What Will $150K a Year Get Teens in Juvie? No Diploma
A Michigan boy with ADHD handcuffed for acting out in class, a teen boy in Texas cuffed for building a clock at home, and a teenage girl in South Carolina slammed to the floor of a classroom by a school police officer. Thanks to zero-tolerance classroom discipline policies and the disproportionate suspension and expulsion of minority students, plenty of recent incidents confirm what several studies have shown: The school-to-prison pipeline is real.
Now, a first-of-its-kind report released Thursday by the Council of State Governments Justice Center examines what’s happening to kids—or what isn’t—on the incarceration end of the pipeline.
Most locked-up children aren’t getting a quality education and don’t have the same access to educational services as their peers, and it’s hard to determine which state officials are responsible for educating them, according to the report. That’s despite the pricey reality that local taxpayers may shell out more than $100,000 a year for an incarcerated child.
Indeed, last year a survey from the Justice Policy Institute found that states are spending an average of $407.58 per person per day, and $148,767 per person per year, on juvenile incarceration—a bill several times higher than the yearly tuition at Harvard.
Meanwhile, the image of child inmates learning a trade behind bars is nearly a thing of the past: Just nine states provide community-equivalent vocational training to kids in lockup, according to the report. Few states track whether juveniles who are released from custody are subsequently enrolled in public school or go on to graduate high school, their best shot at turning their lives around.
Young people in criminal detention typically need social services or psychological help or both, and it’s easy to conclude that “there’s no subset of youth more in need than incarcerated youth,” says Michael Thompson, the CSG Justice Center’s director.
The report found that at least one in three of the 60,000 youths who are incarcerated needs—or is What Will $150K a Year Get Teens in Juvie? No Diploma - Yahoo News:
