This year's Reblaw Conference has at least three different panels that explore the effect of prisons and incarceration on American society: 1) Changing Parole Policy: A Collaborative Effort Between Lawyers, Prisoners, and Government Officials; 2) Lost in a Haze: Legalization and the Drug Reform Movement; and 3) Rejecting "Tough on Crime": Fixing a Broken Criminal Justice System.
The guest post below comes from
Udi Ofer, Advocacy Director of the
New York Civil Liberties Union, and a panelist on this year's Reblaw panel, "Trading Handcuffs for Diplomas: Exploring Zero Tolerance, Special Education, and the School to Prison Pipeline." For more information on the role of police in schools, please read the NY Times recent editorial on the topics, entitled "The Principal's Office First," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05mon3.html?ref=opinion.
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Crisis in our Schools: More Cops, More Arrests, and More ProblemsBy Udi Ofer, NYCLUPolice personnel
handcuffed 5-year-old Denis Rivera and sent him to a psychiatric ward for throwing a temper tantrum in his Queens kindergarten class.
Stephen Cruz was in a bathroom stall in his school in Flushing when a school safety agent
kicked open the stall, striking Stephen’s face and cutting him below his hairline. The police agent allegedly responded to Stephen’s bleeding by saying, “That’s life, it will stop bleeding,” and walking away.
School safety agents
handcuffed and arrested Chelsea Fraser in front of her classmates at her Dyker Heights school. Her crime? She wrote the word “okay” on her desk.
The above examples,
and there are plenty more, are the product of years of education and safety policies that have taken school discipline away from educators and handed them over to the police department.
In New York City, where I work, the problem is particularly bad. There are more than
5,200 police personnel in NYC schools, making it the 5th largest police force in the country—it’s larger than the police force of Washington DC, Detroit or Boston. And today more than ever, children are much more likely to be arrested for minor disciplinary problems that a generation ago would have never been treated as a criminal offense.
What used to be a trip to the principal’s office is now a trip to the local police precinct.
But the problem of overpolicing is not unique to New York. What’s happening in New York City is part of the larger school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon, where students are being pushed out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice and criminal justice systems.
Often, you’ll hear mayors and police officials refer to these policies as “zero tolerance.” They say that these polices will make our schools safer. But in reality, these policies and practices all too often rely on inappropriately harsh discipline and, increasingly, law enforcement, to address trivial schoolyard offenses. Today, children are far more likely to be arrested at school. And way too many of these school-arrests are not for violent behavior.
Children of color and children with disabilities bear the brunt of these harsh trends. Nationally, students of color are suspended at rates of two to three times that of other students. They are also more likely to be subject to suspensions, corporal punishment, and expulsion.
In New York City, children of color are disproportionately subjected to metal detector searches. In schools with permanent metal detectors, 77% of police personnel interventions are in non-criminal matters. High schools with permanent metal detectors issued 48% more suspensions than similar schools
Rather than nurturing and educating children perceived to pose a disciplinary problem, schools are turning to law enforcement to simply get rid of the child.
There are alternatives to arrests and suspensions to deal with school discipline problems. And there are schools across the country that have used positive, rather than punitive measures to address school violence.
Take, for example, the Julia Richman Education Complex (JREC) in New York City. In the early 1990’s, Julia Richman High School was the definition of a failing school. The school had a 66% attendance rate and a 37% graduation rate. There were metal detectors and more than a dozen police personnel. Despite the prison environment in the school, fights were common and guns often found their way onto school grounds.
In the mid-1990’s, a new administration came in to take over the school. It separated the one large school to include six small schools, four of them high schools. The new school leadership refused to allow metal detectors in the schools. The school safety agents were prohibited from enforcing school discipline and instead became responsible for protecting the school from outside intruders
Today, JREC serves the same population but has a 91% attendance rate, 90% graduation rate, and 91% of graduating students go on to college. In 2006-2007, there were four fights, none of which involved weapons more dangerous than thrown fruit.
More police, more suspensions, and more arrests are not the way to safeguard our schools. Instead, educators must take back control over the enforcement of school rules. Police personnel should be limited to legitimate safety concerns and trained to work in the school environment. More money should be spent on guidance counselors, social workers and afterschool programs to engage students, rather than on additional police personnel.
Read more after the jump
