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• J.M. Giordano

Photographs in this story were taken by staff photographer Joe Giordano during the first day of the Schools Not Jails protest on Monday, January 16.

“You know you’re a problem in this city if you’re a black male, even before you know what a prison is, based on what you’ve been taught,” said Lawrence Grandpre against a backdrop of chain-link fence and five state police squad cars. Around him stood about sixty protestors, who had gathered again Tuesday night on the sidewalks of Baltimore to continue their opposition to the proposed 180-bed juvenile detention facility. Grandpre was there, along with several compatriots of the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, conducting a teach-in on what they believe the youth jail represents.

Tuesday was the second day of the planned five-day occupation of the youth jail site, which sits at 600 East Monument Street. Dubbed the Schools Not Jails Occupation and organized by members of Occupy Baltimore and the Baltimore Algebra Project, the five-day protest was planned to raise “awareness of how and where our public money is spent," according to the group's website.

According to Kate Khatib, one of the Schools Not Jails organizers, the proposed youth jail site was considered as the original site of the Occupy Baltimore encampment.

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• J.M. Giordano
• City police in riot gear

Although police presence was quite visible—nine officers on foot and a Baltimore City Police van assembled on the corner of East Monument and Forrest Streets—no demonstrators at Tuesday night’s protest were arrested. The six protestors arrested Monday evening had been released that morning, and several of them were at Tuesday’s gathering, which began with a 6 p.m. dinner followed by the LBS teach-in at 7. According to Maryland State Police spokesperson Greg Shipley, each of the six protestors arrested Monday were charged with two trespassing-related violations. Some were still processing the events from the previous day, which included a visit from about twenty city police suited up in riot gear.

“Police always write the rules that they want,” said 39-year-old Mike McGuire, a self-described veteran street activist. McGuire was one of the six arrested Monday evening. “They [police] bring it [riot gear] out for residents who say we want you to build schools, not jails.”

“That’s just officer safety protocol,” said Baltimore City Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi in a phone interview. “That doesn’t mean that those officers will engage people. That’s just to make sure that the officers don’t get hurt.” He added that relations between the Occupy protestors and the city have been “extremely diplomatic.”

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• J.M. Giordano

“They’re more than welcome to demonstrate at places in the city,” he said. “They just have to abide by basic laws.”

Schools Not Jails is the latest in a series of protests against the proposed juvenile detention center—which would hold between 180 and 230 beds and cost $100 million—that successfully postponed its construction, originally intended to begin fall 2010. Last fall, during a “Rethink Schools, Rethink the Baltimore Youth Jail” march in October, Heber Brown, the pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, said that any talk of constructing a new youth jail is really “talking about locking up more black youth.” In May 2011, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency issued a report stating that the size of the jail could be cut back by nearly a half, to 117 beds; by that date, roughly $14 million had already been spent on “planning, design, demolition, and site preparation,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

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• J.M. Giordano

According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Maryland is projected to have a budget shortfall—the degree to which a state’s “revenues fall short of the cost of providing services”—of $1 billion in fiscal year 2013, in addition to its shortfall of $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2012.

On Wednesday afternoon, Maryland State Delegate Mary Washington informed Brown on his Facebook page that "there are no state funds allocated for the 'Baltimore City Detention Center--Youth Detention Facility' under the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service[s] Capital Budget for 2013."

"We stalled it now for two years and it’s a great victory, but the goal is to get it scrapped altogether," said Brown in an interview Wednesday evening.

“I’m not against building the jail, but I don’t think you need a huge, two-hundred-person jail,” said City Councilman Carl Stokes in an interview Tuesday afternoon. Stokes, whose District 12 would be the home of the proposed detention center, thinks that city money should be directed toward “positive interventions.”

“If the money were redirected into good education, into youth opportunities, into jobs, then the wasted dollars of jailing good people would stop,” he said. Stokes also said he thought the state could have handled the teach-in encampment on Monday night differently. “There’s no reason to arrest people for civil disobedience that’s peaceful and respectful and really makes a point. There’s nothing else going on, on that land.”

On Monday night, after protestors had set up a tent on the sidewalk along one side of Forrest Street, Baltimore City Police SWAT teams moved protestors to the opposite side of the street so that city workers could tear down the tent. And camping on the actual location of the youth jail, inside the fence, is out of the question.

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• J.M. Giordano

But the fact that the site of the youth jail is on state-owned land didn’t deter Gregg Hill, a 19-year-old with the Baltimore Algebra Project, from marching inside the fence Monday evening and helping construct a makeshift school building, something that eventually led to his arrest.

“At a certain point, you wanna be seen taking a stand,” he said. “I’m willing to risk anything in order to bring those changes about.”

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