Jody Owens is the managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi office.

Police officers in Meridian, Mississippi, were spending so much time hauling handcuffed students from school to the local juvenile jail that they began describing themselves as “just a taxi service.”

It wasn’t because schools in this east Mississippi town were overrun by budding criminals or juvenile superpredators—not by a long shot. Most of the children were arrested and jailed simply for violating school rules, often for trivial offenses.


One 15-year-old girl, for example, was suspended and sent to the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center for a dress code violation. Her jacket was the wrong shade of blue. A boy served a suspension in the juvenile lock-up for passing gas in the classroom. Another landed behind bars because he walked to the alternative school instead of taking the bus.

For many kids, a stint in “juvie” was just the beginning of a never-ending nightmare. Arrests could lead to probation. Subsequent suspensions were then considered probation violations, leading back to jail. And suspensions were a distinct possibility in a district where the NAACP found a suspension rate that was more than 10 times the national average.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit to stop the “taxi service” in Meridian’s public schools, where 86 percent of the students are black. The DOJ suit, still unresolved, said children were being incarcerated so “arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience.”

We should all be shocked.

The reality, though, is that Meridian’s taxi service is just one example of what amounts to a civil rights crisis in America: a “school-to-prison pipeline” that sucks vulnerable children out of the classroom at an alarming rate and funnels them into the harsh world of police, courts and prison cells.

For many children, adolescent misbehavior that once warranted a trip to the principal’s office—and perhaps a stint in study hall—now results in jail time and a greater possibility of lifelong involvement with the criminal justice system. It should surprise no one that the students pushed into this pipeline are disproportionately children of color, mostly impoverished, and those with learning disabilities.

The story of Meridian is more than an example of school discipline run amok. It’s a key to understanding how the United States has attained the dubious distinction of imprisoning more people— and a larger share of its population—than any other country.

It’s one reason why the United States today has a quarter of the world’s prisoners—roughly 2.2 million people—while representing just 5 percent of its total population. And it helps explain an unprecedented incarceration rate that is far and away the highest on the planet, some five to 10 times higher than other Western democracies.

As the managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi office, I’ve seen firsthand the devastation wrought by the school-to-prison pipeline, and the senselessness of it all.

When SPLC advocates began interviewing children at the juvenile detention center in Meridian in 2009 we were investigating children being pepper-sprayed by guards when they were in their cells and posing no threat. But we kept hearing stories from students who were pushed out of school and into cells for noncriminal, minor school infractions. These stories would eventually spark the DOJ lawsuit and a thorough examination of how the “pipeline” operated in this town.

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The origins of the school-to-prison pipeline can be traced to the 1990s when reports of juvenile crime began to stoke fears of “superpredators”—described in the 1996 book Body Count as “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters” with little regard for human life. The superpredator concept, based on what some critics have derided as junk science, is now known to be a complete myth. Former Princeton professor and Bush administration official John DiIulio, the Body Count co-author who coined the term, admitted to The New York Times in 2001 that his theory of sharply rising juvenile violence had been wrong.

But the damage had been done. As these fears took root and mass school shootings like the one at Columbine made headlines, not only did states enact law laws to increase punishment for juvenile offenders, schools began to adopt “zero-tolerance” discipline policies that imposed automatic, pre-determined punishments for rule breakers.

At the same time, states across America were adopting harsh criminal laws, including long mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes and “three strikes” laws that led to life sentences for repeat offenders. The term “zero tolerance” was, in fact, adopted from policing practices and criminal laws that focused on locking up minor offenders as a way to stem more serious crime.

Somewhere along the way, as local police departments began supplying on-duty “school resource officers” to patrol hallways, educators began to confuse typical adolescent misbehavior with criminality. Schools became, more or less, a part of the criminal justice system. With police officers stalking the halls and playgrounds, teachers and principals found it easy to outsource discipline. Almost overnight, a schoolyard scuffle could now land a kid in a jail cell.

The results have been disastrous.

In some school districts, as in many African-American communities, police seem to view students as the enemy, or at least as potential criminals.

In places like Birmingham, Alabama, their tactics grew ever more extreme. Officers in this former steel city—where black schoolchildren braved police dogs and fire hoses during the civil rights movement—routinely doused students in predominantly African-American schools with Freeze + P, an aerosol weapon that combines pepper spray and tear gas.

A cell block in Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center in Meridian, Mississippi. | Photo by Marianne Todd

LaTonya Stearnes vividly remembers when the chemical weapon was used on two of her daughters, one of whom is named as a plaintiff in an ongoing class action suit filed by the SPLC. The incident began after a boy pushed one of her daughters. When the girl defended herself, a police officer grabbed her from behind and sprayed her in the face. Her sister also was caught in the stinging mist. “I will never forget my daughter’s red and swollen face,” Stearnes said. “I sent my girls to school thinking they would be safe and protected. I never thought they would be pepper-sprayed. These are teenage girls, not criminals.”

But they were treated like criminals, as were many others. The SPLC found that from 2006 to 2011, chemical weapons were used on about 300 students in the Birmingham Public Schools district, which is 95 percent African American. When you take into account the bystanders inadvertently caught in a cloud of pepper spray, the number swelled to more than 1,000.

***

In Lauderdale County, Mississippi, children caught in the pipeline faced long odds in court.

They had little time to spend with their public defender before appearing for a detention hearing—just minutes, according to the DOJ lawsuit. The public defender did not even provide a way for a child or parent to contact him or her. Instead, meetings regularly took place in the courthouse hallway before a hearing.

It’s little wonder that the DOJ’s lawsuit charges that the public defender did not “meaningfully advise children of the possible consequences of admitting to charges or of proceeding to trial.” But Lauderdale County is just one example of the confusing legal maze children and their families are sometimes forced to navigate with little help.

The stakes are especially high when a state such as Florida puts the decision of trying a child as an adult largely in the hands of a prosecutor rather than a judge. This prosecutorial discretion may explain why Florida sends more children to adult court than any other state in the nation—more than 10,000 in the last five years alone. A staggering 98 percent of those children were transferred to adult court without a hearing before a judge. For these children, just the threat of adult prosecution—and prison—can often elicit a guilty plea.

Florida even allows counties to incarcerate children charged as juveniles in adult jails, such as the Polk County Jail, which includes dorms designated for children. The vast majority of the children at the jail in this largely rural, central Florida county are there for nonviolent offenses. Most are simply awaiting court dates, because children charged in the juvenile system are not eligible for bail.

Jail guards lacked the basic training needed to supervise children. There was little in the way of education and rehabilitative services. Children who acted up were sometimes placed in kennel-like cages and taunted by guards. They were pepper-sprayed and held in prolonged isolation. An SPLC lawsuit over these conditions was tried in federal court in late 2013 and is awaiting the judge’s decision.

It seems obvious that such cruel conditions do little or nothing to help troubled children become better citizens.

When Lisa Jobe’s son, K.J., ended up at the Polk County Jail, she could see that the 15-year-old had changed. “He was always looking over his shoulder,” she said. “You never know when you’re going to be the person that’s going to be jumped next.”

When K.J. was assaulted in jail, no one bothered to call his parents. His mother learned about it when she saw his black eye. “It broke his spirit,” Jobe said. “He was just a different child. He felt there was no hope.”

She wonders about the other children at the jail. “These are children who’ve made mistakes, but we shouldn’t give up on them,” she said. “And, that’s what it seems like has happened at the Polk County Jail. They’ve given up on the children and they’re just locking them up.”

In neighboring Alabama, the state allows children as young as 16 to automatically be charged as an adult for certain offenses. But juvenile court judges can transfer a child as young as 14 to adult court for any offense.

When Patrick (not his real name) found himself in an Alabama prison at age 16, he quickly realized that he had better be ready to fight at any moment. He witnessed more than 30 stabbings in a little more than a year. He learned that if he didn’t want to be stabbed, it was best to simply hand over his property if another prisoner demanded it. Refusing a sexual overture could also result in violence. They were tough lessons for someone barely old enough to drive.

These stories may explain why the practice of housing young people in adult lock-ups is opposed or condemned by a long list of professional organizations, including the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, the American Correctional Association, the American Jail Association, the Association of State Correctional Administrators and the National Association of Counties.

Jailing children has also been profitable for some in the age of prison privatization.

That was the case in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where two judges were sentenced to prison in 2011 for their roles in a $2.6 million bribery scheme that sent juveniles into private, for-profit juvenile detention centers.

It’s believed that more than 2,500 children were affected by the scandal. One teenage girl was sent to a youth camp for delinquent girls in 2007—a stiff punishment for creating a MySpace page that poked fun at her vice principal.

“Everything in my adult life blooms from the moment he boomed, ‘Adjudicated delinquent!’ and had me ushered out of the courtroom so that I could be cuffed to the sound of my mother’s desperate wailing,” Hillary Transue wrote seven years later on Vitamin W, a women’s website. “No child should have to hear her parent, her hero, the center of her universe, crumble to pieces—or the bailiff validating her guilt and shame as the cuffs are locked into place.”

***

Thousands of juvenile convictions have since been overturned in the wake of the Pennsylvania scandal. But many youth across the country remain needlessly entangled in the justice system.

One young man in Mississippi actually became lost within the system after being sentenced to a private, for-profit prison.

When Michael McIntosh attempted to visit his son, Mike, at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which housed youths convicted as adults, he was turned away by guards. They told him his son was no longer at the prison. But no one knew where Mike could be found.

McIntosh launched a desperate search that, weeks later, led him to a hospital in Greenwood, hours away from Walnut Grove. That’s where he found Mike. He couldn’t speak, see or even sit up. “He’s got this baseball-size knot on the back of his head,” McIntosh recounted to the SPLC. “He’s got cuts all over him, bruises. He has stab wounds. The teeth in the front are broken. He’s scared out of his mind. He doesn’t have a clue where he’s at—or why.”

McIntosh still could get no answers from the prison system about what happened to his son. Finally, he received a call from an SPLC advocate investigating the facility. “She said, ‘Your son was in a riot,’” McIntosh said. “They [the SPLC] just took bits [of information] and started putting this puzzle together.”

The picture that came together was highly disturbing.

Mike had suffered brain damage when the violence erupted in February 2010, only about four months after he entered Walnut Grove at age 19. His injuries left him with the cognitive abilities of a 2-year-old. Several other youths were stabbed during the incident. Mike’s cellmate was stabbed in the head. A dozen other people were hospitalized.

Perhaps the most galling detail was that a guard had allowed prisoners into a cell to fight, according to a DOJ investigation. The guard was fired, but her actions were not unusual at this facility operated by a for-profit company. Guards frequently incited violence between the young charges in their care. Violence was a way of life. Drugs and weapons could be obtained throughout the prison. Sometimes guards committed the violence themselves. Some even had gang affiliations.

Sexual abuse of prisoners—including brutal youth-on-youth rapes and “brazen” sexual misconduct by prison staffers who coerced youths—was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation,” DOJ investigators wrote. A federal judge later wrote that the company operating the prison “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate.”

It was no place for a young person—much less a place to rehabilitate someone. An SPLC lawsuit over these conditions led to an agreement that ended the housing of children and teens at Walnut Grove.

And yet the conditions at Walnut Grove, while extreme, are fairly common. We see similar conditions in many lock-ups where children are incarcerated.

***

The Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center—a destination for far too many Meridian students between about 2006 and 2012—also wasn’t immune to abusive conditions. Staffers frequently tormented children by shooting pepper spray into their faces. A child needed only to talk too much or not sit in the back of his cell to find his or her skin and eyes suddenly burning from the chemical.

But even the best behavior could not guarantee a child would be spared. When a boy threw a tissue out of his cell in November 2009, a guard couldn’t determine the culprit. An SPLC lawsuit describes how the guard handled the situation: All of the boys at the detention center were sprayed with the chemical.

Other abuses were also common. Children were confined to small cells for up to 23 hours a day. They slept on mats that smelled of urine as they tried to stay warm under torn, stained sheets. Meals were frequently eaten in their cells, often near a filthy toilet. The detention center did not even provide these youths with underwear—a decision that meant they had to wear the same underwear throughout their confinement.

A settlement agreement was reached in the SPLC lawsuit over these abusive conditions, but the facility was ultimately shuttered because it simply could not comply with the agreement.

The “taxi service” to the detention center was put out of business.

***

Contrary to tough talk about scaring bad students straight, criminalizing kids does not make our communities safer. A growing body of research suggests, in fact, that the current approach to juvenile justice does exactly the opposite.

Studies show that the brain does not fully develop until a person reaches his or her mid-20s. In fact, the part of the brain that governs rational decision-making is the last to develop. This means a child may engage in dangerous behavior without fully realizing the risks and consequences for themselves and others. But that child also has a unique propensity for rehabilitation as well.

In other words, we shouldn’t give up on kids who get into trouble. But that’s what we’re doing.

The research shows that an arrest doubles the odds that a student will drop out. The odds quadruple with a first-time court appearance, according to Justice Quarterly. And dropping out, in turn, increases the likelihood of prison. In fact, African-American men under 35 who failed to finish high school are now more likely to be incarcerated than working.

Criminalizing students comes at a steep cost to taxpayers. Confining a single young person can cost as much as $148,767 a year, according to a recent survey of 46 states by the Justice Policy Institute.

This costly “pipeline” disproportionately harms children of color and causes immeasurable harm to their communities, where many of them live in poverty.

Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Even at the preschool level, there’s a gaping racial disparity: The department found that black preschool students – a group that represents only 18 percent of preschool enrollment – make up 48 percent of preschool children suspended more than once.

When there is such a disparity in discipline at 4 and 5 years old, it shouldn’t be a surprise that African Americans are incarcerated at about six times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Or that they are three to five times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites, despite using drugs at roughly the same rates.

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The court victories against harsh school discipline and brutal detention conditions are vitally important to reforming this system.

But the school-to-prison pipeline has not yet been destroyed. It is still harming young lives; I see it firsthand through my work. I see it operating in school districts across the country, in juvenile courts and detention centers, and in the adult prisons that greet a new generation of young prisoners every year.

We need a new way.

One that does not treat ordinary children like criminals, that does not equate bad behavior with criminality.

One that does not target African-American children for incarceration at an early age.

One that does not place children in brutal, filthy jails and prisons where their needs are neglected and they are subjected to pervasive violence, sexual abuse and psychological torture.

One that does not erode trust in law enforcement among communities of color.

One that believes in the ability of children to change and invests in their futures.

One that provides hope, not despair.

The simple fact is that most children who act up in school or even commit minor crimes will grow out of their bad behavior—if we let them.

This is not to say that children should not be held accountable or punished for committing crimes, particularly violent crimes. But most of the children now being pushed out of school and into detention need a helping hand, not a pair of handcuffs.

We must spend less on prisons and more on education, counseling, therapy and other rehabilitative services. Such an investment will save taxpayer money, enhance opportunities for many communities mired in poverty and, importantly, lead to less crime in the future.

While it is encouraging that people across this nation are finally asking why we imprison so many people, we will miss the bigger picture by only looking at adult prisons. We must look at the schools and the entire justice system if we hope to truly address the mass incarceration crisis. The path to prison starts at an early age. And as long as we continue to needlessly criminalize children in the name of school discipline, our prisons will only continue to overflow.