Since incarceration leads to political and civil disenfranchisement in the United States, the mass incarceration of black and brown men and the consequent loss of rights to participate in the civil society and its processes are especially concerning. The authors argue that the interplay of racial residential segregation, low-quality schooling, and exposure and vulnerabilities to crime and violence so prevalent in these segregated neighborhoods have established a “public school to prison”
In Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Jonathan Kozol exploits extreme inequalities between the schools in East St. Louis and Morris High in Rye, New York in the 1990s. The living conditions in East St. Louis were deplorable. There was no trash collection service, the sewage system was dysfunctional, and crime, illness, poverty, and pollution ran rampant. The schools in East St. Louis had a predominately black student population, and the buildings were extremely obsolete, with lab equipment that was outdated by thirty to fifty years, a football field without goalposts, sports uniforms held together by patches, and a plumbing system that repeatedly spewed sewage. In addition, there was a substantial lack of funds that prevented
This article examines Seacrest High School that had major violent episodes between Asian-American and African-American students. While trying to decide how to deal with the violence and school safety, the other components of the school went by the wayside. All of this was chronicled in the media and an ensuing court order forced the school district to take measures that secured the safety of the students that attended the school. Although not done on purpose, the subsequent result was a neglect of academics and the overall school culture. The focus on safety, created during a chaotic approach to school improvement, led to a loss of focus of content knowledge, critical thinking skills, social-emotional support for students, and moral reasoning.
The book On the Run by Alice Goffman narrates six years Goffman spent hanging out in a black poor neighborhood of West Philadelphia that she calls 6th Street. During her stay there, she became friends with a group of resident young men, and got to know their surroundings such as girlfriends and family members. This experience in this disadvantaged neighborhood pushed her to write this book where she describes the neighborhood’s conditions, the violence encountered by the police and the residents, and the injustices of the criminal justice system. The book’s primary argument is that the continuous threat of surveillance and continuous investigations that lead to the arrest and imprisonment of young people did great harm to 6th Street, turning many of its residents into
The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Primer for Social Workers, a study by Susan McCarter (2017), was written to give a summary of the School-to-prison pipeline in an attempt to break down the factors surrounding children being funneled into this path by their respective school systems around the country. The author explains the correlation between the School-to-prison pipeline and its disparate outcomes for students of color, students with disabilities, and students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (p. 54-55). McCarter presents implications for social workers and multiple specific strategies to reduce the detrimental effects of the School-to-prison pipeline. Susan McCarter, PhD, MSW, is an associate professor
We live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way
Abstract: This paper provides an introduction to the social impact of the collateral consequences (the families left behind) of mass incarceration. The reading will include thoughts from sociological perspectives and empirical studies that focus on the consequences incarceration and re-entry have on the striving family left behind. Partners and families of felons suffer from the system in place that punishes, rather than “corrects,” criminal behavior. Collateral Consequences Patience Kabwasa Prof. Laura Howe Soc 231-C21 May 1, 2014 Collateral Consequences
The literature review clearly has shown that there is a phenomenon called School to Prison, Schoolhouse to Jailhouse, or Public Education to Prison Pipeline. Therefore, Jeremy Thompson (2016) says, “Zero-tolerance policies in schools result in high suspension rates and expulsion rates among students in general, but disproportionately affect minority students, especially African-Americans because students who have been suspended or expelled are more likely than not to end up in the Criminal Justice
In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars
Youth of color specifically are at an increased risk of being suspended at an extended time out of schools. Consequently, they are casted into the streets, which ultimately sends them into juvenile detentions or into prison. The problem of racial and ethnic disproportionality in the discipline of schools is not new issue. In 1974, in one of the earliest investigations of disciplinary policies and practices, “the Children’s Defense Fund revealed that suspension rates for African American students were between two and three times higher than those for white students”( Thomas Rudd February 05, 2015) Ongoing research are still showing that in many places, this problem have worsened significantly.
In 2009, almost 45 percent of Latina females under five years old were enrolled in school while only 39 percent of Latino males were enrolled. When third grade comes around boys tend to be more than a year behind than girls in writing and reading skills. This shows that there is a serious problem within the education system because it isn’t right for males to be that far behind of what school districts want the kids to be taught. It gets even worse, boys that are colored are at a higher chance of experiencing great differences in consequences and punishments such as suspension and expulsion (Sáenz and Ponjuán, 2012). It saddens me to know that we live in the year 2015 and we still see people experience racism and inequality just because the color of his or her
Only 75 percent of blacks have received post-high school education, compared to 85 percent of whites. Not surprisingly, blacks on average also make less money than whites” (Philip M. Deutsch). It’s unjust that people of color are treated as inferior to white people, and it is that kind of social issue that interferes with the liberties of all Americans of
Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.
However, with diversity comes inequalities that people of color face throughout their lives. A particular issue in the United States, specifically in education, is unequal opportunities and treatment in regard to race. Research shows that students from single-parent black families had a high chance of dropping out and participating in illicit behavior (Hallinan 54). While the issue of race is a complicated issue to breach for
INTRODUCTION “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” -Chief Justice Earl Warren Separate But Equal, directed by George Stevens Jr, is an American made-for-television movie that is based on the landmark Brown v. Board of Directors case of the U.S. Supreme court which established that segregation of primary schools based on race, as dictated by the ‘Separate but Equal’ doctrine, was unconstitutional based on the reinterpretation of the 14th amendment and thus, put an end to state-sponsored segregation in the US. Aims and Objectives:
