Melinda D. Anderson: “Education is the civil-rights issue of our time” is a recurring catchphrase in education policy, until the topic turns to the civil rights of incarcerated youth. The notion that youth in juvenile detention are “bad kids” who deserve their fate—and thus that educating them is immaterial—is a philosophical hurdle that activists and others engaged in this work must constantly strive to overcome. How do we begin to combat the belief that these children are expendable?

David Domenici: These are not bad kids—they are poor, they have failed at and been failed by our school systems, they are disproportionately kids of color, many are victims of violence and abuse, and they mostly live in under-resourced neighborhoods, wracked by violence and high unemployment. And yes, many are hard to work with, and some have done some bad stuff. [Yet] I was the principal at what’s now known as New Beginnings Youth Development Center (D.C.’s secure facility for adjudicated youth formerly known as Oak Hill Detention Center) for four years. Hundreds of kids passed through Oak Hill during my time there. Not one was white.

I don’t want white kids locked up either—but we have to be honest about this. About 98 percent were black, the rest Hispanic. Almost all of the kids came from a handful of poor, segregated neighborhoods. None attended the city’s magnet schools, or the one integrated, high-performing high school. How is this not a civil-rights issue? If you choose to purposely look at this narrowly—that kid did something wrong, he got caught, he needs to be held accountable—you might be able to convince yourself it’s not a civil-rights issue. But that’s not the full, or honest, look at this.

[That kid] may very well have done a wrong, but how we treat him while he is held in confinement says a lot about [society]. Do we believe that he deserves a fair shot at a decent, meaningful life or not? The kids at [New Beginnings] are our kids, the kids in the 13 probation camps around Los Angeles are our kids, the kids hidden away in facilities all over the state of Florida are ours—unless we decide we don’t want to claim them.

Anderson: The parts of the school-to-prison pipeline become clear when examining the statistics on incarcerated youth. Youth-detention facilities are the end of a path that starts with the overuse of exclusionary school discipline, such as out-of-school suspensions. From your perspective as an educator and advocate, what can teachers and school leaders do to dismantle this pipeline?

Domenici: This is in part about having the will and determination, and in part about resources. School districts and charter networks that really want to address this need to close down their mandatory “alternative” schools and their suspension and expulsion schools. If you want to see really dysfunctional schools, just go visit the designated alternative schools in any city around the country. These schools are just dumping grounds where schools throw kids they don’t want to deal with; some have great people working in them, doing good by kids here and there—but they are impossible to run well. And their presence just gives everybody an easy out. Close them.