The school-to-prison pipeline is exposed in a DOJ lawsuit.
“I would say there is a school-to-prison pipeline, but there is also a prison-to-school pipeline. [The use of security hardware (cameras, metal detectors and retina detectors) and the practice of treating students as suspects are strategies of the criminal justice system, and they have been flowing into the schools.] It’s like a two-way street, a two-way system that mixes the educational and criminal justice systems. The end result is that we have schools in which the learning environment has been degraded and undermined because we are teaching kids to fear and feel that they are suspects at any particular time.
Educators talk about the teachable moments.
Unfortunately, public fear of kids, public hysteria around another Columbine, has prevented people from remembering that the mission of public schools is to educate.”—Annette Fuentes, author of Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jail House
Mississippi - A Department of Justice lawsuit (pdf.) filed last month against Meridian, Miss., where Green lives and is set to graduate from high school this coming year, argues that the city's juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice system, and violates young people's due process rights along the way.
In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal's office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The police department's policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency.
Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations.
"Defendants engage in a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct through which they routinely and systematically arrest and incarcerate children, including for minor school rule infractions, without even the most basic procedural safeguards, and in violation of these children's constitutional rights," the DOJ's 37-page complaint reads. Meridian's years of systemic abuse punish youth "so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience," the complaint reads.
The federal lawsuit casts a wide net in indicting the systems that worked to deny Meridian children their constitutional rights. It names as defendants the state of Mississippi; the city of Meridian; Lauderdale County, which runs the Lauderdale County Youth Court; and the local Defendant Youth Court Judges Frank Coleman and Veldore Young for violating Meridian students' rights up and down the chain.
The DOJ's complaint also charges that in the course of its eight-month investigation the city blocked the inquiry by refusing to hand over youth court records. Attorneys for city officials deny that claim, and say they are bound by law to protect the confidentiality of youth who've been through the system and so cannot share their records with the federal government.
The SPLC's inquiry into Meridian began in 2008, when attorneys started hearing reports of "horrific abuse" of youth housed in juvenile detention centers, said Jody Owens, managing attorney of the SPLC's juvenile justice initiative in Mississippi. Advocates learned that 67 percent of youth in detention centers arrived there from the Meridian school system, Owens said. In between school and detention, students were denied access to counsel and due process, and many were never made aware of what they were even being arrested for. "The administrators were the judge, jury and executioner," Owens said.
This practice has also appeared to target black students. Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, is 61 percent African-American. But over a five-year period, Owens said, "There was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for."
"We talk about the school to prison pipeline and it's often an abstract thing," said Shakti Belway, an attorney who worked closely with families on the Meridian case for the Southern Poverty Law Center. "But here it is literally happening over ridiculous, minor charges." Indeed, children as young as elementary school students have been taken directly from school and forced to serve school suspensions inside a jail cell. In its complaint, the DOJ charged the city's police department with operating a de facto "taxi service" shuttling students away from school and into youth jails.
A 2010 study by Russell Skiba, a professor of education policy at Indiana University, looked at four decades of data from 9,000 of the nation's 16,000 middle schools. It found that black boys were three times as likely to be suspended as white boys and that black girls were four times as likely to be suspended as white girls. It is a serious, endemic issue.
The federal government's case raises troubling questions about the racial disproportionality that school discipline policies produce broadly. Zero tolerance policies, which crack down on school-based infractions with automatic, harsh punishments, are the mandatory-mimimums of the school discipline world. But whatever their merits and drawbacks, said Skiba, they shouldn't generate racially disparate outcomes. "I think what this suit says is: Whatever you do in a school district, why would it be that there would be racial and ethnic disparities? If we're going to choose suspensions and expulsions and police presence, why are students of color overrepresented in that?"
http://truth-out.org/news/item/13121-the-shocking-details-of-a-mississippi-school-to-prison-pipeline
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_fight_against_the_total_surveillance_state_in_our_schools
The fight against the total surveillance state in our schools.
The battle playing out in San Antonio, Texas, over one student’s refusal to comply with a public school campaign to microchip students has nothing to do with security concerns and even less to do with academic priorities. What is driving this particular program, which requires students to carry “smart” identification cards embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking devices, is money, pure and simple – or to put it more bluntly, this program is yet another example of the nefarious collusion between government bureaucracy and corporate America, a way for government officials to dance to the tune of the corporate state, while unhesitatingly selling students to the highest bidder.
Oblivious to the impact on students’ fundamental rights, school officials with the Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas, have embarked upon a crusade to foist ID badges embedded with RFID tags on about 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School. These tags produce a radio signal that is tied to the students’ Social Security numbers, allowing the wearer’s precise movements to be constantly monitored. Although the school district already boasts 290 surveillance cameras, the cards which the students are required to wear will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times. Teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom. NISD officials plan to eventually expand the $500,000 program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000.
The real driving force behind the decision to require “Smart ID” cards in Texas: the severe financial pressures pushing school districts across the country to look for any means possible to maximize attendance.
Texas is one of a group of states in which a significant amount of public school funding is tied directly to attendance. In contrast to enrollment-based funding, which allocates dollars according to how many students are enrolled at a school, whether or not they actually attend classes, attendance-based funding is believed to provide an incentive to schools to make sure their students go to class.
There are lots of problems with attendance-based funding — for one thing, it disproportionately rewards suburban schools in more affluent communities over urban schools where attendance is depressed by chronic poverty. But that doesn’t mean we should reflexively blame schools for doing what they must to survive under the current rules. Some of the coverage of the Hernandez case has treated Northside School District’s explicit Smart ID rationale — attracting increased funding — as somehow unseemly: a greedy grab for a state handout. But that’s an unfair reading of what’s going on. In Texas (and California, another state that moved to attendance-based funding more than a decade ago) the basic problem is that chronic underfunding of public education gives school districts no choice but to constantly be looking for innovative ways to raise funds.
These tracking devices are not being employed to prevent students from cutting classes or foster better academics. It’s a money game. Using the devices to account for the students’ whereabouts on campus, whether in class or not, school administrators can “count” students as being “in school” and thereby qualify for up to $1.7 million in funding from the state government. As Pascual Gonzalez, Northside’s communications director, explains, “The revenues that are generated by locating kids who are not in their chairs to answer ‘present,’ but are in the building – in the counselor’s office, in the cafeteria, in the hallway, in the gym – if we can show they were, in fact, in school, then we can count them present.”
While this Student Locator program is not yet widespread, it’s only a matter of time before we see more students facing the same struggle. Other student tracking programs are currently being tested in Baltimore, Anaheim, Houston, and the Palos Heights School District near Chicago. Some cities already have fully implemented programs, including Houston, Texas, which began using RFID chips to track students as early as 2004. Preschoolers in Richmond, Calif., have been tagged with RFID chips since 2010.
Unfortunately, while parents and students have fought back in some instances, they have yet to discourage the financial interest of the security industrial complex, which has set its sights on the schools as “a vast, rich market” – a $20 billion market, no less – just waiting to be conquered. Indeed, corporations stand to make a great deal of money if RFID tracking becomes the norm across the country. A variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID Card Group and DataCard, already market and sell RFID trackers to school districts throughout the country, and with big names such as AT&T and IBM entering the market, the pressure on school districts to adopt these systems and ensure compliance will only increase.
RFID is only one aspect of what is an emerging industry in tracking, spying, and identification devices. For example, schools in Pinellas County, Fla., now use palm reading devices to allow children to purchase lunch. The reader takes an infrared picture of the palm’s vein structure, and then matches that information with the child’s identity. 50,000 students in the county are using the readers, and another 60,000 are expected to soon join the program. Palm scanning identification devices are spreading to hospitals and schools across the country, and can be found in over 50 school systems and 160 hospital systems, spanning 15 states and Washington, DC.
http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead64.1.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/27/the_surveillance_state_high_school/
College campuses are attacking free speech and endangering First Amend. rights.
In their rush for “diversity” and “inclusion”, American campus policies have endangered First Amendment free speech rights.
In his most recent article, Washington Post columnist George Will chronicles many varied cases of campus political harassment, notes that speech code enforcement is essentially a tool to ensure bureaucrat employment, and wonders why students and parents would pay to be subjected to such repression.
In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”
“Openly.” “Related to.” Good grief.
The book, “Notre Dame vs. the Klan,” celebrated the 1924 defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in a fight with Notre Dame students. But some of Sampson’s co-workers disliked the book’s cover, which featured a black-and-white photograph of a Klan rally. Someone was offended, therefore someone else must beguilty of harassment.This non sequitur reflects the right never to be annoyed, a new campus entitlement. Legions of administrators, who now outnumber full-time faculty, are kept busy making students mind their manners, with good manners understood as conformity to liberal politics.Liberals are most concentrated and untrammeled on campuses, so look there for evidence of what, given the opportunity, they would do to America. Ample evidence is in “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate” by Greg Lukianoff, 38, a graduate of Stanford Law School who describes himself as a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, lifelong Democrat who belongs to “the notoriously politically correct Park Slope Food Co-Op in Brooklyn” and has never voted for a Republican “nor do I plan to.” But as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE), he knows that the most common justifications for liberal censorship are “sensitivity” about “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” as academic liberals understand those things.In recent years, a University of Oklahoma vice president has declared that no university resources, including e-mail, could be used for “the forwarding of political humor/commentary.” The College at Brockport in New York banned using the Internet to “annoy or otherwise inconvenience” anyone. Rhode Island College prohibited, among many other things, certain “attitudes.” Texas Southern University’s comprehensive proscriptions included “verbal harm” from damaging “assumptions” or “implications.” Texas A&M promised “freedom from indignity of any type.” Davidson banned “patronizing remarks.” Drexel University forbade “inappropriately directed laughter.” Western Michigan University banned “sexism,” including “the perception” of a person “not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” Banning “perceptions” must provide full employment for the burgeoning ranks of academic administrators.
Many campuses congratulate themselves on their broad-mindedness when they establish small “free-speech zones” where political advocacy can be scheduled. At one point Texas Tech’s 28,000 students had a “free-speech gazebo” that was 20 feet wide. And you thought the First Amendment made America a free-speech zone.
At Tufts, a conservative newspaper committed “harassment” by printing accurate quotations from the Koran and a verified fact about the status of women in Saudi Arabia. Lukianoff says that Tufts may have been the first American institution “to find someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”
He documents how “orientation” programs for freshmen become propaganda to (in the words of one orthodoxy enforcer) “leave a mental footprint on their consciousness.” Faculty, too, can face mandatory consciousness-raising.
In 2007, Donald Hindley, a politics professor at Brandeis, was found guilty of harassment because when teaching Latin American politics he explained the origin of the word “wetbacks,” which refers to immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. Without a hearing, the university provost sent Hindley a letter stating that the university “will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct.” The assistant provost was assigned to monitor Hindley’s classes “to ensure that you do not engage in further violations of the nondiscrimination and harassment policy.” Hindley was required to attend “anti-discrimination training.”
Such coercion is a natural augmentation of censorship. Next comes mob rule. Last year, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vice provost for diversity and climate - really; you can’t make this stuff up — encouraged students to disrupt a news conference by a speaker opposed to racial preferences. They did, which the vice provost called “awesome.” This is the climate on an especially liberal campus that celebrates “diversity” in everything but thought.
12/1/12 - A satirical flyer distributed at Harvard with joking references to anti-semitism, “coloreds,” and sexual assault worth defending? We think so. The protection of free speech is meaningless if what we really mean is “free speech we find appropriate.” When we prohibit or punish certain kinds of statements, even vile ones, then we are protecting speech only insofar as we agree with it or it does not offend us. This is not only a logically inconsistent position, but it is also one that harms our students.
The incident illustrates how badly well-intended policies and actions regarding free speech can lead us away from our core values. The flyer in question was a mock invitation to one of Harvard’s infamous all-male ‘final’ clubs that was distributed under room doors in nine different dorms. Announcing the arrival of a new fictional club emphasizing inclusion, diversity and love (and aptly named “The Pigeon”), the invitation warned: “Jews need not apply. Seriously, no f—- Jews. Coloreds okay.” It also referred to the date rape drug, Rohypnol. Despite the fact that it was satirizing the social clubs’ reputation for exclusivity and abuse of women, a firestorm erupted and an investigation was initiated to find the anonymous authors.
After the flyer incident, the administration issued a statement deploring the use of the “deeply disturbing” language and reminding the community that the invitations did not “demonstrate the level of thoughtfulness and respect we expect at Harvard when engaging difficult issues within our community.” Residential staff were enlisted to ferret out the identity of the satirists and to reach out to students who might have been hurt or offended by the crude statements.
Some students know better. Several commentators on the Harvard Crimson website noted the deep irony of watching an administration that has been silent about the abuses of the all-male clubs (which have included life-threatening drinking games, hazing, and sexual assault) suddenly so concerned about ugly words.
“What happens on campus,” Lukianoff says, “doesn’t stay on campus” because censorship has “downstream effects.” He quotes a sociologist whose data he says demonstrate that “those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.”
http://collegeinsurrection.com/2012/12/george-will-colleges-have-campus-speech-on-the-run/
http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/04/wither-goes-free-speech-at-harvard/