City Budget Ignores Youth, We Must Fight for Youth Services Not Jails

63% of City Budget goes to cops and jails, only 3% to children and families.

By Malcolm Suber

New Orleans mayor Latoya Cantrell and arch-racist DA Leon Cannizzaro have teamed up to announce yet another scheme to supposedly curb an uptick in crimes committed by youth, especially young Black men. They are using sensational reports of youth crimes to call for more funds for the NOPD, more police patrols and more police contact with our youth (meaning more unwarranted stops and searches).They are also calling for stepped up enforcement of the citywide youth curfew.

The mayor and DA paint a picture of Black youth as predators in need of rounding up and locking away from the majority of law-abiding residents; so they call for an expansion of the juvenile lock-up as well as the trying of more juveniles as adults.

We workers should not be taken in by this ruling class propaganda. Youth crime is tied to the lack of gainful employment opportunities and lack of recreational and cultural programs that provide youth with positive things to do in their non-school hours. Why don’t the Mayor and DA address the root cause of juvenile crime instead of offering a band-aid on the cancerous conditions which exist for New Orleans youth? The working class community is rightly frustrated by the almost nightly barrage of reported criminal activity by alienated youth. But the Mayor and DA are only playing to this frustration in order to get the public to consent to their plan to lock up more youth. These youth in many cases are lashing out against the rich white ruling class and their politicians who have written them off as nothing more than a public nuisance.

Where is the money for more programming at our recreational centers? Where is the money for hiring full-time coaches? Where is the money for counselors and for youth employment? Rather than ‘disrupting’ the pipeline to prison, the Mayor and DA are actually facilitating the mass incarceration of our youth. They would rather spend more money on surveillance cameras and give fat contracts to their friends to monitor ankle bracelets on the growing number of youth arrested by the NOPD.

“What we are seeing and the rhetoric we are hearing from the political elites is because the system continues to fail our communities. We do a great job of holding vulnerable youth and parents accountable, but who will hold the system accountable? WE WILL THAT’S WHO!”
— Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC)

Even though the capitalist media claims the USA economy is robust and nearing full employment, Black youth unemployment is nearly 50%. Many of their parents and guardians are forced to work two jobs and the youth are left to raise themselves. By allowing these conditions to fester, we show that we are not really concerned about saving these youth from the path to enslavement in the USA prison system.

Our task is to help our youth build a movement that champions their demands for a quality of life that gives them the freedom to explore their revolutionary history of struggle for Black liberation. This movement will train our youth to avoid the modern day slave catchers and give real meaning to being woke and the understanding that Black Lives Do Matter.