By MYRTLE OSNER

On Saturday, January 29, at 10 am at King Kennedy Center in Modesto, a number of speakers will talk about aspects of Juvenile Justice in California. Proposition 21 proposes changes in the prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration of juvenile offenders.

Spurred by an exhaustive study done all over the state by Leagues of Women Voters, a comprehensive publication on Juveniles has been published by LWV in California. In 24 succinct pages, the League lays out its thesis, subtitled "California Efforts to Prevent and Deal with Child Abuse and Neglect and Juvenile Delinquency with Recommendations for Improvement." It is available by calling the League’s office in Modesto, 524-1698, at cost. You are invited to attend the Juvenile Justice Symposium, to hear speakers with expertise in the field.

When the League of Women Voters does a study, it follows its recommendations with action both at the local and state levels. Dollars and cents are involved here, not just policies. Tracking what is happening in Stanislaus County is part of the overall strategy, while the state League works with the legislature to accomplish what its members have said needs to be done. A part of the strategy is responding to ballot propositions. The League takes positions only on matters which it has previously studied. It is therefore the right time to respond to ballot Proposition 21 that will be coming up on the March 2000 ballot. Next month we will give you details of the other ballot propositions, and the League’s recommendations.

The initiative process has been taken over by massively funded organizations, in my opinion and I’m not alone in that view. It behooves voters to find out the truth behind ad campaigns that rely on big money and vested interests. The initiative process was meant to be the way that ordinary citizens could take initiative to accomplish legislation that the legislature refused to enact. No more.

By MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

When is a child not a child?

When he is a black child, apparently.

The spectacle of Nathaniel Abraham, sitting in a courtroom, his life in the hands of 12 strangers, is a stunning indictment of the American "justice" system, where youth is no mitigator.

A troubled youth, to be sure, he was less an individual than an opportunity. An opportunity for some political animal to make his mark, not on a young, tender life, but on one’s future career. In a remarkable compromise verdict, the jury in the case acquitted the boy of weapons charges, while simultaneously convicting him of 2nd Degree Murder, a charge that may result in his banishment to the netherworlds of America’s prison industrial complex for the very rest of his life.

America, which preaches to the world of its vaunted "human rights," is also the world’s leader in incarceration rates. It is creating and sustaining one of the most repressive prison systems in the West, and increasingly becoming much more repressive for juveniles. But, it is increasingly becoming common that a juvenile is just another commodity; a body to be caged, for longer periods of time; not a person in need, not a youth to be rescued, not a life to be transformed.

Nathaniel Abraham was such a one. Charged in the accidental shooting of a Detroit neighbor, the state mobilized its anti-life forces to capitalize on the case, and to secure careers. After decades of fierce and unprincipled demonization by the elite media, the lives of black, Hispanic and poor youth, once exposed to the "tender mercies" of the system, are in dire jeopardy. It is in this spirit that a boy like Nathaniel became more than a boy; he was, and is, projected as a dark symbol of social pathology; with little or no hope of his renewal.

If there is some constant in the psyche of the young, it is that they are in a constant state of growth and development. Their essential nature is that they change; that is, perhaps, what they do best! But Nathaniel Abraham, a little boy of 11 at the time of the shooting, and a little boy of 13 at the time of his trial, will not be allowed to really change, for legally he is adult, and any change is irrelevant. At the very least, young Nathaniel will be held in Michigan confinement until he is 21 years of age — 10 years. At most, he will be caged forever, frozen like a small museum exhibit, in a block of time, no matter how long he lives, nor what he may achieve, no matter who he later becomes as a man: he will be a symbol, a relic that denies his essential reality, as a living, growing being.

It is an irony of American history that where once grown black men were seen as boys, now boys, of no matter how tender an age, are seen, and treated, as men. The constant feature in this social and historical process is the projection upon the eternal other, of values of worthlessness and powerlessness — a relic of our dark and tragic past that we drag along into the future. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. Young Nathaniel Abraham, if denied the natural right to be seen and treated as a child, unwittingly serves as another form of social symbol: he is the canary in a cage, and as he is carried deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, he warns us of an impending catastrophe.

© MAJ 1999

ACTION: The author has been on death row for 17 years. A world wide movement has formed to overturn his wrongful conviction. Go to http://www.mumia.org/index3.html for information or to the Oct. 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, http://www.unstoppable.com/22