On the basis of his three arrests in three months and the increasing severity of the crimes. Jackson was turned over to the state's Youth Authority which assigned him to the Paso Robles School for Boys.

IV

The California prison system into which George Jackson entered is a criminologist's dream and a convict's nightmare. In their 1951 book, New Horizons in Criminology, Harry Elmer Barnes and Hegley K. Teeters said: "The state of California stands in the forefront of penal experimentation, with its progressive philosophy epitomized in the Youth and Adult Authorities." At the time, the statement may well have been accurate, for Earl Warren was then governor of the state and had effected a number of changes designed to bring California's prison system into the 20th century. However, the promise seeded by the reforms of the Warren years was to come no closer to realization than was the promise of American life in the lives of Robert Jackson or his sons.

The California Youth Authority, an agency within the state's Department of Correction, was established in 1941 to handle the disposition of offenders under 21. The increasing rate of juvenile crime and recidivism and the exposure of scandalous conditions in the Fred C. Nelles reform school in Whitter by a public committee in 1940 prompted the state to create the Youth Authority. In May of 1940, the American Law Institute had issued a model law for the creation of an independent agency within state government to administer youthful offenders. The most controversial aspect of the Institute's proposal was that the agency would assume jurisdiction as soon as the offender had been convicted, and thus assume the responsibility for his sentencing from the state course system. Dissipate the objections of the "treat 'em rough" school of penology, California became the first state to adopt the Institute's recommendations. with the major exception of retaining the power to grant probation in the courts.

The initial support of the reform-minded for California's action was quickly eclipsed by the almost universal approval of the new Authority's performance and promise. With great fanfare, the Authority initiated a house cleaning of the more vicious reform schools, accumulated data on youthful offenders, created two new penal programs, and opened two correctional facilities--a girls' school at Los Guilucos and one for boys at Paso Robles.

It was the two new penal programs the Authority began that attracted the greatest amount of attention. The first was the establishment of a diagnostic center at which new charges would be evaluated so that each inmate could receive tailor-made correctional treatment based on a scientific analysis of his character and background. The second new program developed by the Youth Authority was the creation of forestry camps to which the more promising charges would be sent for work outdoors. Based upon the philosophy of the CCC, the forestry camps are intended to offer their workers labor that is "both productive and therapeutic" by allowing them to trade the crime-wise environment of the old reform schools for a chance to serve society by fighting fires, clearing brush, and controlling pests in California's great outdoors.

Supporters of the Youth Authority pointed to its programs as the application of scientific methodology to corrections. The diagnostic centers, it was claimed, would take a juvenile's emotional temperature and gear his rehabilitation to him rather than forcing him to adjust to the destructive demands of survival in the tough, old-style reform schools. The addition of the forest camp alternative also received high praise. On the basis of the apparent success of the Youth Authority, California created an Adult Authority in 1944; and other states also established agencies geared to deal with juvenile offenders. Massachusetts became the third state to follow California's lead when it established the Youth Service Board in 1948.

V

In Soledad Brother George Jackson tells a different view of the Youth Authority's jurisdiction: his life and the experiences of others who have been under the Authority illustrate this difference.

As Jackson relates, the Youth Authority's reforms did nothing to alter the basic emotional shock of entering into a penal institution for the first time:

"The very first time, it was like dying. Just to exist at all in the cage calls for some heavy psychic readjustments. Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been inborn.

It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over the centuries ob black bondage. It is the thing I've been running from all my life. When it caught up to me in 1957 I was 15 years old and not very well equipped to deal with sudden changes. The Youth Authority joints are places that demand complete capitulation: one must case to resist or else...

There were no beatings (for me at least) in this youth joint and the food wasn't too bad.... When told to do something I simply played the idiot, and spent my time reading. The absent-minded bookworm, I was in full revolt by the time seven months were up."

For George Jackson this first incarceration at the Youth Authority's Paso Robles School was just another holding action. While at Paso Robles, he completed the tenth grade and did a great deal of reading; however, he formulated no sense of purpose, nor was any viable aid given to help him do so. Most important, nothing about the outside world was changing for the better while he was in the reform school. Watts was still going to be Watts when he was released, which would mean that it was going to be worse than when he had left it.

Of course it can be pointed out that the Youth Authority was never intended to be an agency of urban redevelopment in a strictly economic sense. But the fact that no significant action was being taken by the state or federal government. at the basic depressed conditions in Watts and Oakland or the chicano barrios or the white trash towns like Stockton meant that there was a definite limit on the possibilities that the early promise shown by the Youth Authority could ever be realized.

Moreover, flaws that had initially been un- or under-noticed in the Authority's program now were manifesting themselves. Despite the great significance placed by the Authority and its supporters on the diagnostic centers and the forestry camps as effective mechanisms for meaningful programs of rehabilitation, the operation of the system proved otherwise. Boys judged as "promising cases" are sent to the forestry camps where they learn skills that will be of little use when they return to their communities and look for employment instead of being sent to places like the Vocational Institute at Lancaster where they can learn marketable skills. On the other hand, charges deemed "incorrigible" are sent to the vocational schools where instead of learning carpentry or machine mechanics they hold informal seminars in second-story work or in the most effective employment of the blackjack or bike chain. In effect, the "promising cases" for showing their capacity for cooperation with the Authority are being exploited by it. Their work in the forestry camps is productive in terms of the needs of the state to control and harness California's environment, but the work in terms of the boys' own needs is no more therapeutic than that of blacks and Southern chain gangs.