Fast-forward to 2016. I was on a team of “hosts” chosen by the actress Anna Deavere Smith as part of her most recent one-woman show, “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.” After Act 1, in which the audience saw a video of Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore and of high school students being roughed up by police, and heard first-person descriptions of the school-to-prison pipeline, our team led small-group discussions with randomly selected audience members. One public high school girl in my group described her school’s metal detectors and a police officer who puts pink handcuffs on students — mostly girls — to show them “what’s going to happen to them.”
The final question we asked audience members: “Where are you in relation to the school-to-prison pipeline (1,000 miles away is still a relation), and what can you do to ameliorate it?” This column is part of my answer.
Among studies of educational inequality, Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (see review in the Winter 2017 issue of Independent School) and James E. Ryan’s Five Miles Away, a World Apart, stand out for meticulous research and explanatory power.
Like Putnam, Ryan begins locally and expands nationally, first contrasting two Virginia schools, one (Thomas Jefferson, or Tee-Jay) inside the city of Richmond, the other (Freeman) just beyond. Ryan avoids sensationalism in favor of a careful analytic approach, noting, for example, that “the differences are more subtle than those that jump off the pages of … accounts that contrast high-flying suburban schools with completely dysfunctional urban ones.” Although Tee-Jay is not among the worst urban schools, the pattern Ryan observes is hardly comforting: “A metal detector marks the entrance to the school, and police officers monitor the halls and the cafeteria; during one visit to the school, I watched an officer break up a fight in the cafeteria and drag a student away.” Studies over a number of years have proven that “campuses with larger populations of students of color are more likely to use harsh surveillance techniques” (The Atlantic, “When School Feels Like Prison,” September 12, 2016).
Ryan agrees with Putnam that the students in these schools “have unequal opportunities and face different futures,” but instead of focusing on race or class, he examines a systemic issue: “the most important boundary in public education: the boundary between city and suburban schools. This boundary has been the fault line of public education for half a century.”
The “half a century” statement is no rough estimate. The suburbanization of America in the mid-20th century, abetted by federal and private housing policies and highway construction, had the effect of “keeping blacks in the city and out of the suburbs.” But this trend needn’t have resulted in a city/suburban or white/nonwhite educational gap. It was a 1974 Supreme Court decision that closed the door on cross-district integration, affirming a pattern that Ryan calls “save the cities, but spare the suburbs.” Politically, this pattern has resulted in halfhearted efforts to improve urban education — through charter schools, vouchers, and high-stakes testing — but without ever seriously challenging the ability of suburbs to isolate themselves financially and demographically from their cities.
Are there exceptions to this pattern of inequity? David L. Kirp’s Improbable Scholars shows how Union City, New Jersey — poor, immigrant-filled, and densely populated — is overcoming these challenges. The key ingredients: a citywide commitment, from the mayor to the teaching staff and a collaborative ethos, which Kirp describes as “teachers and principals working together, not operating as independent contractors; principals trained to ‘lead the learning,’ rather than to manage the building.” Perhaps the key element is that each grade’s teachers work as teams to learn from each other and improve instruction, focusing on proven methods for student learning and minimizing attention to high-stakes test prep.
Kirp describes the pre- and post-test weeks as “Where Fun Goes to Die (And Be Reborn).” (Interestingly, almost exactly the same strategies have been used in Finland since the 1990s to vault that nation to the top of the West’s ranking of schools. This transformation is well described in Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons 2.0.)
But if the school chasm is the result of political decisions, unintended consequences, and insufficient concern for all children, the prison end of the pipeline includes more questionable motives, both economic and social. Two powerful studies, each in its own way, demonstrate the challenge our prisons give to America’s principle of equal justice under law.
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness argues, based on historical and sociological data, that the astonishing levels of incarceration reached in this country over the past three or four decades represent a new level of “social control” over people of color as damaging as its predecessors, from slavery to Jim Crow. Most of her information is familiar: the largest total number of prisoners and rate of imprisonment in the world; the sixfold increase of that population even as crime rates decreased; the militarization of local police and a huge federal entry into the “war on drugs”; the U.S. Supreme Court decision stripping Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure; and, of course, the immense disproportionality with which these actions focus on people of color.
Alexander draws all this data into an overwhelming picture of systemic racial injustice, to which she adds other less well-known elements. One of the most pernicious of these is the economic gains that “grant law enforcement a pecuniary interest in the drug war” through equipment and operating grants, forfeiture rules, and even cash bonuses for drug arrests (but not for other types). This “pay-to-play” nexus is strengthened by the privatization of prisons, whose owners, such as CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), have an openly stated financial interest in blocking “leniency in conviction and sentencing practices.”
Finally, Alexander shows that even a single arrest can place a person in “a parallel universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal.” Among these are possible lifelong removal of voting rights, access to public housing, food stamps, educational assistance, even driving privileges. Alexander argues that, given all these barriers, “a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or black person … in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow.”
While Alexander staggers the reader with the enormity of the issues in our prison system, Bryan Stevenson, in Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, exemplifies Mother Teresa’s dictum, “If I think of the many, I will not act; if I think of the one, I will.”
Stevenson, a civil rights attorney, has fought injustice in policing, trials, and sentencing for more than 30 years, exposing shocking patterns of racial bias, inadequate defense, suborning of perjury, judicial indifference, and abusive prison treatment, primarily toward African Americans. His exemplary case, which runs as a bass line through the book, is of Walter McMillan, an African American singled out by police in Alabama for no apparent reason, demonized as a murderer and drug dealer on false evidence, and refused a new trial for six years, until tenacious work by his lawyers ultimately demolished the case against him. Along the way, Stevenson takes on many other cases: pregnant women shackled during delivery, prisoners with multiple sclerosis denied wheelchairs, decades of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders cruelly charged as adults, an innocent man imprisoned at age 16 and only released after 50 years and the onset of blindness, and even inmates in cages like those we condemn when used by the Viet Cong or ISIS.
Despite having read many books about slavery, the Holocaust, and other past and present atrocities, I found the stories in Just Mercy so disturbing that I could rarely read more than one chapter before seeking a respite from my distress and outrage that such abuses could be perpetrated in our society.
Fortunately, as the decades and Stevenson’s work progress, there are a growing number of successes: the elimination of the death penalty, the elimination of life without parole for youthful offenders, and the exoneration of more than 150 people wrongly convicted of capital crimes. A few lamps illuminating the darkness do not amount to much light at the end of the tunnel, but those beacons provide necessary hope.
Of all my readings, the most heartening is Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart, the story of 20 years working with Los Angeles gang members. The book is subtitled “The Power of Boundless Compassion,” and Boyle, a Jesuit, exemplifies that compassion. Despite having presided at 168 funerals of young people, he retains, and spreads, hope, offering work to gang members at Homeboy Industries (where I’ll be buying all my holiday gifts this year) and combining the erudition of his background with a rich layer of street smarts and wit. Few other writers could cite Dante, Pema Chodron, and Rumi, and also tell a new jobholder, “If I find out, and I will, that you’re hanging, banging, or slanging, with all due respect and love — I will fire your ass.”
Finally, Father Boyle offered an observation seven years ago that seems even more accurate today: “The wrong idea has taken hold in this world. And the idea is this: There just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.”
That is an idea that must change.