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Sonya Soni serves as the advocacy program director at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. She is a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project and The National Black Child Develop Institute. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.
After years of protests and community organizing, on June 30 California shut the doors on the last of its youth prisons, signaling the end of what was once the nation’s largest network of these facilities. The model is also losing steam nationwide, as states from Connecticut to Maine slowly abolish youth prisons and replace them with a holistic restorative justice framework of collective care and support for young people.
Despite this positive movement, however, we have failed, as a country, to acknowledge that young people of color are at risk of being insidiously caught in a web that extends far beyond the prison walls, regardless of how many detention facilities remain standing.
The United States was founded in part on the belief that Black and Indigenous youth were not fully people at all but, rather, acceptable targets of racialized criminalization. Free Black child apprentices, for example, were frequently and forcibly separated from their families and placed into servitude in early America. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Indigenous children were warehoused into white boarding schools by the federal government as a first step toward destabilizing tribal family structures.
While overall youth arrest and incarceration rates have declined over the past decade, young people of color are still surveilled, policed and separated from their families and communities more frequently than their white counterparts. Instead of investing in community resources, this pattern is often accompanied by a shoring up of government systems, programs and placements that further institutionalize, traumatize and isolate young people.
School resource officers, for example, are disproportionately placed in schools with a higher Black and Latino population, leading to a higher rate of school-based arrests and a gateway into the criminal justice system. Mandated reporting — a policy that requires teachers to report any signs they perceive as harm or neglect among their students — can also contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, as children whose guardians are reported often end up being shuffled between penitentiary-esque group homes.
On any given day, a young person can walk into a classroom and end up institutionalized in a group home or sent to foster care by the end of the week, if their family is accused of abuse based on his or her appearance. Of those who have been reported to child protective services, 50 percent confessed that the institutions they were forced into brought more harm rather than support.
Rather than confront the root causes of youth instability, from unjust housing policies to the prison industrial complex, the system is skewed toward punishing young people of color and their families. Movements across the country, including Mandated Reporting is Not Neutral, Mandated Supporters, Not Reporters and JMACforFamilies, are striving to end the use of educators and social workers to police students and, instead, help them to make sure that young people can thrive.
