The Center for Public Integrity

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is voicing concern over the push to put armed police or guards into American schools following the Newtown school massacre of 20 first-graders and six staff last December.

On Tuesday, the Reno, Nev.-based group posted an excerpt of a letter sent to Vice President Biden, who has been leading a month-long effort to gather ideas for more effective gun restrictions and improved school safety. The White House is reportedly poised to reveal some recommendations Wednesday at a midday press conference.

In its letter to Biden, the NCJFCJ expressed strong misgivings about the prospect of communities putting armed guards in schools – which could become even more likely if federal dollars are offered to help schools make that choice.

Published reports indicated Biden’s task force was considering such a plan, which has also been pushed by Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat from California. In addition, the National Rifle Association has been vocal in its backing of armed security in the nation’s schools.   

Echoing concerns by civil-rights and juvenile-justice advocates, the NCJFCJ warns in its letter than an expansive police presence in schools can lead to unintended and negative consequences. The judges’ group argues that the posting of police officers to ensure safety has in the past led to misguided crackdowns on kids.

As the White House considers proposals to allocate federal money for armed guards in schools, prominent school-discipline reform groups have issued a report denouncing the idea as a misguided reaction to the Newtown school shooting.

“Placing more police in schools has significant and harmful unintended consequences for young people that must be considered before agreeing to any proposal that would increase the presence of law enforcement in schools,”says an issue brief released Friday by the Advancement Project, Dignity in Schools and other organizations.

The Advancement Project, founded in 1999, has offices in Washington D.C. and California, and has worked with school districts and states to adopt alternatives to school suspensions and expulsions. Dignity in Schools is also devoted to working with school districts, advocating fewer school suspensions and less involvement of law enforcement in school discipline.   

The groups called on the White House and Congress, before they act, to consider how the school-discipline climate changed after more police were introduced to schools in response to the Columbine school shootings nearly 15 years ago in Colorado.

“We have seen what happens when [schools] ramp up police presence and other security measures in response to a shooting or other violent act. In Colorado, it resulted in more students getting arrested for minor misbehaviors, more students being pushed out of school, and a declining sense of safety in schools,” the brief says.

“These unintended consequences,” the report continues, “are persistent and pervasive – despite efforts by parents, students, and the school district, the high arrest rates and racial disparities that resulted from increased police presence and zero tolerance policies still exist.”

A new report by KPCC Southern California Public Radio focuses on continuing debate in Los Angeles over when it’s appropriate for school police to get involved in ticketing or arresting students.

In collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, KPCC reported Monday that nearly half of all tickets issued in the mostly-minority Los Angeles Unified School District are still being given to students 14 or younger. The most common charge is disturbing the peace. That’s roughly the same proportion that previous Center and public radio reports found when analyzing older data. Administrators pledged reforms after those earlier stories.  

As the KPCC and Center joint report says, the L.A. district is continuing to institute “positive behavior support” methods in every school as way to both limit student suspensions and moderate law-enforcement involvement in discipline matters. The district’s “strategic plan” for 2012-2015 declares a commitment to “a non-punitive enforcement model that supports strategic problem-solving models rather than citation and arrest-driven enforcement.”

However, not all schools have adopted the new models. And the district hasn’t sufficiently clarified standards for ticketing, a Los Angeles student-parent group, the Community Rights Campaign, said in a Jan. 2 letter it sent to Superintendent John Deasy.

The Department of Homeland Security has announced new rules designed to make it easier for thousands of U.S. citizens to legalize undocumented spouses without risking years of separation first. 

The rules—published in the Federal Register Thursday—spell out a policy first announced by President Obama a year ago, in January 2012; the policy is designed to help families avoid the hardship of long separation. However, representatives of those families say thousands of others won’t benefit, and will still face certain exile under a series of little-known but mandatory punishments Congress created in 1996.

Those penalties and their effects on families were the subject of a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity. Thousands of U.S. citizens, many with children, have attempted to legalize spouses only to see them ordered out of the United States for a decade  or more,  as mandated by a 1996 immigration law. As a result, countless couples have chosen not to come forward and attempt to legalize the foreign spouse.

Here is how the current system works, and how the new rule – which takes effect March 4— alters the green-card application process:

Even as Los Angeles authorities continue efforts to reform school-discipline standards, fresh data show that police from the city’s biggest school district are continuing to ticket thousands of young students, especially minorities, at disproportionate rates that critics charge are putting them on a track for dropping out.

Citation rates for this year are little changed from 2011 data. Disclosure of the 2011 data this past spring led to federal civil-rights scrutiny and promises that policies at the Los Angeles Unified School District would be reviewed, and likely changed.

In 2011, children 14 or younger in the school district, the area’s biggest, were issued 43 percent of the nearly 10,200 tickets school police handed out to students for fighting, daytime-curfew violations and other minor infractions — indiscretions that community groups and judges have maintained might better be handled by school officials or referred directly to community-based counseling.

But during the first six months of 2012, even as local juvenile judges’ skepticism about ticketing grew, the share of younger students issued citations increased — to about 48 percent of approximately 4,000 tickets issued, according to a review of the data by the Center for Public Integrity.

After a three-year investigation, authorities in Shelby County, Tenn. signed an agreement Monday with the U.S. Department of Justice to revamp a  juvenile-justice system federal officials said was unduly harsh to black youth, including those accused of minor infractions. 

The agreement will require Shelby, which includes the city of Memphis, to initiate sweeping staff training and changes to improve minors’ defense options, alter court proceedings to guarantee the rights of accused offenders and eliminate detention practices federal officials found dangerous.

In April, federal investigators published a litany of accusations about the Shelby County juvenile-justice system. Investigators alleged that local officials were routinely violating the constitutional rights of youths put into court proceedings and detention. Among the accusations: “cursory” decisions to transfer youths to adult court, inadequate counsel and an adult-court transfer rate for black wards twice that of white wards.

Detention officials also violated their own policies by strapping wards down in restraint chairs for lengthy periods of time and for inappropriate reasons, investigators with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division alleged.  In addition, they said custodians failed to protect wards from “self-injury” and used “dangerous and unconventional pressure point tactics” to subdue youth. 

The so-called “school to prison pipeline” — which has been the subject of several Center for Public Integrity stories —was the focus of new attention on Capitol Hill Wednesday.  Sen. Dick Durbin presided over the first Congressional hearing on schools suspending students and sending them to juvenile-justice authorities for minor discipline problems.

“For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system,” Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and assistant majority leader, said in his introductory remarks. “This phenomenon is a consequence of a culture of ‘zero tolerance’ that is widespread in our schools and is depriving many children of their fundamental right to an education.”

Durbin said he hoped the hearing, archived here, would highlight the troubling consequences of sending  kids to court and placing them in the juvenile system for relatively minor reasons. He also called on speakers who testified that it’s possible to keep schools safe – and boost kids’ engagement in school – by cutting referrals to the justice system and instead employing counseling and innovative discipline methods.  

The hearing was before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

The room was packed with hundreds of community organizers from around the country who are especially concerned about the disproportionate impact that school police citations and arrests are having on African-American and Latino students. Speakers talked of very young students being  handcuffed and arrested for tantrums, or forced to go to court for behavior that used to land them in the principal’s office, or in counseling.

Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has quietly stepped down following an active four-year tenure devoted to changing attitudes about school discipline and improving access to college-prep classes for minorities.

Ali submitted a sweeping progress report late last month outlining her division’s accomplishents. Her office has focused heavily on investigating allegations of suspensions and expulsions that have disproportionately affected students of color.

The division has also focused on investigating  complaints that some schools fail to place minority students in advanced classes, and do not even offer advanced courses students need to qualify for college.

Ali and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have often argued that cutting suspensions and keeping kids in class is critical to boosting graduation rates and  preparing students to compete in a global economy.

Over the past four years, Ali’s office has received nearly 29,000 complaints of alleged rights violations, a 24 percent increase over the previous four-year period under the administration of George W. Bush.

More than half the complaints were related to treatment of disabled students; about 26 percent were related to race or national origin and another 14 percent were related to gender. 

The report also says that Ali’s office closed some  28,500 complaints through various means, including resolution agreements.

According to the new report, Ali’s office found various examples of discipline inequities.

For example, in one unnamed school, a white student was assigned detention for violating a cell phone policy while a black student with a similar disciplinary history was given a one-day suspension for the same infraction. 

While unveiling an alternative to the DREAM ACT — but with no route to citizenship — Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona suggested that illegal immigrants brought here as children can easily get on a path to citizenship if they marry U.S. citizens. 

However, Kyl’s assumption, expressed at a Capitol press conference Tuesday, is wrong in practical terms.  A recent Center for Public Integrity and KQED public radio report detailed how penalties adopted by Congress in 1996 are ousting undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens for at least a decade, sometimes longer, when they try to obtain legal status based on marriages. 

Thousands of undocumented spouses have already found out the hard way that they may actually be forbidden from living in the United States as the result of their American partners’ efforts to sponsor them for legal permanent residency.

To finish the residency visa process, undocumented spouses must leave the United States and return to their home countries for an in-person interview with U.S. consular officials.  Once they are out of the United States, however, the undocumented spouses are officially told at their interviews that they are barred from re-entering the U.S. as a punishment for entering illegally in the past.  

Thousands of families have been split apart by these penalties, and are suffering severe economic and personal  hardship. Thousands of other couples are now too afraid to come forward to apply for residency as a result.

Marijuana — it’s one of the primary reasons why California experienced a stunning 20 percent drop in juvenile arrests in just one year, between 2010 and 2011, according to provocative new research.

The San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice (CJCJ) recently released a policy briefing with an analysis of arrest data collected by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center. The briefing, “California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low,” identifies a new state marijuana decriminalization law that applies to juveniles, not just adults, as the driving force behind the  plummeting arrest totals.

After the new pot law went into effect in January 2011, simple marijuana possession arrests of California juveniles fell from 14,991 in 2010 to 5,831 in 2011, a 61 percent difference, the report by CJCJ senior research fellow Mike Males found.  

“Arrests for youths for the largest single drug category, marijuana, fell by 9,000 to a level not seen since before the 1980s implementation of the ‘war on drugs,’ ” Males wrote in the report, released in October.  

In November, as Males blogged recently, voters in Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize but regulate marijuana use, like alcohol, for people over 21. California’s 2010 law did not legalize marijuana, but it officially knocked down “simple” possession of less than one ounce to an infraction from a misdemeanor — and it applies to minors, not just people over 21. Police don’t arrest people for infractions; usually, they ticket them. And infractions are punishable not by jail time, but by fines — a $100 fine in California in the case of less than one ounce of pot.