In Tennessee, youth on probation who are attending school and receive an out-of school suspension will now be mandated to go to detention (LITERALLY). I came across this article titled Suspended Students go to “CLASS’ at detention center in the Tennessean. Doesn’t that headline speak volumes. Frankly, I think that we really do a disservice to young people when schools mete our harsh disciplinary policies which include excessive suspensions and expulsions. This is helping to “push” students out of school and into the prison pipeline.

From the article:

A new juvenile court program is aimed at keeping children and teens who are on probation or under a court order out of trouble if they receive an out-of-school suspension while attending city and county schools.

The Court Linked Alternative School Suspension (CLASS) will require any child on any level of probation or under a court order (i.e. for truancy) in Rutherford County, who receives an out of school suspension, to spend their suspension in a non-traditional classroom located at the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center.

More from the article:

Children and teens referred to CLASS will be required to bring a packed lunch and books to a dormitory inside the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 8 p.m., Davenport said.

“They are going to sit all day in our dorm,” Davenport continued. “We have a classroom set up inside the dormitory.”

Davenport said the class is needed because “I’m tired of these children (those who have been suspended) not being supervised.” The judge said the 2010 summer vacation has been the “worst summer I’ve ever seen with children traveling in packs and breaking into homes.

“Out-of-school suspension is an accident waiting to happen,” she said, adding CLASS “is a way to get them off the streets and help the parents.”

The class will be supervised by juvenile detention staff, according to Davenport.

“We can monitor them as much as we monitor the others (children currently incarcerated at the juvenile detention center),” she said. “Those referred to class will not be in holding cells and will have absolutely no contact with inmates.”

It is so important for young people to have forums and outlets where they can “talk back” to the increasing criminalization that they must endure.   To that end, I am privileged to be working with an incredible group of young people who are conducting a youth-led research project about the school to prison pipeline.  As part of this project, a couple of weekends ago, a group of young people spent a Saturday discussing harsh disciplinary policies and the impact that these are having on their education.  The event called “Representing the Pipeline” then allowed them to create some art that visualized the school to prison pipeline.  Over the next few weeks, I will feature some of this art here.  In the meantime, here are some pictures of the wonderful young people creating some art.

Representing the Pipeline - 7/31/10

Representing the Pipeline - 7/31/10

Truthworks presents an evening with Angela Davis that took place yesterday. As per usual Ms. Davis breaks it down. She speaks about capitalism, prison industrial complex, and racial privilege.  If you have an hour, it’s well worth it to listen to her presentation.

As promised here are a few more poems from the fabulous chapbook “Until I Am Free” edited by Kevin Coval. If you are moved by this work, please consider learning more about the issue of Juvenile Life Without Parole by visiting the website of the Illinois Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Children.

A Child Taken Away
Terrill Williams

My foundation is shaken. My whole world taken.
Friends gone. Family members no longer here.
Home is so far, so near. Being locked up is bad
but being locked up for something you didn’t do
is hell. Going through your story over and over
but nobody sees. Look for help, but all it seems
to be, a lot of faces. Faces and faces and faces. You pray
just one can get you out. You go from having no care
in the world to fighting for your life, freedom and sanity.
From an innocent boy to an innocent man
I am!

Terrill Williams was 16 years old when he committed the homicide for which he received life without parole. He is now 29 years old.

If Only
Jermaine Jameson

If only I had listened when I was being told
to get my education so loud, clear and bold.
If only I had done what I was told to do
I wouldn’t be arriving in prison on my 1th as J.L.W.O.P. on the new.
If only life had taught me what I have failed to learn in the streets
maybe I wouldn’t be here to nobody’s concern.
I’d still have a couple friends and family by my side.
But after 12 years in prison, people move on.
If only I had tried to make something of myself,
By now I could be enjoying the riches of my wealth.
If only I had restrained from attempts to be grown
and remained a child maybe I could have become
something that would have made my mother proud.
If only I would teach in this tearful message I send
the harder you work in life in the beginning
it makes life so much better in the end.

Jermaine Jameson grew up on the North side of Chicago near Rogers Park. He was 16 years old at the time of the offense for which he received life without parole. Today Jermaine is 29. In prison, he has worked various jobs, and otherwise spends his time playing basketball, reading and studying relevant law to his case.

I thought I knew it All
Jaime C. Hauad

It started in 1989
only nine
The youngest street punk I became
living my life as if it was a game
without the comprehension level to realize it was lame.
All I did was put my mother through shame.
The life of crime never stopped.
My mother tears constantly dropped.
I sold ready rock in hopes to rise to the top.
Learning quickly that with more money came more problems
now I got officer Cesar trying to solve them.
He was tall, built, and mean
always telling me that couldn’t wait until I turn seventeen

At seventeen, my daughter’s conceived
I wanted nothing more than to be free
but I guess officer Cesar had a promise to keep.
And a wish to fulfill, so I find myself in the back seat
of his 4 door Chevy headed toward grand and central.
I didn’t kill anyone. Nor did I partake in this crime
72 hours of torture was the only thing on my mind.
Now I am on my way to county with 1st degree
murder charges surrounding me.
Sick to my stomach. Baby mama pregnant
With one of the best attorneys in the city
and no physical evidence linking me to these crimes
I just knew I’d be home in no time.

I thought I knew it all.

Twelve long years have passed.
It is the year 2009.
I am still fighting.

Jaime Hauad was 17 years old when two people were shot and killed outside a bar on the West side of Chicago. Jaime received a life without parole sentence for the murders and has maintained, and fought to prove, his innocence since. Today, he is 30 years old. Jaime has taken advantage of every program possible in prison.

On July 22nd, I shared info about a CBS report about undocumented immigrants filling Arizona prisons. On July 25th, I blogged about KPHO’s reporting about the connections between the Arizona governor and private prison companies. On August 3rd, I suggested that Arizonans should impeach their elected officials.

Yesterday Rachel Maddow highlighted what I and many others have been writing about regularly for the past few weeks — the ties between private prisons and Arizona’s politicians. Hopefully this will encourage many others in the mainstream media to do more investigative reporting on this matter.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I came across this article today and I have been meaning to blog about it.  So here is the article in its entirety.  It is short and to the point.  It also highlights what is currently happening in terms of the prison industrial complex nationwide:

The state Corrections Department director says the prison population routinely reaches 99 percent of capacity.

An analysis provided to the state Board of Corrections Wednesday showed that as of Aug. 2, state-run prisons were operating at 98.85 percent of capacity with 18,326 offenders. The 99 percent figure includes contract beds at halfway houses, private prisons and county jails.

DOC director Justin Jones said operating at such a high capacity percentage makes it difficult to transfer inmates among facilities.

Jones said a supplemental appropriation of up to $40 million from the Legislature will be sought.

Board member David Henneke says eliminating treatment programs could mean some offenders won’t be able to perform court-ordered assignments.

Jones said judges and the parole board have been told about the lack of programs.

As part of my ongoing documentation of the ludicrousness of zero tolerance policies specifically as implemented in many schools, I bring you today’s installment.

Apparently in the Columbia County Schools this passes as a measure of progress and “common-sense” implementation of their zero tolerance policies:

There was a time when a Tylenol would get you kicked out of school for ten days.  But after 52 students were caught county-wide last year with prescription or over the counter medicine, the school board realized many were accidents and the punishment was unjust.

“It just didn’t make sense. It was over the top and just wrong. It’s too harsh,” said Columbia County School Board Member Mike Sleeper.  For the past five years, students caught with prescription or over the counter drugs in Columbia County schools meant ten days out of school and a tribunal hearing.  “That’s just not right. We’re punishing kids in some cases academically for what may have been a slip of the mind,” said Sleeper.  Marguerite Creekmore’s child accidentally brought a Tylenol to school.  She forgot it was in her pocket.

“So she was scared and I became afraid what if she had been caught with it at school for just a Tylenol she would have been suspended,” said Creekmore.  The board’s vote this year suggests a more common sense approach to discipline.  “Now if you’re caught with over the counter medication you’ll receive in school suspension under the discretion of the building principal,” said Sleeper.  If a student is caught with medication in elementary or middle schools, they face two days suspension for a first offense.  High school students will be placed on in-school suspension for five days for their first offense.  This allows students to continue their education instead of missing days of class instruction.  “If we as administrators can prove there was no intent to do anything wrong then we have the flexibility to suspend them for two days instead of a full blown hearing,” said Evans Middle School Principal Michael Johnson.

We asked Sleeper if this new policy could be taking a step back from “Zero Tolerance.”  “No, we still have zero tolerance. We still don’t tolerate drugs. There is still a punishment but at the same time, it’s common sense,” said Sleeper.  If a student is caught with medications for a second time or more, school leaders say that’s when they’ll be suspended for ten days pending tribunal.

Michelle Alexander’s recent book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness has attracted a lot of attention both negative and positive in the past few months.  In her book, Alexander argues that mass incarceration is the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. She also makes the case that a new racial caste system has been created through mass incarceration.

I want to talk about the caste system that exists for former prisoners who are saddled with criminal records.  Devah Prager’s book Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration is a must-read for anybody who is interested in this issue.  Prager’s sociological study of ex-offenders suggests that their chances of being gainfully employed are truly bleak and that this poses both a moral and social challenge.  It is the only book that I have read that squarely addresses these issues and does so in an accessible way.

This post was prompted by article from the AP that I read yesterday.   From the article:

With millions of adults having criminal records — anything from underage drinking to homicide — a growing number of job seekers are having a rough time finding work. And more companies are trying to screen out people with bankruptcies, court judgments or other credit problems just as those numbers have swollen during the recession.

Just ask Adrienne Hudson, a single mother who says she was fired from her new job as a bus driver at First Transit in Oakland, Calif., when the company found out she had been convicted seven years earlier for welfare fraud.

This is a truly calamitous situation where employers continue to have the upper hand to depress wages and create larger social problems.  Our capitalist system depends on having a permanent imbalance between supply and demand.  Employers are socially engineering the labor pool so that they can pay the most people the least amount of money.

It seems that the Federal Government through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has taken note of this practice and is prepared to act:

Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws as the government steps up scrutiny of hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.

A blanket refusal to hire workers based on criminal records or credit problems can be illegal if it has a disparate impact on racial minorities, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The agency enforces the nation’s employment discrimination laws.

“Our sense is that the problem is snowballing because of the technology allowing these checks to be done with a fair amount of ease,” said Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal counsel at the EEOC.

The following photograph by Herman Krieger really speaks to me and relates to the situation that exists for marginalized people in this country.  We are offering specific groups in society a terrible education, no access to health care, and free room and board in our penal institutions.  Then when they get out of prison, we ensure that they are unable to successfully reintegrate into society so that they are basically forced to return to prison.  This is just immoral.

Free Room, Board, Education, and Tactful Healthcare -- Joliet Prison by Herman Krieger

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of buzz about a UPI report that jails are top mental health institutions.

From the article:

New York’s Riker’s Island, Chicago’s Cook County Jail and the Los Angeles County Jail are the largest mental health institutions in the nation, a study found.

Members of the International Association for Forensic and Correctional Psychology say 15 percent of the inmates of those three jails are mentally ill, making penal institutions — not hospitals — the three largest U.S. mental health institutions.

There was a lot of outrage expressed about this fact and rightly so.  This is the direct consequence of the de-institutionalization of mental health care in the late 70s through the mid-80s.  Many reformers pushed for the closing of asylums and wanted to treat people who suffered with mental illness in the community instead.  The sentiment was correct and humane however the resources did not follow as is so often the case with reforms.   As such, the mentally ill were abandoned first to the streets to join the ranks of the burgeoning homeless population and now to our jails.

I did not write about this issue when the article was published in mid-July because I needed some time to gather my thoughts and to process what it means to have penal institutions responsible for providing mental health treatment.  This issue first came into sharp relief for me when I watched a powerful, infuriating and ultimately tragic Frontline documentary called The New Asylums.

If you haven’t already watched this film, please take one hour out of your day to do so.  It lays out the intricacies of the issue of warehousing the mentally ill in jails and prisons.  The New Asylums was followed up with an equally good Frontline documentary called The Released which tells the story of mentally ill former prisoners struggling to survive on the outside.  Both films are available to be watched for free online.  The films humanize this social problem.  They make them visceral and accessible to the general public.

Jenn Ackerman & Tim Gruber also put a face to the statistics in their photo essay called Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons.

They preface their photos by writing:

The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the nation into the default mental health facilities. The system designed for security is now trapped with treating mental illness and the mentally ill are often trapped inside the system with nowhere else to go.

They also created an Emmy-winning short film of the same name. Part of which can be viewed below:

Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons from Ackerman Gruber Images on Vimeo.

It seems clear to me that it is going to take a mass movement of engaged citizens to reverse the tide here.  I think that one way to start building power for change is to take these stories, photographs, and films on the road and do some door to door, community by community popular education around all of the issues that link the prison industrial complex.  We are beginning to do more of this work here in Chicago and I know that many others across the country are doing the same.  Grits for Breakfast recently posted this blog underscoring the terrible situation that the mentally ill in Texas jails are facing. More information is great. We need to pair this with determined and sustained social action in order to change the situation.

As Dr. King said famously about the Arc of the moral universe (CLICK TO LISTEN): “How long? Not Long? because the arc of a moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

Data geeks rejoice! I have been working on a popular education project about the prison industrial complex for months now.   As such, I am currently looking at a lot of historical data about incarceration and taking tons of notes.  I thought that some of you might be interested in a couple of charts outlining historical racial differences in incarceration since I have shared so much contemporary data over the past few weeks.  If folks are interested, over the coming days, I can share some detailed charts about incarceration in 1929 (start of the Great Depression), 1945 (the end of World War II) and 1964 (the heart of the black freedom struggle). Leave a comment.

Please note that these charts are based on documented information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.  The Bureau has created a set of “estimated” numbers as well because some of the state documentation was unavailable or inaccessible.  So the first chart relies on the BJS’s estimates based on the best available documentation that state governments collected at the time.  The second more detailed chart is based solely on documentation that was provided by jurisdictions at the time.  As such, those tallies actually undercount the numbers of prisoners.  Nevertheless they are interesting to look at and to compare to our most recent numbers.  By any measure, you can see how the United States has become over time a prison nation.

You might find it interesting as you look at the chart below to notice how blacks outnumber whites as prisoners in the southern states of Maryland, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia.

For fun, click here to see current data about state prison populations.   For example, in 2009, Illinois had 45,161 prisoners.  In 1926, Illinois had 1,728 prisoners.  Seems quaint doesn’t it?  Hey, some people get excited about winning a trip to Bermuda, I get psyched about data.  To each her own…

Note: The white U.S. total includes Mexicans, but the Federal and State totals for whites exclude Mexicans.  The “other races” U.S. total excludes Mexicans, but the Federal and State totals for “other races” include Mexicans.

Last week, I blogged about the injustice of the practice of stop & frisk that so many people of color (especially young men of color) have historically endured.

I would like to return to the topic of the relationship between the police and young people of color today.  One of the most consistent themes that I hear from the young people who I work with is that they feel under siege by the police in their neighborhoods.  They are consistently harassed and hassled for no reason other than their youth and skin color.

I have developed several workshops about police violence over the years and am currently working on a new one right now.  In preparation for this, I have been reading a lot of research about how young people experience community policing.

I am particularly intrigued by a study of young African-American males that was conducted by Delores D. Jones-Brown.  Dr. Brown surveyed 125 high school African American males regarding attitudes toward and contacts with the police.  Her findings unsurprisingly suggest that a majority of the males report experiencing the police as a repressive rather than facilitative agent in their own lives and in the lives of their friends and relatives.   The young respondents in her study complained of being stopped because they were suspected of dealing drugs or because they were out past curfew or because they were in the “wrong” neighborhood.  Again, anecdotal evidence supports this as being true.  One only needs to listen to Tupac Shakur in order to hear the exasperation and the barely contained rage at the treatment by police. Listen to Pat’s Justice and his Innocent Criminal Anthem to understand how deeply this experience of being harassed by the police cuts and harms.

In my experience, young people often express a sense of anger and feel as though they are being wronged.  Unfortunately I have also heard some young people internalize this treatment and respond by claiming that people of color bring this scrutiny on to themselves by engaging in a disproportionate amount of criminal behavior.  It always takes a lot of time to disabuse these youth of that idea.  For some, self-hatred is deeply ingrained.

There is another thing still. Henry Giroux recently wrote about the concept of the punishing state and its growing power and impact over the lives of youth of color in his book Youth in a Suspect Society. The police have always been the enforcers of the punishing state. The militarization of schools with their security cameras, police patrols, and bathrooms on lockdown reinforces the idea that young people of color are threats to the state. Giroux also speaks to a “politics of disposability” for young people which serves to remove them from the realm of being deserving of support and resources. Over the past 20 years, young people of color have become increasingly the targets of policies and rules that suggest that they are in some ways already assumed to be “criminal.” Youth are being managed through the lens of crime, repression, and punishment. This has taken a great toll.

I have previously blogged about the silent mental health crisis that is decimating many young black men.   In particular, I relied on the example of rapper DMX to make a larger point about the need to help young black men process their experiences with oppression.  The daily harassment at the hands of the police is often experienced by young men of color as micro-aggressions that they have little power to resist without suffering potentially lethal consequences.  This takes a toll on their physical and mental wellness.   And yet too few educators, pastors, youth workers, parents address this issue with their sons and daughters.  We must break the silence about this experience.  It is crucial to healing our communities.

For old times sake, here is a classic by NWA:

Study Cited — Brown-Jones, Delores D. Debunking the Myth of Officer Friendly: How African American Males Experience Community Policing. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 2000: 16; 209.