Making an Issue

About 22 percent of Massachusetts residents are under 18, according to the U.S. Census. As political debates heat up from the local to the national level, are you hearing candidates talk about how they’ll serve that 22 percent? Vague references to “our children’s future” don’t count.

It falls to adults who care about children to make sure that issues such as educational equity and juvenile justice get front-burner treatment this election season.  The good news is: You don’t need a multi-million dollar advertising program to make that happen. Something as simple as posting a question on a campaign’s Facebook wall lets candidates know that voters care about kids’ issues. A letter to the editor, a question at a candidate forum, even a chat with a door-to-door volunteer can get kids on a candidate’s radar. Imagine if everyone committed to doing just one such thing a month.

Teaching the Hard to Reach: Working with Juvenile Offenders

This post first appeared on Beacon Broadside (9/10/10). David Chura, a writer and educator, worked with at-risk youth for many years and shares the voices of young people that he met as a teacher in a New York prison in his new book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. We highly recommend David’s excellent blog, Kids in the System, and are so grateful to him for letting CfJJ share his post.

Over any teacher’s career—in my case, 26 years of teaching high school English to at-risk teenagers, the last 10 of those years in an adult county jail—you get asked lots of questions. Some about the topic you’re teaching; others, well, it’s hard to know where they come from. But there’s one question I heard a lot, most frequently from my jail students, “Why don’t you teach in a real school?”

This usually happened when a lesson went well and a kid really got what we were talking about. “That was a good lesson, Mr. C.  You should teach in a real school instead of here.” That last part was typical of incarcerated kids. Instead of taking credit for understanding some new idea, the student was quick to give it to me.

I knew where the “real school” remark came from. My students were mostly poor youth of color; many bereft of families. The education they received in their home districts was pretty bogus, and they knew it. Minimal supplies. School buildings as dilapidated as the warehouses (called “public housing”) they lived in. The curriculum dummied down because “they can’t handle the real thing.” For these locked up kids a “real school” was one they weren’t in.

They knew my take on the “real school” remark. My classroom was a real school; they were real students doing real learning; and I expected them to act that way. I confess, I wasn’t always polite about it. It made me mad—at them; at the educational system; at society; at myself. And it made me sad because within that comment was their bone-deep belief that they were worthless.

Troubled Over Bridgewater

Last week, The Boston Phoenix had a front-page article on problems at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, MA.  Among other problems, this facility, where mentally ill inmates are concentrated,  is experiencing the highest rate of inmate suicide of all correctional facilities in Massachusetts (which itself has an inmate suicide rate three times the national average).

Old Colony Correctional Center has been plagued by suicide, overcrowding, and brutality — and things are only getting worse

By CHRIS FARAONE |  September 13, 2010

On a winter evening around 11 pm, the former superintendent of Old Colony Correctional Center walked into a Rhode Island restaurant with a gun in his pocket.Paul Murphy made his way through the dining room to the table where his recently estranged wife, Joan, was sitting with some friends. He sat down at the table and pointed the gun at her face. “I love you,” he said. Then he squeezed the trigger. He shot his wife in the hand and neck, injuries she would survive. Murphy, a man who had overseen a prison of 750 souls, then turned the gun on himself and ended his own life.

Weighing Opportunity Cost

The Chicago Reporter recently dedicated an issue to youth in the juvenile and criminal justice system.  Illinois joined most other states this year when it raised its age of juvenile jurisdiction to include 17 year-olds charged with misdemeanors.  (Massachusetts is a rarity, excluding all 17 year-olds from the juvenile system, regardless of the severity of their charges).  Although charging youth as adults is often seen as the “tough on crime” approach, research has shown that this practice undermines public safety and reduces the chance that a young person will be able to turn around his or her life.

By: Kimbriell Kelly

Posted On: August 31, 2010 Originally published as part of the September, 2010 Issue

I have student loan debt that’s been looming for years. Every time I think about it, my heart races and my brain calculates how much overtime I’d have to pull to pay off the debt in a year.

I run to my financial planner and she says the same thing: Pay the debt and your anxiety will go away. But, you will have funneled tens of thousands of dollars into paying off something that won’t make you any money and will prevent you from saving. Instead, she said it would be better to pay the debt in small monthly payments over time and put the extra money into investments that earn more interest than what I pay toward my student loans. Over time, I will have earned far more money than what I paid, while still paying off my loans. It’s what she called an “opportunity cost.”

Student Arrested for Stealing Cafeteria Chicken Nuggets

Written by Te-Ping Chen, the following was originally posted on Change.org’s Criminal Justice Blog (7/21/10)

When a 15-year-old Wisconsin student was handcuffed and hauled to jail after an assistant school principal accused him of stealing $2.60 cafeteria chicken nuggets, outrage erupted. Local media outlets had a field day with the ludicrous story (charges against the teen were eventually dropped).

But if the case of the “Great Chicken Nugget Heist” had particularly absurd parameters, unfortunately, such events are far more common than most of us might like to think. We’ve written here before about the 12-year-old girl that New York cops handcuffed in her Queens classroom for doodling on a desk. (“I love my friends Abby and Faith,” the perpetrator had written before drawing a smiley face, in green Magic Marker.) And the list goes on. Right now, there are more cops patrolling the halls of New York City schools than there are monitoring Washington, DC. Or Las Vegas. Or any other number of large cities across the nation.

A January report by the Advancement Project finds that with the possible exception of actual prisoners, public schools students are the most policed population in the country. Every year, tens of thousands of students across the country are disciplined by police officers for mild infractions ranging from temper tantrums to “violations of codes of conduct.” Since the 1980s, suspensions, student arrests and expulsions have spiked.