After Graduating From School Go to Jail

The term “School to Prison” in all the research and all the articles I’ve read has two common traits with every incident in dealing with the children of this country, and it all comes down to race and class. The statistics of the number of low income areas and minority communities that are not getting a high school education that are now in prison is 75 percent. If that number doesn’t tell you the root of our problem in America in dealing with our prison population I don’t know what it will take to convince you otherwise.

“Chicago is spending $95 million on a new police academy, but we’re closing public schools and can’t fund mental health services,”.(Meiners para 8).

“In the course of 24 hours in May 2007, without holding a single public hearing, much less a public vote, California state legislature passed the largest prison expansion plan in U.S. history. The law AB900 will add 40,000 new prison beds and 13,000 new jail beds and will cost the state 15 billion for construction and debt services”.

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(Braz para 1). That is just one example in one state out of the 50 that we have, and many states are following this idea of putting tax payer money in school to prison instead of putting more money in our educational system. In many cases you’ll always hear the excuse of “Oh if we had more funding things would be better”. The problem isn’t a lack of not having enough money, it’s that local and state governments are not putting those funds in the right places.

“ According to a report released in 200 by the U.S. Congress’s Bi-Partisan working Group on Youth Violence, “statistically speaking, schools are among the safest places for children to be.

” In fact, the Justice Policy Institute’s School House Hype: School Shootings and Real Risks Kids Face in America observes that “99% of the times a youth is killed in America, it is outside of a school.” Nonetheless, Bernardine Dohrn reports that “between 1990 and 1995, while juvenile homicides dropped 13 percent, related coverage on network evening news programs increased by 240%”, so what the public believes about violent crimes at school is not based on material facts but on mediated fantasies. As Barry Glassner argues in The Culture of Fear , our collective anxiety grows “proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths, we adults have committed great violence against them.

Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves.”(Braz page 130 para 2). In reading all of these stories of children being expelled from school for the most ridiculous things is really disheartening, and is also another point to show that these schools are following the idea of just throw the kids out and into the machine. “For example, in 2000 the Justice Policy Institute and the Kentucky Children’s Law Center issued a report outlining the following cases: A seventeen year old junior was expelled after he shot a paper clip with a rubber band at a classmate, missed, and broke the skin of a cafeteria worker. In Louisiana, a twelve year old diagnosed with a hyperactive disorder warned a fellow student not to eat all the potatoes, or “I’m going to get you.” The student was suspended for two days, then referred to police by the principal and charged with making “terrorist threats.

” The student was imprisoned for two weeks while awaiting trial. (Braz page 131 para 3). I understand that some of these statistics are a little older, but the sad thing is there are even more examples of those stories and they happen now more often than they did back then. But because of our 24 hour new cycles and our over stimulation with social media, we as a society have become numb to a lot of these problems and stories like these and articles on how underfunded and outdated and flat out racist system that we have in the way we are raising our kids gets thrown under the rug, just like our future children. In both of the articles I’ve used to talk about this subject they both had the same conclusion that the real root of this pipeline is capitalism, when we have system that makes more money off the more people that are in prison. Then is it really that shocking that we have such a huge number of poor and uneducated minorities in this country that are in prison for crimes that real are not crimes? I think that no matter what road we take in trying to fix this huge problem.