There is well-deserved outrage over the decisions by two grand juries in St. Louis and New York City to not indict police officers Darren Wilson and Dan Pantaleo for the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The good news is that many of the nation’s school reformers realize that it isn’t enough to transform education. Groups such 50Can Teach For America, and Parent Revolution, along with activists such as Derrell Bradford, Stacy Childress, Alex Hernandez, and James Shuls, realize that reformers must stand up and counted when it comes to addressing the intersection between American public education and our criminal justice systems.
Raising voices is a start. But I declared in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, reformers must also take action by working with criminal justice reform advocates to address how schools and courts end up damaging our children. One area in which reformers can play powerful roles lies in keeping kids out of the nation’s juvenile justice systems and overhauling how those already condemned to youth prisons are treated, educationally and otherwise.
The latest focus on our juvenile prisons comes courtesy of the Obama Administration, which issued guidance on Monday to state superintendents and attorneys general on how to stem the high numbers of children caught up in juvenile justice systems, as well as overhaul how teaching and curricula is provided to the 146,979 kids incarcerated in prisons and jails (including residential treatment centers) as of 2011, according to an analysis of federal and state data by the criminal justice reform-oriented Justice Policy Institute. Certainly there will be some reformers who will argue that the Dear Colleague guidance is another form of federal overreach as they did when the Obama Administration began work on reducing overuse of harsh school discipline. But the administration deserves credit for once again shining a light on how schools and criminal justice systems work together to condemn so many children to the worst America offers.
One aspect of the administration’s guidance has to do with the reality that far too many children from poor and minority households are more-likely to end up trapped in juvenile justice systems than kids from white and middle class backgrounds. This, of course, reflects what happens in American public education. Sixty percent of delinquency cases involving black children, along with 58 percent of American Indian, and 56 percent of Asian kids, were petitioned (or led to formal charges) in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Justice; only one out of every two cases involving white kids led to formal charges.
The Obama Administration’s guidance comes both amid the uproar over the Ferguson and Garner grand jury verdicts, and as Justice Policy released its special report revealing that 46 states (along with the District of Columbia) spent $148,767 per child annually on juvenile incarceration in 2011. Based on those numbers, states (along with the federal government) actually spent $22 billion on imprisoning youth, more than four times the official number of $5.7 billion (which only accounts for kids in juvenile prisons, not those in residential treatment where most incarcerated youth will be placed). Concludes Justice Policy staffers Amanda Petteruti, Marc Schindler, and Jason Ziedenberg: “Policies that needlessly confine youth have an immediate cost for taxpayers and our communities.”
This is an understatement. Twenty-five percent of convicted juvenile delinquency offenders and seven percent of convicted status offenders (or children convicted of activities that would be legal if they were 18 or 21), were incarcerated in 2011. Another 64 percent of convicted juvenile delinquency offenders and 56 percent of those convicted of status offenders end up on probation, which can be just as onerous as prison time because probation usually lasts until a child reaches age 18 or 21 (and could lead to prison if they violate — quite likely given high recidivism rates — or if families fail to pay often-exorbitant monthly probation fees to courts). Given that only 4.6 percent of the 1.5 million juvenile arrests made in 2011 were for violent crimes such as murder, and property crimes accounted for just 23 percent of arrests, children end up in juvenile justice systems either for minor offenses that can be solved through better means or because of referrals by traditional districts and other school operators for matters they should be handling on their own.
This is especially troubling for three important reasons.
Children incarcerated in juvenile prisons such as the now-shuttered Al Price in Beaumont, Texas, often never get high-quality education. (Photo courtesy of the Beaumont Enterprise.)
The first: Once a child lands in juvenile courts, they are unlikely to gain the kind of due process granted to adults. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling, In Re Gault, established that juveniles are entitled to legal counsel and due process the same way adults are. Yet as Seattle University School of Law Professor Janet Ainsworth noted in a 1996 report, 47 percent of accused juvenile offenders in three states went through court without any legal representation; a decade later, the National Juvenile Defender Center and the Indiana Juvenile Justice Task Force reported that 40 percent of juvenile cases in Indiana were handled without defense counsel. Just 19 states allow alleged juvenile offenders to have their cases decided by jury trial in at least some situations, according to NJDC.
Because of the lack of due process and legal representation, children can end up being subjected to arbitrary and capricious behavior by judicial overlords — who often control juvenile jails and probation agencies alongside their own courts — whose decisions can end up causing more harm to kids than any possible good. Your editor detailed what could happen in a 2006 editorial series for the Indianapolis Star on scandal that enveloped the Circle City’s juvenile court. An even more-horrific example was revealed three years later, when then-Luzerne County (Pa.) Court of Common Pleas judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella were charged with (and later, convicted of) racketeering and bribery charges for funneling $1.3 million a year in taxpayer dollars to cronies operating two private jails by incarcerating alleged youth offenders (many of whom were first-time offenders charged with misdemeanors such as spraying graffiti, writing prank notes, and truancy), often finding the kids guilty in less than two minutes, and denying them their rights to attorneys.
The second reason: Once a child ends up in juvenile prisons and jails, there is little likelihood that they will be safe from harm. Twelve percent of juvenile prisoners report being sexually assaulted by either another inmate or by prison staff, according to a Justice Department study. Last year, the Justice Department revealed that one out of every three children held in 13 juvenile jails and prisons — including the Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility in Ohio and the Illinois Youth Center Joliet — were sexually abused by guards, other employees, or fellow inmates. And in California, the problems of sexual abuse of children in juvenile prisons was brought to light once again last October when Cesar Navejar, who worked as an officer in Kern County’s juvenile jail, was accused of sexual battery on a child locked up there.
But the damage to kids in juvenile jails extends beyond molestation. Thirty-five percent of juvenile prisoners reported that they spent some time in solitary confinement, essentially being subjected to the kind of psychological abuse that has gotten prisons serving adults into trouble. Because juvenile prisons and jails are ill-equipped to deal with the underlying mental health issues of kids incarcerated in them, suicide ends up being common. The average age of children in juvenile prisons committing suicide between 1995 and 1999 was 15.7 years old, according to a 2009 report from the Justice Department; 72.7 percent of them were locked up for nonviolent offenses, while 65.8 percent had a history of mental illness, and 78.5 percent had a history of physical or emotional abuse. Given that 63 percent of kids incarcerated in juvenile prisons were convicted of nonviolent property, drug, and technical (read: probation) offenses, putting kids into juvenile prisons harms them physically and mentally in the present — and does little to help them change their behavior and become model citizens in the future.
Then there is the reality that most kids in juvenile jails and prisons are unlikely to be provided high-quality education. Just nine percent of children locked up in state juvenile prisons in 2009 graduated with either a high school diploma or lower-quality GED, according to the Justice Department; a mere four percent of inmates were either enrolled or accepted into a higher education program. When they are locked up in juvenile prisons, they are unlikely to get high-quality teaching and curricula; 26 percent of children locked up in juvenile prisons and jails for more than 90 days made any kind of academic progress, according to a report released earlier this year by the Southern Education Foundation. Meanwhile as lawsuits such as one filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center have revealed, few juvenile prisons and jails do much to provide kids with education in the first place.
The failures of public education in juvenile justice systems is especially problematic for kids who have been condemned to the nation’s special ed ghettos when they were attending traditional district schools. Thirty percent of incarcerated youth surveyed by the U.S. Department of Justice were diagnosed as being special ed cases. University of Florida professor Joseph C. Gagnon and his team determined in a 2009 study that between 38 percent and 44 percent of juvenile inmates were taking special ed classes. As Sarah Butrymowicz and Jackie Mader of the Hechinger Report detailed this past October in a report on Mississippi’s juvenile prisons, the likelihood of a juvenile prison following up on an incarcerated child’s individualized education plan is slim to none.
Certainly the complex nature of juvenile justice systems can make it difficult for school reformers to even discuss, much less devote energy to it. As I noted four years ago, the complex behavioral and psychological issues alone are harder to grapple with than matters of teacher quality. Yet reformers must work hand-in-hand with advocates for overhauling juvenile justice systems. Why? Because far too many children are condemned to juvenile systems for problems that have as much to do with the failures of American public education as they do with bad parenting and a fraying civic society.
Corruption and denial of due process to children by juvenile justice officials such as now-convicted former Luzerne County judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella is far too commonplace.
As Dropout Nation has noted over the past few months, schools account for three out of every 10 status referrals to juvenile courts in 2011, according to the Justice Department. This includes 65 percent of truancy referrals, which account for 33 percent (or the single-largest share) of all status cases handled by juvenile courts. Given that juvenile court judges are incapable of handling matters that have to do with the failures of traditional districts to provide high-quality education and families not keeping their kids in classrooms, there is little reason why truancy cases are even be adjudicated.
The failures of traditional districts on the literacy front are another reason why so many kids are ensnared by juvenile justice systems. Forty-four percent of incarcerated children in state juvenile prisons were at least a grade level behind in reading. As Stanford University researchers Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels in first grade are strong predictors of long-term disciplinary problems by third grade; essentially kids act out because they realize that they are falling behind their peers, but are unable (or unwilling to) verbalize it. This was further borne out in a 2011 study by Chuang Wang and Bob Algozzine of University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Thanks to low-quality literacy instruction and curricula (especially in the early grades), along with the lack of intensive identification and remediation of functionally-illiterate children, kids who would otherwise stay out of trouble in and out of schools end up on the path to incarceration.
The failure of districts to help illiterate children end up leading to another problem that ends up in juvenile justice systems: The overlabeling of children, especially young black and white men, as special ed cases. As Dropout Nation noted in reports on school districts in Ferguson, Mo. (where Michael Brown was slain), districts in the Washington, D.C., metro area, and Minneapolis, children in special ed ghettos are at least twice as likely to be arrested or referred to juvenile justice systems as peers in regular classrooms. Because districts fail to address literacy issues, and because teachers and other adults in schools end up labeling certain groups of students as special ed cases because they think they are destined to end up that way, far too many kids end up being put on the path to juvenile and adult prisons. That many special ed ghettos embrace many of the worst practices of those prisons — including use of seclusion (or solitary confinement) and restraints on kids — essentially conditions kids to being mistreated in juvenile justice.
Then there’s the role that state education departments fail to play in regulating schools and other educational programs operated in juvenile prisons and jails. Because education agencies often fail to fulfill their mandates to oversee juvenile correctional schools — as well as because of their struggles in developing robust data systems that can provide data on their performance (as well as allow them to get information from districts) — jails and prisons end up doing little for the kids in their academic care. In fact, as a 2009 study by team led by Gagnon determined, more than half of principals running juvenile detention schools believe that kids in their care should not be expected to learn at grade level; which means that incarcerated children are being subjected to the soft bigotry of low expectations by those who should do better by them. The neglect of state education departments on this front is one reason why the Obama Administration’s guidance extends to them as well as to attorneys general.
The failures of our schools and juvenile justice systems spill out onto our streets — especially in the form of black kids essentially condemned to lives of incarceration. So overhauling juvenile justice systems must be a priority for school reformers and criminal justice reform advocates alike.
This starts with reformers and juvenile justice advocates, along with the rest of the criminal justice reform community, coming together to support reforms that can keep kids out of juvenile justice systems in the first place. This includes ending mandatory sentencing for all but the most-violent acts of delinquency, as well as backing laws requiring jury trials and legal counsel (in a manner similar to the guardian at litem system for kids going through child welfare systems) for all alleged juvenile offenders. These moves, along with greater oversight of juvenile incarceration (including putting operation of juvenile jails in the hands of city and county jail agencies and out of the hands of judges) should be undertaken.
Youth in detention are routinely searched, at some facilities six times a day is standard procedure. (Photo courtesy of Richard Ross)
Directly addressing the intersection between public education and juvenile justice systems, reformers should support juvenile justice reform overhauls being advanced by outfits such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation. Casey, in particular, has worked diligently in cities such as Indianapolis to reduce the numbers of kids referred by districts to juvenile courts. Crafting laws that require state education departments to keep better tabs on juvenile prison schools must also be a key priority.
Yet there will still be some kids who will be in juvenile prisons and jails because of violent offenses. This is why reformers must play powerful roles in overhauling the schools that serve our kids locked up in juvenile prisons and jails. This is where charter school operators such as KIPP can come in. Outfits such as the See Forever Foundation, which operates schools serving the District of Columbia’s juvenile jail (as well as other charters serving ex-dropouts) have shown that incarcerated kids can and should receive high-quality teaching and curricula. Online and blended learning players such as Rocketship should also help out on this front. Universities, technical schools, and apprenticeship programs can also help by providing kids in juvenile jails the postsecondary education they will need to avoid poverty and incarceration upon adulthood.
Meanwhile juvenile justice advocates should support reformers in transforming American public education. After all, if we ensure that all kids are reading proficiently and on the path to lifelong success, we keep them out of juvenile justice systems. This includes high-level reforms such as implementing Common Core reading and math standards; implementing techniques such as Response to Intervention (which can keep kids from landing in special ed ghettos and help them get reading remediation); building school data systems that can help all schools inside and outside juvenile justice systems serve children well; and expanding school choice and Parent Power, especially for poor and minority families affected most by the dysfunctions of public education and criminal justice.
We must keep our children out of juvenile justice systems and help them, along with those already trapped in them, get the high-quality education they need and deserve. Reformers can’t stand on the sidelines any longer on this matter.
Featured photo courtesy of Richard Ross. Check out his Juvenile in Justice series.