Protecting Innocence In A Carceral State By Erica R. Meiners

The book “for the Children? Protecting innocence in a Carceral State” written by Erica R. Meiners, is a book about how youths in the communities of color are deprived of protection, and how childhood was not being made available to all children of that community. According to the book, Meiners pointed out school-to-prison pipeline, incarceration willful defiance, racial profiling and policing has been a recurring and terrifying issue among the children of color, especially among the African American children. The ideology of policing and incarceration was to ensure that American citizens, both white and black are protected from harm and violence in schools and in their different neighborhoods.

According to Meiners, Carceral State

I remember stumbling on a social media experiment video on youTube a few weeks ago where some African Americans wanted to see how the police will react when they see a white or a black guy with a gun on the street. To my greatest surprise, the white youth with the gun was only asked why he was in possession of a gun in broad daylight, but on the contrary, the African American was prosecuted for being in possession of a gun. This made me believe that there is the need for African Americans to fight for their humanity, and that this can only be done if they could understand or recognize that oppression does not exist within a closed world from which there is no exit (Darder, 2017, pp. 54). Therefore, they should take a bold step in waging the struggle to restore their humanity. I believe that, the fact that students or youth of color still live in the past (seeing themselves as slaves), which is one of the reasons why many of them engage in different violent acts, the United States justice system has not been fair enough to them. This made the author conclude that, an African American student would five times more likely to be suspended than his/her white

110). According to the author, the aim of restorative justice is to heal communities from an incident where people were harmed and, ideally, help prevent the same thing from happening again. I believe that, there is going to be a higher possibility of crime reduction in schools and in different neighborhood if victims and offenders mediate a restitution agreement to the satisfaction of each other. In conjunction to this, if the government can be more committed in supporting these approaches, I believe that there will be a massive drop in crime