"Nobody cared"
This original piece was created by a Youth Advocates Program participant in collaboration with coLAB Arts as part of New Jersey Institute for Social Justice’s #150YearsIsEnough campaign to close juvenile detention facilities in New Jersey.
By Mira Abou Elezz
In the U.S. criminal-justice system, poverty and race play huge roles in determining who winds up in prison.
Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the nonpartisan Prison Policy Initiative found that in 2014, people who wound up in jail or prison had a median annual income of $19,185 prior to their incarceration — 41 percent less than their non-incarcerated peers.
The path to incarceration begins, all too often, in schools — disproportionately targeting children in low-income areas. The school-to-prison pipeline pushes children out of school and into the criminal-justice system — often for minor incidents, and as the result of “zero-tolerance” policies. Poverty increases the risk of incarceration and incarceration exacerbates poverty — driving an oppressive feedback loop.
Students who are low-income people of color are more likely to attend highly policed schools, and — due to learned biases — are more likely to be perceived as unruly by school staff. The over-policing of underserved schools deepens racial and economic disparities, since incarceration diminishes educational and economic opportunities.
Mark Hopkins of Camden spoke with me about the challenges he faced in school.
Now in his late 20s, Mark describes his younger self as a smart Black boy from the hood with undiagnosed ADHD who was exposed to domestic and substance abuse at home. His school, which failed to engage him academically, was the catalyst for his first encounter with the law.
Hopkins recalls the violent outburst that landed him in handcuffs in the third grade. A staff member singled him out for something he didn’t do; feeling attacked and frustrated, Hopkins started to cry. When a classmate threatened to “jump him” for crying, Hopkins acted out. He describes the scene in graphic detail:
[My classmate] fell and hit his head on the radiator, then he started gushing blood. In a fit of rage I stomped on him. So then they had to grab me off of him and out to the principal’s office. Usually the way the scenario works out is he [would] go to the nurse. If things got crazy, they’d suspend me and they might suspend him …
But what happened this time is his mom was called, my peoples was called, the police was called. I was arrested. I had handcuffs on my tiny little Black hands and they fuckin’ pressed charges, aggravated assault.
At the age of nine, Hopkins now had a criminal record. Administrators also pulled him out of his classroom after the incident. “They would place me in special-ed classes,” he said, “which was a big thing … taking inner-city kids and putting them in special-ed classes if they just [had] behavioral issues, which [were] linked to their home domestic issues, health-care issues, you know what I mean, drug issues they [had] to deal with.”
The issues Hopkins names can profoundly affect a child’s development and behavior. An effective system would address the mental health of underprivileged minority students. Yet studies show that schools serving low-income students of color are more policed than affluent ones, favoring punitive criminal justice-oriented disciplinary policies over psychological or behavioral care.
School suspensions and expulsions have spiked since the 90s, which is when school policing became more prevalent. And data show that disciplinary proceedings are implemented more harshly and more frequently with students of color. Not only are Black, Latinx and low-income students punished at much higher rates than their white and wealthier peers, but they are more likely to be arrested.
There are much more effective and humane alternatives to the school-to-prison pipeline.
Youth Justice New Jersey is a coalition that aims to dismantle the current oppressive system of youth incarceration in favor of a system that focuses on rehabilitation and prevention. The organization has brought attention to youth incarceration in New Jersey, influencing the creation of programs like the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI).
Concerned about the overcrowding in youth-detention centers nationwide, JDAI focuses on decreasing the number of youth detained before trial. This program helped cut the total population of confined youth in New Jersey’s juvenile-residential facilities by more than half between 1997–2010.
More recently, Youth Justice New Jersey’s advocacy has led to legislation “aimed at providing age-appropriate treatment and access to rehabilitation for juveniles who encounter the criminal justice system.” In 2015, Gov. Chris Christie signed the legislation. Among its other reforms, the law raised the minimum age at which a child may be prosecuted as an adult from 14 to 15, narrowed the list of offenses that can lead to prosecution as an adult, and requires due process before a person confined to a juvenile-detention facility can be transferred to an adult prison.
One of Youth Justice New Jersey’s main goals is to “eliminate disparate treatment of youth of color in the juvenile justice and adult corrections systems.” This disparate treatment begins long before one arrives at a corrections facility. Kids in underserved communities generally have access only to struggling schools. I spoke to Haitian-American New Jersey resident Christopher Etienne, who experienced this disparate treatment firsthand as a result of busing.
Many states used busing to integrate schools in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Busing gained popularity in the ’70s and ’80s but its practice has sharply declined since. Etienne contrasts the quality of education he received from the privileged school he attended in Florida to that of his local high school in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
“In high school I went to [school in] Cape Coral [Florida] and I think for every 20 white students was one Black student,” he said. “But the teachers actually cared and that was what I respected bout it. Like if I got a C on a test I would be approached by my teacher like ‘OK, what can we do to turn this C into a B?’…
“When I went to Asbury Park High School it was a different dynamic. We had no orchestra there so I couldn't play a violin no more … I knew the shortcomings of the school system when I started failing every one of my classes … I wasn’t the most intelligent child, but I was very big on academics … But when I was failing in Jersey my parents didn’t even get a letter home. Nobody cared. It was just so normalized like, yeah, ‘just another one of these Black dudes failing all his classes, who cares?’”
Etienne said that the lack of care he received in school pushed him “to the streets.” Without any hope of academic success, he began to see success in those who seemed to be the only people in his neighborhood with enough money to support themselves and others: the drug dealers. This association eventually led to his incarceration.
Etienne’s experience points to the pressing need to better fund schools in low-income districts. The sad reality, however, is that the United States invests drastically more money in the mass-incarceration system than it does in education.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the annual cost of mass incarceration in the United States is about $80 billion. A Prison Policy Initiative study asserts that this figure underestimates the actual cost. The group’s report Following the Money of Mass Incarceration notes that the $80-billion cost of maintaining prisons and jails is just one of the many expenses needed to sustain our criminal-justice system. With $63 billion used for policing, $38 billion for paying staff and $12 billion for health care and other expenses, it takes a staggering $182 billion a year to fund mass incarceration.
That averages to almost $80,000 per inmate. In contrast, the United States spent just $12,201 per public-school student in 2017. And this figure doesn’t represent how much money is actually spent on each student.
That amount varies greatly across and within states, exposing massive inequities. There’s a difference of more than $12,400 between what the highest-funded state (New York) spends and what the lowest-funded state (Idaho) does.
Researchers at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and Education Law Center published the report Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, which looks at school-funding distributions from 1993–2015. They found that more funding leads to more fairly distributed resources. This translates into higher staffing levels, smaller class sizes and more competitive wages for teachers.
The National Report Card calls for increased funding relative to the degree of concentrated student poverty in a given school district. There are many schools even in high-funded states, like New Jersey, that lack sufficient resources for quality education and fair wages for teachers and other staff.
The National Report Card designates states that provide more funding to low-income districts as “progressive” and states that allocate less as “regressive,” with a “flat” system allocating about the same amount across districts with varying needs. The report finds that “the majority of states have unjust funding systems.”
This trend is growing. Only 11 states in 2015 had progressive funding systems, down from a high of 22 in 2008. The National Report Card ranks New Jersey as progressive, meaning its high-poverty districts receive at least 5 percent more funding than its affluent districts.
While this is a move in the right direction, racial and economic disparities are still very much a reality today in New Jersey and the school-to-prison pipeline remains a force in many communities. Etienne offers some wisdom on what we should be working toward to remedy the “burden of incarceration”:
“Because you have a child that thinks like ‘damn, I have a juvenile record. It’s over for me, I’ll never have a shot.’ No, it’s not over. And what I want to do in the future is not just help people post-incarceration. I’m hoping that I will be able to get some child before that happens, maybe deal with at-risk youth exclusively, who are going through those types of situations, and help them reshape that dynamic. And get them an opportunity at success. Without having to go through this burden of incarceration. This stigma of a record on your jacket, without having to go into that.
“Who knows, they might want to be prosecutors or lawyers or judges. They can’t get there with a juvenile record. So if we can catch them before that prison-to-pipeline blindsides them, then you’re talking about a reservoir of untapped potential that can help reshape this nation.”
We need the insights of the very people we are incarcerating to understand how to help.
Like me, Mark and Christopher are alumni of Rutgers University. They were part of the Mountainview Project, an initiative that promotes the pursuit of higher education via direct contact with at-risk youth and inmates. Programs like MVP are important and can make a world of difference.
Mark graduated from Rutgers University this past May and was an integral student activist on campus. He believes in solidarity across oppressed communities as our only hope for social justice. Christopher graduated from Rutgers with two undergraduate degrees and is now continuing his studies and running his own video-production company, Cinematic Productions. He provides a platform for marginalized people to share their stories and raise our collective consciousness.
Progress seems to be already here and yet still impossible to attain. Christopher Etienne offers us a starkly simple definition of progress: “Until white America is comfortable … to switch out shoes with Black America, we have not progressed.”