When school slides into prison easier than graduation
Sheriffs showed up to a 12-year-old Black boy's home after a toy gun appeared on his webcam for school. What happened next? (an election aftermath break until next week)
The school to prison pipeline has long been established across the country, Colorado is no different. But this year, online classes have brought school discipline into children’s homes. This story explores how that could impact Black children. First written by me for the Colorado Springs Indy (Oct. 14, 2020)
On the third day of online school in August, Dani Elliott called her 12-year-old son. She was terrified. She told him to lock every door, turn off the lights and go to the basement until his father returned from a quick errand down the street.
Widefield School District 3’s two school resource officers (SROs), who are El Paso County Sheriff’s Office (EPSO) deputies, were on their way to her home for a welfare check. A teacher had reported Elliott’s son and his friend, another student taking classes at her home, for displaying what the teacher thought, but was not sure, was a toy gun during an online class.
Elliott’s first thought, she says, was of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy like her son who was killed by police in 2014 when an officer shot him because he thought his toy gun was real.
“It seems like almost every week there’s a new story, and I did not want my son to be the next headline of something that happened tragically at the hands of law enforcement because of a misunderstanding,” she says.
The SROs gave Isaiah a stern lecture with his father present and told him he could have been criminally charged with “interference with an educational institution.” He was not charged, but he was suspended by the school for five days for behavior which was “detrimental to the welfare, safety or morals of other pupils or school personnel” and violating district policies.
Experts say implicit bias and racism result in higher rates of punishment of minority students, which contributes to the “school-to-prison” pipeline where students of color are more likely to end up incarcerated and less likely to graduate than white students. Elliott believes her son was a victim of that same bias, only in a new online setting. And there are other cases like Isaiah’s. In September a 9-year-old Black student was suspended in Louisiana when a teacher saw a BB gun in his room during an online class.
Locally, Elliott says the school handled the situation poorly. “Not only did [they] fail to protect his safety, but [they] endangered his life, potentially, by calling the police,” she says.
But the district says it acted with Isaiah’s well-being in mind, though it is not policy to send SROs to the home.
Isaiah’s parents pulled him out of D-3’s Grand Mountain school after the incident due to, they say, fears for his safety. But Elliott says Isaiah’s interaction with the EPSO deputies took away a piece of his innocence. She says he was in tears after the visit and thought he was going to jail. All of a sudden, an already difficult school year became even harder. [Read the full story]
News
Determined to be heard: Wrecked by COVID and denied ballots, inmates in San Quentin voted on smuggled and hand written ones. The Guardian (Oct. 28, 2020)
Criminalization of poverty: In Arkansas, landlords can file criminal charges against tenants for their failure to pay rent. Since 2018, 45 people have been arrested on those charges. ProPublica (Oct. 26, 2020)
Mental illness = death sentence: Transferred to a crisis clinic, this teen ended up at a jail and died eight days later of dehydration. Seattle Times (Nov.1, 2020)
COVID in the west: In the last two weeks, Colorado’s prison COVID-19 cases have swelled resulting in the fourth death in the state of an inmate with symptoms. In California, the 79th incarcerated person has died of the virus. The Denver Post (Oct. 29, 2020)
Law enforcement against 45: Left short-staffed with an administration they say made working conditions less safe and undermined unions, federal prison guards rallied behind Biden. The Marshall Project
Suicide: A Mississippi man found dead in his cell has pushed the state Department of Corrections to say it’s going to change mental health access. It’s unclear why they are announcing after this particular death, the 89th since Dec. 29, 2019. The DOJ has been investigate the prisons since February. Clarion Ledger (Oct. 29, 2020)
Incarcerated with disability: Navigating prison and the legal processes after conviction are even more difficult with autism. The Marshall Project (Nov. 2, 2020)
A tool of the oval: The Department of Justice used civil rights law to shut down over 100 polling stations under Trump. Vice (Oct. 22, 2020)
COVID-19: Close to half of South Dakota’s prison population tests positive for the virus. Argus Leader (Oct. 26, 2020)
Under-wraps: Wisconsin releases list of COVID-19 inmate deaths more than a month after the first death. Ten inmates have died from the virus. Wisconsin State Journal (Oct. 31, 2020)
Long read: Marsy’s Law, designed to protect victims of crime, is being used to shield law enforcement involved in use of force incidents. ProPublica (Oct. 29, 2020)
In January 2019, a Dollar Tree employee in Masaryktown, Florida, called 911 after a homeless man stole $70 of beer, wine, candy and cookies. A sheriff’s deputy had little trouble finding him — the man had passed out drunk in a nearby ditch with an open box of Reese’s Pieces.
The deputy took the man to the hospital, where he became irate. With his left wrist handcuffed to the bed, he started swinging his right arm wildly. To get the suspect “under control,” the deputy pepper-sprayed him in the face.
The Hernando County Sheriff’s Office provided a copy of the use-of-force report to USA TODAY and ProPublica in response to a public records request. Blacked out was one crucial detail: the deputy’s name.
Under a law passed to protect crime victims, the deputy was entitled to privacy, officials said. He’d suffered a battery: The flailing suspect had been attached to a pulse monitor, and the wire hit near the deputy’s shoulder. ProPublica
Educate yourself: COVID-19 cases are reaching new levels across the nation and that includes inside prisons and jails. We look at a study and data to see what this could mean.
It’s not just the people inside. Rates show that correctional staff is impacted at 2.5 the rate of other people. Compare the rise nationwide to the incarcerated rate:
The rates are rising sky rocketing with no end in sight as America sets daily case records. And to me, the scary part is most of these states have had the same procedures in place to protect staff and inmates since the Spring, and it is not doing much of anything to slow the spread.
A recent study estimated that the reproduction rate for one person infected with COVID-19 in a large urban jail is 8.44 cases. This is significantly higher than previous estimates of a reproductive rate of 3 in jail and prison settings which is still way higher than the normal population’s estimated spread of the virus. Though jails have a larger risk of spread than prisons due to higher turnover, the infection rate still reflects the higher than thought before risk of transmission in any incarcerated environment.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
This matters because the high reproductive rate means that large urban jails are not just hot spots but COVID-19 infection factories.
Though prisons are well known as hotspots for disease spread, jails have been ignored in past public health outbreaks, not receiving vaccinations for diseases while prisons did. The study also highlights that correctional officers are not classified by the CDC as first responders despite their direct interaction with COVID-19 positive inmates.
Read here: Estimation of COVID-19 Basic Reproduction Ratio in a Large Urban Jail in the United States
COVID-19 resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection.
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