Young, Black and Locked Up

If you were asked where the United States ranks among industrialized countries on low birthweight, infant mortality or child poverty, a guess much higher than the bottom on any of these social indicators would be wrong. But if you were asked where America stands on imprisoning its citizens, you would be correct to answer that we surpass everyone else. Our nation incarcerates more people -- over 2.3 million in 2006 -- than any other country. Because justice is not equally administered in the United States, Black males are disproportionately represented among America's imprisoned population, currently numbering 837,000 in state and federal prisons. Our ranking as the world's number one jailer represents a monumental national failure.

More and more of those who enter the Prison Pipeline start with arrest records as young children. Earlier this year, a police officer arrested seven-year-old Gerard Mungo, Jr., in East Baltimore, Maryland, claiming that the child was riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. Gerard was handcuffed and taken to a police station where officers took his fingerprints and mug shot.

Incarceration is extremely costly. In California, state detention centers for young people cost $216,000 a year per child; county facilities cost about $117,000. States spend on average nearly three times as much per prisoner as they do per public school pupil. In some states, the growth in prison costs also exceeds the growth in higher education spending. When it costs more to detain a child than to provide him a Head Start, we need to seriously reassess our nation's values and priorities. While there seems to be no cap on prison spending; Head Start funding serves only half of those eligible.

We need to refocus what we do with the children we detain. Too much cruelty permeates our youth detention culture where the focus is often on control and punishment instead of rehabilitation. A 2003 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into conditions at Oakley and Columbia Juvenile Training Schools in Mississippi found that juveniles there were being hog-tied with chains, physically assaulted by guards, sprayed with chemicals during military exercises, forced to eat their own vomit and put in dark, solitary confinement cells after being stripped naked. Mississippi's juvenile justice system is now under a federal judicial decree because of these and other violations found by the Department of Justice.

For some young people, being sent to a youth detention facility can be a death sentence. In January 2006, 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson died of suffocation at a state-run boot camp in Florida after seven guards beat and restrained him. His death occurred the day after he arrived at the camp after violating parole for taking his grandmother's car for a joy ride.

One state that has gotten it right on juvenile justice is Missouri. Under the caring youth-focused leadership of Mark Steward, its former Youth Services Director, in 1983 Missouri closed all of its youth prisons and divided the state into five regions so that confined youths would be within driving distance of their homes. Each region has two facilities housing no more than 40 young people. This Department of Youth Services focuses on intensive individual counseling, academic and vocational education, and positive behavior modification. Key features of the Missouri model are its integration of mental health into all of its rehabilitation components and its comprehensive approach to treatment, which includes family therapy and counseling.

Each confined youth is brought together with nine other teens who eat, study and live together as a team. Each team of ten is under the supervision of two trained youth specialists. When a young person has a problem, s/he can call a meeting of the team to work out a solution. Academic success is emphasized and a high percentage of young people in Missouri's Department of Youth Services facilities earn their GEDs. Missouri has dramatically reduced youth recidivism to seven percent, at a cost of nearly one-third less per youth than the cost of systems in Louisiana and Florida, which have much higher recidivism rates.

Sadly, Missouri is an exception to the bumper-sticker thinking of too many state leaders who pursue "Tough on crime," "Zero tolerance," "Lock 'em up" approaches to punish rather than address the problems of troubled youths. Increasing investments in health care, quality early childhood education, better schools and positive youth development in out-of-school time would not only increase the number of children reaching successful adulthood but increase public safety. The last thing a young person needs is lessons in how to become a hardened criminal by exposure to adult criminal mentors in adult prisons or callous adults in juvenile "justice" systems. It's time for a change for our children and our nation's sake.

Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender

Comments

[elkabong]

Make all drugs legal (not just the burgeoning list of advertised crap). Regulate them, tax them. Pour all that tax money and the hundreds of billions spent on enforcement and incarceration into our schools and after school programs. Give our kids the sciences And the arts or the best vocational training. Pay teachers the kinds of salaries that will attract the most talented and inspirational. Properly fund rehab.

No more drug lords. No more drive-by's. No more corner drug pimps. No more Afghan poppies funding terrorism. No more immense prison populations. Law enforcement freed to look for violent criminals and terrorists. Judges freed to hear cases that matter. New cash crops for our farmers, etc., etc., etc..

People who want to do drugs will always find a way. People who don't want to do them won't begin just because they've been made legal.

Besides, it's not the government's responsibility to protect us from ourselves.

[GoreSavingPlanetForJesus]

I agree.

I think the zero tolerance policy is a distaster for our youth.

[dbrgroup]

Shouldn't african american youth be considered a resource by their own families first? Maybe focus on personal responsibilities instead of the size of the rims on your car? Most music/culture today dwells on prison life & drug dealing & mo' money. It seems like you are looking at the wrong end of the problem. Am I supposed to feel sorry for a convicted felons? Oh yeah...eve­ryone in prison is innocent.

[BadChristian]

Everyone does this by race... No one does this by region.

People who live in urban areas are jail-food.

[Nommo]

How is it, still, that 75% of recreational drug users in this nation are white, yet 90% of those convicted of drug crimes are Black?

[wsblake]

One thing we should have done is end the war on drugs- drug addiction should be handled as a medical problems not as criminal behavior.
But beyond that, and probably more importantly, we have to end welfare as we know it. A statistic you don't mention is that more than 90 percent of the incarcerated come from homes in which there was limited or complete government assistance. Encouraging fifteen year olds to have babies ( which is what our system does) is the root of the problem. And if you don't believe me, just have a conversation with any group of American fifteen year olds, and then picture them as parents.

[Cautious]

I would simply add that Daniel Patric Moynihan predicted this in his 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action". At that time Moynihan's greatest concern was growing fatherlessness in black families, which is partly due to the AFDC welfare regulations which required the father to be absent from the home for the wife and children to be able to recieve the welfare funds.

http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm

Unfortunately, the problem of fatherlessness is not confined to the African-American family but has now begun to cut across all classes and all races.

[hootie1fan]

It amazes me that so many are willing to spend so much of our tax $$$$$ on incarceration, when fewer of our tax $$$$ spent of preventative programs and guaranteed education would result in keeping these people pit of prison.

[TWOSHORT]

1968 Dr King was shot standing outside of his motel room!For how many day was this nation locked in Riot's across this nation?Never will that happen again[Felony!One loses there right to work and to vote was part of it.Unemplo­yment why is it so high amoung Black Men[AFFIRMTIVE ACTION] when 12-20 million here as guess seem to be doing better than Black Men born here as U.S Citizen!And how we see ads asking young black men who share in nothing to risk there lives to fight for those who do nothing for them.Black Men need to start standing up for themseleves

[redfish62]

I'm in favor of locking up people that are any kind of threat to me.

I worked in D.C. for six years and I came across an awful lot of threats to my well-being.

[MagisterLudi]

It's the old dilemma between rehabilitation and punishment. Nothing new here.
With juveniles the place to begin is the home, prior to manifestations of consistent criminal behavior.

This would include free after-school art,music and sports programs, mental health care, less severe punishments for marijuana possession.
Personally, GED and hopes for college is a very wrong model for such children. Most of these children have few advanced cognitive skills and will likely drop out.
A MUCH better model would be trade/artisan education: electrician, mechanic, plumber, construction, glass blower etc.
Obtaining a real job skill could provide a real option and hope.

But this alone would not be enough to break the cycle.
The drive towards criminal life style begins and ends with immediate surroundings.
When children see their parents, aunts, uncle etc in jail, on welfare or engaging in petty crime or worse, they tend to model their behavior on just that.
BY the time their detained it's often too late. Many children have fully internalized the "street" life model.

As they say "it takes village to raise a child."
What if the village is a criminal enterprise?

[Treeboys]

I have looked into a career in juvenile justice (which is, by the way, an oxymoron as it is now operated.) What I found is that there is no shortage of ideas and solutions. We know what works: just look at how rich kids are treated in their private "therapeutic schools." We KNOW what works. What stands in the way is the state-funded correctional officers unions, who are for the most part thugs in uniform. All you have to do is look at the behavior of these "officers" - which is an awful lot like the behavior of the worst criminals on the streets - to figure out why they block reform. The real criminals are running the system.

[GasDoc]

I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Edelman's positions. I think that all youths must be viewed as a resource that must be nurtured. There is truth in the hackneyed expression that the young people of today are our future. I have spent countless evenings in birthing units in hospitals providing epidural analgesia for teen mothers who are ill prepared for the labor process let alone for the responsibility of parenthood. Among the extended family present,there is often a prospective grandmother little more than twice the age of the parturient. Statistics show that the breakdown of the Black family structure is contributing factor in the involvement of Black males in the criminal justice system. If it takes a village to raise a child then it's time for the Black community to begin the task! Certainly we must use our power at the ballotbox to petition our government to begin to utilize such innovative methods Ms. Edelman proposes because real change is needed in our approach to youth crime. But equal if not greater energy should be placed in fostering the Black family structure.

[oogabooga]

In the 1980s, we had a confluence of wildly violent drug gangs made up young boys without fathers and the cocaine trade. Violence got so far out of hand that people demanded that "career criminals" be locked up. At first, these criminals were defined as habitual offenders. The idea was to get killers, robbers and rapists off the streets for good. But the "career criminal" definition soon stretched to include drug violators and petty criminals. And we started filling up our prisons with non-violent perpetrators. And remember the millions of parolees out there. They have problems finding jobs if they want to go straight. We have to legalize drugs, period, and focus on the killers, robbers and rapists. Finally, please encourage fathers to be responsible instead of just breeders and studs. The feminist notion that fathers are irrelevant is just plain tragic and wrong, and we see the results now - in prison. Boys need positive male guidance, especially in a violence-drenched society.

[Gabrielle]

PURE RACISM