More than 1,000 Texas teenagers have had to spend time in jail due to missing school and not being able to pay truancy fines. While some might see this as a feasible way to scare mostly poor black and latino teenagers straight into attending school, it often has the opposite effect because students fall even farther behind:
While in jail, students told BuzzFeed News, they witnessed adult inmates beating each other and soliciting sex. Still, some young people said their jail stint startled them into recognizing the value of school — a point echoed by proponents of the system. “It’s important that children learn that there are consequences to their actions,” Judge David Cobos of Midland County, in western Texas, told state legislators at a recent hearing. … But many other students said that jail scarred them by making them feel like failures or, in some cases, by exacerbating preexisting mental illnesses. One student was housed in solitary confinement for most of his 11-day sentence in 2013, leaving only to spend 48 hours under suicide watch in the infirmary, according to jail officials.
Even worse? None of these students have access to lawyers to help them understand their options.
Team Blackness also discussed a Florida sheriff who had some ignorant things to say about black people, CNN president’s thoughts on Don Lemon, and more on the death of Eric Harris.
Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS
scav
If sending kids to public jails for a solid stint was so very effective at getting kids to straighten up and take education seriously, there’d be a line round the block of the rich paying goodly sums of hard, cold cash for the cure.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
IIRC from that report, one of the reasons kids were truant was because they had to care for sick parents or younger siblings. Not really sure how throwing them in jail solves those problems.
And if you’re going to put truant kids in some kind of “jail,” doesn’t it make more sense to put them into essentially a daylong detention with a one-on-one tutor to help them start to get caught up rather than putting them in adult jail?
Don’t get me started on the lack of mental health services and learning disability screenings for poor kids, either. It’s a fucking disgrace.
WereBear
It is simply a way of getting cold hard cash from the state for jailing teens.
Cruelty for Money!
It’s the Confederate Way.
raven
During the summer of 1966 I was given the choice between Charlie Town (St Charles juvenile detention center) outside of Chicago and enlisting in in the US Army on my 17th birthday in November. My dad. the WW2 Navy Vet and school administrator had tried everything he could think of and saw the military as the last resort and better that jail. The deal was that the discipline and no-nonsense approach of the US Army would knock the shit out of me and make me a man. This was at the very time Project 100,000, a program that took that many men a year who could not meet basic military standards, kicked in. The program was seen as a “bootstraps” effort by the government and would give economically and educationally deprived men a shot at a better life. It also sought to bring more men into the military as the draft deferments for those in college, or working in critical jobs, we let off the hook. The US Army was beginning it’s breakdown in 1967 and, by the time I got to Vietnam in 1968, it was in full fledge deterioration. The pointlessness of the war combined with the same forces of discrimination that was seen in the country as a whole took it’s toll and the military was as much a part of the social upheaval as anywhere else. The best depiction of the reality of this is the bunker scene in Platoon. Did it make a man out of me? Hell no, but it taught me a great deal about who was who and what mattered.
Waspuppet
Somehow, as always, the “scare ’em straight” model doesn’t seem to apply to Wall Streeters. For some reason I can’t seem to put my finger on.
JustRuss
Truancy fines? So poor teenagers who very likely don’t have jobs and whose parents are–did we mention this–poor, get jail time while their better-off peers get to walk? There’s a special hell for whoever cooked up that idea.
slag
I love the thought of a bunch of adults sitting around a table wondering how to get kids to go to school, and they finally come up with, “Let’s send them to jail!” Brilliant. I hope they got paid a decent salary for such an ingenious solution.
It’s quite possible that the entire mass of intellectual capital in the great state of Texas could fit quite comfortably into Delaware with room enough to spare for all of Rhode Island.
Kay
I’m convinced “scared straight” was for the benefit of adults. It makes them think they’re “solving problems” and it’s blustery and dramatic and loud.
Creating more chaos for people who live in economically insecure and sometimes violent homes doesn’t help anything. It makes me cringe with shame for adults when I see it. It reminds me of the people you see out in public who make a big show out of disciplining their kids. It’s self-indulgent. Showing kids adults who absolutely lose their shit with rage and strutting around bragging about “holding people accountable” is not setting a good example and not helpful.
The “scared straight” crowd are loud bullies who found an outlet.
Kay
I also don’t understand why we think all people are the same. They aren’t. Some people respond to fear as a motivator (scared straight is fear-inducing) and some people don’t, at all. If policy makers are drawn to this as a “solution” they might want to recognize that might have more to do with how they are than the people they are trying to help.
slag
@Kay:
This is at least part of it, for sure.
But they also paint themselves into a corner. When one option is punishment and every other option is MORAL HAZARD!!!1!, your potential solution set is pretty limited.
Exactly how much of this problem is institutional racism, how much is sadism, and how much is sheer lack of imagination may be murky. But when you’re one of the privileged class, lacking imagination comes at a pretty low cost. And it’s a double win when your utter lack of imagination looks, to the uninitiated, like actual exertion.
I’m sure it hurts them very much that they have to put their foot down like this. If only the rest of us would just stop acting up.
rikyrah
SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE IS REAL
jomike
Yeah, because zero tolerance discipline and juvenile boot camps and all that shit over last 30 years have worked so great. Obviously, kicking their asses even harder will get even better results.
As the Buzzfeed article notes, the sages dispensing this tough love aren’t required to have legal training or experience of any kind. Most are just GOBs or politician-wannabes. Even if they gave a damn about these kids they wouldn’t dare to reconsider this madness because Tough On Crime. They’ll just keep on reasoning by anecdote, like that asshole “judge” Payton profiled in the Buzzfeed article. Voters will keep on rewarding them for it.