H I P H O P M AT T E R S decade, a whirlwind of political, legislative, and legal maneuvering that subscribed to the idea that the best way to deal with young of-fenders was to lock them up for extended periods of time. Whether blacks or Latinos, young men or women, hip hop’s youth found themselves—or someone close—chained to a correctional system and culture determined to mete out severe punishment. The harsh turn in the juvenile justice system added up to more than the raw number of youths sentenced to lockup. For some of hip hop’s most disenfranchised and disempowered youth, the rise of the prison in- dustrial complex was all too real and that was all too tragic. . . . At the center of the state’s youth incarceration crisis was the Califor-nia Youth Authority (CYA). Created by law in 1941 the CYA began providing educational training and parole supervision for juvenile and young adult oƒenders two years later. According to its own mis-sion, as described in Section 1700 of the State Welfare and Institutions Code, the CYA was created to protect the public from criminal activity. Among other things, the law mandates that the nation’s largest youthful oƒender agency provide a range of educational, treatment, and training services for young oƒenders and also aid in the development of crime prevention programs and services. Like many of the earliest juvenile justice programs in the U.S., the CYA was created to reform and improve the lives of young people who had presumably lost their way. That idea dated back to the early nineteenth century when a series of reform measures were created to deal specifically with young oƒenders. The first facility created for children was the House of Refuge in New York in 1825. Several states followed suit and began creating facilities and services for errant youth. Though some of the institutions may not have been ideal, many of them did abide by an important philosophy. For more than a century and a half the U.S. juvenile justice system was based on the idea that young oƒenders, if properly cared for, instructed, and 174