smallblog domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/cestbonl/public_html/thehaleyreport/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6170His girlfriend on the other end of the line responded, “You better not miss the start,” with a chuckle. “Is your grandfather really that grouchy?”
“Yes!” Brian responded. “There’s a reason I haven’t seen him since my high school graduation. If it wasn’t for this family history report I have to pass in by tomorrow I would not be seeing him until Christmas.”
Brian got a beep on his phone; his mother was calling him. “Babe I got to go my Ma’s calling me. I promise I won’t be late.”
“Hi Ma, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.” Brain answers his Ma’s call.
“Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you too, you meeting with Papa today?”
“Yeeeessss! I’m meeting with him. I’m almost pulling up to his house now. Do you think he consciously means to be mean or is he just naturally a grouch?”
“Oh be nice to your Papa. He’s just set in his ways. Just remember he loves you.” Ma says with a light hearted laugh.
“Yea, he loves to bust my chops! I’ll give you a call when I’m done interviewing him. I love you Ma.”
“Love you too. Remember to be nice.” Ma said as she hung up the phone.
As Brian pulled up to his Grandfather’s house and turned off the ignition he grabbed his book bag and stepped out of the car. He was dressed in his St. Patrick’s Day’s finest. A bright green Boston Celtics Tee-shirt, with a ‘Kiss me I’m Irish’ button pinned on it. Green skinny jeans, white sneakers with green shamrocks he colored in on them, and his green hair that his girlfriend dyed last night. He couldn’t have been happier with his outfit for the party later.
He walked up to the front door of his Grandfather’s house and pushed the doorbell. He heard his Grandfather coming to the door and unlocking the lock. As his Grandfather opened the door he let out a surprise laugh and said:
“Is this my Grandson or a green clown?!”
“Ha Ha, Very funny Papa.”
“Look at you all grown up. You almost look like a man. Come on in.”
Brian didn’t know if he should take that as a compliment or not. He just smiled and walked in.
They sat down at the dining room table and Brian pulled out his notebook from his book bag. Before he could ask his Grandfather any questions his Grandfather asked:
“What is up with that green hair?”
“Come on Papa its St. Patrick’s day.” Brain answered annoyed.
“What the hell do you know about St. Patrick?” Papa asked looking for an argument.
“He’s the Patron Saint of Ireland.” Brian answered all proud that he knew one of Papa’s questions.
“Oh, is he my boy? Why is he the Patron Saint of Ireland?” Papa asked in a condescending tone.
“I don’t know.” Brian answered annoyed. He did not come here for this.
“Oh, the college boy with the green hair doesn’t know. Well let me enlighten you a little you plastic paddy.
All Brian could do was sit there and listen. Ma said to be nice.
“St. Patrick was of Roman decent. He was kidnapped by a Irish King and brought to Ireland to be a slave in the 5th century. He spent 6 years in Ireland but stayed devoted to his Christian faith and prayers. He escaped one day to France and joined the priesthood. But you know what? He came back to Ireland 20 years later and brought Christianity to the Irish people. You see he learned a lot about the Irish customs and languages when he was a slave and that helped him with converting the Irish people to Christianity.”
“I didn’t know all that.” Brain said.
“Where do you think the shamrock comes from?” Asked Papa.
“Ireland!” Brian answers quickly.
Papa shakes his head “Being Irish is a whole lot more than just shamrocks and leprechauns.” Papa hesitated a moment, “You see, St. Patrick used the shamrock as a way to show the Irish people the union of the holy trinity. Each leaf representing one of the Father, he Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Brian just nodded, impressed to learn what he just heard. Knowing his Grandfather could talk for hours with his Irish gift of gab he spoke up and said to Papa “I gotta meet up with some friends soon. I’d like to know the sad and troubling effect the great famine had on the Irish people.” He asked the question as if he was reading it off his class assignment sheet.
Papa said “Yea, the great famine was a sad and troubling time in our history, but it was one of the best things to happen to our people.”
Now, Brian was really confused. He thought to himself, ‘did Papa really just say that?’ He thought Papa has finally lost his mind.
“How could you say that the famine was one of the best things to happen? That’s crazy even for you Papa.”
“The famine did kill over a million Irish. The famine did break up our families. And the famine did drive millions of Irish to immigrate to other countries. But that immigration is what saved the Irish people.” Papa declared.
“How?!” Brian asked confused and interested.
“You see the English hated us Irish. They oppressed us for hundreds of years. When the famine hit Ireland in the 1840’s the English are the ones who let us starve and die. We as a people had no choice but to immigrate.”
“OK, but how is that a good thing Papa?” Asked Brian.
“That immigration gave us freedom to do and learn what we wanted to. The English tried to take away who we were. They outlawed our language, our religion, and our culture. When we came to America we learned so much. We were allowed to work and save our money. We learned how to fight. Did you know that we Irish had our own regiments in the Civil War? We were fighting in the Union Army! Learning how to fight in a war was what got us our nation.”
“How did fighting in the U.S. Civil War get us our nation? Asked Brian.
“A lot of the Irish who fought in the Civil War ended up going back to Ireland after the war was over. They now had the knowledge of warfare and a little bit of money. They had a few uprisings when they went back, but nothing that made a big impact. But, he Irish who came back they started to teach and pass on he information and knowledge they learned while fighting in the States. Young Irish kids who learned from these soldiers are responsible for the 1916 uprising that eventually led to our freedom.” Papa went on to say “you see the worst thing to happen to our people is what led us to our freedom. If the hate he English had for us wasn’t so strong and they just fed us, we wouldn’t have comeback so strong as we did. It’s that Irish stubbornness and pride that wouldn’t let us roll over and die.”
Brian had a wave of emotions his him at once. Pride, sadness, confusion. He wanted to know more.
“Why did the English want us dead? What happened in the 1916 uprising? Who were the leaders then?” Brian asked wanting to know everything.
“Oh, we’ll save that for another time. You gotta go meet up with your friends and drink your green beer.” Papa said with a laugh and then added “I gotta go take a nap. That green hair is giving me a headache. You can let yourself out.”
By Padraig Collins
]]>The Chair! When one sits in the barber’s chair it’s as if your sitting on a cloud. Those cushioned seats and arm rests. The raised footrest and the nice pillow like headrest to lay back into for that special occasion when you want a shave to go along with your haircut. I am not ashamed to admit that I’ve fallen asleep a few times in that chair over the years.
On this particular day at this particular Barbershop on Highland avenue I knew it was going to be an interesting cut. As I walked in the door and heard the bells hanging on the door jingle I noticed that three of the five chairs were already taken. So it left me with two barbers to choose from. One was Pete, who was bald, he was not a choice. As a young kid when my Dad use to bring me to this very same barbershop he told me “when picking a barber never pick a bald barber” he went on “bald barbers don’t respect your hair because they don’t have any hair of their own to respect”. I’ve always remembered that bit of barbershop wisdom. The other barber to choose from was Thomas, who never talked but loved to hum songs while he cut your hair. He was an older gentleman with a perfect head of hair. Thomas was going to be cutting my hair today.
Some barbershops are really quiet, church quiet, where you can hear the clip of every man’s hair being cut by the scissors. Others, are loud and obnoxious with men expressing and defending their opinions like what they had to say would solve the world’s problems or make their hometown team the winner of the next pennant. Today was going to be the latter. And, I could tell with this group of men in the barber chairs it was going to be a vicious assault on my ears.
As I took my seat in that lovely barbershop chair and got covered with the cape I took a glance down to my right at all the other men getting their haircuts. There was this young hippy looking kid that must of been in his early twenties sitting next to me. He was getting his shoulder length hair a trim. He was in a passionate conversation with the two men sitting to his right.
The hippy said nice and loud “Your President is a liar!”
He was responding to the Days News that the President was making statements that he didn’t do anything wrong and that the newest investigation on him and his inner circle was just political. The President was accused of looking into firing his Attorney General and a Special Prosecutor doing the investigation.
The two men that the hippy was conversing with was Robert and Joseph. Two friends that have known each other since their days at the prestigious Ivy League college in town some thirty years now. That’s one thing about a barbershop, it is one of the few places where money, class, age, or political affiliation does not matter. These barbers will cut any man’s hair and the group of men that come to these establishments would end up talking to someone they wouldn’t normally look at never mind speak to. As we have today with Robert, Joseph, and the hippy.
I sensed that Robert was more angered at the hippy’s statement then Joseph. Joseph just laughed when the hippy called the President a liar, but Robert would not have any of that.
“You kids don’t have a clue about politics, you just want everything handed to you. This President is going to do great things for our country.” Robert said.
“Great things?!” The hippy asked. The hippy went on about how the President was going to ruin this country. He mentioned how the rich are getting richer with all the tax breaks, how black people have no rights and are getting killed in the streets, that he was looking for trouble whenever he spoke about the troubles in Asia, and that this President would probably get impeached before his term was up anyways.
Joseph responded by saying “Listen son you have to stop believing everything you hear from the media. If it was not for this President this country would be going down the drain.”
I wanted to chirp in but I learned a long time ago to never discuss politics with someone who is not like minded on the matter, it’s just a waste of time. Most people don’t want to hear they just want to be heard. I personally don’t believe that our county is in danger, but there are a lot of people who are afraid of our future.
The hippy answered Joseph’s words by saying “I don’t believe everything the media says” and added “Black people don’t have any rights, just take a look around you. Asia is going to be trouble for this country for years, the rich are getting all the tax breaks, the upper class doesn’t care about us working people, and I have a kid on the way, I can only imagine what his or her future is going to look like”.
“Our future is going to be great, have faith in our President” said Joseph.
Robert added “It’s better to have this President then the alternative”.
Thomas started to hum real loud while he was cutting my hair. He was trying to quiet our great debaters I believe. The barbershop was getting a little uncomfortable. These men would be here all day and they wouldn’t change each other’s minds. They were really ruining my barbershop experience today.
After a few minutes of awkward silence between the men and Thomas’ humming, the hippy’s barber broke out the sweet Talcum Powder and brushed off the hippy’s shoulders singling the end to the Hippy’s time in the heavenly chair.
As the hippy rose up out of the chair and pulled out his wallet as he walked to the cash register, you could tell that he wanted to say something to Robert and Joseph. After he paid his bill and reached for the door handle he stopped and turned around.
The hippy said, “You’ll see that that lying Nixon will get impeached, you’ll see”.
Then the hippy walked out the door as the door bells jingled and Thomas hummed.
Padraig Collins
]]>
By: Eric “Bagel” Reeves
]]>Struck with sensationalized images and stories of city gang violence, people were convinced that America was facing an onslaught of a radicalized, sociopathic youth. On every corner could be one of these young predators, they thought, waiting to brutally take a life without consideration. People wanted protection, and leading political figures saw it as an opportunity to score political points by addressing these, if misguided, genuine fears.
What resulted from those efforts were a series of laws directed at juvenile offenders that would fail to make important distinctions between adult criminals and corrupted, immature juvenile delinquents. What resulted would be a major push towards “tough-on-crime” policies that would exacerbate and expand the tragedy of mass incarceration.
And yet in 2017, a time when the topic of police brutality and a broken criminal justice system is prevalent in political conversation, it seems figures who were so instrumental in the shift towards tough crime policies two-and-a-half decades ago are now changing course without a word of how they put us on the wrong track to begin with.
We see this through a recent editorial put out on the Boston Globe by Wayne Budd, former Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. His recent piece in the Boston Globe, titled “A Tipping Point for Criminal Justice Reform”, is filled with important ironies that should be noted and addressed before his new-found commitment to criminal justice reform can be taken seriously.
In it, he rails against the ills that have come from an age of heightened mass incarceration and harsher criminal justice principles. Citing a report released a few months ago by the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, he explains the need to reverse missteps like high incarceration rates, cuts in rehabilitation programs and mandatory minimum sentencing.
Before we are so quick to listen to and heed the calls for criminal justice reform from Wayne Budd, we should be fully aware of his background and role in creating the issues he now laments.
We can follow Budd back to his time working in Massachusetts with his law firm, Budd and Reilly. The second name will sound familiar to Massachusetts residents; Reilly is Tom Reilly, former Massachusetts Attorney General. Reilly and Budd have been lifelong friends, running this law firm together and even running campaigns together when Wayne Budd served as Reilly’s campaign manager.
When the “tough on crime” mentality was taking over the imaginations (and ambitions) of Massachusetts politicians, Wayne Budd was right there in the center of the action. When local and state officials began to worry about the possibility of a riot set off by racially-charged police brutality, Wayne Budd advised then-Governor Bill Weld to appoint an African-American as District Attorney to Suffolk County to deter protest.
Budd’s close relationship with Tom Reilly cannot be missed. In a 2001 issue of Boston College Law Review, Christine Chamberlain pinpoints a important and relevant source of the advance of harmful mandatory-minimum sentencing procedures for juveniles:
“The need for more serious punishment for juveniles who commit very serious crimes was expressed by Massachusetts state legislators, district attorneys, the Attorney General and the Governor, following the initial decision of Judge Paul Heffernan to try fifteen-year-old Edward O’Brien as a juvenile for the gruesome murder of his neighbor”.
District Attorney Tom Reilly personally served as the prosecutor for the Eddie O’Brien case, a highly unusual role for any DA to be playing on a trial of such stature. As Chamberlain points out above, this was the case that made way politically for the sentencing of children to adult prisons for life with no parole, a practice deemed unconstitutional in 2015.
It takes a little putting the pieces together, but as one begins to explore the history of the prosecutors of this case, it begins to look like tough-on-crime policies were being used to satisfy political ambitions.
The Edward O’Brien case was recently reviewed with its conclusion challenged by author Margo Nash in “The Politics Of Murder”. While her stance that the 15-year-old boy at the center of the case was innocent and a victim of political gain has not been confirmed, the unconventional and sloppy practices by the prosecution revealed in the book leads one to take pause. In Nash’s eyes, prosecutor Tom Reilly his network of support from figures like Governor Bill Weld and Wayne Budd used this case to amass support for mandatory minimum sentencing, thereby increasing their own political standing.
And indeed, as we follow the political history along, we see that these men had no lack of the political ambition central to the motive we have asserted. After the Eddie O’Brien case and other public pushes towards tougher policies, Governor Bill Weld would unsuccessfully challenge Democratic Senator John Kerry in the 1996 Senate election. Tom Reilly would successfully run as Attorney General in 1998 and be re-elected in 2002.
As for Wayne Budd, his work in the field of criminal prosecution landed him his own impressive positions in the political world. Though before the onset of Eddie’s case, he served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts from 1989-1992.
He also served as Associate Attorney General of the U.S., overseer of the Civil Rights, Environmental, Tax, Civil and Antitrust divisions at the Department of Justice and served on the Federal Bureau of Prisons as an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Notably, the Clinton administration is now widely criticized for exacerbating the issue of mass incarceration, though Budd’s connection to those policies are less clear.
In Wayne Budd’s editorial, he eloquently diagnoses what happened in Massachusetts and across the country to erode the morality of the criminal justice system:
“For the past two decades, like other states across the country, Massachusetts responded to sensationalized events with tough-on-crime policies that sent more people to prison and kept them there longer. At the same time, the state cut back on treatment and reentry services that can alleviate underlying problems that lead individuals into criminal activity. Without help, prison simply reinforces criminogenic tendencies, leading these individuals to reoffend.”
Budd is spot on, and he even gives a prescription for how to start addressing the issue:
“Reform starts with sentencing, in this case immediately repealing ineffective mandatory-minimum sentences that keep judges from considering circumstances that may warrant less time in prison.”
But no where in this editorial does Budd address his own role, and the role of his own close peers, in pushing for these mandatory-minimum sentencing policies. No where does he explain his change in heart and mind that prompted this change in tune on issues of criminal justice. His past and the past of others responsible for pushing these harmful policies seems to be brushed over by claiming it was all part of a wide-spread mass hysteria over sensationalized crime.
We could give him a pass. We could take Wayne Budd’s editorial for what it is, be thankful that he has indeed changed course in the right direction and go on letting individuals like him shape the criminal justice policies of the future.
Or we could ask a deeper question. How seriously should we take Wayne Budd’s commitment to positive criminal justice reform that will inject humanity and decency into the way we deal with our nation’s prison population? Could Wayne Budd simply be blowing hot air in the direction of the current political winds now that the tides have changed?
Back in the 90s, often racially-charged and sensationalized violent crime was leading the public into a panic. People wanted a way to know they would be safe in the streets. Instead of assessing the situation calmly and taking a strategic, measured approach, officials like Bill Weld, Tom Reilly and Wayne Budd used this public hysteria as a wave to surf right into political promotion on.
As a result, more people went to prison unnecessarily for longer. Punishment was emphasized over rehabilitation, and entire legions of human beings, often with little more than a drug charge, were left to rot in a correctional system devoid of compassion. More children, with minds that had not yet developed and personalities that had not yet matured, were punished as if they were adults.
The citizens wanted safety, but these tough-on-crime policies had the opposite effect by over-incarcerating and criminally radicalizing people behind bars so that they’d be more likely, not less, to commit crime when they left.
Today, more and more of the public has realized the failure of the criminal justice policies of the past. Politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, who want to be taken seriously are having to ride a new wave of compassionate correctional reform. Should we trust figures like Wayne Budd to truly have the integrity and will to lead us into an era of criminal justice reform? Or without admitting responsibility and explaining the change in course, should we assume Budd is still playing the game of political gain by trying to follow the popular rhetoric of the day?
]]>That’s just what happened to Eddie O’Brien according to Margo Nash, former bar counsel of the 1995 case of a 15-year-old boy that was convicted of first degree murder. She believes he was innocent, and that a corrupted judicial system stood in the way of his fair defense. The infamous O’Brien case is currently under review by the Innocence Program and set to undergo investigation.
Eddie was charged in the mid-90s, when political fervor was ramping up against “super-predators”, a racially-charged term to refer to sadistic, homicidal youths.
O’Brien was a white, Catholic teenager…and he might have been the perfect target for a political win for the prosecution. Was there a concerted effort to ignore the evidence against Eddie O’Brien being the murderer of Janet Downing? Nash thinks so.
The Politics Of Murder, Nash’s thrilling investigative book on the O’Brien case, paints a picture of a corrupted judicial system which convicted an innocent boy to advance a political agenda.
Margo’s side of the story hardly leaves any piece of evidence unaddressed. She has entirely gone back and reinvestigated the case, piecing together an over-arching political influence behind the failure of O’Brien’s defense, a motive she says she missed the first time.
Margo explains her conviction to stick with the case and working so tirelessly to prove Eddie’s innocence in her book:
“I have often cringed at the realization that I completely missed the big picture twenty years ago. But to be fair, the big picture took years to develop and emerge into a legible image…today, I finally understand what actually happened to Eddie O’Brien and who he has spent more than half of his life behind bars.”
Nash argues that the person who tried the case against Eddie O’Brien, the county’s District Attorney at the time, had political motives to use Eddie’s case to reform juvenile criminal justice law and put himself into a position to run for Attorney General. She has done her homework and provided incredible evidence and a compelling narrative to tell that side of the story.
Even at the time that Eddie’s case was decided, controversy was brewing over the apparent lack of investigation into the brother-in-law of Janet Downing. An article in the editorial South Coast Today, posted in 1997, commented:
“His parents’ anger with the verdict was directed at investigators who they said did not seriously investigate Janet Downing’s brother-in-law whom she apparently had evicted from her house several months before the crime.”
Those protests from O’Brien’s parents, then just another element of the great public spectacle the case turned out to be, are explored in-depth in Nash’s Politics of Murder. In fact, she lays out exactly how she believes corruption within the judicial system led to evidence being systematically ignored and Eddie O’Brien being targeted and framed.
Is it true? Margo Nash certainly outlines a well-investigated and well thought-out theory as to why she thinks it is. She also holds with her the testimony of several who worked closely on the case who confirmed that they believed in Eddie’s innocence.
Enough evidence has also been brought forward to put Eddie’s case on the list for the Innocence Program, an organization which works to appeal false conviction cases and get innocent people out of prison.
Margo’s work to uncover the truth behind this case picks apart the legal evidence and proceedings, but it goes even further. This book paints the image of the context in which this trial happened to show readers just what happened to fool the Boston area into thinking an innocent 15-year-old boy was guilty of murder.
Whether you buy the story she uncovered or not, Nash’s masterful feat of weaving together this story should give pause to anyone who trusts the integrity of the judicial system. Nash shows just how easily the social networks of powerful people within a local court system can lead to an influential person manipulating the process and infringing on the rights of ordinary Americans.
From biased appointments to the court to political intimidation to key figures on the case or to general masking of the real story with rhetorical games and legal tricks, Nash demonstrates how realistic political corruption in the court system is.
The central argument of The Politics Of Murder depends on the former Middlesex District Attorney, Thomas J. Reilly, former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, and their political aspirations to run for Attorney General and US Senator.
Imagine being in a particular political moment where the public was frenzied over perceived danger in the streets from young, soulless, homicidal “super-predators” who threatened to unweave the very fabric of society. Imagine being in a moment in which the pressure was on to move policy to try certain charged juveniles as adults through the criminal justice system.
Now imagine the opportunity Thomas J. Reilly and William Weld, both politicians aspiring for a higher office, saw in the Eddie O’Brien case. Here was a young 15-year-old who looked like he may be guilty of a sadistic crime. Try and convict this kid, use it as political leverage to make the juvenile system more strict and win political points with your constituents that will turn into votes later.
And when it looked like that kid might not have been guilty after all, when evidence to the contrary comes up, they just had to use their respective powers to influence to case to their advantage. ‘
Thomas Reilly, in an unprecedented move to personally try a case as District Attorney, took on the Eddie O’Brien case himself. With the help of the O’Brien case, Governor Weld would sign into law a bill that required anyone aged 14, 15 or 16 charged with murder to be tried as an adult.
As another piece of powerful evidence, Margo Nash recalls a conversation she had with a judge, Judge Paul Heffernan, who says he was pressured to step down from the case by powerful political interests. Governor Weld would replace Judge Heffernan with a judge who, by all accounts, seemed much more likely to give into the prosecution’s demands.
Years later, Judge Heffernan stands up to the corruption he was asked to participate in by telling Nash the real story in The Politics of Murder.
It wasn’t hard to see the interests merging, the political actions taken as a result of the case, and just how the conviction of Eddie O’Brien would be convenient for a number of powerful people.
It looks like Eddie O’Brien is going to get another chance to make his case and prove his innocence. Margo Nash believes so much in O’Brien’s innocence that she put together a comprehensive image of political corruption in the legal system.
O’Brien has spent nearly 20 years in jail for a crime that he and others close to him maintain he didn’t commit. His trial was headed by a prosecution team who was great at playing the legal system, but Margo Nash has unearthed new evidence that warrants a full investigation on the decades-old case.
Margo speaks highly of Eddie O’Brien, a man who she calls “a good man, a spiritual man, a forgiving man”. She says she has kept in touch with the 35-year old and his parents, and that he helped her piece together the puzzle of the O’Brien case in order to write this book.
In the opening pages of The Politics Of Murder, she introduces his case as one which “would turn out to be the catalyst which changed juvenile law in Massachusetts and sent children to adult prisons for the rest of their natural lives. It also catapulted political careers and perverted the orderly administration of justice that he, his parents, and I, until then, all very much believed in.”
The Politics of Murder very much could be the first time that the story of Eddie O’Brien, from the fateful night that led to his conviction through the legal proceedings that followed, has been told in all honesty. His story swept the news in the mid-1990s, but it’s likely that the public by-and-large wasn’t seeing half of the story.
Was everyone from the public to the defense team blinded by a thin veil hiding deep corruption? Has Eddie O’Brien, charged at 15 years old, spent 20 years in prison as an innocent man and a victim of political ambition?
You can read Margo Nash’s book for yourself and decide. The Politics of Murder is now available on Amazon for Kindle or Print here.
]]>But, just as many societal ideals, this is too often not a reality.
Let’s set aside the problem of the price and accessibility of higher education for a moment and focus on the kids who often don’t ever make it out of high school. We have a big problem in this country with unnecessarily criminalizing children, often for non-violent offenses or offenses that are ultimately rooted in discrimination or structural barriers.
This problem is collectively known as the school-to-prison pipeline, and the image that name evokes is fairly accurate. It is a system in which some groups of students in this nation are disciplined disproportionately. It is a system in which schools across the country outsource their disciplinary obligations to local law enforcement.
It is a system in which children are placed unnecessarily into correctional facilities. Those experiences are shaping their own conception of who they are, often leading to a pattern of behavior that will land them in prison again and again.
Here’s how it works (in part):
Challenges Facing Certain Groups Of Students:
The school-to-prison pipeline does not necessarily start with bad behavior on the part of a student. Behaviors that might lead to harsh punishment often begin with disadvantages that certain students face, and failures of schools to recognize and correct for these disadvantages. Example of these groups include:
Students of color disproportionately facing:
LGBTQ+ Students disproportionately facing:
Low-income students facing:
Students with disabilities disproportionately facing:
Removal From School/Harsh Treatment:
So then, certain groups of students are systematically facing an institutional environment that has too often left them behind. In many, many situations, it is barriers such as these that lead to the kinds of behaviors that schools have to discipline. But at this point in the pipeline, we must look at how schools choose to discipline students to see how this worsens the issue.
In the 2011-2012 school year, schools sent around 260,000 students to law enforcement, with 92,000 students arrested on school property. Suspensions and expulsions rose over the last ten years, pushing students out of school and building extra barriers to success.
Data indicates that these removals from school are often due to trivial misbehavior, and not violent behavior. That data holds up when looking at students detained in the juvenile justice system as well.
Students involved with drugs are also pushed out of school rather than being properly treated for addiction, or otherwise rehabilitated.
Labelling Theory:
When schools choose to send students out of school and into the criminal justice system due to trivially breaking regulation, they do these children a major injustice. Not every student can be disciplined and kept in school, but many can.
Schools are not addressing the underlying challenges facing these students and their methods of discipline are not rehabilitating them. Instead, they are taking these children by the arm and dragging them into a mindset that says, “I’m a criminal.”
There is absolutely no need for this.
With these circumstances, it isn’t hard to see how the school-to-prison pipeline works. This cannot go on, the underlying issues must be understood and addressed, and schools must find a way to actually help these kids, not send them straight through the pipeline from school to jail.
(Facts and statistics from American Bar Association study conducted by School to Prison Pipeline Task Force)
(Image Credit: www.hamline.edu)
]]>Unfortunately, in practice, that ideal is nowhere close to a reality.
Take the case of Steven Jessie Harris, a man who entered the Mississippi prison system under murder charges in 2005. Though doctors had confirmed that this man suffered from symptoms of schizophrenia and he was declared unfit to stand trial, he somehow remained in prison for 11 years without even being offered any kind of trial or opportunity to get out.
His brother claims the mental disorder, as well as the alleged shooting of their father by another culprit, was what triggered the tragic violent episode. District Attorney Scott Colom said Harris’ case simply “fell through the cracks”.
Harris wrote a letter that he intended to send to the “U.S. General” in 2012:
“I been in jail…after I stormed the city of West Point with my guns. I need your help because it was war crimes, and I can’t get a fair trial…please let me go with some funding.”
Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the only case of mentally ill people being mistreated by our criminal justice system.
The problem starts with how police tend to treat mentally ill people who are not yet incarcerated. According to a report written by the Treatment Advocacy Center in 2015, a person with an untreated mental illness is 16 times more likely to be killed by police.
The US criminal justice system, whether it’s behind the bars or on the streets, has disturbingly become a way to address mental illness in lieu of any affordable public mental health care option in the country. As recently as 2012, reports indicated that there were around 356,268 people with severe mental illnesses in prison and jails. In state hospitals at the time, there were only about 35,000 patients with severe mental illnesses.
You read that right. That means that in 2012, there were about 10 times as many people with severe mental illnesses in prison than in state hospitals. While awareness of this may be on the rise in some circles, undoubtedly this problem has yet to be addressed comprehensively on a federal level.
The Treatment Advocacy Center has also released a report which claims that the following issues associated with incarcerated mentally ill persons are widespread:
This is a crisis of human rights and an epidemic of unthinkable cruelty. There are countless individuals with severe mental health care issues who are doing time in solitary confinement, surfing more and more and becoming more ill by the day. Our society has a moral obligation to make sure that no person with a legitimate mental illness is doing time behind bars and especially not in solitary confinement; they must instead be treated by hospitals.
Will all of these individuals be able to integrate back into society? No. But we cannot force these people into solitary confinement, and we cannot allow their mental state to deteriorate without proper care. While many state and federal prisons do offer mental health care facilities, the problem is far too widespread and a new system must be created to stop this crisis.
We can’t continue to ignore the basic rights of our citizens. We can’t keep letting this issue hide in the shadows.
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