America's War On Children

haven't introduced yourself? He is Robert Evans. Words words and my guest today, Courtney Cossack and I are going to sit quietly for an hour and a half and that's going to be the podcast. No words. I'm doing a bold new thing and podcasting, or we don't do anything here that bold. There's plenty of meditation pod us that do that. People are allowed to meditate, people are not allowed to meditate. I will I will kick your ass if you meditate during our quiet podcast. Be really stressed

out the whole time. Courtney, how are you doing today? You know, I'm pretty good. Considering. Considering is something happening? No, just the world? Just the dumpster fire? Oh, I saw a lovely dumpster fire the other night, so that they could burn a police union down. Yeah, it was. It was a good buck dumpster fire. Courtney, speaking of children,

do you like kids? Yeah? Yeah, not really? Okay, Well, um, I was going to ask how you feel about incarcerating children and penitentiaries for what most people would consider modest misbehavior. But I guess you're fine with that. So again back to the ninety minutes of silence that we had planned. I'm into civil rights. I mean, I feel like kids can. I just don't want one. So kids get civil rights? In your head, you're a fan of that. Okay, Okay,

that's a bold stance, children getting civil rights. Um, that's the episode we're gonna talk about. What this is about the war on children? Um, that that our country has been fighting for for a while. Now did you did you know we were fighting a war on children? I it's been brought to my attention. Yeah, we fucking hate kids in this country. We absolutely hate kids. It's it

fully rules how much this country hates kids. As of right now this moment, about two hundred thousand children into the adult criminal justice system every year, mostly for non violent crimes. About ten thousand children are housed in adult prisons and jails every single day. Uh, and about of incarcerated kids are locked away in private, for profit facilities. While the number of incarcerated children has fallen somewhat in recent years, it is still massively escalated over where it

was in the past. In ninete, only a hundred thousand or hundred and seven thousand children were incarcerated every year, so it's roughly doubled since nineteen uh From nineteen eight three, though tonight day to ninety seven, the number of juveniles incarcerated and adult facilities jumped by around three hundred and sixty six. So it used to be way lower than it was back in the eighties, like like a fraction of the number of kids were incarcerated as are now.

So that's cool. That is that is not cool. How did we get here, Robert? How did we get here? Well? I wish we were going to explain that, but again, this podcast is mostly going to be ninety minutes of silence. Um, Okay, I'll shut the funk up. It's okay, No, you shouldn't shut the fun I need to. I'm I am very strung at. I was getting shot at repeatedly by federal agents again last night, so I'm a little bit I'm

a little bit punchy. I apologize, thank you for being cool for me saying I'll take anything at this point that grunt earlier fantastic. Let's do this all right, all right? So Courtney, the US incarceraates children at a rate five times higher than the next highest nation, South Africa. Um. So like that that's where we are. Like, if you're looking, if you're playing a global game, um, you're looking at like,

what are the things the United States does better? One of the things the best, one of the things on that short list, one of the things that no country can take away from US, is like we're the best at locking children away. We're so good at it. Yeah, well, like we you think fucking Paraguay can lock up children, Like they don't know shit about locking up kids in Paraguay. They just let him roam, they start rome, They just let him go on the streets like they're goddamn Like,

uh juju bees, what's a juju bi? I don't know. They let him out, they let them, they let him wander. It's a problem. So in nineteen sixty, yeah, let's let's talk about where this all started. How America got to the point that it is now. With all these kids not walking around and instead locked up in criminal facilities. Uh. It started, well, kind of the the legal jurisprudence around whether or not it's cool to throw kids in a small, dark hole owned by the government. That all really started

to kick off in the nineteen sixties. Um, and for a while they judges and stuff like pretty consistently cited with kids having rights. It started in nineteen sixty four with fifteen year old Gerald Galt. He was convicted of juvenile delinquency by an Arizona juvenile judge and sentenced to be incarcerated until age twenty one. So that was like a seven year sentence, and his crime was making a lewd phone call. Oh my god. Well, yeah, you got a lock of kid away for a quarter of his

life for that ship, just during the formative years. No big deal, He'll be fine and throw him in a hole. Yeah, he made a dirty phone call. Six years, seven years Jesus. So the young Mr Galt enjoyed no defense counsel, which you might recognize as a violation of what this nation considers to be his basic human rights. He was also sentenced to a vastly higher penalty than an adult would have received for the same crime, because again, fifteen years old,

that's like a six year sentence. An adult at the time charged with the same crime making a lewed phone call would have effaced at most two months of jail. Um. So were there was a lawsuit as a result of Jared Galt's case, and his parents filed for a bit of habeas corpus. Now, at the time, juveniles were not allowed to appeal in California, so the Superior Court and the Supreme Court of the state backed up this nonsense.

Galt's family appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court and they agreed to hear the case for the specific purpose of determining the procedural rights of a juvenile defendant. The courts nineteen sixty seven decision determine that kids have the same due process rights as adults, including the right to counsel. So that's good, that's a win. Yeah, I like that. But wait, was this was he poor? Or how did

this even happen? Um? I mean it was Arizona. They they you know, we'll talk a little bit about how it happened, but the gist of it is that while consistently in this period, like the Supreme Court kind of tend has tend tend to decide on this on the side of child's rights. A lot of judges really fucking hated kids and a lot of cops really hated kids,

because those are both groups of people. I think a lot of what it comes down to, based on at least my reading, is that judges and cops are both people who are used to receiving a certain kind of respect um often a fear based respect, and kids don't give a ship. And when you are disrespected by a child as one of those types of people, because you're that type of person, your instinct is to lock them in a hole for a large chunk of their life.

Punishable character flaw. That's not good. I could call yelling at the cops a character flaw. Yeah. So the Galt case was the start of a series of major wins in the field of children's legal rights. In Tinker v. Des Moine's Independent Community School District in nineteen sixty nine case, the court ruled that public school students cannot be punished for expressing their personal opinions on campus, so long as doing so does not interfere with the work of the

school or with other students. In nineteen seventy, the court ruled the juveniles are constitutionally entitled to proof beyond a reasonable doubt before they can be declared delinquent. The sixties were, in general, a pretty good time to be an advocate for the legal rights of children. This period of winds occurred right up until nineteen seventy seven, which is the

year the court ruled on Ingraham v. Right. This is the case that determined schools were not violating the Constitution by quote paddling the recalcitant children on the buttocks with the fat, flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long, three to four inches wide and about one and a half inch thick. Um. So that's nineteen seventy seven. The court rules schools can still paddle kids. It's not limiting

their rights to paddle them. Children were, however, limited to five licks from a paddle um, which is written into jurisprudence. And that's that's why did you ever get hit in the school by your teachers? I did not. I was forced to uh crawl around on the floor. That was probably the most terrible thing, but it was a pretty bad punishment. Uh not hit though, Oh my god, I can't imagine. My mom always tells me stories about getting hit by nuns when she was in my school. Paddled.

Definitely paddled your school paddled. Yeah, was that legal? Yeah yeah, yeah, it's Oklahoma. Yeah yeah, I forgot about OKLAHOLM. Yeah. They were like, of course you can paddle kids. Can you not paddle kids? Is that Okay? That's the question we have in Oklahoma because we're so busy paddle and kids. So yeah, the Supreme Court rules and seventy seven that you can paddle kids at school, you just can't lick

them more than five times. In ninety nine, another court case rules that minors can be placed in state run mental health facilities for basically no reason without any kind of like do process really, um. And so in the late seventies, this kind of trail of anti child court cases continued and sort of the you know, this thing that had started in the sixties with children getting you know, awarded more and more or not, but having more and

more rights kind of recognized in court cases. That turns around and uh, courts start chipping away at the rights of children and to not be locked in dark holes by the government for long periods of time. And this continues until nineteen eighty four, when the Supreme Court rules on Shall v. Martin and affirms that children do, in fact have a lesser inherent interest in liberty than adults. Uh. The justification for this is that they are always in

some form of custody. So while Galt affirmed, you know that the first case we talked about a firm that children had the right to the same due process as adults, Shall flipped the table and declared that juvenile attention facilities are basically the same as kids living at home or

in a foster facility. So it really doesn't matter if kids get sentenced to something without having a lawyer, because kids have no real liberty anyway, and the state putting them in a hole is no different from their parents putting them in a bedroom. Oh that God, who hurt that guy? That's what we need to really investigate, Jesus. I mean, the messed up thing is it's like, who hurt that large room full of judges and all of

their aids who decided that was a good way. It's kind of ad right to say that, to be like, kids aren't interested in freedom, like so it's okay. Whatever we did, Whe's okay. It's the most backwards thing, literally now. According to a paper I found in the Temple Law Review, the reason for this tragic reversal and the general decades long trend towards less rights for children under trial is that trial judges in the latter half of the twentieth

century really fucking hated kids. And I'm gonna quote from that paper now right after I sneeze fucking tear gas. Okay. The real actors who influenced juvenile justice were state juvenile court judges and administrators, whose hostility to the principles of GALT led many of them to ignore the decision from the very beginning. Many trial level juvenile courts simply ignored Galts thrust when it came to the actual provision of

council to juveniles. According to Professor Wally um lineark Quote, studies in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties found that few children were represented by counsel. The predominant reason is that these juveniles waived their right to counsel, often without being properly informed of the right. State courts also employed insidious methods to ensure the juveniles from poor families, who are supposed to benefit from the constitutional right to free

court assigned counsel, never were assigned a lawyer. In Florida, for example, indigency rules were so strict that having five dollars in the bank made a family ineligible for appointment of counsel. Moreover, as Professor Liniak has explained, Florida parents had to pay a forty dollar fee just to apply for an indigency determination. So you see what they do in places like you have the right to a lawyer unless we determine you have too much money to get

a free lawyer. And we're saying five dollars is too much. That is so crazy. If your family net worth is five dollars, you're doing way too well for a free lawyer. Where are the social workers in all this? That's like a whole another episode. Probably, Yeah, I mean it's christ underpaid, often traumatized, and let's face it, in some cases, like being very much a part of fucking these kids over because some of them suck to Like it's it's a

whole mess, right, and it's this underfunded thing. Um, and yeah, it's just bad. There's not a lot. There's not a lot looking out for poor kids in the states that have the most protections for poor children, right, And Florida is not the most protection state the Arizona of the other side of the East coast, of the East coast. Yeah,

so accurate. Yeah, good stuff, everybody, good stuff. So yeah, we're gonna be hearing a lot from Florida in this episode, or also gonna hear a lot from trial judges who hate children with a passion that boggles the mind. Um, which is cool and good. Uh, And this was a fun episode to write. Um, that didn't make me want

to commit federal crimes anyway. The whole situation um with children's rights degenerated right up through the mid nineteen nineties, which is when a study conducted by the American Bar Association found that huge numbers of kids kids waived their right to counsel without really knowing what they were doing. As a result, the association's report wrote, many children charged with crimes were literally left defenseless and Maryland of kids

charged with crimes waived their right to a lawyer. Ent of Louisiana children did, as did fifty to seventy percent of children in Florida and more than half of the children in Georgia, Ohio and Kentucky who went before judges. So that's a lot of kids not having lawyers. Um. And I don't know if you know much about kids, but one thing they're not good at is representing themselves in court. My god, they really should be with our education system, I don't know what the fuck. Yeah, it's

good stuff. Everything's good stuff. Um, everything's great stuff. I'm happy. Another major change that happened in the nineteen or from the nineteen seventies to the nineteen nineties was the ease with which courts were allowed to treat juveniles as adults now. Um as in most things, New York State led the way in this. New York was like, we're not treating kids like adults enough when we decide how long to throw them into dark holes owned by the guff let's

change that. This is the state of New York and this is the fight we're picking. Um. So in nineteen seventy eight, they changed their laws in order to make it possible for courts to prosecute children aged thirteen and up an adult criminal court. Um, you know all those hardened adult thirteen year olds that you know, Um, is it like just for murder or I mean that was kind of the justification, but it wound up being for

a lot of things, right the idea. The idea was initially like, there's so many dangerous teenage predators, we have to start treating them like adults. But like the people who the kids who actually get tried as adults, most of them are not murderers. So every state in the Union followed New York's example to one extent or another, making it easier to try children as adults. This whole process really accelerated in the late nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.

Is the crack epidemic fueld waves fears of a new wave of child super predators. Age of offense thresholds were reduced all around the nation, and politicians who had fought for the right of children to be treated as children were attacked for being soft on crime. Now, the two folks most responsible for this, we're right wing criminologist John Delulio and our old buddy James Q. Wilson. If you remember listening through the Behind the Police mini series we did.

James Q. Wilson is the co author of the Broken Windows Theory of crime um and coincidentally best friends with the guys who wrote the racist book about i Q the Bell Curve Um, which is far cool group. Dudes. Yeah,

call me for the barbecue, guys. Yeah, I'm gonna insinuate uh series of racial attitudes towards policing and pushed them so deeply into the zeit guys that people think that they're actually just protecting their neighborhoods when they're in reality contributed to something that could be viewed as almost an active Jennessia. Sorry, I don't I lost I lost track of the surfer pro voice I was doing after a while there. Anyway, Okay, let's catch our breath for a second.

Just catch our breath for a second to that minutes of silence? Ready, everyone, back to the ninety minutes of silence. So John Delulio and James Q. Wilson, they write a paper in arguing that the US is about to experience a wave of unprecedented youth crime driven by single parent families, crack, cocaine, and a bunch of other stuff that was all basically

coded language for the existence of black people. Wilson predicted that by two thousand ten, there would be two hundred and seventy thousand additional predators on the streets committing violent crimes at an unprecedented level. These children, he wrote, would be radically impulsive, brutally remorseless, elementary school youngsters who packed guns instead of lunches, and have absolutely no respect for human life. So let's put them in a hole. See

if it gets better. I also love the idea that they're packing guns instead of lunches because they do two separate things. James, still you still, you still the eat even if you're going to be shooting people, You want to have a lunch. Yeah, like you don't. You don't lose hunger pains just because you're packing a nine. You know,

I don't know, you might get hungry. So basically, everybody, Republican and democratic like in the American political establishment, bought into the idea of these child super predators to one extent or another. And they also bought into the argument delu Leo and Wilson made about what to do with

this upcoming crop of super predators. I'm gonna quote now from the book The End of Policing, delu Leo and his colleagues argued that there was nothing to be done but to exclude such children from from children, from settings where they could harm others, and ultimately to incarcerate them for as long as possible. Delu Leo's ideas were based on spurious evidence and ideologically motivated assumptions that turned out to be totally inaccurate. Every year since, juvenile crime in

and out of schools in the US has declined. However, the super predator myth was extremely influential. It generated a huge amount of press coverage, editorials, and legislative action. One of the immediate consequences was a rash of new laws lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier to incarceerate young people in adult jails, and keeping with the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration. So that's good ship right there. We're all part of the problem

if we're clicking on that clickbait super predator bullshit. Yeah don't. I mean, it was the nineties, so that was people people knew less to be dag to be worried about the clicks. But yeah, always be worried about the clicks. Don't don't don't click Atlantic articles yeah, don't click Atlantic articles, just just say no to the Atlantic. So by the nineteen nineties, politicians realized that specifically fucking over children was

a really good vote getter. Um. Some elected leaders, like the Republican Speaker of the House also fun children literally because Dennis Hastard is a pedophile. Uh well, also advocating for children to be treated as adults under criminal law. And there's a really dark joke in that whole situation. Um, but I I don't I'm not gonna I'm not gonna

make it. But there is one in there about Dennis Hastard wanting kids to be treated as adults while he molests a bunch of kids while being the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House. Read about Dennis Hastert, it's a real, real bad story. This is one of the guys who like stood up there and talked about how bad Bill Clinton was. It turns out he was a child molester of the whole time. A lot of people don't talk about Dennis Hastard enough anymore. Oh, first time

I'm hearing about him. Oh yeah, you didn't know about the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House, who was just the just a complete child molester the entire time he was in office. But the first impression, it's so bad. Yeah, he was just molesting the hell out of some kids. It was really a problem. Um. Yeah, good stuff. You want to take a break, buddy, Yeah, let's take an ad break, Courtney. You know who won't be the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House and use their power

to assault children. Whoever this ad is for. That's exactly the case, unless this is yet another one of our ads for Dennis Haster, in which case I I do apologize. We do not know how they keep getting in there. We're back and we're talking about children being in cars rated. So in the nineteen nineties, yeah, kids decide politicians decide that, like really specifically going after kids as criminals is like

the thing to do. Um. So this is the political situation in the US in nineteen nine when too Colorado high school kids with an interest in Adolf Hitler walked into Columbine High School and murdered thirteen people with firearms. Now, there were armed police in Columbine that day, um, and

they failed to stop the rampage. But the kind of folks who vote based solely on scary things that just happened, did the thing that those kind of people do, and they started voting to increase the presence of armed police in schools. Politicians were happy to do this because given the shocking number of civilian arms in the US and are growing supply of angry young men, it seemed likely

that more Columbines would soon follow. The real fix this problem would probably have involved doing something to fill the yawning cast him at the center of our national soul, and that wasn't about to happen, So everybody just agreed to throw more men with guns and badges at the problem. School resource officers became increasingly common in school districts around

the nation at this point, So that's good, um. And another thing that happens in nine the President passes like the Gun Free Schools Act or something, I forget the exact name, but that's is like the legal justification that starts pushing a lot of zero tolerance policies and schools and really starts ramping up the number of s r o s. But it's Columbine that kind of adds fuel to that fire. Were you in Were you in school when columb Mine happened. I was. I was like, maybe uh,

senior or early college. I was, Yeah, it was when I was still growing up. But I mean I went to a small rural school, so like that, I mean it could still happen, but like that armed police presence was not at my school, and I think still isn't. We started to have cops in my schools after Columbine. And what I remember most that was just kind of like the attitude change was like feeling that teachers were

kind of suspecting kids of planning something. Now, Like it was this very weird feeling that like, oh, now we're all kind of like now they're searching us as we enter the school, were all kind of suspects of wanting to kill each other. That feels like it's not going to lead anywhere. Well oh yeah I was yeah high school. Yeah, maybe a little more suspect from the teachers for sure. Yeah. It was weird. Um, it was not a cool time

to be in school. Um, so yeah, columb Mine. Now, in the immediate wake of Columbine, there were like people did get more worried about bullying too. Briefly, Um, there was like I think just because there was this assumption that the kids who shot up the school had been like bullied, which wasn't really true. But like everybody got on that too for a while. But for a practice.

On the practical level, most of the focus in preventing another Columbine involved zero tolerance discipline, and the idea of zero tolerance policies and schools was basically the broken windows theory as applied to living children. Right. The broken windows theory says that like, as soon as you have a broken window, it's permission for people to engage in more anti social behavior. So soon they'll start tagging up windows and breaking other windows and lightning ship on fire, and

then you have, you know, the collapse of civilization. Um, it's that as applied to students. If a kid acts up in one way, you know, if he talks back to a teacher, you have to punish him more than he deserves to be punished for that, because if you don't, it could lead to other bad behavior like shooting up your school. Like that that was the justification for zero

tolerance policies. Great, and it's good stuff. They weren't effective, right, because there's been like a million more shootings have there been other shootings since Colon. Yeah, I've heard of it. I don't. I don't read the news, Courtney. Um, I didn't realize America still had a problem with this. I assumed that this had been settled. Yeah, mostly solved, but

it's still a few still. It seems like we gotta handle on it now that all of the schools are closed from the play we did everybody making things a lot harder for school shooters. Thank you COVID nineteen. Thank you so um yeah. Uh. Now. Another thing that happened right around the same time. It was a major reorganization and the way that schools measured success and failure for students.

Standardized testing began to have an increased influence on teacher pay and on school funding, This creating situation where it was in the interest of adult administrators and teachers to find ways to remove low performing students from their classroom. Florida schools adopted a high stakes testing model in nineteen and within five years their rate of out of school

suspensions had increased. In two thousand four, twenty eight thousand Florida children were arrested at school, two thirds of them from minor offenses that would have been dealt with noncar serrale in the past. By two thous six, eight years after adopting a high stakes testing policy, teacher morale had created more than half of all Florida teachers reported thinking about quitting their field. Florida's graduation rate felt a fifty

seven percent, the fourth lowest in the nation. Now. Texas also adopted a high stakes testing program in the nineteen nineties. Governor George W. Bush's education advisor, Sandy Kress, convinced him that the soft bigotry of low expectations is what held back minority students, and he felt that Texas could fix this by making all schools administer the same tests statewide. That would make it easier to determine where resources were needed.

The implementation of standardized tests was accompanied by new zero tolerance policies to and since school funding and teacher pay was now tied to test results, teachers you know used those uh punishments like whenever kids would do something bad, it was threatening that kid that teachers payment like that the money that they would get in the money the school would get, so they would report those kids. Suspension rates began to soar, and nent of suspensions were from

minor infractions. By two thousand nine, there were two million suspensions statewide, and the sheer number of suspended kids in Texas led to the creation of so called super max schools, which are basically prisons designed for children to go to

class at. And this was the kind of thing. I grew up in Texas in this period of time, and we everyone would talk about these schools because you all knew somebody who had been sent there, right, who had been like and it was always something like, yeah, they would talk up in class, or maybe they got caught with weed or something, but like usually it was just like they annoyed a teacher for a couple of days in a row, and then suddenly this person is like

going to a school where you have to like fucking go through a metal detector and if you talk in the hallways you could get arrested. Like it's this fucking it was pretty pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, And yet like none of the kids who go to these schools like learn anything. They're like, like the school work. I remember, because again we we knew some kids who would go there. The schoolwork they would get was like you know, ship that kids five or six years younger would have found

easy like it was. It was clearly that like the kids who went to that building, the state was giving up on and was locking them in a separate building and saying like this is technically schoolwork. Do this until you're old enough that we can put you in a real prison. Yeah, and like, don't infect our test scores in the meantime, just go yeah exactly, because they're not fucking up the test scores of the the other schools, which makes it look like things are going better for

the other schools. So yeah, it's not great. A lot of the kids in these in these SUPERMANX schools drop out, but overall it looked like Texas test scores were improving massively. Um And that fact was trumpeted loudly during the twoth

House and election. George W. Bush called it the Texas Miracle, and huge numbers of people, including my parents, still believe that this was a thing that happened, that like Texas figured it out and massively improved education via standardized testing and you know all of these policies, the zero tolerance policies and ship. When Governor Bush became President Bush, he worked with famed Lady drowner, Ted Kennedy to make no Child left Behind law nationwide. And this is what lady

drowner is. Well, he drowned that lady. He absolutely did. Yeah, yeah, good old Ted Kennedy, the lady drowner. So, um, he worked at President Bush. They they came down the middle. You know. Uh, this this this man who would go on to commit a series of war crimes, and this other man who had drunkenly drowned a lady in his car. Uh.

They made No Child Left Behind nationwide. Um. And the law promised that by two thousand and fourteen, all students in the United States would meet or exceed their states proficient level of academic achievement. Um. They didn't hit that goal. I'm sorry to say, Courtney. Um, we didn't fix teaching. That might might surprise you at the moment, but we got a whole batch of new criminals. We do have so many new criminals. So No Child Left Behind brought

with it zero tolerance policies. Of course, the tight teacher pay to test scores In a lot of cases. Nationwide, short term suspensions increased by forty one percent and long term suspensions by a hundred and thirty five percent. Black students were three and a half times likelier to be suspended. By two thousand and eight, the number of school resource officers nationwide had doubled and more than sixteen thousand students

had been arrested. After ten years of no child left behind, graduation rates were about the same, dropout rates were about the same, and in general, absolutely nothing had been achieved except that a funck ton of kids had gotten suspended and arrested. Now people were baffled by this, and they started looking into why the Texas Miracle hadn't worked out nationwide. It turned out that this was because the Texas Miracle

had never actually been a thing. From MSNBC quote, Texas started to lose seventy kids a year, mostly dropping out before they had to take the tenth grade test that would count against the school. Almost a third of kids in Texas who started high school never finished. Scores on the Texas Test rose, but s a t scores for prospective college students dropped. Researchers discovered that the Texas Test,

designed by Pierson, primarily measured test taking ability. Apologists cherry picked National Assessment of Educational Progress scores to show progress but overall Texas lost ground to the rest of the country, found Dr Julian V. Hellig, an education researcher at the University of Texas. But by then it was too late. The Texas Miracle, mirage or not, was law of the land. So that's fun that it actually made everything worse than they made it. The law nationwide is fun the word

for that. No. Oh, like, was anyone surprised? A lot of people were. Most people still don't know that the Texas Miracle isn't a thing that happened. Oh my god. Yeah, listeners can't see, but my jaws just been on the floor the entire episode, just trying to pick it up. Oh god, Yeah, it's good stuff. I love fool and good. Yeah. You know what else is cool and good is I

Sometimes life gives you lemons. And when you get lemons, you got a lock of shipload of kids away in what are essentially prisons until they learn how to make their own weapons and stab prison guards that they can go to adult prisons and learn how to cook methamphetamines and join the Area Nations. That's just a thing you gotta do sometimes because clearly there are no other options and that's fine. They can make lemonade and you can

pay them like one cent for doing it. Absolutely, and they can make I don't know, license plates or mac books. Why don't we have Why don't we have children making MacBooks in prisons? That's what I want to know. Why are we letting the Chinese have all the fun of making mac books when we could have eleven year olds who talked up in class doing it. That's what I want to know. Good question. Thank you for liking my question.

So all of this stuff that we've been talking about today kind of jelled together to create something commonly known as the school to prison pipeline. Schools with school resource officers have nearly five times the arrest rate as schools without school resource officers. And again, because these schools were

getting by before they had the cops. It kind of suggests that those arrests are things that could have been handled without cops and arrests um most of those arrests are students of color and students with disabilities, both of

whom are vastly disproportionately arrested by school cops. Uh. And I'm gonna quote again from the book The End of Policing The ost Department of Education found in a two thousand eleven, two thousand and twelve survey of seventy two thousand schools that black, Latino and special needs students were

all disproportionately subjected to criminal justice actions. While black students represent sixteen percent of student enrollment, they represent twenty seven percent of students referred to law enforcement and thirty one percent of students subjected to a school related arrest. In comparison, white students represent fifty one percent of enrollment, forty one percent of students referred to law enforcement, and thirty nine

percent of those arrested. Some individual districts have even starker numbers. In Chicago, in two thousand, thirteen, two and fourteen, black students were twenty seven times more likely to be arrested than white students, leading to eight thousand arrests in a two year per read Over fifty of those arrested were under fifteen. It's good stuff. Yeah, that's depressing. It's hard,

it's it's just sad. It's just really sad. I mean, you know, yes, yes, it is a big part of the problem is that putting cops in schools made calling in the school cop an option for teachers and administrators who would have had to do the actual hard work of like disciplining a child earlier. It's easier to just have the kid arrested if he's pissing you off, and it might help increase your pay, so like why the

funk not now. The argument that much of what's going on was the result of teachers not wanting to bother or not knowing how to handle students with more complex problems was bolstered by the fact that special needs children make up more than of students referred to police, they make up just fourteen percent of the student population. One good example of how this looks is the two fifteen

case of a Lynchburg, Virginia, sixth grader. Eleven year old Caleb Moon Robinson has autism and behavioral issues, and one incident, he kicked a trash can after being scolded by a teacher. The school s r O filed disorderly conduct charges against the boy for this. In another incident, the s r O body slammed the kid and handcuffed him after he resisted being dragged out of the classroom for another behavioral issue.

The student was charged again with a misdemeanor disorderly conduct and this time with felony assault on a police officer. Oh my god, they love doing that. If you struggle in your handcuffs, you're assaulting the cop if they beat you. Yeah, he's fifteen, No, eleven, he's eleven. This eleven year old was charged with felony assault on a police officer after he was body slammed. It's good. I love it when eleven year olds feloniously assault police officers. Happens all the time. Well,

it actually happens quite a lot. Yeah, not even in that. Just didn't like the If a person grabs you and starts like choking and body slamming you, sometimes your body, you will resist them without you thinking about it. I think that's self defense. Yeah, it is self defense. If that person is a cop and you do anything but go limp, you have assaulted the cop. Because literally, anything you do to a cop is assaulting the cop. Because cops have very very thin skin. They're tiny, tiny little people.

Defund the police, they're very soft. Yeah, I mean that's one option that that that that's a start, you know, defund the police. Uh, I don't know. I'm not gonna I've urged enough federal crimes on other podcasts anyway. Um, So Caleb was yeah, found guilty on all charges, although this was thankfully reversed and new statewide protections for children under thirteen were put in place due to the outrage

generated by Caleb's case. But it took this cop like assaulting and then fucking charging as an adult an eleven year old for there to be changes in Virginia as a result of this, uh, which ain't great. So part of the problem is that school resource officers don't get meaningful training for how to deal with kids, let alone special needs kids, and so they tend to treat every problem the way cops treat problems with indiscriminate, blind, furious violence.

In August of two fifteen, a Kentucky Sheriff's deputy handcuffed an eight year old boy and a nine year old girl, both disabled, for disorderly behavior tied to their disabilities. Since they were too small to handcuff properly, the officer had to handcuff their biceps. The whole thing was caught on tape and you can hear the cops tell the boy you can do what we ask you to or you

can suffer the consequences. It was so I taught special lead and my kid was, like, my kid had some serious behavioral problems, right to the point where he had seventies something workman's compt claims processed against him because of all the injuries he caused people. He permanently crippled a gym teacher. You know, not long before I started the job, by predecessor, he'd broken his skull, so he was like he was a kid that required a lot of specialized care.

And most days my job was to just get hit in the face by this kid because the other teachers were like older ladies who couldn't who couldn't safely be hit in the face by a seventeen year old um.

And we had incidents were like this kid would like smash his face and like a bus window to get attention, but also he would be covered in blood and cops would wind up being called him because it was like happening on a bus on like a street and ship, and the police, like I I guess thankfully at the time, I was frustrated because like I was having to deal with this like violent bleeding kid and the police were just like stand back looking terrified and have no fucking

idea what to do. But reading all of this, it's like, oh, thank god they didn't get involved. They would have shot that boy, Oh totally, they would have put a fucking bullet in him. Yeah. Both my parents are special ed teachers, and my dad had like your first job where like his his first gig was like at this middle school and kids would just like throw their heads into walls and like it was nuts. But you do have to have a special I mean, my dad was like an

angel dealing with them. I can't imagine with cops. Yeah. I certainly wasn't an angel at dealing with him because I was too young to be doing that job. But like, I'm glad I wasn't. I'm glad it wasn't a cop dealing with it. Um. Yeah. So for most of the odds, schools steadily increased the number of cops on campus. They also pumped more and more weapons into the police departments

dedicated to protecting those schools. The Washington Post reports at least a hundred and twenty school affiliated police forces in thirty states have made use of the ten thirty three weapons transfer program. This has gotten rather famous lately. Um, it's the thing that let's cops get things like tanks and grenade launchers. Um, so this is why, like the

l A School police department has a tank. Um. Yeah, the ten thirty three programs, So that like throughout the odds, they're just getting pumped full of military grade weaponry as they are choke holding eleven year olds and charging them with assault. So militarized police have meant that militarized police tactics keep getting used on children. The most infamously vile example of this may have been the two thousand three squat raid on Goose Creek High School in South Carolina.

The goal had been defined drugs and guns. The result was that dozens of heavily armed cops forced hundreds of mostly black students onto the ground for no reason. Students, of course, we're not warned, and many panicked and ran when officers indistinguishable from soldiers leapt out of closets and out from under stairwells, screaming and waving guns. Yeah yeah, yeah, they were just like, what don't we just really funk with these kids? Like, what don't we just have an

army come in and funk these kids? Up um and no no drugs were found, like no contrabound was found. UM, but huge numbers of students were traumatized. And the school administrator, who coordinated the whole thing because there was a local outroar, apologized, but he stated that quote, once police are on campus, they are in control. UM. So honestly, the students of Goose Creek ought to be grateful because none of them were beaten or assaulted by crowd control weapons in a

serious way that day. Um. But this too has actually become very common in other schools and in the end of policing, Alex Vitality writes quote and two dozen tend. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action lawsuit against the Birmingham, Alabama Schools, claiming they were systematically using

excessive force. The alleged that from two thousand, six hundred and ninety nine students have been sprayed with a combination pepper spray and tear gas agent called freeze plus P, which causes extreme pain and skin irritation and can impede breathing and vision. All of the students sprayed were African American. One student was pregnant, many were innocent bystanders, and some

were completely non violent when sprayed. In most cases, officers made no effort to treat those sprayed, and some were held in police custody to await arraignment, wearing chemically coded clothing and to this. In fifteen, a federal court found the school district guilty of civil rights violations and banned the use of a spray. A seventeen year old high school student in Texas was tazard by an s R

O while trying to break up a school fight. The student was critically injured by the resulting fall and blow to the head and spent fifty two days in a medically induced COMA surveillance video showed that the young man was actually stepping away from the officers when he was tazard. You can find a million stories like this, because it's bad to have these people in schools. Oh my god, Can we just go back to hitting the kids like Jesus Christ? Yeah? Man, that paddle doesn't sound so bad now,

does it. Yeah? Yeah, bring back the fucking paddle. Uh? Or not? Maybe just not do violence to children. I don't know. I don't want to be an extremist in my political beliefs. It's think it's time for an ad break, all right, Well, enjoy our ads from Safari Land, the company making all of the tear gas that's getting dumped into American streets. Oh we're back. Oh my god, what a nice night. It's not nighttime, it's the middle of

the day. I am real cracked out. So violence by s r o s against children is terribly common between two thou tend into than fifteen. At least twenty eight U S students were severely injured by school cops, and one was killed, fourteen year old Derek Lopez. His crime was punching a fellow student and then running away when the school cop told him to freeze. The s r O chase Lopez and shot him to death in a nearby backyard shed, claiming the boy had bull rushed him. Yeah.

Pretty cool that a fist fight at school led to a man with a gun chasing a child. That was a situation that needed to happen. Oh my god, And the kid just had fists. No, of course, he was fourteen year old boy. He was a fourteen year old boy in school. I mean, it's one of those things I think about all the fist fights I got into at school. And it's a shame there wasn't a man with a gun there to chase any of us. Otherwise it might have ended, you know, thankfully. I don't know.

It's just bad. It's bad. This is bad. I don't have a joke. So for all of this, Courtney, like again, the reason all these cops are in all these schools is because a ship like Columby and everybody getting worried that someone's gonna murder kids at schools. For all of this, there's not a single solitary case of a school resource officer preventing a school shooting. The closest thing they have is a guy who was arrested by his s r

o s after shooting two people. But he had finished the shooting when this this the school resource officers like got him, Like he went after his girlfriend and somebody else and he he shot them and then he was done. Uh And I guess they stopped that. Like they didn't stop that. They never stop it. They're bad at there that job. So, as it turns out, students in schools that have police in them report feeling less safe than

students in similar schools without police. No evidence exists to even suggest that the presence of school resource officers reduces violent crime or any other kind of crime for that matter. What they do, though, is arrest a whole funk load of kids. More than a million children have been arrested by school resource officers in the last twenty years. That's good. Yeah, that's a lot of kids with criminal records getting pumped

into the system. Yeah. And of course, like a huge amount of research shows that punishing kids in this way reduces their odds of graduating massively. A lot of these kids never get back to school. It increases their rods of developing a criminal record. Uh. And that's for kids who don't get a criminal record because of the charges filed against them by an s R. Oh, like the Virginia middle schooler who was charged with as salt and battery for throwing a baby carrot at her teacher. Baby carrots,

Well it was an assault baby carrot. Yeah, the most assault weapon ever. That carrot was trimmed down. Yeah, it wasn't even a full carrot, didn't even have the skin

on it. Yeah, it's pretty pretty fun that that happened. Um, So all of these factors combined together to create again what's called the school to prison pipeline, which has gotten bad enough that it's sometimes called the cradle to prison pipeline because a lot of kids are kind of dumped into places where this will happen to them from the very beginning of their school career. Suspensions, which almost never

occurred in the nineteen seventies, have become routine. In the two ten academic year, over five hundred schools in the country suspended more than half of their students. By two thousands six, nearly fifteen percent of Blackmail middle school students were suspended in a given year. Now, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, all of these suspensions and arrests of students lead to a hell of a

lot of incarcerated kids. Too. Many of them end up at adult facilities, and if you pay it any attention to them the nation lately, you know why that's not a good thing. But the unfortunate reality is that the children's facilities specifically made for juvenile offenders aren't much better, and sometimes they're worse. Nearly of juvenile to linquents in this country are sent to private, for profit facilities. For many kids, that means some form of boot camp, juvenile

prison or detention center. Ironically, many of these kids wind up in the care of people who are criminals themselves. And this brings me to the story of one James F. Slattery, founder of the Correctional Services Corporation, among other businesses, geared at making money by incarcerating kids. In twenty years, more than forty thousand girls and boys in sixteen states went

to facilities run by James Slattery. An expanse of Huffington Post investigation Prisoners of Profit makes it agonizingly clear what is a bad idea this was. Slattery got his start owing a chain of shitty hotels in the nineteen eighties, and he was not good at this. His buildings were stuck with hundreds of code violations and notorious for being

vermin invested hell holes. In six two men got into a fight at the hallway of one of his properties and fell down a broken elevator shaft, dying on impact. Several weeks later, a fire broke out and killed four children in the same building. So Slattery and his business partner decided that the hospitality business might not be for them, largely because people care when your customers die horribly due

to your ill maintained facilitlities. They decided to move to a business where no one cared about the clientele and started selling their space to the government to act as re entry housing for newly released federal inmates. A new company, Smore Incorporated, was formed to oversee the business, and I'm gonna quote from the Huffington Post now. As federal prison officials awarded Smore an emergency contract to operate a halfway

house in Brooklyn. Local community leaders challenged the decision, questioning why the same people who had managed problem plagued welfare hotels should be given fresh responsibility. Less than three years after as More Lope opened La Marquis to former inmates, federal inspectors from the Bureau of Prisons found that parts

of the building were turning to ruin. Inspectors documented low paid, untrained employees, poor building conditions from vermin, leaky plumbing to expose electrical wires and other fire hazards, and inadequate barely edible food. Federal prison officials were close to canceling the contract in nine two, according to media accounts at the time, but they said conditions at the facilities started to improve

after frequent inspections, and a federal lawsuit won. The Marquis employee, Richard Moore, alleged that he had been severely beaten by another employee at the direction of management after he reported poor conditions to federal inspectors. In another federal lawsuit, for female inmates asserted that they had been raped and assaulted by Smore's private resident advocate, the employee who was supposed to protect inmates by handling their grievances. So you might

say that, um, he wasn't good at this job. That like that the company he made was fundamentally terrible at this job. But Smore made a lot of money, and soon soon the company had expanded its operations to Fort Worth, where it opened a boot camp for young boys, as well as New Jersey and Washington, where it opened immigrant detention centers. The company went public, netting Slattery five point

two million dollars. The next year, a riot broke out in his New Jersey immigrant detention center when an organized group of inmates assaulted guards and took over the facility. Subsequent investigations found that, among other things, Slattery's guards constantly sexually harassed female inmates, uh and stole regularly from other inmates. Training was virtually non existent. Now. I n S did

not find as more for this or cancel its contract. Instead, they allowed the company to sell their I n S contract to the Corrections Corporation of America for six million dollars, because fuck it. The whole disaster was enough to make Slattery opt for a change of venue, though, and he moved the company's headquarters south to Florida in nineteen six

and changed the company name to Correctional Services Corporation. He decided his new focus would be incarcerating children, since that had seemed relatively easy so far compared to locking up adults.

Florida was a great place to do this. In the nineteen eighties, the state had started outsourcing juvenile attention to private companies to cut costs, and in the nineteen nineties a bunch of teenagers had killed people, leading to a crackdown on juvenile crime and a soaring juvenile prison population. So that's the situation. This guy starts by running cheap hotels for like houseless people, and he gets a bunch of them killed, and then he starts running cheap halfway

houses for people who are getting out of prison. And a bunch of them, you know, get raped and assaulted. And finally he's like, you know what, the job for me is watching after children. Oh my god, what a resume this guy. And the State of Florida is like yes. In Slattery One bids to make two facilities in Florida.

Both prisons were meant for boys aged fourteen to nineteen who had been convicted as adults, but whoopsie doodles, the state realized too late that it had had enough beds for those kids, so instead, the Florida Department of Justice filled these prisons with random delinquents who hadn't been tried as adults and weren't meant to be put in such restrictive settings. And a press release announcing the construction of

these new facilities, Slattery called them the future of American corrections. Now, appropriately enough, the future of American corrections was an instant nightmare. The first Correctional Services Corporation prison to open was the Pohokey Youth Development Center, northwest of Miami. It started taking inmates in early nineteen. The Huffington Post reports quote within months, local judges were hearing complaints about abuse of staff. Prison

like conditions and food full of maggots included. According to recent interviews and state audits and court transcripts from the time, Miami Dade County Circuit Judge Tom Peter Person drove an hour and a half to Pahokey in nineteen ninety seven and started snapping pictures. As a juvenile judge, he thought he was sending boys to a moderate risk program with outdoor wilderness activities. What he found was a hardcore prison. I came back with all those pictures and I raised

hell about it, Peterson recalled in an interview. He saw small twelve year olds can find along much stronger seventeen year olds. Boys were served food he called an edible. That same year, local public defenders asked another judge to move children from Pahokey into a less punitive program. Follow Up reviews by state contracted auditors confirmed to the operation

was dysfunctional. Now evidence of this dysfunction included a child with unpre paid prison gambling debts who was beaten so badly by three other kids that he had to have his spleen removed. In another incidents, four staff members allowed two boys to fight for ten minutes while they watched. No one reported this incident. Thanks to this prison's rural location, rats and spiders were common. No efforts were taken to control pests within the prison, leading to an epidemic of

bites among the incarcerated children. Slattery's kid prison was found to be holding children past their scheduled release dates too, in order to more money out of the government. This was literally a crime, but no one was punished. Judges did, however, start to demand that Poky be closed. The States stopped sending new kids in August of nineteen nine, but did not cancel Slattery's contract. They allowed the company to withdraw from its contract eight months early, thus letting it continue

to bid for contracts within the state of Florida. Now, none of these abuse allegations, the revelations of literal crimes harmed business at all. By nine, Correctional Services Corporation was making two hundred and twenty three million dollars a year, more than double what it had ranked in three years earlier. Slattery used his newfound cash to buy a rival corporation, Youth Services International. This put him in charge of five new facilities in Florida, and that all worked as well

as you might guess. Problems grew so bad at one facility named Hickey, that the Justice Department commenced an investigation. It revealed that staff repeatedly concealed evidence of physical assaults, only disclosing two thirds of such cases to the government. Lack of staff, a cost cutting measure by slattery, made it easier for boys to enter each other's rooms and commit all The Justice Department concluded that these conditions violated

the constitutional and federal statutory rights of the youth residents. Again, no one was penalized. The school turned the facility over to the state, escaping any financial burden to fix it, and sailed onto profits elsewhere. In two thousand one, eighteen year old Brian and Alexander died of pneumonia while confined at a Correctional Services Corporation boot camp near Fort Worth. The Texas Ranges conducted an investigation into the matter, and

the Huffington's Posts reporting summarizes it. Quote other inmates at the facility had told investigators that they knew something was wrong with Alexander. In early January, he had stopped eating, his lips turned to purple, and he shivered even while taking hot showers. He begged a nurse and drill instructors to take him to the hospital, but they told him he was faking it, according to the Texas Rangers report. As Alexander pleaded for help, one help, one drill instructor

told him to go ahead and die already. According to the investigative report, the nurse connivate Rays, told him to stop lying about his illness. Other inmates that the facility saw Alexander coughing up blood into trash cans and frequently struggling to breathe. According to the report, a week after he began complaining, staff finally took Alexander to the hospital.

He died there two days later. A doctor told Texas Rangers that Alexander could have survived if the staff had taken him to get a chest X ray when he first reported feeling sick. So that's great that they're like, if you would have done literally anything, just anything. Yeah, you had weeks. You could have taken literally any action to save this child's life, but refused to. And that's fine. You will face no corporate penalties for this. I mean, actually they did a bit. In two thousand two, a

judge found Rays guilty of negligent homicide. The Nurse and Correctional Services Corporation was found liable to thirty eight million dollars in the wrongful death suit. That same year, auditors at a Maryland facility found that employees there had forced inmates to fight on Saturdays as a way to settle arguments. Fines, Negative Justice Department reports, and even furious judges plagued Slatteries companies constantly, but they never stopped getting contracts. All over

the United States. For most of the last five years, y s I, the company's Slattery bought oversaw about nine per sent to Florida's juvenile jail beds. Y s I was also responsible for fifteen percent of all reported cases of excessive force and injured youths and state jail beds. Forty thousand kids have been sent to Slattery's prisons in the last twenty years, and state funding has made him a very rich man. He's poured a lot of that

money back into the pockets of state officials. Slattery donated more than four hundred thousand dollars to various politicians in a fifteen year period, two hundred and seventy six thousand of which went to the Florida Republican Party. He's one of its largest donors. Now interesting, Yeah, that's cool. Good. More than forty percent of youth offenders sent to one of Florida's juvenile prisons wind up arrested or convicted of

another crime within a year of their release. In New York State, by comparison, where youth offenders are never put in private institutions, just twenty five percent of juvenile offenders are convicted again within a year of release. It is hard to overstate what a disaster Slattery's facilities are on a societal level and on a human level. Children at his facilities, interviewed by The Huffington Post recalled being served bloody raw chicken and finding flies and i'd pre cooked meals.

Inmates were allowed to gamble on sporting events and earn the right to take other students food during the next meal. One inmate, Angela Phillips, were called We were kept like rats in a trap in a maze. There was no outlet and no stimulation, so they would just turn on each other and turn on staff. That's how it was day and day out. So that's good. That's the episode.

That's just the situation. It's a real problem. Just super depressed. Okay, great, yeah, this is this is why a number of cities, including the one I'm in Portland, but also you know, places like mine, apples and stuff, are increasingly like pulling cops out of schools, which is how like the start of this, but clearly it goes beyond like. For one thing, why isn't the slattery guy going to get like investigated and I don't know, thrown in a hole somewhere. He shouldn't

be allowed to own anything. No, he shouldn't be allowed to own anything. It's not great, very frustrating, frustrating stuff. Introduced the episode, I thought we were going to be talking about kids in cages, like uh at the border, and it's just we have such an obsession with putting kids in cages in our entire country. Oh yeah, I mean yes, we have a long history of that that goes on well beyond any of this. Based on the title of the dock for the script, I thought you

were gonna be talking about that commercial cars for kids. No, no, this actually was initially about a completely other horrible thing done to children. Um, I just haven't had time to finish writing that one. But yeah, there's a whole scandal where judges um locked children in prisons in exchange for direct payments to themselves, um, which we're just not even going to get into yet. So good stuff. Everybody feeling good today. I'm just going to carry the memory of

the bloodied chicken throughout the day. I feel like that is my fuel for the rest of the day. But disgusting image. Whoa, yeah, it's great. Well, Courtney, you want to tell the listeners where they can find you on the interwebs, dot com, slash backslash net, um, you can find me everywhere on the internet at Courtney Kosak. Check out my podcast Sophia Alexander and I my co host. We got happy ending massages in Tokyo right before the choir,

so yeah, that's a good escape. I got a sad ending massage in Tokyo once he got a he got a phone call and found out his mom had died. It was really it was a bummer, god, really sad massage. Really, I mean I made him finish, but yeah, very sad massage. Christ Well, on that note, Wow, you can follow Robert for more loving stuff like that. That? I right, okay? On Twitter, you can pull us at bastards pod. You can buy our merch, including our uh what's what's the

f d A one. I can't get it right. Every FDA approved to prevent all diseases, because those masks are in fact FDA approved to prevent all diseases. Um. And if the FDA has a problem with it, you know, uh what do you? You fucking cowards spend what six thousand dollars a year on weaponry f DA? Like, you can't, you can't take me down. You don't have the guns f d A. That's right, I'm calling your asses out. And on that note, this is the end of the episode.

This is the end of the episode. Thank you, Courtney, thank you,