The School-to-Prison Pipeline

Last week, Mychal Bell, an African-American teenager in Jena, Louisiana, was released from jail on $45,000 bond. Bell was one of six black high school students who had been incarcerated in December 2006 and charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy in the beating of a white student in December 2006. Bell, who is 16 years old, was to be tried as an adult, and faced 22 years in adult prison; the other five defendants faced another 53 years behind bars for their alleged roles in the beating.

A massive rally in Jena on September 20th on behalf of the six accused has been described as the largest march in the Deep South since the era of the civil rights movement. (Police estimates varied between 5,000-15,000; eyewitnesses, including FOR members, put the crowd at between 50,000 to 100,000.) Other solidarity rallies were held on the same day in cities around the United States.

Yet there has remained a significant racial disparity between those who have joined the cause of the "Jena 6" -- the case has resonated deeply in the black community, but liberals and progressives from other racial/ethnic backgrounds have been slow to participate. Why is this?

In the October 8th edition of The New Yorker, a commentary titled "Disparities" by Steve Coll notes one key reason: while many whites have tended to look at the specifics of this case, blacks see it within the broader spectrum of racism and discrimination in our society.

Many African-Americans understand the case not only as the civil-rights era redux but as a stark illustration of a here-and-now problem, one about which whites are mainly silent: the mass incarceration of black youths—America’s “school-to-prison pipeline,” as some scholars have christened it.

The number of blacks in prison has quadrupled since 1980. There are many overlapping causes, among them severe automated federal sentencing rules; a passionate but badly managed “war on drugs” prosecuted most heavily in African-American neighborhoods; and deepening inequalities in personal income and access to education, whose effects fall hardest on urban teen-agers. One study estimates that, if recent trends continue, a third of the black males born in 2001 can expect to do time.

On the same day that Bell was released on bail, a two-day conference in Washington DC was coming to a close. The "Cradle to Prison Pipeline Summit," convened by the Children's Defense Fund, brought together hundreds of people concerned about this nationwide crisis. In connection with the summit, CDF has already released a massive report, which can be downloaded from their web site (in parts or as a whole). One excellent aspect of this resource is a listing of organizations & models of how to prevent children from getting caught into this terrible "pipeline."

One way we can all work together on this is by participating in direct mentoring mechanisms with youth, formally or informally. This week's New York Times features an article titled "In Newark, the Mayor's Crusade Gets Personal," profiling Mayor Cory Booker, the young African-American political leader in New Jersey, and three black teenage males he is trying to mentor. These young men were arrested a year ago for spray-painting "Kill Booker" in a school; and the mayor struck a deal with the state prosecutors to let him serve as a mentor to them and to drop the charges. As the article notes, "in a city where crime, drugs and violence have a way of ensnaring children, the fact that all three teenagers have stayed alive and out of jail is an achievement of some magnitude."