile system. He describes the magazine as a tool that helps keep youth on the right track. Roy is also an advocate of the Books Not Bars campaign. He said he hopes that Alameda County will ultimately close the CYA and create a better environment for youth to rehabilitate and receive a better education while locked up.

“Alameda County has a lot of stuff to deal with and a lot of cities. They just want to warehouse kids but this doesn’t take our problem away,” said Roy.

The CYA costs the state of California about $80,000 per inmate, said Roy. California’s recidivism rate is 90 percent, which could eventually go down if California’s legal system were modeled after more successful programs like those in state facilities like Missouri, Roy suggested.

According to a June 16 article in the San Francisco Bay View, Missouri’s youth correctional system focuses on addressing the causes of behavior problems through group processing and peer counseling. Missouri’s system does not use solitary confinement or additional time as punishment for fights and other behavior problems. The article states that the Missouri system’s recidivism rate is only about 8 to 15 percent, compared to a rate of 90 percent for CYA.

Dan Macallair, a lecturer for the Criminal Justice Department at SF State University, said that the CYA continues to report low recidivism rates to the public (based on young adults who violate their parole), in order to keep CYA open. Low recidivism rates means low return rates and this is used as proof that the system is working.

“The youth authority recidivism rates are measured in different ways based on the kids who violate their parole,” said Macallair.

Macallair said the recidivism rates that CYA uses do not include the youth who go to adult prison after a parole violation.

BAMMA is a summer journalism camp for high school students coordinated by the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism through the journalism department at SF State. For more information or comments on BAMMA, please contact Cristina Azocar.