Wearing the wrong color socks to school could get a child sent to prison

Juvenile In Justice, by Richard Ross Or passing gas. Or talking back to the teacher.  

If that child is black or disabled.

If that child is attending the public schools in Meridian, Mississippi.

This is what the Justice Department has charged in their lawsuit filed last Wednesday in Mississippi.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit today against the city of Meridian, Miss.; Lauderdale County, Miss.; judges of the Lauderdale County Youth Court; and the state of Mississippi alleging that the defendants systematically violate the due process rights of juveniles.  

The litigation seeks remedies for violations of the Fourth, Fifth and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The complaint alleges that the defendants help to operate a school-to-prison pipeline in which the rights of children in Meridian are repeatedly and routinely violated. As a result, children in Meridian have been systematically incarcerated for allegedly committing minor offenses, including school disciplinary infractions, and are punished disproportionately without due process of law. The students most affected by this system are African-American children and children with disabilities. The practices that regularly violate the rights of children in Meridian include:

'    Children are handcuffed and arrested in school and incarcerated for days at a time without a probable cause hearing, regardless of the severity ' or lack thereof ' of  the alleged offense or probation violation.
'    Children who are incarcerated prior to adjudication in the Lauderdale County system regularly wait more than 48 hours for a probable cause hearing, in violation of federal constitutional requirements.
'    Children make admissions to formal charges without being advised of their Miranda rights and without making an informed waiver of those rights.
'    Lauderdale County does not consistently afford children meaningful representation by an attorney during the juvenile justice process, including in preparation for and during detention, adjudication and disposition hearings.

This story has been in the news for some time, since the Justice Department made an announcement of its investigative findings, and referred to this situation as part of the school-to-prison pipeline. The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal
Reform, by Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen
and Damon T. Hewitt The use of the term school-to-prison pipeline is not new, nor is it a problem restricted to the south. School systems across the U.S., especially in areas with large minority populations, feed that pipeline each week. The book, depicted above by Richard Ross, is a photo essay on juvenile incarceration, and all the photos are available at his blog. An equally important read is The School to Prison Pipeline.

The 'school-to-prison pipeline' is an emerging trend that pushes large numbers of at-risk youth'particularly children of color'out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice system. The policies and practices that contribute to this trend can be seen as a pipeline with many entry points, from under-resourced K-12 public schools, to the over-use of zero-tolerance suspensions and expulsions and to the explosion of policing and arrests in public schools. The confluence of these practices threatens to prepare an entire generation of children for a future of incarceration.

Organizations like the Sentencing Project, The ACLU, The Southern Poverty Law Center, The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), along with grassroots local groups of parents, young people and teachers, have been fighting for years to stem the flow of children into jails and prisons, many of them which are now "for-profit."

Meridian, Mississippi, is simply the latest cynosure, and has to now go to court to defend itself against these charges.

I don't live in Meridian. Nor have I ever lived in Mississippi, though I lived in neighboring Louisiana. When I hear "Meridian" it brings up memories of the civil rights workers murdered there in 1964; James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael 'Mickey' Schwerner. Cheney was from Meridian. It took over 40 years to finally get a conviction (for manslaughter) for only one of the murderers. His gravesite has been repeatedly desecrated.  

This history must not be forgotten. Those civil rights workers who went to the south, went there to hook up with local people, like James Cheney, who wanted the right to vote.

Last Sunday I wrote about voter suppression and intimidation efforts by the Republican Party.

Today, I'd like to address how the system has effectively disenfranchised a significant group of our citizens, and how the school-to-prison pipeline plays a key role in ensuring that the voteless will remain poor, unemployed or underemployed and overwhelmingly black, or of color.  

Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions. Felony disenfranchisement is an obstacle to participation in democratic life which is exacerbated by racial disparities in the criminal justice system, resulting in 1 of every 13 African Americans unable to vote.

As we near the date of the next elections, almost all of our efforts are focused on protecting and getting out the vote'as they should be.  

But unless we address the insidious affect of our skewed criminal injustice system on those citizens and young people who may never have a right to vote, we are being willfully blind to the long game that is being played'on us.  

(Continue reading below the fold.)