Would Today’s Schools Put Dennis the Menace Behind Bars?
Picture a criminal behind bars. What’s the first thing that pops into your mind? Now sit with that image for a little while. Do you see a child?
We live in a country that incarcerates more people than almost any other nation. But even worse, we incarcerate children. The United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world—and not only for so-called violent crimes. According to the Campaign for Youth Justice, on any given day over 70,000 juvenile offenders are locked up, two-thirds for nonviolent charges like running away or breaking curfew. An estimated 250,000 youth are tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults every year mostly for non-violent offenses. That means that each day nearly 7,500 young people are locked up in adult jails. And African-American youth make up 62% of those kids in the adult criminal system, and are 9 times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence.
We incarcerate children for being children, for doing things that we did as children. These “status offenses,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice, include running away, truancy, “chronic disobedience,” and incorrigibility. This generation didn’t invent graffiti, writing on the bathroom stalls, truancy, or rolling their eyes and refusing to talk. This generation didn’t invent walking out of school. The question is, why are these children being put in jail for the same things we did?
And if you look more closely at “zero-tolerance” policies, particularly in charter schools like those I’ve written about here in New Orleans, you’ll find that kids are sent into the justice system for things like bringing medicine to school, accidentally bringing chopsticks, have fancy barrettes, refuse to cut their hair, or go to the bathroom without asking.
The system is broken. Worse, we are not trying to fix it. Instead, we seem to be going in the wrong direction. Yeah, a lot of work needs to be done, but that work is not with our children and teenagers. It’s with us, the adults. Where has our collective conscience gone? We are the stewards, here to protect our children, protect their innocence, and to help shepherd them to full adulthood.
Have we forgotten our favorite characters from treasured books, shows, and comics? What about Dennis “The Menace”? Or Huck Finn? The children from Recess? And let’s not even talk about The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink. Smoking weed, dancing in the school,
