The Center for Public Integrity

Meridian is not alone under the Justice Department magnifying glass. In a somewhat similar case in Tennessee,  DOJ says the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County has failed both to inform children of the charges against them and to make sure they understand what their legal rights are ahead of questioning. Like Meridian, the juvenile court is also accused of failing to hold timely hearings.

Worries about a school-to-prison pipeline have grown in recent years, but there are different ways to define the issue, said Jim Freeman, senior attorney at Advancement Project, a nonprofit legal action group that fights racial injustice.

“How I like to define it,” Freeman said, “is the use of policies and practices that increase the likelihood that young people become incarcerated.”

That includes at-school arrests for minor behavioral incidents, as well as what he calls more indirect actions, like suspensions, expulsions or references to juvenile court or alternative schools.

Such practices have grown in the last 10 to 15 years, he said. “It really started out mostly in very low income communities of color, the schools in those districts. It’s expanded pretty dramatically beyond that.”

In a high-profile Delaware case in 2009, a six-year-old was almost suspended for 45 days for having his Cub Scout knife at school. The school board intervened to cut that to three to five days.

The combination of zero-tolerance school rules, themselves fueled by safety fears, and the kind of high-stakes testing required by the federal government “create some of these dynamics,” Freeman contended.

Mississippi was under the high-stakes testing regime of the federal No Child Left Behind law until it won a waiver in July 2012.

MERIDIAN, Miss. — Lionel Townsend will turn 14 in September. And a few months after that he will be able to return to school, ending a year of exile.

Lionel admits he got into fights multiple times at Magnolia Middle School. When he was charged with vandalizing a school bus security camera, he was booted from school. He fought again in a community day program. The county Youth Court eventually put him on probation and ordered him to stay at home with an ankle monitor.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is alleging the juvenile justice system here is so faulty that it amounts to a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

“If you do wrong, you got to pay,” insisted Lionel’s mother, Ella Townsend, speaking in the living room of the home she shares with her mother, Lionel and four of the boy’s siblings. Lionel listens quietly, a skinny boy, who grins when attention is turned to him, or he’s teased about the sparkly blue earring studded in his ear. “But “that was harsh punishment,” she said, “I feel like they were sort of out of order.”

Townsend says her son’s ankle monitor was so sensitive it went off if he went in the back yard. The young man is rid of it now, but not before he gouged off the speaker, causing what Townsend said the court assessed as $1,500 in damage.

She worries if Lionel makes another mistake, he will end up in prison with adults, where he will learn little more than how to be a criminal.

The Justice Department says it has probable cause to believe the city of Meridian and Lauderdale County routinely and  repeatedly incarcerate children for school disciplinary infractions, as outlined in an Aug. 10 open letter that was issued at the conclusion of an eight-month investigation. The department’s letter is addressed to the city and county, the county's two Youth Court judges, as well as the state Division of Youth Services, but not the Meridian school system.

Undocumented youths 15 to 30 years old certainly can’t vote. But they are a large group — estimated at 800,000 to 1.7 million — that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney doesn’t think he can write off completely.

Why? Conventional wisdom has it that Romney, to win, needs to peel off Latino votes from President Obama in key swing states such as Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado. Some Latino voters were once undocumented themselves, or know someone who was or is. They also tend to support the decade-old federal DREAM Act proposal — or something like it that would give youths a chance to earn full legal immigrant status, which isn’t possible within the current immigration system.

Over the weekend, former GOP Florida Gov. Jeb Bush warned his party that it had to get with the nation’s changing demographics and heed the Latino vote — or get left behind. 

As Romney’s campaign prepares for the sprint to the finish, the GOP standard-bearer might consider the 2010 California gubernatorial campaign of Meg Whitman, a Romney supporter. In a blitz of Spanish-language TV and radio ads, Whitman simultaneously tried to woo Latino moms and dads by praising Latino schoolchildren as “the future,” while attacking illegal immigrants as a burden and opposing legalization for youths or adults. 

That didn’t work.

Foster parent Jenae VanEvery got a call around midnight one day in September 2011 asking if she could take in two sisters — ages 2 and 3 — who had been found living in filth and squalor by Lincoln, Neb. police.

The children were in the custody of the non-profit group KVC, one of the private contractors the state of Nebraska had hired after deciding in 2009 to privatize its child welfare system. VanEvery agreed but said she could not pick up the children until the next afternoon.

When VanEvery and her husband arrived to pick up the children, they were sleeping in a back room – still wearing the urine- and-feces-covered clothing they had on when police took them the day before.

“When we walked in, the 3-year-old woke up and jumped into my arms. I was taken aback by the strong aroma coming from her. It made my eyes water, and it was hard to breathe,” VanEvery said. “When we arrived home, we took them straight to the bathroom.  The 3-year-old had a cable-knit sweater … that … had rubbed her shoulder blades raw because it had become so saturated in urine and feces that it dried incredibly stiff and rough.

“Her shoes were covered in feces — inside and out,” VanEvery said. “My husband took the clothes straight to the clothes washer, and I started giving them a bath.  I had to change the water twice.”

It apparently had been so long since the children were bathed that “they freaked out when I turned the water on,” she said. “This was very scary for them.”

As it was for VanEvery: How, she thought, could caseworkers allow the girls to remain so filthy while in their care?

A Public Failure

VanEvery told her story last January during a series of hearings before the Nebraska Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee — the beginning of the end of Nebraska’s largely failed experiment to privatize its ailing child welfare system.

One of the nation’s top immigration think tanks estimates that 1.76 million undocumented people could attempt to benefit from an Obama administration decision to shield them from deportation, temporarily, and grant them two-year work permits. Moreover, the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. estimates in its new report that 58 percent of this population who are now between 15 and 30 years old are already in the U.S. labor force.

As of Aug. 15, the administration is opening up the process for certain undocumented youths brought here as children to apply for the two-year reprieve. It represents one of the biggest undertakings by U.S. immigration officials in years. It is not a program for permanent residency, but it does provide youths who meet the criteria temporary protection from deportation, as well as the ability to work legally and stop using fake Social Security cards or laboring off the books.

The Migration Policy Institute’s report includes state-by-state charts and other estimates that help paint a portrait of where and who the youths are. The report is based in part on data from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The institute estimates that California alone could have 460,000 potential applicants. Youths cannot apply until they are 15 years old, so applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. There is no deadline to apply. The limits are set by maximum age limits and other criteria. 

Violent juvenile crime has fallen over the last decade — good news — but the numbers of American girls getting into trouble have continued to increase, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Girls now represent 15 percent of those held in juvenile facilities and as much as 34 percent in some states,” the survey by the nonpartisan Denver- and Washington, D.C.-based group found. Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon and New Mexico have passed laws that require “gender-specific” rehabilitation programs or plans for programs for this growing female population.

The number of girls accused of offenses has been on the rise for three decades, according to U.S. Department of Justice reports. For example, the arrest rate of girls for simple, or minor, assault in 2003 was more than triple the rate in 1980.

The NCSL report also takes a look at state trends to address “disproportionate minority contact” with the juvenile justice system at all its levels. “Various explanations have emerged for the disproportionate treatment of (ethnic minority) minors, ranging from jurisdictional issues, certain police practices and pervasive crime in some urban areas,” the report states.

In 2008, according to the report, Iowa became the first state to require a “minority impact statement” for each proposal in the state to alter juvenile sentencing, parole and probation. Connecticut followed with similar requirements. In 2010, Maryland scrutinized law-enforcement in schools, adopting a law to require “cultural competency training” for all law-enforcement officers assigned to public schools.

Venture capitalists to the rescue of locked-up youth?

The world of juvenile justice is abuzz over news that Goldman Sachs will provide New York City with a $9.6 million loan — a so-called “social impact bond” — to finance rehabilitation programs for youths locked up at the Rikers Island correctional complex. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal is reducing Rikers’ young offender recidivism rate of more than 50 percent.

In the innovative heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University’s School of Business has delved into the concept of firms ponying up such social impact bonds as way to improve the outcome of public services, including corrections. To get an idea of what CEOs hot on socially responsible investing have to say about private investment in social programs, check out some lectures posted through the business school’s Center for Social Innovation. 

In Britain, where the social-impact-bond idea was pioneered, the company Social Finance explains “building the market” on its website.

Essentially, as Reuters points out, “social impact bonds partner local governments with non-profits and private investors in deals that require a government to pay out only if a social services group can meet a specified performance goal.”

There’s more context for Bloomberg’s deal.

Teen pregnancies and the number of kids victimized by violent crime have fallen noticeably, but nearly a quarter of U.S. children are living in poverty and more, not fewer, are being exposed to damaging air pollution, according to a newly released federal report. 

“America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being,” is an annual report compiling a variety of statistics and yearly measurements. The data comes from 22 federal agencies and private research partners. The report is issued by the collaborative Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics.

Some good news — which could inform debate on crime policies — is that fewer 12-to-17-year-olds were victims of violent crime in 2010 than in 2009. The proportion dropped from 11 out of 1,000 kids in 2009 to seven out of 1,000 in 2010. Rates, in fact, have been continuing to slide since 1990, when 40 out of 1,000 kids in this age group were victims of a violent crime.

Preliminary data showed a drop in teen pregnancies from 20 per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 17 in 2009 to 17 per 1,000 in 2010. A decline was registered for all ethnic groups.

But the percent of American kids living in poverty was calculated at 22 percent in 2010, up one point in a year and six percentage points higher than the historic low of 16 percent in 2001. The effects of the recession continue.

In a section on physical environment and safety, an alarming statistic suggests a reversal in progress toward ensuring environmental protections safeguarding children.

From President Obama to Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, politicians are habitually warning us that high dropout rates among some students are a civil rights issue, and a drag on U.S. global competitiveness.

On the East Coast, let’s see if the Maryland Board of Education’s recent decision to force reductions in school suspensions actually helps boost graduation rates in that state’s more troubled schools. A major board report on discipline policies notes that 54 percent of Maryland’s out-of-school suspensions are for non-violent infractions.

On the West Coast, keep an eye on California, which could adopt state bills that also set limits on school discipline policies. A Los Angeles public-interest law firm, Public Counsel, is sponsoring many of California’s eight pending bills, and says that for many kids, out-of-school suspensions are merely “an unsupervised vacation.” 

A growing number of education experts, along with some juvenile court judges, are concerned that school discipline has spiraled out of control with more zero-tolerance mandates — in part, a reaction to school shootings — and harsher responses to misbehavior that’s really pretty minor. New research finds that removing kids frequently from classrooms can result in kids feeling more alienated from school, falling behind and continuing to make poor choices — dropping out among them.

In a report aired Monday, Southern California’s KPCC radio interviews the chief of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s police department — the nation’s largest school police force — and other district  officials about controversial police ticketing at schools.

KPCC has collaborated with the Center for Public Integrity on recent stories highlighting the police department’s citations of students, including thousands of mostly black and Latino middle-school kids ordered to court because of fighting, tardiness and other minor offenses. In Monday’s story, reporter Vanessa Romo talks to Los Angeles Unified School Police Chief Steven Zipperman about his views and plans for reforms.

Zipperman, who also spoke to the Center recently, told KPCC his department didn’t have the capacity to look to trends by analyzing its own citation data by age, ethnicity, gender, school location and infraction. But the Center for Public Integrity was able to analyze three years’ worth of tickets to students, KPPC said, and “its research has forced a dramatic rethinking of school police ticketing this summer.”  Romo also interviewed Russlynn Ali, the U.S. Department of Education’s top civil rights official, who explains her concerns about school discipline policies and policing.