As the Juvenile Justice Center Construction Continues, Local Group Continues to Fight
By MEL BUER
On July 14th, five members of the group Our Omaha, a community advocacy organization, attended the city’s topping-off ceremony of the new Juvenile Justice Center. The Juvenile Justice Center will include juvenile justice services along with County Attorney and Public Defender's offices and detention facilities. The advocacy group opposes the inclusion of detention facilities at the new center. As the final beam was lifted to the top and installed in front of the assembled crowd, the group turned their backs.
Members of Our Omaha turn their backs at the city's topping off ceremony on July 14th for the new juvenile justice center downtown.
Jaquala Yarboro attended the ceremony in protest, and highlighted the need to seek other ways to work with juvenile criminal offenders. “While we do need to work together in our community, I don’t believe that building another prison is the way to do that,” she said. “We are seeking more humane ways to look at rehabilitation as opposed to prison.”
Nicole Le Clerc has opposed this project since its inception in 2018, and maintains that the process has not included input from the people of Omaha. “This is outrageous--this whole process has not involved the people,” she said. “It’s profit over people, profit over kids.”
Our Omaha, which has mounted a sustained resistance to the building of the detention facilities at the new Juvenile Justice Center over the past three years, held a public event July 17 to discuss their ongoing opposition to the project. District Two City Councilmember Juanita Johnson was in attendance, as well as community advocates Roger Garcia and Laura Shiffermiller.
The group built a mockup of the juvenile sleeping rooms that are slated to be built in the new center. The rooms are 11’x7’ (77 square feet) and 25% of the rooms are windowless. In general, adult restricted housing unit cells, or solitary confinement cells, are 84 square feet. The planned room size is well below that of standard adult cells, and the group is concerned about the psychological damage that could be dealt to the children who spend an extended period in the detention center. According to opening remarks given by a member of Our Omaha, “The average length of stay for a youth charged in adult court in 2020 was 181 days...Kids who are not sent to alternative programs spend serious time at the jail.”
A mockup of the new juvenile sleeping cells. Each cell is 11'x7' and is meant to hold one child per cell.
According to a handout given to attendees at the event on July 17, the new detention facility does not include on-site food service or laundry facilities. The new center also provides minimal outdoor recreational space for youth and the rec room ceiling heights are not adequate for exercise. Additionally, visitation space “does not meet Constitutional requirements for youth to have private space to meet with their attorneys.”
Daniel Garcia, the Director of Federal Programs at The National Center for Families Learning, spoke about the importance of focusing on initiatives that help families first, rather than incarceration. “There are services that actually make sense and truly help families.“Not like incarceration, but actual services on the ground helping parents,” he said speaking in opposition to the inclusion of detention spaces in the juvenile justice center.
Our Omaha plans to continue their opposition to the project, and hopes to endorse candidates for county commissioner and other roles in local government that plan to advocate more clearly for rehabilitation of juvenile offenders, rather than incarceration.
“There is no empirical evidence to suggest that a new jail in an urban setting will save one kid from the criminal justice system,” Our Omaha said in a statement. “The project is bad for kids, bad for taxpayers, and bad for downtown.”