The Center for Public Integrity

At the first-ever congressional hearing on the subject of solitary confinement, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois recently observed that it’s not always “the worst of the worst” who are subjected to the practice. Mentally-ill inmates, immigrants and juvenile offenders are put in solitary as well. And perhaps, said a series of witnesses at the hearing, the time has come to rethink the issue.

Many states are now doing just that. But the debate is not devoid of its own unique politics.

In California, for instance, a bid to require every-four-hour mental-health evaluations of minors who are “segregated” from other wards died a quick death this spring — even though the Golden State’s legislature is one of the nation’s most liberal and the measure was endorsed by the Los Angeles Times. The legislation failed by one vote to move beyond the seven-member state Senate Public Safety Committee. Three of five Democrats voted for the bill, including the Senate’s top leader, Democrat Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento. But two Democrats and the committee’s only two Republicans voted against it.

Depending on who’s talking, the idea faltered because it was flawed, unnecessary and would cost the Golden State money it doesn’t have — or it died because law-enforcement groups with savvy lobbying and financial clout leaned on key legislators to kill it. The dispute is the latest in a series of Sacramento battles over policies pitting liberal juvenile-justice reformers against cops and corrections officers.

Now that young illegal immigrants are an election-year football, Americans have an opportunity to learn a few things from the kids.

A lot of adults profess some degree of sympathy for these young people, who were born in undocumented parents’ native countries, brought here as very young children, either illegally or on visas parents overstayed. They’ve grown up here, gone to school here, speak English and feel American but are undocumented “through no fault of their own,” as both President Obama and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney say.

But why can’t they go back to where they were born, line up and become legal “the right way?"

Young illegal immigrants have been asking the same sort of question for years, as demonstrated on forums started by so-called DREAMers. That’s the name for this group that derives from the once-bipartisan DREAM Act. The decade-plus-old failed federal proposal would have opened up a path for these youths to earn temporary legal status, and, eventually, a green card by serving in the military (which they can’t do now) or completing at least two years of college.

Here’s some of what DREAMers have learned. And they aren’t the kind of details you will get, lamented a Washington Post editorial, whenever the subject of immigration gets batted around by Romney, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — a GOP point man on the subject — and, to a lesser degree, President Obama.

Lesson one: As DREAMers now know, there is no Ellis Island-like line for them or anyone else to get into, either here on U.S. soil, or back in birth countries, to become legal immigrants. Visas to enter the United States are not open to anyone on a first-come, first-served basis, as long as they are willing to be patient and do it the “right way.”

A group of Florida public defenders is asking a state court to remove and stop sending troubled juveniles to a privately run detention facility they claim is rife with abuses. A court filing disclosed Wednesday also accuses Florida juvenile-justice officials of lax oversight and asks the court to appoint an independent monitor to investigate the Thompson Academy, a 154-bed “moderate risk” residential center in Florida’s Broward County.

Gordon Weekes, Broward County chief assistant public defender, said he has long been concerned about conditions inside the Thompson Academy in Pembroke Pines in Florida. To protect his young clients’ confidentiality, Weekes filed the public defenders’ motion in early June directly with a judge in Florida’s 17^th Judicial Circuit. Weekes disclosed it Wednesday after the motion was filed with the court clerk and copies were given to a Florida juvenile prosecutor, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice and Youth Services International (YSI), the company that runs Thompson Academy.

Broward’s public defenders represent 56 children from that county who’ve been sent to Thompson Academy for housing and treatment, Weekes said.

The motion asks the court for an order to quickly take depositions of “essential witnesses,” including former and current Thompson employees and state oversight officials. It also asks for a court order to prevent Thompson Academy employees from knowing, at this point, the identities of juveniles who have complained about alleged abuses. Weekes said he wants the order to protect the minors from possible intimidation by custodians. 

Public defenders allege, in the motion, that Thompson employees “actively smoke” marijuana at the facility and make it available to wards placed there for rehabilitation, and that food quality is poor and so “minimal” staff use it as “currency” to reward youths for certain behavior. 

In a sweeping policy change with political overtones, President Obama has announced that his administration will allow undocumented youths who grew up here to apply for work permits and spare them from deportation if they meet certain criteria.

The policy will not include a path to legal residency, a first step before applying for citizenship, so it differs from the proposed DREAM Act. That proposal once had bipartisan Congressional support but has repeatedly stalled in the face of Republican opposition. Even though the new policy falls short of the path to legal status that immigration activists would like, the change is likely to expand Obama’s appeal among crucial Latino voters in November.

Obama’s decision will also have tremendous personal impact on a population of young people who were brought here as children and have no way to pursue legal status, either here or back in birth countries, under current immigration rules.

Certain states, such as California, Arizona, Texas, New York and Florida, are home to significant numbers of these youths. And many of them have anguished over their predicament. They say they have been left with no option but to work with fake identification, or under the table, or drive without a license or not drive at all. Some have been admitted to college but barred from pursuing loans and grants. Others have given up such dreams.

In the wake of critical news reports, Los Angeles school police and administrators have agreed to rethink enforcement tactics that have led to thousands of court citations yearly for young students in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods.

The Center for Public Integrity and the Los Angeles-based Labor-Community Strategy Center each performed their own analysis recently of previously unreleased citation records obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department, the nation’s largest school police force. The Center found that between 2009 and the end of 2011, Los Angeles school police officers issued more than 33,500 tickets to students 18 and younger, with more than 40 percent handed out to kids 14 and 10 years old. That was an average of about 30 tickets a day. A large portion of the tickets for younger children were for disturbing the peace, which can include a physical fight or using threatening or disruptive language. 

Some parents and concerned juvenile-justice judges have questioned whether it’s appropriate for such minor indiscretions to be handled by police, rather than school authorities. 

Arguing that heavy police ticketing of children is counterproductive, Manuel Criollo of the Labor Community Strategy Center said his group has met twice with L.A. Unified School Police Chief Steven Zipperman and Michelle King, a deputy district superintendent. A third meeting is expected to take place this month.

Previously undisclosed school police records from New York City are raising new concerns about students getting heavily ticketed for vague allegations of disorderly conduct.   

More than 70 percent of court summonses issued to New York City school students between January and the end of March this year were for disruptive behavior, according to a new analysis released by the American Civil Liberties Union of New York this week.

“The high percentage of disorderly conduct charges — a catchall category that could encompass all kinds of typical misbehavior — indicates that NYPD officers are getting involved in non-criminal disciplinary incidents,” said Udi Ofer, the ACLU New York’s advocacy director, in a statement.  The NYPD took control of school safety in 1998. Armed officers are assigned to patrol schools, along with thousands of school safety officers who are unarmed but have the authority to search and arrest students.

The ACLU’s concerns mirror a burgeoning nationwide debate over the proper role of school police, and whether officers are intervening too often in matters that used to be settled in school without handcuffs or court citations.

For example, newly released data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity showed that school police in Los Angeles have been issuing thousands of court citations each year to students, including 11 and 12-year-olds, for disturbing-the-peace offenses, including scuffles at school. 

When it comes to student discipline, suspending kids and a heavy police presence in schools are policies that are doing more harm than good, according to a new report on three especially troubled California districts.  

The report released Thursday by University of California scholars and Human Impact Partners is an exhaustive profile of students in South Los Angeles, Oakland and the agribusiness hub of Salinas in Central California. All these communities have high levels of family poverty, high rates of student suspension and high dropout rates. Oakland-based Human Impact Partners reviews data and conducts on-the-ground interviews to assess the effects that public policies have on equity and health in communities.

The report was funded by the California Endowment. The Center for Public Integrity also receives some support from the Endowment.

The Los Angeles school district has already adopted what’s called “positive behavioral support” as an alternative to out-of-school suspension. But researchers found that some L.A. schools are still failing to use the method. As a result, students are still being suspended and losing hundreds of days of school time. The report delves into the high rate of suspensions for “willful defiance,” and the serious discipline challenges the schools face.

The researchers also touch on Los Angeles’ school police, the largest school police force in the nation. They recommend that district police officers, sheriff’s deputies and city police “dedicate a meaningful amount of their professional development over the next three years” to learning about positive behavioral support as “an alternative intervention.” 

A father talks about his young son’s arrest at school and subsequent court citation, and Los Angeles’ school police chief responds to a growing controversy in a new report aired by Southern California Public Radio.

The report by KPCC radio was produced in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity. It features an interactive map showing Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools where court citations were heavily concentrated last year. The map is based on a Center analysis of records recording school police officers’ citations for students to appear in lower-level juvenile court.

Students in lower-income, mostly black and Latino neighborhoods were far more likely to be given tickets for disturbing the peace, arriving late to school or being truant and other infractions. The Center’s companion report contains additional details on the accelerating dispute over student-police interaction at schools, and federal education officials’ decision to scrutinize discipline patterns and police citations in the Los Angeles district.

Alexander Johnson arrived at Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy to pick up his 12-year-old after school on May 19, 2011. When his son, A.J. didn’t appear, Johnson went inside the Los Angeles middle school. What he found was devastating.

A.J. and a friend had gotten into a physical altercation over a basketball game, and school staff had summoned not parents, but police officers. Neither boy was injured, and the school ended up suspending his son for only one day, Johnson said. But officers wrote up a court citation and decided, on the spot, to also handcuff and arrest A.J. as the alleged aggressor — after what Johnson believes was only a cursory look into what had happened.

Despite Johnson’s pleas for another solution to what the citation said was a “mutual fight,” officers drove A.J. to a station, booked him, fingerprinted him and took a mug shot before releasing him. The family hired a lawyer, and school staff later apologized. But Johnson and his wife still can’t comprehend why school officials got police involved. And while school police say they have a duty to fight crime, the Johnsons can’t help but think that officers arrested their son because of snap judgments about African-American kids in South Central Los Angeles.

“He’s got good grades and he’s never been in trouble,” Johnson said he kept telling police. “Tell it to the judge,” he said police replied. 

Broader concerns

What happened to the Johnsons’ son is the type of incident — in Los Angeles and elsewhere — that has the Obama Administration’s Department of Education and a growing number of juvenile-court judges deeply concerned.