School to Prison Pipeline

We are blogging a little bit today about the school to prison pipeline. I wanted to offer a few links to the wider issue of the drug war and incarceration.

The Drug War - some facts.

The New Jim Crow.

Drugs and New Jim Crow.

On Mass Incarceration.  

My own thoughts on the subject tend to tie back to two things: money and race. First, targetting low-income kids of color makes sense for the criminal justice 'industry;' that is, all the jobs and salaries that depend on increasing amounts of criminals. Ever-expanding police and prison forces need new bodies to fill their cells - and coffers. Getting students into the system early is like tobacco companies marketing cigarettes to children: the young are your best customers. Eerily enough, students are the young "customers" for the criminal justice industry.

So why do they target low-income communities of color? Well, here race and class co-exist in a self-perpetuating cycle. Low-income communities of color have been historically disadvantaged - decades, if not centuries, of disinvestment by mostly white politicians and leaders have left many communities without many options, particularly for education. The lack of resources means that these young "customers" make for inviting targets. They can't afford lawyers, bail, and court costs like higher-income neighbors and citizens, whether those neighbors are white or not. So even if the individual cops making arrests aren't overtly racist themselves (just "following the law"), they are operating in a system where the consequences and effects of their actions are explicitly racialized: this is called institutional racism. It's how we get a racist criminal justice system even though no one administering the system believes they themselves are racist.

On the subject of black on black crime, which is a favorite mark of newspapers like the The Wall Street Journal, I have a few quick thoughts. Like Police Commissioner Kelly or Mayor Bloomberg with Stop and Frisk, these folks like to argue that low-income neighborhoods of color get targeted because that's "where the crime happens." I have to arguments: one, this is where class comes in. People without opportunities and choices tend to make decisions that only make short-term sense in the larger scope of their lives. Why invest years in a bad education in a bad school system when you can provide for yourself faster by making different choices, such as dealing drugs for quick cash? If people had better choices to make, they might make them. Two, if you look for crime in certain places, you'll find it, because "crime" exists everywhere. If you start to police other neighborhoods, perhaps you'll find more illegal behavior - that is, if you start Stopping and Frisking NYU students, you're bound to find drugs on their person. Then crime rates will go up and - wallah - that, too, will be "where the crime is." In part, their tactics rely on a self-fulfilling prophecy.