Following an 18-month study guided by formerly-incarcerated teens, city officials have agreed to a plan that will close San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center juvenile jail by the end of 2021. 

The move will make San Francisco the first large city to eliminate its youth incarceration program. 

The measure, approved this week with a 10-1 vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, will not only close the city's juvenile hall, but will also end the practice of incarcerating arrested teens while they await trial. The initiative also spurs city officials to work with community members to develop alternative forms of rehabilitation for teens convicted of crimes, and will create a Youth Justice Reinvestment Fund to fuel those efforts. The restorative justice-focused fund will be sustained by the money saved from closing the jails and will help provide employment, affordable housing, and other services.

San Francisco currently spends $13 million per year to operate the jail, which, according to reports, is often up to 75-percent empty. Prior to the creation of the bill, the Dreams Behind Bars Fellows, a group made up of members of the Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ) and Urban Peace Movement, spent 18 months researching the city's youth detention policies and practices. The fellows found that the incarceration system functions very inefficiency financially speaking and that it institutionalizes and marginalizes Black and Latino youth at much higher rates than other groups. Though the system's prison population has remained relatively constant over the last decade, for example, the annual cost of incarcerating a youth has basically doubled to $270,000, Next City reports.

The move comes as tentative reforms to America's mass-incarceration-focused correctional system begin to take shape across the country. 

In New York City, for example, the city has initiated a plan to shutter and relocate its main municipal jail, Rikers Island. Though the city will build new jail facilities as part of the closure, the overall overall prison capacity is shrinking in conjunction with the effort.

In Seattle, where a new 112-bed, $232 million youth detention facility is currently in the works, things are a bit more complicated. Social justice-focused groups and some municipal agencies are working to instill restorative justice, as well, however. In 2018, for example, King County Executive Dow Constantine proposed a $4 million "Roadmap to Zero Youth Detention" initiative. 

In Los Angeles, on the other hand, debate over whether or how to relocate the decrepit Men's Central Jail has influenced Los Angeles County-led plans for a new 3,000-bed jail. 

The contentious debates over urban jails come as American cities experience historically-low rates of crime and as the negative consequences of mass incarceration become more widely understood.