BEING BAD: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Here is another super-important book, just published and written by Crystal Laura, a former student and good friend. It’s called BEING BAD: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and I wrote the Foreword (below). I sincerely hope people will check this out and Share widely:
I met Chris Smith through a thick plexiglass window, each of us scrunched onto a small metal stool and taking turns shouting hellos and introductions through a little metal grate in order to be heard above the din. Chris was incarcerated in Cook County Jail awaiting trial on a robbery charge, and I was visiting because I’d promised Crystal Laura, his sister and my student at the time as well as my friend then and now, that I would. The place was miserable: a dark and narrow hallway with maybe 15 of us visitors evenly distributed on our side of the impenetrable glass and concrete wall, waiting. We’d inched along the slow-snaking roped-off security line; we’d been run through metal detectors and then patted down; we’d been identity-checked and hand-stamped; we’d been ordered about, checked off, and registered; some of us had even been scolded by the turn-keys for our choice of pants or top and been banished, told to come back wearing “appropriate” clothing. After all that I thought for sure we’d be meeting in a big room seated at tables across from our friends or loved ones. No such thing: Chris and the other cuffed and chained Black men shuffled in and took seats on their side of the barrier, straining to be seen and heard. The stench of the slave market was everywhere.
“What’s up?” I shouted, and he smiled and shouted back: “Doing good; nice to meet you.” He was as Crystal had always described him: sharp, smiling, small in his jumbo-sized jump suit, and “cute as a button.”
With this courageous book Crystal Laura takes us on an odyssey into her cherished little brother’s world—jail and prison to be sure, but before that school and special education, the temptations and the perils of the streets, and right from the start a beloved family fighting with all its might to disrupt a narrative with its brutal conclusion seemingly already written in indelible ink for Chris. With an ethnographer’s endurance, a scholar’s intent, and a sister’s hopeful heart Crystal Laura has constructed a unique and morally-awake narrative of the twists and turns that BEING BAD: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline | Bill Ayers:
I met Chris Smith through a thick plexiglass window, each of us scrunched onto a small metal stool and taking turns shouting hellos and introductions through a little metal grate in order to be heard above the din. Chris was incarcerated in Cook County Jail awaiting trial on a robbery charge, and I was visiting because I’d promised Crystal Laura, his sister and my student at the time as well as my friend then and now, that I would. The place was miserable: a dark and narrow hallway with maybe 15 of us visitors evenly distributed on our side of the impenetrable glass and concrete wall, waiting. We’d inched along the slow-snaking roped-off security line; we’d been run through metal detectors and then patted down; we’d been identity-checked and hand-stamped; we’d been ordered about, checked off, and registered; some of us had even been scolded by the turn-keys for our choice of pants or top and been banished, told to come back wearing “appropriate” clothing. After all that I thought for sure we’d be meeting in a big room seated at tables across from our friends or loved ones. No such thing: Chris and the other cuffed and chained Black men shuffled in and took seats on their side of the barrier, straining to be seen and heard. The stench of the slave market was everywhere.
“What’s up?” I shouted, and he smiled and shouted back: “Doing good; nice to meet you.” He was as Crystal had always described him: sharp, smiling, small in his jumbo-sized jump suit, and “cute as a button.”
With this courageous book Crystal Laura takes us on an odyssey into her cherished little brother’s world—jail and prison to be sure, but before that school and special education, the temptations and the perils of the streets, and right from the start a beloved family fighting with all its might to disrupt a narrative with its brutal conclusion seemingly already written in indelible ink for Chris. With an ethnographer’s endurance, a scholar’s intent, and a sister’s hopeful heart Crystal Laura has constructed a unique and morally-awake narrative of the twists and turns that BEING BAD: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline | Bill Ayers: