Speaker 1: M u um you know um pod? Was that an interest?
Speaker 1: Is that how you start a show? Great? Do it? Literally,
Speaker 1: I'll take I'll take anything at this point. Okay, well
Speaker 1: just a grunt. I just don't Yeah, this is the bastards.
Speaker 1: All do your job. This is behind the bastards. Continue.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you, thank you. You know what I hate?
Speaker 1: Sophie what Evans the host of this podcast? Do you
Speaker 1: haven't introduced yourself? He is Robert Evans. Words words and
Speaker 1: my guest today, Courtney Cossack and I are going to
Speaker 1: sit quietly for an hour and a half and that's
Speaker 1: going to be the podcast. No words. I'm doing a
Speaker 1: bold new thing and podcasting, or we don't do anything
Speaker 1: here that bold. There's plenty of meditation pod us that
Speaker 1: do that. People are allowed to meditate, people are not
Speaker 1: allowed to meditate. I will I will kick your ass
Speaker 1: if you meditate during our quiet podcast. Be really stressed
Speaker 1: out the whole time. Courtney, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1: You know, I'm pretty good. Considering. Considering is something happening? No,
Speaker 1: just the world? Just the dumpster fire? Oh, I saw
Speaker 1: a lovely dumpster fire the other night, so that they
Speaker 1: could burn a police union down. Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 1: was a good buck dumpster fire. Courtney, speaking of children,
Speaker 1: do you like kids? Yeah? Yeah, not really? Okay, Well, um,
Speaker 1: I was going to ask how you feel about incarcerating
Speaker 1: children and penitentiaries for what most people would consider modest misbehavior.
Speaker 1: But I guess you're fine with that. So again back
Speaker 1: to the ninety minutes of silence that we had planned.
Speaker 1: I'm into civil rights. I mean, I feel like kids can.
Speaker 1: I just don't want one. So kids get civil rights?
Speaker 1: In your head, you're a fan of that. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a bold stance, children getting civil rights. Um, that's
Speaker 1: the episode we're gonna talk about. What this is about
Speaker 1: the war on children? Um, that that our country has
Speaker 1: been fighting for for a while. Now did you did
Speaker 1: you know we were fighting a war on children? I
Speaker 1: it's been brought to my attention. Yeah, we fucking hate
Speaker 1: kids in this country. We absolutely hate kids. It's it
Speaker 1: fully rules how much this country hates kids. As of
Speaker 1: right now this moment, about two hundred thousand children into
Speaker 1: the adult criminal justice system every year, mostly for non
Speaker 1: violent crimes. About ten thousand children are housed in adult
Speaker 1: prisons and jails every single day. Uh, and about of
Speaker 1: incarcerated kids are locked away in private, for profit facilities.
Speaker 1: While the number of incarcerated children has fallen somewhat in
Speaker 1: recent years, it is still massively escalated over where it
Speaker 1: was in the past. In ninete, only a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: or hundred and seven thousand children were incarcerated every year,
Speaker 1: so it's roughly doubled since nineteen uh From nineteen eight three,
Speaker 1: though tonight day to ninety seven, the number of juveniles
Speaker 1: incarcerated and adult facilities jumped by around three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty six. So it used to be way lower than
Speaker 1: it was back in the eighties, like like a fraction
Speaker 1: of the number of kids were incarcerated as are now.
Speaker 1: So that's cool. That is that is not cool. How
Speaker 1: did we get here, Robert? How did we get here? Well?
Speaker 1: I wish we were going to explain that, but again,
Speaker 1: this podcast is mostly going to be ninety minutes of silence. Um, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll shut the funk up. It's okay, No, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: shut the fun I need to. I'm I am very
Speaker 1: strung at. I was getting shot at repeatedly by federal
Speaker 1: agents again last night, so I'm a little bit I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit punchy. I apologize, thank you for being
Speaker 1: cool for me saying I'll take anything at this point
Speaker 1: that grunt earlier fantastic. Let's do this all right, all right?
Speaker 1: So Courtney, the US incarceraates children at a rate five
Speaker 1: times higher than the next highest nation, South Africa. Um.
Speaker 1: So like that that's where we are. Like, if you're looking,
Speaker 1: if you're playing a global game, um, you're looking at like,
Speaker 1: what are the things the United States does better? One
Speaker 1: of the things the best, one of the things on
Speaker 1: that short list, one of the things that no country
Speaker 1: can take away from US, is like we're the best
Speaker 1: at locking children away. We're so good at it. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: like we you think fucking Paraguay can lock up children,
Speaker 1: Like they don't know shit about locking up kids in Paraguay.
Speaker 1: They just let him roam, they start rome, They just
Speaker 1: let him go on the streets like they're goddamn Like,
Speaker 1: uh juju bees, what's a juju bi? I don't know.
Speaker 1: They let him out, they let them, they let him wander.
Speaker 1: It's a problem. So in nineteen sixty, yeah, let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about where this all started. How America got to
Speaker 1: the point that it is now. With all these kids
Speaker 1: not walking around and instead locked up in criminal facilities. Uh.
Speaker 1: It started, well, kind of the the legal jurisprudence around
Speaker 1: whether or not it's cool to throw kids in a small,
Speaker 1: dark hole owned by the government. That all really started
Speaker 1: to kick off in the nineteen sixties. Um, and for
Speaker 1: a while they judges and stuff like pretty consistently cited
Speaker 1: with kids having rights. It started in nineteen sixty four
Speaker 1: with fifteen year old Gerald Galt. He was convicted of
Speaker 1: juvenile delinquency by an Arizona juvenile judge and sentenced to
Speaker 1: be incarcerated until age twenty one. So that was like
Speaker 1: a seven year sentence, and his crime was making a
Speaker 1: lewd phone call. Oh my god. Well, yeah, you got
Speaker 1: a lock of kid away for a quarter of his
Speaker 1: life for that ship, just during the formative years. No
Speaker 1: big deal, He'll be fine and throw him in a hole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he made a dirty phone call. Six years, seven years Jesus.
Speaker 1: So the young Mr Galt enjoyed no defense counsel, which
Speaker 1: you might recognize as a violation of what this nation
Speaker 1: considers to be his basic human rights. He was also
Speaker 1: sentenced to a vastly higher penalty than an adult would
Speaker 1: have received for the same crime, because again, fifteen years old,
Speaker 1: that's like a six year sentence. An adult at the
Speaker 1: time charged with the same crime making a lewed phone
Speaker 1: call would have effaced at most two months of jail. Um.
Speaker 1: So were there was a lawsuit as a result of
Speaker 1: Jared Galt's case, and his parents filed for a bit
Speaker 1: of habeas corpus. Now, at the time, juveniles were not
Speaker 1: allowed to appeal in California, so the Superior Court and
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court of the state backed up this nonsense.
Speaker 1: Galt's family appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court and
Speaker 1: they agreed to hear the case for the specific purpose
Speaker 1: of determining the procedural rights of a juvenile defendant. The
Speaker 1: courts nineteen sixty seven decision determine that kids have the
Speaker 1: same due process rights as adults, including the right to counsel.
Speaker 1: So that's good, that's a win. Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1: But wait, was this was he poor? Or how did
Speaker 1: this even happen? Um? I mean it was Arizona. They
Speaker 1: they you know, we'll talk a little bit about how
Speaker 1: it happened, but the gist of it is that while
Speaker 1: consistently in this period, like the Supreme Court kind of
Speaker 1: tend has tend tend to decide on this on the
Speaker 1: side of child's rights. A lot of judges really fucking
Speaker 1: hated kids and a lot of cops really hated kids,
Speaker 1: because those are both groups of people. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of what it comes down to, based on at
Speaker 1: least my reading, is that judges and cops are both
Speaker 1: people who are used to receiving a certain kind of
Speaker 1: respect um often a fear based respect, and kids don't
Speaker 1: give a ship. And when you are disrespected by a
Speaker 1: child as one of those types of people, because you're
Speaker 1: that type of person, your instinct is to lock them
Speaker 1: in a hole for a large chunk of their life.
Speaker 1: Punishable character flaw. That's not good. I could call yelling
Speaker 1: at the cops a character flaw. Yeah. So the Galt
Speaker 1: case was the start of a series of major wins
Speaker 1: in the field of children's legal rights. In Tinker v.
Speaker 1: Des Moine's Independent Community School District in nineteen sixty nine case,
Speaker 1: the court ruled that public school students cannot be punished
Speaker 1: for expressing their personal opinions on campus, so long as
Speaker 1: doing so does not interfere with the work of the
Speaker 1: school or with other students. In nineteen seventy, the court
Speaker 1: ruled the juveniles are constitutionally entitled to proof beyond a
Speaker 1: reasonable doubt before they can be declared delinquent. The sixties were,
Speaker 1: in general, a pretty good time to be an advocate
Speaker 1: for the legal rights of children. This period of winds
Speaker 1: occurred right up until nineteen seventy seven, which is the
Speaker 1: year the court ruled on Ingraham v. Right. This is
Speaker 1: the case that determined schools were not violating the Constitution
Speaker 1: by quote paddling the recalcitant children on the buttocks with
Speaker 1: the fat, flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long,
Speaker 1: three to four inches wide and about one and a
Speaker 1: half inch thick. Um. So that's nineteen seventy seven. The
Speaker 1: court rules schools can still paddle kids. It's not limiting
Speaker 1: their rights to paddle them. Children were, however, limited to
Speaker 1: five licks from a paddle um, which is written into jurisprudence.
Speaker 1: And that's that's why did you ever get hit in
Speaker 1: the school by your teachers? I did not. I was
Speaker 1: forced to uh crawl around on the floor. That was
Speaker 1: probably the most terrible thing, but it was a pretty
Speaker 1: bad punishment. Uh not hit though, Oh my god, I
Speaker 1: can't imagine. My mom always tells me stories about getting
Speaker 1: hit by nuns when she was in my school. Paddled.
Speaker 1: Definitely paddled your school paddled. Yeah, was that legal? Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Oklahoma. Yeah yeah, I forgot about OKLAHOLM. Yeah. They
Speaker 1: were like, of course you can paddle kids. Can you
Speaker 1: not paddle kids? Is that Okay? That's the question we
Speaker 1: have in Oklahoma because we're so busy paddle and kids.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the Supreme Court rules and seventy seven that
Speaker 1: you can paddle kids at school, you just can't lick
Speaker 1: them more than five times. In ninety nine, another court
Speaker 1: case rules that minors can be placed in state run
Speaker 1: mental health facilities for basically no reason without any kind
Speaker 1: of like do process really, um. And so in the
Speaker 1: late seventies, this kind of trail of anti child court
Speaker 1: cases continued and sort of the you know, this thing
Speaker 1: that had started in the sixties with children getting you know,
Speaker 1: awarded more and more or not, but having more and
Speaker 1: more rights kind of recognized in court cases. That turns
Speaker 1: around and uh, courts start chipping away at the rights
Speaker 1: of children and to not be locked in dark holes
Speaker 1: by the government for long periods of time. And this
Speaker 1: continues until nineteen eighty four, when the Supreme Court rules
Speaker 1: on Shall v. Martin and affirms that children do, in
Speaker 1: fact have a lesser inherent interest in liberty than adults. Uh.
Speaker 1: The justification for this is that they are always in
Speaker 1: some form of custody. So while Galt affirmed, you know
Speaker 1: that the first case we talked about a firm that
Speaker 1: children had the right to the same due process as adults,
Speaker 1: Shall flipped the table and declared that juvenile attention facilities
Speaker 1: are basically the same as kids living at home or
Speaker 1: in a foster facility. So it really doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: kids get sentenced to something without having a lawyer, because
Speaker 1: kids have no real liberty anyway, and the state putting
Speaker 1: them in a hole is no different from their parents
Speaker 1: putting them in a bedroom. Oh that God, who hurt
Speaker 1: that guy? That's what we need to really investigate, Jesus.
Speaker 1: I mean, the messed up thing is it's like, who
Speaker 1: hurt that large room full of judges and all of
Speaker 1: their aids who decided that was a good way. It's
Speaker 1: kind of ad right to say that, to be like,
Speaker 1: kids aren't interested in freedom, like so it's okay. Whatever
Speaker 1: we did, Whe's okay. It's the most backwards thing, literally now.
Speaker 1: According to a paper I found in the Temple Law Review,
Speaker 1: the reason for this tragic reversal and the general decades
Speaker 1: long trend towards less rights for children under trial is
Speaker 1: that trial judges in the latter half of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century really fucking hated kids. And I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: that paper now right after I sneeze fucking tear gas. Okay.
Speaker 1: The real actors who influenced juvenile justice were state juvenile
Speaker 1: court judges and administrators, whose hostility to the principles of
Speaker 1: GALT led many of them to ignore the decision from
Speaker 1: the very beginning. Many trial level juvenile courts simply ignored
Speaker 1: Galts thrust when it came to the actual provision of
Speaker 1: council to juveniles. According to Professor Wally um lineark Quote,
Speaker 1: studies in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties found that
Speaker 1: few children were represented by counsel. The predominant reason is
Speaker 1: that these juveniles waived their right to counsel, often without
Speaker 1: being properly informed of the right. State courts also employed
Speaker 1: insidious methods to ensure the juveniles from poor families, who
Speaker 1: are supposed to benefit from the constitutional right to free
Speaker 1: court assigned counsel, never were assigned a lawyer. In Florida,
Speaker 1: for example, indigency rules were so strict that having five
Speaker 1: dollars in the bank made a family ineligible for appointment
Speaker 1: of counsel. Moreover, as Professor Liniak has explained, Florida parents
Speaker 1: had to pay a forty dollar fee just to apply
Speaker 1: for an indigency determination. So you see what they do
Speaker 1: in places like you have the right to a lawyer
Speaker 1: unless we determine you have too much money to get
Speaker 1: a free lawyer. And we're saying five dollars is too much.
Speaker 1: That is so crazy. If your family net worth is
Speaker 1: five dollars, you're doing way too well for a free lawyer.
Speaker 1: Where are the social workers in all this? That's like
Speaker 1: a whole another episode. Probably, Yeah, I mean it's christ underpaid,
Speaker 1: often traumatized, and let's face it, in some cases, like
Speaker 1: being very much a part of fucking these kids over
Speaker 1: because some of them suck to Like it's it's a
Speaker 1: whole mess, right, and it's this underfunded thing. Um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just bad. There's not a lot. There's not a
Speaker 1: lot looking out for poor kids in the states that
Speaker 1: have the most protections for poor children, right, And Florida
Speaker 1: is not the most protection state the Arizona of the
Speaker 1: other side of the East coast, of the East coast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so accurate. Yeah, good stuff, everybody, good stuff. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be hearing a lot from Florida in this episode,
Speaker 1: or also gonna hear a lot from trial judges who
Speaker 1: hate children with a passion that boggles the mind. Um,
Speaker 1: which is cool and good. Uh, And this was a
Speaker 1: fun episode to write. Um, that didn't make me want
Speaker 1: to commit federal crimes anyway. The whole situation um with
Speaker 1: children's rights degenerated right up through the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: which is when a study conducted by the American Bar
Speaker 1: Association found that huge numbers of kids kids waived their
Speaker 1: right to counsel without really knowing what they were doing.
Speaker 1: As a result, the association's report wrote, many children charged
Speaker 1: with crimes were literally left defenseless and Maryland of kids
Speaker 1: charged with crimes waived their right to a lawyer. Ent
Speaker 1: of Louisiana children did, as did fifty to seventy percent
Speaker 1: of children in Florida and more than half of the
Speaker 1: children in Georgia, Ohio and Kentucky who went before judges.
Speaker 1: So that's a lot of kids not having lawyers. Um.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if you know much about kids,
Speaker 1: but one thing they're not good at is representing themselves
Speaker 1: in court. My god, they really should be with our
Speaker 1: education system, I don't know what the fuck. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: good stuff. Everything's good stuff. Um, everything's great stuff. I'm happy.
Speaker 1: Another major change that happened in the nineteen or from
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies to the nineteen nineties was the ease
Speaker 1: with which courts were allowed to treat juveniles as adults now.
Speaker 1: Um as in most things, New York State led the
Speaker 1: way in this. New York was like, we're not treating
Speaker 1: kids like adults enough when we decide how long to
Speaker 1: throw them into dark holes owned by the guff let's
Speaker 1: change that. This is the state of New York and
Speaker 1: this is the fight we're picking. Um. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, they changed their laws in order to make
Speaker 1: it possible for courts to prosecute children aged thirteen and
Speaker 1: up an adult criminal court. Um, you know all those
Speaker 1: hardened adult thirteen year olds that you know, Um, is
Speaker 1: it like just for murder or I mean that was
Speaker 1: kind of the justification, but it wound up being for
Speaker 1: a lot of things, right the idea. The idea was
Speaker 1: initially like, there's so many dangerous teenage predators, we have
Speaker 1: to start treating them like adults. But like the people
Speaker 1: who the kids who actually get tried as adults, most
Speaker 1: of them are not murderers. So every state in the
Speaker 1: Union followed New York's example to one extent or another,
Speaker 1: making it easier to try children as adults. This whole
Speaker 1: process really accelerated in the late nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Is the crack epidemic fueld waves fears of a new
Speaker 1: wave of child super predators. Age of offense thresholds were
Speaker 1: reduced all around the nation, and politicians who had fought
Speaker 1: for the right of children to be treated as children
Speaker 1: were attacked for being soft on crime. Now, the two
Speaker 1: folks most responsible for this, we're right wing criminologist John
Speaker 1: Delulio and our old buddy James Q. Wilson. If you
Speaker 1: remember listening through the Behind the Police mini series we did.
Speaker 1: James Q. Wilson is the co author of the Broken
Speaker 1: Windows Theory of crime um and coincidentally best friends with
Speaker 1: the guys who wrote the racist book about i Q
Speaker 1: the Bell Curve Um, which is far cool group. Dudes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: call me for the barbecue, guys. Yeah, I'm gonna insinuate
Speaker 1: uh series of racial attitudes towards policing and pushed them
Speaker 1: so deeply into the zeit guys that people think that
Speaker 1: they're actually just protecting their neighborhoods when they're in reality
Speaker 1: contributed to something that could be viewed as almost an
Speaker 1: active Jennessia. Sorry, I don't I lost I lost track
Speaker 1: of the surfer pro voice I was doing after a
Speaker 1: while there. Anyway, Okay, let's catch our breath for a second.
Speaker 1: Just catch our breath for a second to that minutes
Speaker 1: of silence? Ready, everyone, back to the ninety minutes of silence.
Speaker 1: So John Delulio and James Q. Wilson, they write a
Speaker 1: paper in arguing that the US is about to experience
Speaker 1: a wave of unprecedented youth crime driven by single parent families, crack, cocaine,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other stuff that was all basically
Speaker 1: coded language for the existence of black people. Wilson predicted
Speaker 1: that by two thousand ten, there would be two hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy thousand additional predators on the streets committing violent
Speaker 1: crimes at an unprecedented level. These children, he wrote, would
Speaker 1: be radically impulsive, brutally remorseless, elementary school youngsters who packed
Speaker 1: guns instead of lunches, and have absolutely no respect for
Speaker 1: human life. So let's put them in a hole. See
Speaker 1: if it gets better. I also love the idea that
Speaker 1: they're packing guns instead of lunches because they do two
Speaker 1: separate things. James, still you still, you still the eat
Speaker 1: even if you're going to be shooting people, You want
Speaker 1: to have a lunch. Yeah, like you don't. You don't
Speaker 1: lose hunger pains just because you're packing a nine. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you might get hungry. So basically, everybody,
Speaker 1: Republican and democratic like in the American political establishment, bought
Speaker 1: into the idea of these child super predators to one
Speaker 1: extent or another. And they also bought into the argument
Speaker 1: delu Leo and Wilson made about what to do with
Speaker 1: this upcoming crop of super predators. I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from the book The End of Policing, delu Leo and
Speaker 1: his colleagues argued that there was nothing to be done
Speaker 1: but to exclude such children from from children, from settings
Speaker 1: where they could harm others, and ultimately to incarcerate them
Speaker 1: for as long as possible. Delu Leo's ideas were based
Speaker 1: on spurious evidence and ideologically motivated assumptions that turned out
Speaker 1: to be totally inaccurate. Every year since, juvenile crime in
Speaker 1: and out of schools in the US has declined. However,
Speaker 1: the super predator myth was extremely influential. It generated a
Speaker 1: huge amount of press coverage, editorials, and legislative action. One
Speaker 1: of the immediate consequences was a rash of new laws
Speaker 1: lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier
Speaker 1: to incarceerate young people in adult jails, and keeping with
Speaker 1: the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration. So that's
Speaker 1: good ship right there. We're all part of the problem
Speaker 1: if we're clicking on that clickbait super predator bullshit. Yeah don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was the nineties, so that was people
Speaker 1: people knew less to be dag to be worried about
Speaker 1: the clicks. But yeah, always be worried about the clicks.
Speaker 1: Don't don't don't click Atlantic articles yeah, don't click Atlantic articles,
Speaker 1: just just say no to the Atlantic. So by the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, politicians realized that specifically fucking over children was
Speaker 1: a really good vote getter. Um. Some elected leaders, like
Speaker 1: the Republican Speaker of the House also fun children literally
Speaker 1: because Dennis Hastard is a pedophile. Uh well, also advocating
Speaker 1: for children to be treated as adults under criminal law.
Speaker 1: And there's a really dark joke in that whole situation. Um,
Speaker 1: but I I don't I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: make it. But there is one in there about Dennis
Speaker 1: Hastard wanting kids to be treated as adults while he
Speaker 1: molests a bunch of kids while being the longest serving
Speaker 1: Republican Speaker of the House. Read about Dennis Hastert, it's
Speaker 1: a real, real bad story. This is one of the
Speaker 1: guys who like stood up there and talked about how
Speaker 1: bad Bill Clinton was. It turns out he was a
Speaker 1: child molester of the whole time. A lot of people
Speaker 1: don't talk about Dennis Hastard enough anymore. Oh, first time
Speaker 1: I'm hearing about him. Oh yeah, you didn't know about
Speaker 1: the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House, who was
Speaker 1: just the just a complete child molester the entire time
Speaker 1: he was in office. But the first impression, it's so bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was just molesting the hell out of some kids.
Speaker 1: It was really a problem. Um. Yeah, good stuff. You
Speaker 1: want to take a break, buddy, Yeah, let's take an
Speaker 1: ad break, Courtney. You know who won't be the longest
Speaker 1: serving Republican Speaker of the House and use their power
Speaker 1: to assault children. Whoever this ad is for. That's exactly
Speaker 1: the case, unless this is yet another one of our
Speaker 1: ads for Dennis Haster, in which case I I do apologize.
Speaker 1: We do not know how they keep getting in there.
Speaker 1: We're back and we're talking about children being in cars rated.
Speaker 1: So in the nineteen nineties, yeah, kids decide politicians decide that,
Speaker 1: like really specifically going after kids as criminals is like
Speaker 1: the thing to do. Um. So this is the political
Speaker 1: situation in the US in nineteen nine when too Colorado
Speaker 1: high school kids with an interest in Adolf Hitler walked
Speaker 1: into Columbine High School and murdered thirteen people with firearms. Now,
Speaker 1: there were armed police in Columbine that day, um, and
Speaker 1: they failed to stop the rampage. But the kind of
Speaker 1: folks who vote based solely on scary things that just happened,
Speaker 1: did the thing that those kind of people do, and
Speaker 1: they started voting to increase the presence of armed police
Speaker 1: in schools. Politicians were happy to do this because given
Speaker 1: the shocking number of civilian arms in the US and
Speaker 1: are growing supply of angry young men, it seemed likely
Speaker 1: that more Columbines would soon follow. The real fix this
Speaker 1: problem would probably have involved doing something to fill the
Speaker 1: yawning cast him at the center of our national soul,
Speaker 1: and that wasn't about to happen, So everybody just agreed
Speaker 1: to throw more men with guns and badges at the problem.
Speaker 1: School resource officers became increasingly common in school districts around
Speaker 1: the nation at this point, So that's good, um. And
Speaker 1: another thing that happens in nine the President passes like
Speaker 1: the Gun Free Schools Act or something, I forget the
Speaker 1: exact name, but that's is like the legal justification that
Speaker 1: starts pushing a lot of zero tolerance policies and schools
Speaker 1: and really starts ramping up the number of s r
Speaker 1: o s. But it's Columbine that kind of adds fuel
Speaker 1: to that fire. Were you in Were you in school
Speaker 1: when columb Mine happened. I was. I was like, maybe uh,
Speaker 1: senior or early college. I was, Yeah, it was when
Speaker 1: I was still growing up. But I mean I went
Speaker 1: to a small rural school, so like that, I mean
Speaker 1: it could still happen, but like that armed police presence
Speaker 1: was not at my school, and I think still isn't.
Speaker 1: We started to have cops in my schools after Columbine.
Speaker 1: And what I remember most that was just kind of
Speaker 1: like the attitude change was like feeling that teachers were
Speaker 1: kind of suspecting kids of planning something. Now, Like it
Speaker 1: was this very weird feeling that like, oh, now we're
Speaker 1: all kind of like now they're searching us as we
Speaker 1: enter the school, were all kind of suspects of wanting
Speaker 1: to kill each other. That feels like it's not going
Speaker 1: to lead anywhere. Well oh yeah I was yeah high school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe a little more suspect from the teachers for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was weird. Um, it was not a cool time
Speaker 1: to be in school. Um, so yeah, columb Mine. Now,
Speaker 1: in the immediate wake of Columbine, there were like people
Speaker 1: did get more worried about bullying too. Briefly, Um, there
Speaker 1: was like I think just because there was this assumption
Speaker 1: that the kids who shot up the school had been
Speaker 1: like bullied, which wasn't really true. But like everybody got
Speaker 1: on that too for a while. But for a practice.
Speaker 1: On the practical level, most of the focus in preventing
Speaker 1: another Columbine involved zero tolerance discipline, and the idea of
Speaker 1: zero tolerance policies and schools was basically the broken windows
Speaker 1: theory as applied to living children. Right. The broken windows
Speaker 1: theory says that like, as soon as you have a
Speaker 1: broken window, it's permission for people to engage in more
Speaker 1: anti social behavior. So soon they'll start tagging up windows
Speaker 1: and breaking other windows and lightning ship on fire, and
Speaker 1: then you have, you know, the collapse of civilization. Um,
Speaker 1: it's that as applied to students. If a kid acts
Speaker 1: up in one way, you know, if he talks back
Speaker 1: to a teacher, you have to punish him more than
Speaker 1: he deserves to be punished for that, because if you don't,
Speaker 1: it could lead to other bad behavior like shooting up
Speaker 1: your school. Like that that was the justification for zero
Speaker 1: tolerance policies. Great, and it's good stuff. They weren't effective, right,
Speaker 1: because there's been like a million more shootings have there
Speaker 1: been other shootings since Colon. Yeah, I've heard of it.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't read the news, Courtney. Um, I
Speaker 1: didn't realize America still had a problem with this. I
Speaker 1: assumed that this had been settled. Yeah, mostly solved, but
Speaker 1: it's still a few still. It seems like we gotta
Speaker 1: handle on it now that all of the schools are
Speaker 1: closed from the play we did everybody making things a
Speaker 1: lot harder for school shooters. Thank you COVID nineteen. Thank
Speaker 1: you so um yeah. Uh. Now. Another thing that happened
Speaker 1: right around the same time. It was a major reorganization
Speaker 1: and the way that schools measured success and failure for students.
Speaker 1: Standardized testing began to have an increased influence on teacher
Speaker 1: pay and on school funding, This creating situation where it
Speaker 1: was in the interest of adult administrators and teachers to
Speaker 1: find ways to remove low performing students from their classroom.
Speaker 1: Florida schools adopted a high stakes testing model in nineteen
Speaker 1: and within five years their rate of out of school
Speaker 1: suspensions had increased. In two thousand four, twenty eight thousand
Speaker 1: Florida children were arrested at school, two thirds of them
Speaker 1: from minor offenses that would have been dealt with noncar
Speaker 1: serrale in the past. By two thous six, eight years
Speaker 1: after adopting a high stakes testing policy, teacher morale had
Speaker 1: created more than half of all Florida teachers reported thinking
Speaker 1: about quitting their field. Florida's graduation rate felt a fifty
Speaker 1: seven percent, the fourth lowest in the nation. Now. Texas
Speaker 1: also adopted a high stakes testing program in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Governor George W. Bush's education advisor, Sandy Kress, convinced him
Speaker 1: that the soft bigotry of low expectations is what held
Speaker 1: back minority students, and he felt that Texas could fix
Speaker 1: this by making all schools administer the same tests statewide.
Speaker 1: That would make it easier to determine where resources were needed.
Speaker 1: The implementation of standardized tests was accompanied by new zero
Speaker 1: tolerance policies to and since school funding and teacher pay
Speaker 1: was now tied to test results, teachers you know used
Speaker 1: those uh punishments like whenever kids would do something bad,
Speaker 1: it was threatening that kid that teachers payment like that
Speaker 1: the money that they would get in the money the
Speaker 1: school would get, so they would report those kids. Suspension
Speaker 1: rates began to soar, and nent of suspensions were from
Speaker 1: minor infractions. By two thousand nine, there were two million
Speaker 1: suspensions statewide, and the sheer number of suspended kids in
Speaker 1: Texas led to the creation of so called super max schools,
Speaker 1: which are basically prisons designed for children to go to
Speaker 1: class at. And this was the kind of thing. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Texas in this period of time, and
Speaker 1: we everyone would talk about these schools because you all
Speaker 1: knew somebody who had been sent there, right, who had
Speaker 1: been like and it was always something like, yeah, they
Speaker 1: would talk up in class, or maybe they got caught
Speaker 1: with weed or something, but like usually it was just
Speaker 1: like they annoyed a teacher for a couple of days
Speaker 1: in a row, and then suddenly this person is like
Speaker 1: going to a school where you have to like fucking
Speaker 1: go through a metal detector and if you talk in
Speaker 1: the hallways you could get arrested. Like it's this fucking
Speaker 1: it was pretty pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, And yet like
Speaker 1: none of the kids who go to these schools like
Speaker 1: learn anything. They're like, like the school work. I remember,
Speaker 1: because again we we knew some kids who would go there.
Speaker 1: The schoolwork they would get was like you know, ship
Speaker 1: that kids five or six years younger would have found
Speaker 1: easy like it was. It was clearly that like the
Speaker 1: kids who went to that building, the state was giving
Speaker 1: up on and was locking them in a separate building
Speaker 1: and saying like this is technically schoolwork. Do this until
Speaker 1: you're old enough that we can put you in a
Speaker 1: real prison. Yeah, and like, don't infect our test scores
Speaker 1: in the meantime, just go yeah exactly, because they're not
Speaker 1: fucking up the test scores of the the other schools,
Speaker 1: which makes it look like things are going better for
Speaker 1: the other schools. So yeah, it's not great. A lot
Speaker 1: of the kids in these in these SUPERMANX schools drop out,
Speaker 1: but overall it looked like Texas test scores were improving massively.
Speaker 1: Um And that fact was trumpeted loudly during the twoth
Speaker 1: House and election. George W. Bush called it the Texas Miracle,
Speaker 1: and huge numbers of people, including my parents, still believe
Speaker 1: that this was a thing that happened, that like Texas
Speaker 1: figured it out and massively improved education via standardized testing
Speaker 1: and you know all of these policies, the zero tolerance
Speaker 1: policies and ship. When Governor Bush became President Bush, he
Speaker 1: worked with famed Lady drowner, Ted Kennedy to make no
Speaker 1: Child left Behind law nationwide. And this is what lady
Speaker 1: drowner is. Well, he drowned that lady. He absolutely did. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: good old Ted Kennedy, the lady drowner. So, um, he
Speaker 1: worked at President Bush. They they came down the middle.
Speaker 1: You know. Uh, this this this man who would go
Speaker 1: on to commit a series of war crimes, and this
Speaker 1: other man who had drunkenly drowned a lady in his car. Uh.
Speaker 1: They made No Child Left Behind nationwide. Um. And the
Speaker 1: law promised that by two thousand and fourteen, all students
Speaker 1: in the United States would meet or exceed their states
Speaker 1: proficient level of academic achievement. Um. They didn't hit that goal.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to say, Courtney. Um, we didn't fix teaching.
Speaker 1: That might might surprise you at the moment, but we
Speaker 1: got a whole batch of new criminals. We do have
Speaker 1: so many new criminals. So No Child Left Behind brought
Speaker 1: with it zero tolerance policies. Of course, the tight teacher
Speaker 1: pay to test scores In a lot of cases. Nationwide,
Speaker 1: short term suspensions increased by forty one percent and long
Speaker 1: term suspensions by a hundred and thirty five percent. Black
Speaker 1: students were three and a half times likelier to be suspended.
Speaker 1: By two thousand and eight, the number of school resource
Speaker 1: officers nationwide had doubled and more than sixteen thousand students
Speaker 1: had been arrested. After ten years of no child left behind,
Speaker 1: graduation rates were about the same, dropout rates were about
Speaker 1: the same, and in general, absolutely nothing had been achieved
Speaker 1: except that a funck ton of kids had gotten suspended
Speaker 1: and arrested. Now people were baffled by this, and they
Speaker 1: started looking into why the Texas Miracle hadn't worked out nationwide.
Speaker 1: It turned out that this was because the Texas Miracle
Speaker 1: had never actually been a thing. From MSNBC quote, Texas
Speaker 1: started to lose seventy kids a year, mostly dropping out
Speaker 1: before they had to take the tenth grade test that
Speaker 1: would count against the school. Almost a third of kids
Speaker 1: in Texas who started high school never finished. Scores on
Speaker 1: the Texas Test rose, but s a t scores for
Speaker 1: prospective college students dropped. Researchers discovered that the Texas Test,
Speaker 1: designed by Pierson, primarily measured test taking ability. Apologists cherry
Speaker 1: picked National Assessment of Educational Progress scores to show progress
Speaker 1: but overall Texas lost ground to the rest of the country,
Speaker 1: found Dr Julian V. Hellig, an education researcher at the
Speaker 1: University of Texas. But by then it was too late.
Speaker 1: The Texas Miracle, mirage or not, was law of the land.
Speaker 1: So that's fun that it actually made everything worse than
Speaker 1: they made it. The law nationwide is fun the word
Speaker 1: for that. No. Oh, like, was anyone surprised? A lot
Speaker 1: of people were. Most people still don't know that the
Speaker 1: Texas Miracle isn't a thing that happened. Oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: listeners can't see, but my jaws just been on the
Speaker 1: floor the entire episode, just trying to pick it up.
Speaker 1: Oh god, Yeah, it's good stuff. I love fool and good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know what else is cool and good is I
Speaker 1: Sometimes life gives you lemons. And when you get lemons,
Speaker 1: you got a lock of shipload of kids away in
Speaker 1: what are essentially prisons until they learn how to make
Speaker 1: their own weapons and stab prison guards that they can
Speaker 1: go to adult prisons and learn how to cook methamphetamines
Speaker 1: and join the Area Nations. That's just a thing you
Speaker 1: gotta do sometimes because clearly there are no other options
Speaker 1: and that's fine. They can make lemonade and you can
Speaker 1: pay them like one cent for doing it. Absolutely, and
Speaker 1: they can make I don't know, license plates or mac books.
Speaker 1: Why don't we have Why don't we have children making
Speaker 1: MacBooks in prisons? That's what I want to know. Why
Speaker 1: are we letting the Chinese have all the fun of
Speaker 1: making mac books when we could have eleven year olds
Speaker 1: who talked up in class doing it. That's what I
Speaker 1: want to know. Good question. Thank you for liking my question.
Speaker 1: So all of this stuff that we've been talking about
Speaker 1: today kind of jelled together to create something commonly known
Speaker 1: as the school to prison pipeline. Schools with school resource
Speaker 1: officers have nearly five times the arrest rate as schools
Speaker 1: without school resource officers. And again, because these schools were
Speaker 1: getting by before they had the cops. It kind of
Speaker 1: suggests that those arrests are things that could have been
Speaker 1: handled without cops and arrests um most of those arrests
Speaker 1: are students of color and students with disabilities, both of
Speaker 1: whom are vastly disproportionately arrested by school cops. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the book The End of
Speaker 1: Policing The ost Department of Education found in a two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, two thousand and twelve survey of seventy two
Speaker 1: thousand schools that black, Latino and special needs students were
Speaker 1: all disproportionately subjected to criminal justice actions. While black students
Speaker 1: represent sixteen percent of student enrollment, they represent twenty seven
Speaker 1: percent of students referred to law enforcement and thirty one
Speaker 1: percent of students subjected to a school related arrest. In comparison,
Speaker 1: white students represent fifty one percent of enrollment, forty one
Speaker 1: percent of students referred to law enforcement, and thirty nine
Speaker 1: percent of those arrested. Some individual districts have even starker numbers.
Speaker 1: In Chicago, in two thousand, thirteen, two and fourteen, black
Speaker 1: students were twenty seven times more likely to be arrested
Speaker 1: than white students, leading to eight thousand arrests in a
Speaker 1: two year per read Over fifty of those arrested were
Speaker 1: under fifteen. It's good stuff. Yeah, that's depressing. It's hard,
Speaker 1: it's it's just sad. It's just really sad. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, yes, yes, it is a big part of
Speaker 1: the problem is that putting cops in schools made calling
Speaker 1: in the school cop an option for teachers and administrators
Speaker 1: who would have had to do the actual hard work
Speaker 1: of like disciplining a child earlier. It's easier to just
Speaker 1: have the kid arrested if he's pissing you off, and
Speaker 1: it might help increase your pay, so like why the
Speaker 1: funk not now. The argument that much of what's going
Speaker 1: on was the result of teachers not wanting to bother
Speaker 1: or not knowing how to handle students with more complex
Speaker 1: problems was bolstered by the fact that special needs children
Speaker 1: make up more than of students referred to police, they
Speaker 1: make up just fourteen percent of the student population. One
Speaker 1: good example of how this looks is the two fifteen
Speaker 1: case of a Lynchburg, Virginia, sixth grader. Eleven year old
Speaker 1: Caleb Moon Robinson has autism and behavioral issues, and one incident,
Speaker 1: he kicked a trash can after being scolded by a teacher.
Speaker 1: The school s r O filed disorderly conduct charges against
Speaker 1: the boy for this. In another incident, the s r
Speaker 1: O body slammed the kid and handcuffed him after he
Speaker 1: resisted being dragged out of the classroom for another behavioral issue.
Speaker 1: The student was charged again with a misdemeanor disorderly conduct
Speaker 1: and this time with felony assault on a police officer.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, they love doing that. If you struggle
Speaker 1: in your handcuffs, you're assaulting the cop if they beat you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's fifteen, No, eleven, he's eleven. This eleven year old
Speaker 1: was charged with felony assault on a police officer after
Speaker 1: he was body slammed. It's good. I love it when
Speaker 1: eleven year olds feloniously assault police officers. Happens all the time. Well,
Speaker 1: it actually happens quite a lot. Yeah, not even in that.
Speaker 1: Just didn't like the If a person grabs you and
Speaker 1: starts like choking and body slamming you, sometimes your body,
Speaker 1: you will resist them without you thinking about it. I
Speaker 1: think that's self defense. Yeah, it is self defense. If
Speaker 1: that person is a cop and you do anything but
Speaker 1: go limp, you have assaulted the cop. Because literally, anything
Speaker 1: you do to a cop is assaulting the cop. Because
Speaker 1: cops have very very thin skin. They're tiny, tiny little people.
Speaker 1: Defund the police, they're very soft. Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: one option that that that that's a start, you know,
Speaker 1: defund the police. Uh, I don't know. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: I've urged enough federal crimes on other podcasts anyway. Um,
Speaker 1: So Caleb was yeah, found guilty on all charges, although
Speaker 1: this was thankfully reversed and new statewide protections for children
Speaker 1: under thirteen were put in place due to the outrage
Speaker 1: generated by Caleb's case. But it took this cop like
Speaker 1: assaulting and then fucking charging as an adult an eleven
Speaker 1: year old for there to be changes in Virginia as
Speaker 1: a result of this, uh, which ain't great. So part
Speaker 1: of the problem is that school resource officers don't get
Speaker 1: meaningful training for how to deal with kids, let alone
Speaker 1: special needs kids, and so they tend to treat every
Speaker 1: problem the way cops treat problems with indiscriminate, blind, furious violence.
Speaker 1: In August of two fifteen, a Kentucky Sheriff's deputy handcuffed
Speaker 1: an eight year old boy and a nine year old girl,
Speaker 1: both disabled, for disorderly behavior tied to their disabilities. Since
Speaker 1: they were too small to handcuff properly, the officer had
Speaker 1: to handcuff their biceps. The whole thing was caught on
Speaker 1: tape and you can hear the cops tell the boy
Speaker 1: you can do what we ask you to or you
Speaker 1: can suffer the consequences. It was so I taught special
Speaker 1: lead and my kid was, like, my kid had some
Speaker 1: serious behavioral problems, right to the point where he had
Speaker 1: seventies something workman's compt claims processed against him because of
Speaker 1: all the injuries he caused people. He permanently crippled a
Speaker 1: gym teacher. You know, not long before I started the job,
Speaker 1: by predecessor, he'd broken his skull, so he was like
Speaker 1: he was a kid that required a lot of specialized care.
Speaker 1: And most days my job was to just get hit
Speaker 1: in the face by this kid because the other teachers
Speaker 1: were like older ladies who couldn't who couldn't safely be
Speaker 1: hit in the face by a seventeen year old um.
Speaker 1: And we had incidents were like this kid would like
Speaker 1: smash his face and like a bus window to get attention,
Speaker 1: but also he would be covered in blood and cops
Speaker 1: would wind up being called him because it was like
Speaker 1: happening on a bus on like a street and ship,
Speaker 1: and the police, like I I guess thankfully at the time,
Speaker 1: I was frustrated because like I was having to deal
Speaker 1: with this like violent bleeding kid and the police were
Speaker 1: just like stand back looking terrified and have no fucking
Speaker 1: idea what to do. But reading all of this, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: thank god they didn't get involved. They would have shot
Speaker 1: that boy, Oh totally, they would have put a fucking
Speaker 1: bullet in him. Yeah. Both my parents are special ed teachers,
Speaker 1: and my dad had like your first job where like
Speaker 1: his his first gig was like at this middle school
Speaker 1: and kids would just like throw their heads into walls
Speaker 1: and like it was nuts. But you do have to
Speaker 1: have a special I mean, my dad was like an
Speaker 1: angel dealing with them. I can't imagine with cops. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I certainly wasn't an angel at dealing with him because
Speaker 1: I was too young to be doing that job. But like,
Speaker 1: I'm glad I wasn't. I'm glad it wasn't a cop
Speaker 1: dealing with it. Um. Yeah. So for most of the odds,
Speaker 1: schools steadily increased the number of cops on campus. They
Speaker 1: also pumped more and more weapons into the police departments
Speaker 1: dedicated to protecting those schools. The Washington Post reports at
Speaker 1: least a hundred and twenty school affiliated police forces in
Speaker 1: thirty states have made use of the ten thirty three
Speaker 1: weapons transfer program. This has gotten rather famous lately. Um,
Speaker 1: it's the thing that let's cops get things like tanks
Speaker 1: and grenade launchers. Um, so this is why, like the
Speaker 1: l A School police department has a tank. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the ten thirty three programs, So that like throughout the odds,
Speaker 1: they're just getting pumped full of military grade weaponry as
Speaker 1: they are choke holding eleven year olds and charging them
Speaker 1: with assault. So militarized police have meant that militarized police
Speaker 1: tactics keep getting used on children. The most infamously vile
Speaker 1: example of this may have been the two thousand three
Speaker 1: squat raid on Goose Creek High School in South Carolina.
Speaker 1: The goal had been defined drugs and guns. The result
Speaker 1: was that dozens of heavily armed cops forced hundreds of
Speaker 1: mostly black students onto the ground for no reason. Students,
Speaker 1: of course, we're not warned, and many panicked and ran
Speaker 1: when officers indistinguishable from soldiers leapt out of closets and
Speaker 1: out from under stairwells, screaming and waving guns. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were just like, what don't we just really funk
Speaker 1: with these kids? Like, what don't we just have an
Speaker 1: army come in and funk these kids? Up um and
Speaker 1: no no drugs were found, like no contrabound was found. UM,
Speaker 1: but huge numbers of students were traumatized. And the school administrator,
Speaker 1: who coordinated the whole thing because there was a local outroar, apologized,
Speaker 1: but he stated that quote, once police are on campus,
Speaker 1: they are in control. UM. So honestly, the students of
Speaker 1: Goose Creek ought to be grateful because none of them
Speaker 1: were beaten or assaulted by crowd control weapons in a
Speaker 1: serious way that day. Um. But this too has actually
Speaker 1: become very common in other schools and in the end
Speaker 1: of policing, Alex Vitality writes quote and two dozen tend.
Speaker 1: The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action lawsuit
Speaker 1: against the Birmingham, Alabama Schools, claiming they were systematically using
Speaker 1: excessive force. The alleged that from two thousand, six hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety nine students have been sprayed with a combination
Speaker 1: pepper spray and tear gas agent called freeze plus P,
Speaker 1: which causes extreme pain and skin irritation and can impede
Speaker 1: breathing and vision. All of the students sprayed were African American.
Speaker 1: One student was pregnant, many were innocent bystanders, and some
Speaker 1: were completely non violent when sprayed. In most cases, officers
Speaker 1: made no effort to treat those sprayed, and some were
Speaker 1: held in police custody to await arraignment, wearing chemically coded
Speaker 1: clothing and to this. In fifteen, a federal court found
Speaker 1: the school district guilty of civil rights violations and banned
Speaker 1: the use of a spray. A seventeen year old high
Speaker 1: school student in Texas was tazard by an s R
Speaker 1: O while trying to break up a school fight. The
Speaker 1: student was critically injured by the resulting fall and blow
Speaker 1: to the head and spent fifty two days in a
Speaker 1: medically induced COMA surveillance video showed that the young man
Speaker 1: was actually stepping away from the officers when he was tazard.
Speaker 1: You can find a million stories like this, because it's
Speaker 1: bad to have these people in schools. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Can we just go back to hitting the kids like
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ? Yeah? Man, that paddle doesn't sound so bad now,
Speaker 1: does it. Yeah? Yeah, bring back the fucking paddle. Uh?
Speaker 1: Or not? Maybe just not do violence to children. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't want to be an extremist in
Speaker 1: my political beliefs. It's think it's time for an ad break,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, enjoy our ads from Safari Land, the
Speaker 1: company making all of the tear gas that's getting dumped
Speaker 1: into American streets. Oh we're back. Oh my god, what
Speaker 1: a nice night. It's not nighttime, it's the middle of
Speaker 1: the day. I am real cracked out. So violence by
Speaker 1: s r o s against children is terribly common between
Speaker 1: two thou tend into than fifteen. At least twenty eight
Speaker 1: U S students were severely injured by school cops, and
Speaker 1: one was killed, fourteen year old Derek Lopez. His crime
Speaker 1: was punching a fellow student and then running away when
Speaker 1: the school cop told him to freeze. The s r
Speaker 1: O chase Lopez and shot him to death in a
Speaker 1: nearby backyard shed, claiming the boy had bull rushed him. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool that a fist fight at school led to
Speaker 1: a man with a gun chasing a child. That was
Speaker 1: a situation that needed to happen. Oh my god, And
Speaker 1: the kid just had fists. No, of course, he was
Speaker 1: fourteen year old boy. He was a fourteen year old
Speaker 1: boy in school. I mean, it's one of those things
Speaker 1: I think about all the fist fights I got into
Speaker 1: at school. And it's a shame there wasn't a man
Speaker 1: with a gun there to chase any of us. Otherwise
Speaker 1: it might have ended, you know, thankfully. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's just bad. It's bad. This is bad. I don't
Speaker 1: have a joke. So for all of this, Courtney, like again,
Speaker 1: the reason all these cops are in all these schools
Speaker 1: is because a ship like Columby and everybody getting worried
Speaker 1: that someone's gonna murder kids at schools. For all of this,
Speaker 1: there's not a single solitary case of a school resource
Speaker 1: officer preventing a school shooting. The closest thing they have
Speaker 1: is a guy who was arrested by his s r
Speaker 1: o s after shooting two people. But he had finished
Speaker 1: the shooting when this this the school resource officers like
Speaker 1: got him, Like he went after his girlfriend and somebody
Speaker 1: else and he he shot them and then he was done.
Speaker 1: Uh And I guess they stopped that. Like they didn't
Speaker 1: stop that. They never stop it. They're bad at there
Speaker 1: that job. So, as it turns out, students in schools
Speaker 1: that have police in them report feeling less safe than
Speaker 1: students in similar schools without police. No evidence exists to
Speaker 1: even suggest that the presence of school resource officers reduces
Speaker 1: violent crime or any other kind of crime for that matter.
Speaker 1: What they do, though, is arrest a whole funk load
Speaker 1: of kids. More than a million children have been arrested
Speaker 1: by school resource officers in the last twenty years. That's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of kids with criminal records getting pumped
Speaker 1: into the system. Yeah. And of course, like a huge
Speaker 1: amount of research shows that punishing kids in this way
Speaker 1: reduces their odds of graduating massively. A lot of these
Speaker 1: kids never get back to school. It increases their rods
Speaker 1: of developing a criminal record. Uh. And that's for kids
Speaker 1: who don't get a criminal record because of the charges
Speaker 1: filed against them by an s R. Oh, like the
Speaker 1: Virginia middle schooler who was charged with as salt and
Speaker 1: battery for throwing a baby carrot at her teacher. Baby carrots,
Speaker 1: Well it was an assault baby carrot. Yeah, the most
Speaker 1: assault weapon ever. That carrot was trimmed down. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: wasn't even a full carrot, didn't even have the skin
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, it's pretty pretty fun that that happened. Um,
Speaker 1: So all of these factors combined together to create again
Speaker 1: what's called the school to prison pipeline, which has gotten
Speaker 1: bad enough that it's sometimes called the cradle to prison
Speaker 1: pipeline because a lot of kids are kind of dumped
Speaker 1: into places where this will happen to them from the
Speaker 1: very beginning of their school career. Suspensions, which almost never
Speaker 1: occurred in the nineteen seventies, have become routine. In the
Speaker 1: two ten academic year, over five hundred schools in the
Speaker 1: country suspended more than half of their students. By two
Speaker 1: thousands six, nearly fifteen percent of Blackmail middle school students
Speaker 1: were suspended in a given year. Now, as I mentioned
Speaker 1: at the top of the episode, all of these suspensions
Speaker 1: and arrests of students lead to a hell of a
Speaker 1: lot of incarcerated kids. Too. Many of them end up
Speaker 1: at adult facilities, and if you pay it any attention
Speaker 1: to them the nation lately, you know why that's not
Speaker 1: a good thing. But the unfortunate reality is that the
Speaker 1: children's facilities specifically made for juvenile offenders aren't much better,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they're worse. Nearly of juvenile to linquents in
Speaker 1: this country are sent to private, for profit facilities. For
Speaker 1: many kids, that means some form of boot camp, juvenile
Speaker 1: prison or detention center. Ironically, many of these kids wind
Speaker 1: up in the care of people who are criminals themselves.
Speaker 1: And this brings me to the story of one James F. Slattery,
Speaker 1: founder of the Correctional Services Corporation, among other businesses, geared
Speaker 1: at making money by incarcerating kids. In twenty years, more
Speaker 1: than forty thousand girls and boys in sixteen states went
Speaker 1: to facilities run by James Slattery. An expanse of Huffington
Speaker 1: Post investigation Prisoners of Profit makes it agonizingly clear what
Speaker 1: is a bad idea this was. Slattery got his start
Speaker 1: owing a chain of shitty hotels in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and he was not good at this. His buildings were
Speaker 1: stuck with hundreds of code violations and notorious for being
Speaker 1: vermin invested hell holes. In six two men got into
Speaker 1: a fight at the hallway of one of his properties
Speaker 1: and fell down a broken elevator shaft, dying on impact.
Speaker 1: Several weeks later, a fire broke out and killed four
Speaker 1: children in the same building. So Slattery and his business
Speaker 1: partner decided that the hospitality business might not be for them,
Speaker 1: largely because people care when your customers die horribly due
Speaker 1: to your ill maintained facilitlities. They decided to move to
Speaker 1: a business where no one cared about the clientele and
Speaker 1: started selling their space to the government to act as
Speaker 1: re entry housing for newly released federal inmates. A new company,
Speaker 1: Smore Incorporated, was formed to oversee the business, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from the Huffington Post now. As federal prison
Speaker 1: officials awarded Smore an emergency contract to operate a halfway
Speaker 1: house in Brooklyn. Local community leaders challenged the decision, questioning
Speaker 1: why the same people who had managed problem plagued welfare
Speaker 1: hotels should be given fresh responsibility. Less than three years
Speaker 1: after as More Lope opened La Marquis to former inmates,
Speaker 1: federal inspectors from the Bureau of Prisons found that parts
Speaker 1: of the building were turning to ruin. Inspectors documented low paid,
Speaker 1: untrained employees, poor building conditions from vermin, leaky plumbing to
Speaker 1: expose electrical wires and other fire hazards, and inadequate barely
Speaker 1: edible food. Federal prison officials were close to canceling the
Speaker 1: contract in nine two, according to media accounts at the time,
Speaker 1: but they said conditions at the facilities started to improve
Speaker 1: after frequent inspections, and a federal lawsuit won. The Marquis employee,
Speaker 1: Richard Moore, alleged that he had been severely beaten by
Speaker 1: another employee at the direction of management after he reported
Speaker 1: poor conditions to federal inspectors. In another federal lawsuit, for
Speaker 1: female inmates asserted that they had been raped and assaulted
Speaker 1: by Smore's private resident advocate, the employee who was supposed
Speaker 1: to protect inmates by handling their grievances. So you might
Speaker 1: say that, um, he wasn't good at this job. That
Speaker 1: like that the company he made was fundamentally terrible at
Speaker 1: this job. But Smore made a lot of money, and
Speaker 1: soon soon the company had expanded its operations to Fort Worth,
Speaker 1: where it opened a boot camp for young boys, as
Speaker 1: well as New Jersey and Washington, where it opened immigrant
Speaker 1: detention centers. The company went public, netting Slattery five point
Speaker 1: two million dollars. The next year, a riot broke out
Speaker 1: in his New Jersey immigrant detention center when an organized
Speaker 1: group of inmates assaulted guards and took over the facility.
Speaker 1: Subsequent investigations found that, among other things, Slattery's guards constantly
Speaker 1: sexually harassed female inmates, uh and stole regularly from other inmates.
Speaker 1: Training was virtually non existent. Now. I n S did
Speaker 1: not find as more for this or cancel its contract. Instead,
Speaker 1: they allowed the company to sell their I n S
Speaker 1: contract to the Corrections Corporation of America for six million dollars,
Speaker 1: because fuck it. The whole disaster was enough to make
Speaker 1: Slattery opt for a change of venue, though, and he
Speaker 1: moved the company's headquarters south to Florida in nineteen six
Speaker 1: and changed the company name to Correctional Services Corporation. He
Speaker 1: decided his new focus would be incarcerating children, since that
Speaker 1: had seemed relatively easy so far compared to locking up adults.
Speaker 1: Florida was a great place to do this. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, the state had started outsourcing juvenile attention to
Speaker 1: private companies to cut costs, and in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: a bunch of teenagers had killed people, leading to a
Speaker 1: crackdown on juvenile crime and a soaring juvenile prison population.
Speaker 1: So that's the situation. This guy starts by running cheap
Speaker 1: hotels for like houseless people, and he gets a bunch
Speaker 1: of them killed, and then he starts running cheap halfway
Speaker 1: houses for people who are getting out of prison. And
Speaker 1: a bunch of them, you know, get raped and assaulted.
Speaker 1: And finally he's like, you know what, the job for
Speaker 1: me is watching after children. Oh my god, what a
Speaker 1: resume this guy. And the State of Florida is like yes.
Speaker 1: In Slattery One bids to make two facilities in Florida.
Speaker 1: Both prisons were meant for boys aged fourteen to nineteen
Speaker 1: who had been convicted as adults, but whoopsie doodles, the
Speaker 1: state realized too late that it had had enough beds
Speaker 1: for those kids, so instead, the Florida Department of Justice
Speaker 1: filled these prisons with random delinquents who hadn't been tried
Speaker 1: as adults and weren't meant to be put in such
Speaker 1: restrictive settings. And a press release announcing the construction of
Speaker 1: these new facilities, Slattery called them the future of American corrections. Now,
Speaker 1: appropriately enough, the future of American corrections was an instant nightmare.
Speaker 1: The first Correctional Services Corporation prison to open was the
Speaker 1: Pohokey Youth Development Center, northwest of Miami. It started taking
Speaker 1: inmates in early nineteen. The Huffington Post reports quote within months,
Speaker 1: local judges were hearing complaints about abuse of staff. Prison
Speaker 1: like conditions and food full of maggots included. According to
Speaker 1: recent interviews and state audits and court transcripts from the time,
Speaker 1: Miami Dade County Circuit Judge Tom Peter Person drove an
Speaker 1: hour and a half to Pahokey in nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 1: and started snapping pictures. As a juvenile judge, he thought
Speaker 1: he was sending boys to a moderate risk program with
Speaker 1: outdoor wilderness activities. What he found was a hardcore prison.
Speaker 1: I came back with all those pictures and I raised
Speaker 1: hell about it, Peterson recalled in an interview. He saw
Speaker 1: small twelve year olds can find along much stronger seventeen
Speaker 1: year olds. Boys were served food he called an edible.
Speaker 1: That same year, local public defenders asked another judge to
Speaker 1: move children from Pahokey into a less punitive program. Follow
Speaker 1: Up reviews by state contracted auditors confirmed to the operation
Speaker 1: was dysfunctional. Now evidence of this dysfunction included a child
Speaker 1: with unpre paid prison gambling debts who was beaten so
Speaker 1: badly by three other kids that he had to have
Speaker 1: his spleen removed. In another incidents, four staff members allowed
Speaker 1: two boys to fight for ten minutes while they watched.
Speaker 1: No one reported this incident. Thanks to this prison's rural location,
Speaker 1: rats and spiders were common. No efforts were taken to
Speaker 1: control pests within the prison, leading to an epidemic of
Speaker 1: bites among the incarcerated children. Slattery's kid prison was found
Speaker 1: to be holding children past their scheduled release dates too,
Speaker 1: in order to more money out of the government. This
Speaker 1: was literally a crime, but no one was punished. Judges did, however,
Speaker 1: start to demand that Poky be closed. The States stopped
Speaker 1: sending new kids in August of nineteen nine, but did
Speaker 1: not cancel Slattery's contract. They allowed the company to withdraw
Speaker 1: from its contract eight months early, thus letting it continue
Speaker 1: to bid for contracts within the state of Florida. Now,
Speaker 1: none of these abuse allegations, the revelations of literal crimes
Speaker 1: harmed business at all. By nine, Correctional Services Corporation was
Speaker 1: making two hundred and twenty three million dollars a year,
Speaker 1: more than double what it had ranked in three years earlier.
Speaker 1: Slattery used his newfound cash to buy a rival corporation,
Speaker 1: Youth Services International. This put him in charge of five
Speaker 1: new facilities in Florida, and that all worked as well
Speaker 1: as you might guess. Problems grew so bad at one
Speaker 1: facility named Hickey, that the Justice Department commenced an investigation.
Speaker 1: It revealed that staff repeatedly concealed evidence of physical assaults,
Speaker 1: only disclosing two thirds of such cases to the government.
Speaker 1: Lack of staff, a cost cutting measure by slattery, made
Speaker 1: it easier for boys to enter each other's rooms and
Speaker 1: commit all The Justice Department concluded that these conditions violated
Speaker 1: the constitutional and federal statutory rights of the youth residents. Again,
Speaker 1: no one was penalized. The school turned the facility over
Speaker 1: to the state, escaping any financial burden to fix it,
Speaker 1: and sailed onto profits elsewhere. In two thousand one, eighteen
Speaker 1: year old Brian and Alexander died of pneumonia while confined
Speaker 1: at a Correctional Services Corporation boot camp near Fort Worth.
Speaker 1: The Texas Ranges conducted an investigation into the matter, and
Speaker 1: the Huffington's Posts reporting summarizes it. Quote other inmates at
Speaker 1: the facility had told investigators that they knew something was
Speaker 1: wrong with Alexander. In early January, he had stopped eating,
Speaker 1: his lips turned to purple, and he shivered even while
Speaker 1: taking hot showers. He begged a nurse and drill instructors
Speaker 1: to take him to the hospital, but they told him
Speaker 1: he was faking it, according to the Texas Rangers report.
Speaker 1: As Alexander pleaded for help, one help, one drill instructor
Speaker 1: told him to go ahead and die already. According to
Speaker 1: the investigative report, the nurse connivate Rays, told him to
Speaker 1: stop lying about his illness. Other inmates that the facility
Speaker 1: saw Alexander coughing up blood into trash cans and frequently
Speaker 1: struggling to breathe. According to the report, a week after
Speaker 1: he began complaining, staff finally took Alexander to the hospital.
Speaker 1: He died there two days later. A doctor told Texas
Speaker 1: Rangers that Alexander could have survived if the staff had
Speaker 1: taken him to get a chest X ray when he
Speaker 1: first reported feeling sick. So that's great that they're like,
Speaker 1: if you would have done literally anything, just anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you had weeks. You could have taken literally any action
Speaker 1: to save this child's life, but refused to. And that's fine.
Speaker 1: You will face no corporate penalties for this. I mean,
Speaker 1: actually they did a bit. In two thousand two, a
Speaker 1: judge found Rays guilty of negligent homicide. The Nurse and
Speaker 1: Correctional Services Corporation was found liable to thirty eight million
Speaker 1: dollars in the wrongful death suit. That same year, auditors
Speaker 1: at a Maryland facility found that employees there had forced
Speaker 1: inmates to fight on Saturdays as a way to settle arguments. Fines,
Speaker 1: Negative Justice Department reports, and even furious judges plagued Slatteries
Speaker 1: companies constantly, but they never stopped getting contracts. All over
Speaker 1: the United States. For most of the last five years,
Speaker 1: y s I, the company's Slattery bought oversaw about nine
Speaker 1: per sent to Florida's juvenile jail beds. Y s I
Speaker 1: was also responsible for fifteen percent of all reported cases
Speaker 1: of excessive force and injured youths and state jail beds.
Speaker 1: Forty thousand kids have been sent to Slattery's prisons in
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, and state funding has made him
Speaker 1: a very rich man. He's poured a lot of that
Speaker 1: money back into the pockets of state officials. Slattery donated
Speaker 1: more than four hundred thousand dollars to various politicians in
Speaker 1: a fifteen year period, two hundred and seventy six thousand
Speaker 1: of which went to the Florida Republican Party. He's one
Speaker 1: of its largest donors. Now interesting, Yeah, that's cool. Good.
Speaker 1: More than forty percent of youth offenders sent to one
Speaker 1: of Florida's juvenile prisons wind up arrested or convicted of
Speaker 1: another crime within a year of their release. In New
Speaker 1: York State, by comparison, where youth offenders are never put
Speaker 1: in private institutions, just twenty five percent of juvenile offenders
Speaker 1: are convicted again within a year of release. It is
Speaker 1: hard to overstate what a disaster Slattery's facilities are on
Speaker 1: a societal level and on a human level. Children at
Speaker 1: his facilities, interviewed by The Huffington Post recalled being served
Speaker 1: bloody raw chicken and finding flies and i'd pre cooked meals.
Speaker 1: Inmates were allowed to gamble on sporting events and earn
Speaker 1: the right to take other students food during the next meal.
Speaker 1: One inmate, Angela Phillips, were called We were kept like
Speaker 1: rats in a trap in a maze. There was no
Speaker 1: outlet and no stimulation, so they would just turn on
Speaker 1: each other and turn on staff. That's how it was
Speaker 1: day and day out. So that's good. That's the episode.
Speaker 1: That's just the situation. It's a real problem. Just super depressed. Okay, great, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is why a number of cities, including
Speaker 1: the one I'm in Portland, but also you know, places
Speaker 1: like mine, apples and stuff, are increasingly like pulling cops
Speaker 1: out of schools, which is how like the start of this,
Speaker 1: but clearly it goes beyond like. For one thing, why
Speaker 1: isn't the slattery guy going to get like investigated and
Speaker 1: I don't know, thrown in a hole somewhere. He shouldn't
Speaker 1: be allowed to own anything. No, he shouldn't be allowed
Speaker 1: to own anything. It's not great, very frustrating, frustrating stuff.
Speaker 1: Introduced the episode, I thought we were going to be
Speaker 1: talking about kids in cages, like uh at the border,
Speaker 1: and it's just we have such an obsession with putting
Speaker 1: kids in cages in our entire country. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean yes, we have a long history of that that
Speaker 1: goes on well beyond any of this. Based on the
Speaker 1: title of the dock for the script, I thought you
Speaker 1: were gonna be talking about that commercial cars for kids. No, no,
Speaker 1: this actually was initially about a completely other horrible thing
Speaker 1: done to children. Um, I just haven't had time to
Speaker 1: finish writing that one. But yeah, there's a whole scandal
Speaker 1: where judges um locked children in prisons in exchange for
Speaker 1: direct payments to themselves, um, which we're just not even
Speaker 1: going to get into yet. So good stuff. Everybody feeling
Speaker 1: good today. I'm just going to carry the memory of
Speaker 1: the bloodied chicken throughout the day. I feel like that
Speaker 1: is my fuel for the rest of the day. But
Speaker 1: disgusting image. Whoa, yeah, it's great. Well, Courtney, you want
Speaker 1: to tell the listeners where they can find you on
Speaker 1: the interwebs, dot com, slash backslash net, um, you can
Speaker 1: find me everywhere on the internet at Courtney Kosak. Check
Speaker 1: out my podcast Sophia Alexander and I my co host.
Speaker 1: We got happy ending massages in Tokyo right before the choir,
Speaker 1: so yeah, that's a good escape. I got a sad
Speaker 1: ending massage in Tokyo once he got a he got
Speaker 1: a phone call and found out his mom had died.
Speaker 1: It was really it was a bummer, god, really sad massage. Really,
Speaker 1: I mean I made him finish, but yeah, very sad massage.
Speaker 1: Christ Well, on that note, Wow, you can follow Robert
Speaker 1: for more loving stuff like that. That? I right, okay?
Speaker 1: On Twitter, you can pull us at bastards pod. You
Speaker 1: can buy our merch, including our uh what's what's the
Speaker 1: f d A one. I can't get it right. Every
Speaker 1: FDA approved to prevent all diseases, because those masks are
Speaker 1: in fact FDA approved to prevent all diseases. Um. And
Speaker 1: if the FDA has a problem with it, you know,
Speaker 1: uh what do you? You fucking cowards spend what six
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year on weaponry f DA? Like, you can't,
Speaker 1: you can't take me down. You don't have the guns
Speaker 1: f d A. That's right, I'm calling your asses out.
Speaker 1: And on that note, this is the end of the episode.
Speaker 1: This is the end of the episode. Thank you, Courtney,
Speaker 1: thank you,