On March 29, Louisiana voters will weigh in on Amendment 3, which would change the state constitution to remove the protections that keep most young people out of the adult criminal legal system. Louisiana already allows children to be sent to adult facilities on serious charges like murder or rape, but Amendment 3 would give the legislature power to expand this list to other felonies of their choosing.

Such a change would be a public safety disaster. By making it easier to charge and imprison teenagers as adults, the amendment would put Louisiana’s children at increased risk of both physical and sexual abuse in adult facilities and of being denied the chance to access basic supports, take meaningful accountability, and make positive changes as they grow up.

Case in point: incarcerated young people have already sued the state over its decision to transfer them from juvenile detention to the infamous Angola prison, and subsequently, to the Jackson Parish adult jail. Court filings describe their experiences being attacked by others held in the jail, maced by guards, deprived of education, and kept away from their families.

A system that sets children up for failure

Kevin Griffin-Clark is a community organizer in New Orleans and a member of Step Up Louisiana, an organization that collaborates with parents, workers, students, and community members to build safety and justice in Louisiana’s schools and workplaces. Griffin-Clark works with young people held in both juvenile detention centers and adult prisons, fighting to ensure they can access education as well as legal and emotional support. He is alarmed that Amendment 3 will funnel more of the children he works with into unsafe prisons.

“[Amendment 3 is] one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation,” Griffin-Clark said. “Unfortunately, in our penal system, there isn’t much rehabilitation. You’re going to take some of our best and brightest that just need a little love here and there, and need some full investment, and now put them into this penal system that I have not seen do anything good.”

Griffin-Clark’s fears about Amendment 3 are founded in his personal experience growing up in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. When he was 10 years old, he got into a fight with three kids in his neighborhood. Outnumbered, he ran to his sister’s house. But before he got inside, he turned around and threw a glass bottle at his three pursuers. Then, he slammed the door shut.

That throw cost him five years of his life. The bottle hit one of the kids in the eye and the district attorney charged him with attempted murder. He was convicted of a lesser charge and sent to the notorious Correctional Center for Youth in Tallulah from ages 10 to 15.

Tallulah was traumatic for him. Rife with violence, limited meals, and low on programming to support the young people in its care—experts called it the worst juvenile prison in the nation before its closure in 2004. Griffin-Clark was forced to do his time “23 and 1:” 23 hours in a cell with no contact, one hour out of his cell. He says he was the youngest person in the prison for several years.

Predictably, the experience did not set Griffin-Clark up for success upon his release. His first day back at his old school after incarceration, a student threw a spitball at his head. He threw a chair at the kid’s chest in retaliation.

“That’s what I learned at Tallulah,” he said. “You take it all the way to prevent them from even thinking about playing with you again.”

Griffin-Clark worked hard to put that mentality behind him. Some effects linger—he still eats quickly, a relic of his time in Tallulah, where he was given three minutes to eat meals under the eyes of corrections officers. But his family and community took care of him when he came home, and he got the support that Louisiana’s legal system denied him behind bars.

And while Tallulah has since closed, Griffin-Clark says that experience has him alarmed that the young people he works with could face similar conditions—if not worse—in adult prisons should Amendment 3 pass.

“We should not throw adolescents in a cage with adults in any shape, form, or fashion,” he said. “We separate . . . elementary from middle school and middle school from high school. They’re just not there mentally. We get that in every other context, but the state of Louisiana is deliberately ignoring that fact in this context.”

Kids need paths to accountability and community—not state prison

When children misbehave—and when they break the law—they need to acknowledge the harm they have caused, accept consequences, and work to change their behavior. And it is crucial that we provide them with the right services and supports to do so. When we use the correct tools to respond to their behavior, we set young people up to succeed as they grow. In contrast, sending kids to jails and prisons puts them at an extreme deficit.

Incarcerating young people to begin with impedes their ability to access education, damages their mental health, and can increase their chances of being arrested or imprisoned again in the future. And even when they are released, now with a conviction history, they’ll face destabilizing barriers to housing and employment.

Putting teenagers in adult facilities further compounds these harms by subjecting them to an increased threat of violence. A report from the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission found that young people in adult jails and prisons may be at the single highest risk of sexual violence among all incarcerated people. Locking up children in adult facilities places even greater strain on their mental health and puts them at higher risk of suicide. Those young people are 33 percent more likely to die in early-to-mid adulthood than their peers.

On the other hand, restorative justice programs, academic support, counseling services, and job readiness training are linked to significant reductions in reoffending among young people. Evidence reviewed by the National Academies of Science shows that “well-designed community-based programs” for youth are more likely to promote “healthy development and reduce recidivism” than incarceration.

Louisiana’s Amendment 3 is poised to harm youth of color most of all. Nationally, Latinx youth are 40 percent more likely than white youth to be sent to an adult prison, while Black youth are nearly nine times as likely. Those numbers will only compound the racial injustices that already exist in Louisiana’s penal system, which is built atop the infrastructure of slavery.

Passing Amendment 3 would do nothing to help children make changes to their behavior and work toward a better future, and supporters of the amendment even concede this point. Louisiana State Representative Tony Bacala justified his support by deeming system-involved young people irredeemable: “Some of these kids are already lost at two years old. I want to make that point. Everybody realizes it,” Bacala said.

Louisiana legislators should not be wasting their time trying to change the state’s constitution, sending even more teenagers to adult prison. Instead, they should be directing resources into the kinds of effective programs that keep kids out of the legal system in the first place. Writing kids off as lost causes is not only cruel, it’s foolish and flies in the face of what we know actually builds safety. Young people are far more likely to be strong members of their communities when given the tools to learn and grow, rather than being locked up, traumatized, and provided limited support—especially in adult facilities.

Voters should reject Amendment 3 decisively on March 29.