PROBLEM STATEMENT People of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos, make up the abnormally high rate of fifty six percent of all incarcerated people in the United States, though their overall population within the country constitutes about half that (Criminal Justice Fact Sheet). There is great debate as to why this exists, however the association between people of color and crime remains factual. At Bronxdale High School, students are arrested and expelled after pulling the fire alarm. This paper will argue that handcuffing young men of color for the non-violent crime of pulling the fire alarm within the school walls creates a criminal identity within the self of student, feeds the school-to-prison pipeline, limits access to education …show more content…
This said, there has been a shift to heavy reliance on police and court systems in schools identified as “problem schools”. Problem schools are identified by Socio-Economic status, or in other words, color (Rabinowitz, 2006). In the article, “Leaving Homeroom in Handcuffs: Why an Over-Reliance on Law Enforcement to Ensure School Safety is Detrimental to Children”, Jennie Rabinowitz highlights the negative impacts of being arrested as a child. She states that there is an aspect of self-fulfilling prophecies associated with being arrested; if you believe you are a criminal, then you will act like one, and thus, become one (Rabinowitz, 2006). Handcuffing children within the very walls that are supposed to make them feel safe and help them learn right from wrong become directly responsible for the development of criminal behavior. Additionally, having a delinquent record makes it nearly impossible for adolescents to get jobs. Once they are released, having been exposed to gang involvement within the jail walls, adolescents now resort to an illegal job network to rely on which further perpetuates the criminalization of young men of color (Rabinowitz, …show more content…
Board of Education case, Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that it is not sensible to believe a child can prosper without education. Police arrests at school, expelling students, and the school-to-prison pipeline has become another way to keep students of color from receiving a fruitful education and succeeding in life (Dunn, 2013). Critical consequences of allowing students to be arrested at school for non-violent, age appropriate misbehavior directly impacts students of color, revokes their right to education and thus, any sensible belief they can succeed. It becomes an element that perpetuates the criminalization of young men of
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander states that we still use our criminal justice system to “label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage i...
The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to
In his novel Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Victor M. Rios aims to demonstrate the catastrophe of criminalization, the flops of using cruel and humiliating punishments that attempt to “‘correct’ and ‘manage’ marginalized youths” (p. 23), and to display the consequences that these practices will have on the paths that teenagers take. He does this by documenting parts of his experience in observing forty boys of Black and/or Latino who are “heavily affected by criminal justice policies and practice” (p. 8). Then, he clarifies how these flaws impacted the boys in these situations. The aim of this essay is to summarize Dr. Rios’ observations and analyze and critique the primary arguments made in the book.
This study is about the phenomena of students experiencing a transfer from school straight into juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Heitzeg (2010, 1) presents how this study attempts to explain how the pipeline emerged with the help of media and youth violence. In addition to media, the process of moving youth toward the pipeline is also due to authority’s tendency to target youth according to racial, social, and economic backgrounds (Heitzeg, 2010). The implementations of zero tolerance policies exhibit a trend among African American and Hispanic/Latino youth. “African-American students are referred for misbehavior that is both less serious and more subjective than white students” (Fowler, 2011, p.17). According to a study done by the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University (2005), “the single greatest predictor of future involvement in the juvenile system is a history of disciplinary referrals at school.”(Fo...
The book "Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys" is written by Victor M. Rios, who was a former gang member in his hometown and later turned his life around. He went to Berkeley and earned a doctorate in sociology. This book explores how youth of color are punished and criminalized by authorities even under the situation where there is no crimes committed and how it can cause a harmful consequence for the young man and their community in Oakland, California. The goal is to show the consequences of social control on the lives of young people of color and try to remind the authorities. This is important Since society plays a crucial part in shaping the lives of people. And the authorities have biases towards them and mistreat
This news article addresses the issue of the mass amount of kids in jail and who is most likely to be in jail. In this article, the author uses many key statistics of the amount of colored kids and teens in jail. In the beginning, the article starts with the amount of kids in jail then proceeds to tell us the percentage of colored kids versus the percentage of non colored kids in jail. Next, it focuses on the amount and increase of people that have been incarcerated just in the past few years and why they have most likely been sentenced. Lastly, the author then states what actions have been taken to stop this and mentions the committees that have formed to help those who have been targeted by this issue. The intended audience is parents who
These authors’ arguments are both well-articulated and comprehensive, addressing virtually every pertinent concept in the issue of explaining racially disparate arrest rates. In The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, Wilbanks insists that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is a fabrication, explaining the over-representation of African Americans in arrest numbers simply through higher incidence of crime. Walker, Spohn and DeLone’s The Color of Justice dissents that not only are African Americans not anywhere near the disproportionate level of crime that police statistics would indicate, they are also arrested more because they are policed discriminately. Walker, Spohn and DeLone addi...
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001. In theory if this trend continues it is estimated that about 1 in 3 black males being born can be expected to spend time in prison and some point in his life. One in nine African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 are currently incarcerated. Although the rate of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than males African American women are incarc...
In the United States, the rate of incarceration has increased shockingly over the past few years. In 2008, it was said that one in 100 U.S. adults were behind bars, meaning more than 2.3 million people. Even more surprising than this high rate is the fact that African Americans have been disproportionately incarcerated, especially low-income and lowly educated blacks. This is racialized mass incarceration. There are a few reasons why racialized mass incarceration occurs and how it negatively affects poor black communities.
He provides us a with a depth overview of a three-year study of 40 minority youths, 30 of whom were previously arrested. The study was done in Oakland, California. Rios give us a clear overview inner city young Latino and African American. Rios emphasize on the difficult lives of these young men, who are faced with policies in their schools, communities, and policing. Importantly, he gives us a clear understanding
The era of mass incarceration began four decades ago, marking the greatest count of prisoners held in U.S. jails and prisons. When speaking of mass incarceration, more than acknowledging the numbers, the significance lies within the statistics of who the cities, states, and government are imprisoning. Out of the whopping two million people who are confined, more than 70 percent of prisoners are people of color, consistently of a poor and underprivileged background (Davis 1998: 684). Sociologists as well as psychologists’ studies bear and explain this phenomenon. The idea of social control and its relation to crime seemingly differ in groups and communities. Street crime, for instance, although is a form of formal social deviance, does not highlight
The role of criminal justice professionals is to preserve and uphold the Constitution by enforcing laws, protecting citizen’s rights and promoting justice for all. Police officers in the field of duty must be able to discern situations to be able to act in the most appropriate manner as it relates to their job. In this case study, Officer Smith is threatened with being penalized for making a decision he thinks is good community policing, but his Lieutenant feels he violated protocol. Officer Smith responds to a domestic dispute between an intoxicated husband and wife. Normal procedure would be to arrest the husband and put him in jail until the decision is made whether or not to press charges. Instead, Officer Smith decides to intervene and asks the couple questions about if they love each other, and why they are physically assaulting each other. They respond they do love each other, but the alcohol makes them violent towards one another. Officer Smith then recommends counseling for the couple, as an alternative to putting the husband in jail. The couple agrees to
Black Americans and Hispanic American seem to be stopped more, frisked more , and arrested more. It could be because they commit crimes more, but statistics show that African Americans commit drug offenses the same rate as their white counterparts (Strauss). Moreover Black Americans and White Americans break drug laws at the frequency, but Black Americans face the tougher sentences. African Americans in Philadelphia accounted for 72% of the stops and 80% of the risks of pedestrians (Washington). Additionally this high percentage shows that everyday African Americans are being stopped and frisked and are being purposely targeted. African Americans are only 43.4% of Philadelphia, but are stopped 72% of the time (United States Census Bureau). These surprising percentages give insight to American’s unfair incarceration of minorities. The offenders are not the only ones suffering due to the racist mass incarceration; the families and children of the prisoners are suffering as well. A white child is six times less likely to have a parent in jail compared to a black child (Strauss). In fact, parents pay a big part in a child’s development, and having an absence of one causes a negative impact. An incarcerated parent can lead to the child to drop out of school, have health problems such as asthma, and misbehave in school (Strauss). It’s important to realize that having problems in school, or even dropping out could lead a child to jail. A parent in prison cannot give a child the knowledge to work through cognitive and noncognitive outcome measures (Strauss). To point out, a child that can not work through cognitive problems effectively may turn to crime. This can cause a never ending cycle of families being the prison system. Getting rid of these biases that cause harsher sentences could bring down the prison rate by allowing children to
This article discusses new policies for the Los Angeles school system in order to reduce arrest rates. Students have been getting arrested for on-campus fights and damaging school property for years in Los Angeles. Recently, school officials adopted a new set of policies to decrease the number of students feeding into the juvenile court system. The goal of these new policies is to reduce the arrest rates in Los Angeles’ schools. Once these policies are implemented, students who deface school property, are involved will not be given citations from the Los Angeles School Police Department but will instead receive disciplinary action from within the schools. Given that the Los Angeles school system is the second largest in the nation it is concerning that researchers have found students at these schools are far more likely to receive a criminal citation than students in other areas infamous for delinquency such as Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. In addition, black and Latino students are more often subject to harsh disciplinary procedures.
This injustice is commonly referred to as the school-to- prison pipeline. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “zero tolerance” policies in schools criminalize minor violations of school rules, resulting in resource officers placed in schools lead students to be criminalized for situations that should be handled within the school. Moreover, students of color are three times more likely to be severely punished for their behavior than white students. This discrimination follows the student into young adulthood where they are more likely to be incarcerated. This continuous cycle of entering the prison system and then continuously going in and out of it was discussed in the documentary. Possible solutions that have been discussed to end the school-to-prison pipeline include: police being the last resort in fixing conflict, improving the student to staff ratio, and providing more alternative discipline practices. Recently, more schools are noticing the damaging effects related to taking students out of class for disciplinary reasons and have since came up with alternatives to suspension such as restorative justice, which allows students to resolve conflict through conversations that may include the student, the person the student hurt and their