Children in the U.S. Told: Go Directly to Jail

Tweet Reading this Sharon Smith article about the jailing of children in this country will flabbergast you--I guarantee it! Linda

"When kindergartner Desre'e Watson of Avon Park, Florida threw a temper tantrum in school last month, she was arrested and charged with battery on a school official (a felony), disruption of a school function and resisting a law enforcement officer (both misdemeanors).

"Watson's arrest is not at all unusual in Florida. Back in December 2000, the St. Petersburg Times reported, "Nowadays, children as young as 6 or 7 are carted off in handcuffs, locked up and saddled with permanent criminal records More than 4,500 kids 11 and under were charged with crimes in Florida during the fiscal year that ended in June."

"The Times continued, "Kids as young as 7 spend the night in detention centers. Kids as young as 10 are sent away for a year or more. And in a very few cases, children enter the justice system at even younger ages, such as a 5-year-old St. Petersburg boy charged this year with burglary; and incredibly, a preschool arson suspect who went through a pretrial diversion program in South Florida at age 3."

"In December 2001, after arresting a 10-year-old autistic fourth grader who disrupted a special education class, the Okaloosa, Florida Sheriff's Department's Rick Hord defended his actions, arguing, "[T]here's no question but that we had all the elements of a felony crime present."
Not all children are treated equally. Race and class loom large. As the Times noted, "there is a stark difference among arrests of children by race -- one that gets sharper as the children get younger." The young targets of "zero tolerance" arrests nationwide are overwhelmingly Black, Latino and Native American. In 2000, according to the Suffolk University Law School Juvenile Justice Center (JJC), African-American children-who made up just 15 percent of the U.S. juvenile population-were 46 percent of those incarcerated and 52 percent of those whose cases ended up in adult criminal court. Black children are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites, while Latino and Native American children are placed in correctional institutions at two and a half times that of whites.

From Counterpunch.org