Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Problem Students in Pipeline to Prison
A 13-year-old girl was handcuffed and arrested at Brockton High School last June for wearing a T-shirt. The T-shirt, which she was asked by school officials to remove, bore the image of her ex-boyfriend, 14-year-old Marvin Constant, who had recently been killed in a Boston area shooting. The girl refused to remove the memorial shirt and was arrested for "causing a disturbance."
In Texas, 14-year-old high school freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her crime was pushing a hall monitor out of the way when she was stopped from entering a school building. The official charge was "assault on a public servant."While extreme, these cases are not unusual. In Massachusetts and across the country, an increasing number of incidents that traditionally have been handled in schools by trips to the principal's office are being dealt with by law enforcement officials and judges in the juvenile justice system. Countless school children, particularly children of color in poverty-stricken zip codes, are being pushed out of schools and into juvenile correctional facilities for minor misconduct.
A variety of overzealous disciplinary measures, including a mandatory "zero-tolerance" policy, are removing children as early as elementary school from mainstream educational environments and funneling them into a one-way pipeline to prison. This "school-to-prison pipeline" begins in the nation's neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country's expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons.
America's Promise Alliance released a report in April that said that 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates of lower than 50 percent. Boston barely boasted a graduation rate of 57 percent, placing it 27th among the 50 cities. It is no surprise that urban public high schools ranked lower in graduation rates than their suburban counterparts.
When school funding is based on student test performance, lack of resources creates heinous incentives for school officials to funnel out "problem" students believed likely to drag down a school's scores. This bottom line business is a convenient method of concealing schools' educational deficiencies, but it does little to address the systemic problem of poor performance.
Racial disproportion runs through every level of the system. A black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime compared with a white male's 1 in 17 chance. Incarceration rates are directly correlated with school performance. Children of color are more likely to be suspended or expelled than their Caucasian classmates. More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. The cycle begins early and is hard to break. A black child is nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent, and children with imprisoned parents far more likely to be imprisoned themselves.
Abraham Lincoln wrote that "the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." There remains a deeply ingrained punitive paradigm in the psyche of the American criminal justice system. Our overzealous "get tough on crime" philosophy is totally inadequate to the stormy present. Americans are far more likely to be victimized by a violent assault, rape, murder, or robbery than our European counterparts who incarcerate relatively tiny percentages of the population. There, prison is viewed as a fundamentally "criminogenic" institution that creates more crime than it deters.
Prisoners are a major fiscal burden on the rest of society. It costs Massachusetts $43,000 a year to keep an inmate behind bars. States are spending on average more than three times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil. Is it more valuable to imprison than to teach? The majority of suspended students and juveniles in detention did not commit violent offenses. Is society safer with nonviolent criminals in jail or in school?
Relying on incarceration as the sole solution to crime is ineffective. Academic achievement is the leading determining factor for delinquency. Improving school performance will be an effective strategy for reducing chronic court involvement.
We have the resources. It is not a question of funds but rather a question of will. Will Massachusetts be first to say enough and dam the flow of the school-to-prison pipeline?
Daniel G. Meyer is a volunteer at the Youth Advocacy Project at the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
13 Comments so far
Show AllWhen a fight of any kind happens at my daughter's high school (even a verbal threat), the police get called and then things really escalate. We're teaching kids all right, just not what they should be learning.
Equality in the USA is obviously an exaggerated ideal, given continual lip-service by the ruling-class hypocrites that like to push "pro-American" values on the rest of the developing world. In reality, there is no equality between the wealthy and the poor in the USA. If a spoiled brat from a wealthy family were treated the same way as the poor kids in this article, the authorities responsible would be sued and lose their jobs.
Poor people, unfortunately, do not have the wealth, power, or influence to recieve the same kind of justice as the wealthy, but our political leaders will not admit this because they belong to the wealthy ruling-class themselves and their position is to give continual lip-service to the wonderful American ideals that have become eroded by their negligence and denial.
As for the cops that are directly responsible for such unjust, draconian treatments of the poor, they are a bunch of robotic, low-IQ sadistic dupes that simply enjoy following orders that make them feel much bigger than they are.
This is something that is now only coming to light. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are now living in a "police state".
You're right pattmarty. This country feels like we're living in a insane asylum, with inmates running it.
BeForKids
This is what fascist or totalitarian governments do. What I don't understand is why people are surprised by this mistreatment of children. Prison's for profit are at the bottom of this. Actually, Capitalism is at the very bottom of this. There will be much worse to come until we regulate the hell out of BIG business and put prisons and utilities and the Damn criminal oil companies back in the public domain and out of the private sector. From what I have seen over the past 30 years we are doomed! Good day and good luck!
Many of our schools are scenes of complete bedlam. I once taught highschool and middle school in Prince Geo' County, MD, just to see if the stories I had heard -- and couldn't believe -- were true. The situation was in fact far worse, even to the point of homicides on school premises. Until this situation is changed, I see no way to protect the innocent in our schools than to deal with criminal acts via the criminal justice system.
I found a wikipedia entry for Shaquanda Cotton case. She was released after spending only a year in a juvenile detention center. Her original sentence specified that she would be released no later than her 21st birthday, and teachers and other school officials testified about her prior disciplinary problems, including threatening a teacher with violence.
If Shaquanda didn't deserve the punishment she received, there are many many more kids who do. Some of these kids are a mess ! They grow up in violent neighborhoods or households, have little or no parental guidance, carry weapons, have zero respect for authority, and wreak havoc in the schools which adversely affects the good students. We want to be caring and compassionate, but sometimes the right thing to do is take them away from their toxic environments and lock them up. They can still go to school while incarcerated.
Imprisonment isn't always just punishment via loss of freedom, many times it's rehabilitation through forced self-reflection on one's own actions. Even Shaquanda says, according to the wikipedia entry, "I feel like I have a second chance," ... "I'm going to be a better person now. I'm a good person, but I want to be a better person."
Dallas Morning News did story last year re police calls at local area high schools in one school year. Typical numbers for suburbs went something like:
3,125 students - 235 police calls
6,470 students - 812 police calls
We are indeed criminalizing childhood in this country, just as we are running the largest police state since Stalin.
It's illegal (unofficially) to be a child in America, that is until ur establised enough to buy "toys" such as new houses and new trucks.
Parents should consider home schooling their kids. That's one way to protect them from this fascistic public school system.
Solution for our prison problems: make school voluntary, make drugs legal, abolish the minimum wage and institute a maximum wage.
How about helping to nip the problem in the bud with free(government-paid) contraception and sterilization for every US citizen who wishes it. Maybe even free abortions too.
If only the so-called morals were removed from the abortion issue and it were dealt with in a logical manner. I had my tubes "tied", my health insurance covered the entire bill. I guess their logic is that it would be more expensive for them to pay for pregnancies than a sterilization. I think the cost of a single pregnancy would have exceeded the cost of the tubal ligation. Abortions too could be viewed as a cost-effective procedure.