Bob Herbert: "School To Prison Pipeline."

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09herbert.html?th&emc=th

Op-Ed Columnist
School to Prison Pipeline
E-MailPrint Save By BOB HERBERT
Published: June 9, 2007
The latest news-as-entertainment spectacular is the Paris Hilton criminal justice fiasco. She�s in! She�s out! She�s � whatever
Far more disturbing (and much less entertaining) is the way school officials and the criminal justice system are criminalizing children and teenagers all over the country, arresting them and throwing them in jail for behavior that in years past would never have led to the intervention of law enforcement.

This is an aspect of the justice system that is seldom seen. But the consequences of ushering young people into the bowels of police precincts and jail cells without a good reason for doing so are profound.

Two months ago I wrote about a 6-year-old girl in Florida who was handcuffed by the police and taken off to the county jail after she threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class.

Police in Brooklyn recently arrested more than 30 young people, ages 13 to 22, as they walked toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a teenage friend who had been murdered. No evidence has been presented that the grieving young people had misbehaved. No drugs or weapons were found. But they were accused by the police of gathering unlawfully and of disorderly conduct.

In March, police in Baltimore handcuffed a 7-year-old boy and took him into custody for riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The boy tearfully told The Baltimore Examiner, �They scared me.� Mayor Sheila Dixon later apologized for the arrest.

Children, including some who are emotionally disturbed, are often arrested for acting out. Some are arrested for carrying sharp instruments that they had planned to use in art classes, and for mouthing off.

This is a problem that has gotten out of control. Behavior that was once considered a normal part of growing up is now resulting in arrest and incarceration.

Kids who find themselves caught in this unnecessary tour of the criminal justice system very quickly develop malignant attitudes toward law enforcement. Many drop out � or are forced out � of school. In the worst cases, the experience serves as an introductory course in behavior that is, in fact, criminal.

There is a big difference between a child or teenager who brings a gun to school or commits some other serious offense and someone who swears at another student or gets into a wrestling match or a fistfight in the playground. Increasingly, especially as zero-tolerance policies proliferate, children are being treated like criminals for the most minor offenses.

There should be no obligation to call the police if a couple of kids get into a fight and teachers are able to bring it under control. But now, in many cases, youngsters caught fighting are arrested and charged with assault.

A 2006 report on disciplinary practices in Florida schools showed that a middle school student in Palm Beach County who was caught throwing rocks at a soda can was arrested and charged with a felony � hurling a �deadly missile.�

We need to get a grip.

The Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union has been studying this issue. �What we see routinely,� said Dennis Parker, the program�s director, �is that behavior that in my time would have resulted in a trip to the principal�s office is now resulting in a trip to the police station.�

He added that the evidence seems to show that white kids are significantly less likely to be arrested for minor infractions than black or Latino kids. The 6-year-old arrested in Florida was black. The 7-year-old arrested in Baltimore was black.

Shaquanda Cotton was black. She was the 14-year-old high school freshman in Paris, Tex., who was arrested for shoving a hall monitor. She was convicted in March 2006 of �assault on a public servant� and sentenced to a prison term of � hold your breath � up to seven years!

Shaquanda�s outraged family noted that the judge who sentenced her had, just three months earlier, sentenced a 14-year-old white girl who was convicted of arson for burning down her family�s home. The white girl was given probation.

Shaquanda was recently released after a public outcry over her case and the eruption of a scandal involving allegations of widespread sexual abuse of incarcerated juveniles in Texas.

This issue deserves much more attention. Sending young people into the criminal justice system unnecessarily is a brutal form of abuse with consequences, for the child and for society as a whole, that can last a lifetime.

by putting officers who report to Police HQ rather than the Principal in schools. And the number of such officers is greater than the total number of police in all but 9 US cities!

These officers act like prison guards, they build thick dossiers on ordinary kids for use whenever they can trump up some "crime" to get them sent upstate, and they intimidate teachers and school administrators with the threat of arrest!

Anybody who votes for Giuliani is voting for proven fascism, IMO.

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1078580 and an "Editorials" thread cited there.

Trying to deal with serious social problems by criminalizing them is not only harsh and stupid, it betrays a collective lack of imagination. We can do better than turning our kids into criminals.

America, the land of the free, holds more prisoners than any other country including China.

Why? It's making the right people a lot of money.

years may be a more important factor in establishing the prison pipeline system than the "tough on crime" Southern Strategy Richard Nixon started in 1968.

Who grows up WANTING to be a drug dealer?

Redlining by powerful financial institutions and ideological biases against government financial regulation and fair distributions of public investments have severely constrained the life choices of those trapped in inner cities. For example, Alan Greenspan regarded as "socialism" proposals for a real-asset Social Security Trust Fund, which most likely would have pumped hundreds of billions in business and mortgage investment into inner cities.

Past discrimination as well as current inequity and redlining in housing, education, and business investment have created communities where any minority male baby is born with severely limited life-chances.

Google "Gregory D. Squires", a great sociology prof, for more information about these important geographic disinvestment factors in social inequality.

From http://www.gwu.edu/~soc/docs/Squires-Kubrin.pdf :

"Suburbia has been sold as much as it has been bought (Judd, 1984). Creation of the long-term 30-year mortgage featuring low downpayment requirements, availability of federal insurance to protect mortgage lenders, federal financing to support a secondary market in mortgage loans (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) which dramatically increases availability of mortgage money, tax deductibility of interest and property tax payments, and proliferation of federally funded highways created sprawling suburban communities that would not have been possible without such public largesse (Jackson, 1985).

The federal government�s underwriting rules for FHA and other federal mortgage insurance products and enforcement of racially restrictive covenants by the courts along with overt redlining practices by mortgage lenders and racial steering by real estate agents virtually guaranteed the patterns of racial segregation that were commonplace by the 1950s. Concentration of public housing in central-city high-rise complexes (many of which are now being torn down) reinforced the patterns of economic and racial segregation that persist today. Exclusionary zoning ordinances of most suburban municipalities that created minimum lot size and maximum density requirements for housing developments (often prohibiting construction of multifamily housing) complemented federal policy (Hays, 1995; Hirsch, 1998; Ihlanfeldt, 2004; Jackson, 1985, 2000; Massey and Denton, 1993; Rusk, 1999; Yinger, 1995).

Government policy has also encouraged the flight of businesses and jobs from cities to surrounding suburban communities and beyond. Financial incentives including infrastructure investments, tax abatements and depreciation allowances favouring new equipment over reinvestment in existing facilities all have contributed to the deindustrialisation and dis-investment of urban communities. The pursuit of lower wage and tax bills, and fewer govern-ment regulations, have also encouraged the flight of business from cities and regions viewed as high-cost areas to other regions of the country, and other nations altogether, that present capital with lower costs (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982, 2000). In order to �meet the competition�, localities often believe it is necessary to provide incentives to businesses that they cannot afford and which undercut their ability to provide traditional public services for less privileged communities more dependent on those services (Barnekov and Rich, 1989;
Reed, 1988).

Research has generally failed to demonstrate that these incentives encourage new investment or employment or target development to economically distressed communities (Peters and Fisher, 2004). Often, incentives are offered but little effort is made to ensure that the terms and conditions recipients are supposed to meet (such as job creation goals) are in fact met. And frequently such expenditures are offered for development that would have occurred without the benefit (Barnekov and Rich, 1989; Ellen and Schwartz, 2000; LeRoy, 1997). As one observer noted, "Subsidising economic development in the suburbs is like paying teenagers to think about sex" (Wray, 1999)."

A lot of kids these days.

For an awful lot of kids there appears to be two routes out of the poverty in which they grow up. Those routes are professional athlete and drug dealer.

The realistic kids know that professional athlete is almost impossible to attain, so they concentrate on being the best "drug dealer" they can be.

When you have no other role models, maybe being a drug dealer doesn't seem so bad.

After all, what is a liquor store owner but a "drug dealer"?

present "redlining" by private and public financial decisions. Take away the constraints, and inner city youth make the same kinds of choices others make. Google "Moving to Opportunity", a Federal research project that allowed randomly chosen applicants for public housing to move to suburban townhouses instead.

to handle what in the past was their job. i have talked to my boys school how so many things in the past would have been handled calling the parents into the office. in case of conflict parents of children fighting would be brought in to resolved. this was a good lesson in a couple ways, teachng children how adult resolve issue. today parents are no longer allowed that role or they refuse it and it is a smight to our children who no longer see adult resolve issues but hand it off for easy punishment, not lesson learned.

i tell my children to walk lightly and think twice about things. that today they get arrested with what we did in the past.