SAN FRANCISCO ― Dozens of community organizers, youths and city officials stood on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall on Tuesday, rallying in support of a new measure to shut down the county’s juvenile hall by the end of 2021.

“We’re going to shut down juvenile hall, close youth prisons and build leaders together,” Supervisor Shamann Walton, who spent time in juvenile hall as a youth, said to cheers from the crowd. People held signs reading, “Books not bars,” “Free us kids” and “No youth jail.”

Members of the city’s Board of Supervisors introduced legislation on Tuesday, backed by six of the 11 supervisors, to close the youth detention center within three years and instead create programs to serve as “alternatives to incarceration” for youth who don’t need to be detained and a smaller rehabilitative “non-institutional” center for those who need to be in a facility by law.

The bill would create a 12-person working group, made up of officials from city agencies, juvenile justice experts and community members, who’d spend the next couple of years designing alternatives. It would also create a fund to redirect money previously allocated for the juvenile hall to community-based programs, mental health support and academic help for youths involved in the justice system.

The city’s public defender’s office and District Attorney George Gascón have both come out in support of the measure, with Gascón saying in the supervisors’ news release: “The days of big juvenile halls should be behind us.”

“There is no way in hell we could put a system in place that is worse than juvenile hall,” Walton said at the rally, calling instead for efforts like mentorship and quality after-school programs to give young people “opportunities rather than teach them how to be institutionalized.”