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A Report of the
Children’s Defense Fund

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About the Children’s Defense Fund

T

he Children’s Defense Fund’s Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child
a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.

CDF provides a strong, effective voice for all the children of America who cannot
vote, lobby or speak for themselves. We pay particular attention to the needs of poor and
minority children and those with disabilities. CDF encourages preventive investment
before children get sick or into trouble, drop out of school or suffer family breakdown.
CDF began in 1973 and is a private, nonprofit organization supported by foundation
and corporate grants and individual donations. We have never taken government funds.

We exist because each day in America:
4
5
8
33
77
192
383
906
1,153
1,672
1,879
2,261
2,383
2,411
2,494
4,017
4,302
17,132

children are killed by abuse or neglect.
children or teens commit suicide.
children or teens are killed by firearms.
children or teens die from accidents.
babies die before their first birthdays.
children are arrested for violent crimes.
children are arrested for drug abuse.
babies are born at low birthweight.
babies are born to teen mothers.
public school students are corporally punished.
babies are born without health insurance.
high school students drop out.
children are confirmed as abused or neglected.
babies are born into poverty.
babies are born to mothers who are not high school graduates.
babies are born to unmarried mothers.
children are arrested.
public school students are suspended.

© October 2007 corrected printing by the Children’s Defense Fund
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-881985-49-0
© Photographs by Steve Liss, 2005, reprinted with permission.

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America’s Cradle
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A Children’s Defense Fund® Report

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Acknowledgments
CDF commissioned two nationally distinguished journalists, Julia Cass, a Pulitzer
Prize winning reporter and co-author of the award winning book, Black in Selma: The
Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr., and Connie Curry, prize winning author and
documentary filmmaker of The Intolerable Burden, to document more systematically what
we were hearing from advocates, families, young people and child advocates across the
nation. Julia Cass traveled to Ohio, and Connie Curry to Mississippi to conduct in-depth
interviews with children and families trapped in the Pipeline to Prison and with a wide
range of professionals committed to dismantling it. We chose Cincinnati, Ohio, and
Sunflower County, Mississippi, for geographic balance and diversity and because both
are states with longstanding CDF offices. Mississippi is a southern, predominantly rural
state with a legacy of segregation and poverty. Ohio is a northern Midwestern state with
a history of migration of Southern Blacks and Appalachian Whites to work in urban areas.
Although the stories are different in these two states, the challenges and frustrations of
children and families are largely the same. Julia Cass’s writing gives life to the children in
the Pipeline and urgency to the cause of ending it.
Steve Liss’s powerful photographs on the cover and in Chapter 2 on juvenile detention
and poverty are poignant illustrations of children in or at risk of entering the Cradle to
Prison Pipeline.
CDF thanks a team of advisors to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline® initiative whose support, wisdom and expertise were invaluable. They include Carol Biondi, Carlton and
Elizabeth Jones Bradshaw, Geoffrey Canada, James Comer, Edward Cornwell III, Inger
Davis, Peter Edelman, Ron Ferguson, Angela Glover Blackwell, Winifred Green, Maya
Harris, Donna Lawrence, Gary Orfield, Malika Saada Saar, Sandy Trujillo and Roger
Wilkins. We are grateful to these and many other experts and advocates who are working
in effective ways on a piece of the Cradle to Prison Pipeline who helped inform us as did
a range of Black and Latino community and systems leaders who attended Best Practices
Institutes at CDF Haley Farm over the past several years.
We also thank the many young leaders who attended CDF’s “Beating the Odds:
Dismantling the Cradle to Prison Pipeline Symposium” at Georgetown University Law
School. Their brave struggles, thoughtful ideas and heroic examples are infused throughout
this report and inspire all of CDF’s work.
As always, this report was a CDF team effort. Morna Murray and Jill Morningstar led
CDF’s early efforts to develop the report aided by Jonathan Stahler and Jadine Johnson. We
are deeply grateful to MaryLee Allen, Karen Lashman and Susan Gates for their guidance
and leadership and to members of CDF’s policy staff for the completion of this report.
CDF’s research team, Janet Simons and Paul Smith, provided much of the data included
in the report as they so ably do for all CDF publications. CDF-Ohio and CDF-Mississippi
staff provided great assistance with state-level research, reporting and outreach. And
CDF communications staff, Casey Aden-Wansbury, Anourack Chinyavong and Elizabeth
Alesbury, produced and published this report.

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CDF Board of Directors
Carol Oughton Biondi
Commissioner
Los Angeles County
Commission for Children
and Families
Los Angeles, CA

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Chair, Department of
African and African
American Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

Angela Glover Blackwell
Vice Chair
Founder and Chief
Executive Officer
PolicyLink
Oakland, CA

Winifred Green
President
Southern Coalition for
Educational Equity
New Orleans, LA

Reverend Kirbyjon Caldwell
Senior Pastor
The Windsor Village –
St. John’s United Methodist
Churches
Houston, TX
Geoffrey Canada
Vice Chair
President and Chief
Executive Officer
Harlem Children’s Zone, Inc.
New York, NY
Leonard Coleman, Jr.
Cendant Corporation
New York, NY
Leslie Cornfeld, Esq.
Director
Mayor’s Task Force on
Child Welfare and Safety
New York, NY
Marian Wright Edelman
Founder and President
Children’s Defense Fund
Washington, DC
James Forbes, Jr.
Senior Minister Emeritus
The Riverside Church
New York, NY
James Forman, Jr.
Associate Professor
Georgetown Law School
Co-Founder, Maya Angelou
Charter School
Washington, DC

Robert F. Vagt, Chair
President Emeritus
Davidson College
Davidson, NC
Laura Wasserman
Movie Music Supervisor
Los Angeles, CA
Reese Witherspoon
Actress
Los Angeles, CA

Dr. Dorothy Height
President Emerita and
Chair of Board
National Council of Negro
Women, Inc.
Washington, DC

Deborah Wright, Esq.
President and Chief
Executive Officer
Carver Bancorp, Inc.
New York, NY

Ruth-Ann Huvane
Child Advocate
Los Angeles, CA

Board of Directors
Emeritus

William Lynch, Jr.
President
Bill Lynch Associates, LLC
New York, NY

Lisle Carter, Jr.
Chair 1973-1986
Laura Rockefeller Chasin
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Chair 1986-1992

Katie McGrath
Child Advocate
Los Angeles, CA

Maureen Cogan

Ivanna Omeechevarria
Child Advocate
Alexandria, VA
Wendy Puriefoy
President
Public Education Network
(PEN)
Washington, DC
J. Michael Solar, Esq.
Solar & Associates, LLP
Houston, TX
Thomas A. Troyer, Esq.
Partner
Caplin & Drysdale
Washington, DC

Howard H. Haworth
David Hornbeck
Chair 1994-2005
James Joseph
Chair 1993-1994
Marylin Levitt
Charles E. Merrill, Jr.
Leonard Riggio
Donna E. Shalala
Chair 1992-1993
Susan P. Thomases

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Table of Contents
Mission of the Children’s Defense Fund and Why We Exist
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
CDF Board of Directors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

Foreword
A Call to End Adult Hypocrisy, Neglect and Abandonment of Children
and America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
• Are We Part of the Problem or Solution?
• The Cradle to Prison Pipeline and the Dangerous Intersection
of Poverty and Race
• Key Immediate Action Steps to Protect and Rescue Children
from the Cradle to Prison Pipeline
• CDF’s Next Steps
• How This Report Is Organized
• Dedication to Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter
• A Parent, Community and National Audit

Part I
Chapter 1 – An Overview of Key Factors Contributing to America’s
Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
• Eric and Frankie: Children Born into the Pipeline
• Pervasive Poverty and Racial Disparities
• A Need for a Comprehensive Continuum of Support from
Birth to Adulthood
• Case Study Findings in Ohio and Mississippi: A Guide for Action
• An Ounce of Prevention Is Most Cost-Effective in Long Run
• 2015 Millennium Development Goals: A Policy Agenda for
Dismantling the Pipeline

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Table of Contents
Chapter 2 – Faces of Children at Risk of or in the Pipeline
by Photographer Steve Liss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Poverty
Race
Single Parents
Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Need Support
Unmet Health and Mental Health Needs
Criminalizing Children at Younger Ages
Homelessness
Girls in the Pipeline
Substance Abuse
Juvenile Detention
Child Gun Deaths
Intergenerational Transmission of Violence
Need for Community Supports, Role Models, Mentors and Positive
Alternatives to the Streets

Part II
Case Studies of Children in or at Risk of the Pipeline in Ohio
and Mississippi by Julia Cass and Connie Curry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Part III: Afterword
The Next Movement: Saving Our Children and Youth and
Our Nation’s Future and Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

Part IV: Appendices
Examples of Promising Approaches to Help Children Avoid
and Escape the Pipeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing to the
Cradle to Prison Pipeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Selected 50-State Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
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Foreword

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A Call to End Adult Hypocrisy, Neglect and
Abandonment of Children and America’s
Cradle to Prison Pipeline

T

his very painful report on America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis is a loud siren of
alarm and wake up call to action to every parent, faith, community, public policy,
political and cultural leader, child and family serving agency and citizen.

I am often asked “What’s wrong with our children?” Children having children.
Children killing children. Children killing others. Children killing themselves. Children
roaming streets alone or in gangs all day and night. Children floating through life like
driftwood on a beach. Children addicted to tobacco and alcohol and heroin and
cocaine and pot, drinking and drugging themselves to death to escape reality.
Children running away from home and being thrown away or abused and neglected
by parents. Children being locked up in jails with adult criminal mentors or all alone.
Children bubbling with rage and crushed by depression.
Well adults are what’s wrong with our children. Parents letting children raise
themselves or be raised by television or the Internet. Children being shaped by peers
and gangs and foul mouth rappers instead of parents, grandparents and kin. Children
roaming the streets because there’s nobody at home or paying enough attention.
Children going to drug houses that are always open instead of to school houses and
church houses, mosques and temples that are too often closed. Children seeing
adults take and sell drugs and be violent to each other and to them. Adults telling children
one thing and doing another. Adults making promises we don’t keep and preaching
what we don’t practice. Adults telling children to control themselves while slapping
and spanking. Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating in our
homes, offices and public life. Adults telling children not to be violent while marketing
and glorifying violence and tolerating gun saturated war zones in communities all
across our land. Adults telling children to be healthy while selling them junk food and
addicting them to smoke and drink and careless sex.

Our “child and youth problem” is not a child and youth problem;
it is a profound adult problem as our children do what they see
us adults doing in our personal, professional and public lives.

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What’s wrong with our children? We are what’s wrong with our children. And I
hope God will help us to repent, to open our eyes and ears and see and hear our children’s
cries for help and guidance, and act to save them all—now!
What must children feel when parents, kin, neighbors and cultural icons abuse
drugs and engage in or condone violent behavior? What must children feel when
those entrusted with caring for them in their homes, neighborhoods, schools and
other institutions abuse and neglect them? How great must be their fear and anger
when parents and relatives are snatched away from them by drugs and gun violence
and incarceration. How scary it must be for a child to sleep in an unsafe shelter full
of strangers with no place to call home. How angry and rejected a child or teen must
feel when there is no loving, reliable person s/he can trust and who is being shunted
from one family foster home or group home to another and from one school that suspends
and expels him to another. How isolated and alone it must feel when no one sees or
cares whether you’re truant or home before dark or struggling to see the blackboard
or have a learning disorder. What can children believe when important adults in their
lives tell them in word and deed that they are not worth much and treat them as a burden
rather than a gift, don’t expect and help them to achieve, or abandon them altogether to
raise themselves? What do children learn about right and wrong when they see corporate leaders being arrested for pillaging their corporations and the life blood of
workers, seniors and stockholders? How can children trust political leaders who
repeatedly promise to alleviate their poverty, to rebuild their flooded homes and
schools, to ease their suffering and then leave them like debris still waiting over two
years later, in a purgatory of hopelessness and uncertainty, for their nation to help
them heal their monstrous losses and to prepare them for productive lives? Who can
children believe when religious leaders, charged by their faith to protect and nurture
them, abuse them instead? And who can rudderless children and youth look up to as
s/heroes in a culture that permits violence and guns and prison and underachievement to be promoted as cool, almost as rites of passage, and bling as worth living,
killing and dying for?
It is time for adults of every race and income group to break our silence about
the pervasive breakdown of moral, family, community and national values, to place our
children first in our lives, and to struggle to model the behavior we want our children
to learn. Our “child and youth problem” is not a child and youth problem, it is a profound
adult problem as our children do what they see us adults doing in our personal, professional and public lives. They seek our attention in negative ways when we provide
them too few positive ways to communicate and to get the attention and love they
need. And we choose to punish and lock them up rather than take the necessary,
more cost-effective steps to prevent and intervene early to ensure them the healthy,
head, safe, fair and moral start in life they need to reach successful adulthood.

Are We Part of the Problem or Solution?
As parents, adults, citizens and leaders we must examine ourselves regularly to
determine whether we are contributing to the crisis our children face or to the solutions they urgently need. And if we are not a part of the solution, we are a part of the

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problem and need to do better. Our children don’t need or expect us to be perfect.
They do need and expect us to be honest, to admit and correct our mistakes, and to
share our struggles about the meanings and responsibilities of faith, parenthood, citizenship and life. Before we can pull up the moral weeds of violence, materialism and
greed in our society and world that are strangling so many of our children, we must
pull up the moral weeds in our own homes, backyards, neighborhoods, institutions
and public policies. So many children are confused about what is right and wrong
because so many adults talk right and do wrong in our personal, professional and
public lives.

The Cradle to Prison Pipeline and the Dangerous
Intersection of Poverty and Race
It’s time for America to become America. The Cradle to Prison Pipeline crisis can
be reduced to one simple fact: The United States of America is not a level playing
field for all children and our nation does not value and protect all children’s lives equally.
As Connie Curry and Julia Cass report in Part II, countless children, especially poor children of color like baby Eric and Frankie, “already are in the Pipeline to Prison before
taking a single step or uttering a word,” and many youth in juvenile justice facilities never
were in the pipeline to college or success. “They were not derailed from the right
track; they never got on it.”
So many poor babies in rich America enter the world with multiple strikes already
against them: without prenatal care and at low birthweight; born to a teen, poor and
poorly educated single mother and absent father. At crucial points in their development,
from birth through adulthood, more risks and disadvantages cumulate and converge
that make a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and
involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely. Lack of access to
health and mental health care; child abuse and neglect; lack of quality early childhood
education to get ready for school; educational disadvantages resulting from failing
schools that don’t expect or help them achieve or detect and correct early problems
that impede learning; zero tolerance school discipline policies and the arrest and
criminalization of children at younger and younger ages for behaviors once handled
by schools and community institutions; neighborhoods saturated with drugs and violence;
a culture that glorifies excessive consumption, individualism, violence and triviality;
rampant racial and economic disparities in child and youth serving systems; tougher
sentencing guidelines; too few positive alternatives to the streets after school and in

We are guilty of many errors and many faults but our worst crime is abandoning
the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can
wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being
formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed.
To him we cannot answer “Tomorrow.” His name is “Today.”
—Gabriela Mistral, Chilean poet, educator, Nobel Laureate

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summer months; and too few positive role models and mentors in their homes,
community, public and cultural life overwhelm and break apart fragile young lives with
unbearable risks. Without significant interventions by families, community elders and
institutions, and policy and political leaders to prevent and remove these multiple,
accumulated obstacles, so many poor and minority youths are and will remain trapped
in a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment and premature death.
The most dangerous place for a child to try to grow up in America is at the intersection of poverty and race. That a Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance and
a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance of going to prison in their lifetime is a national disaster
and says to millions of our children and to the world that America’s dream is not for all.

Key Immediate Action Steps to Protect and Rescue
Children from the Cradle to Prison Pipeline
I hope the sobering facts in this report will wake us up, lead each of us to conduct
a personal, community and national audit and commit to do whatever is necessary for
as long as it takes to stop the flow of children into the Pipeline, get as many out as
early as possible, and reroute them to successful adulthood.
The Pipeline is not an act of God or inevitable; it is a series of human choices
at each stage of our children’s development. We created it, we can change it. We
know what to do. We can predict need. We can identify risk. We can prevent damage.
We can target interventions. We can monitor progress. In so doing, we can guarantee
returns on public investments and control costs to children and society. We can train
professionals and create programs that heal and nurture. We can adapt and replicate
strategies that work in communities across our nation and incorporate them in policy.
We can restore hope and build on child strengths and resiliency. We can wrap
buffers around our children’s fragile places, bind up their wounds and prepare them
with spiritual anchors inside to better weather the storms of life. We have the knowledge and the experience to do this. It is not impossible or futile as countless inspiring
stories of children and youth beating the odds every day attest. What it takes is a critical mass of leaders and caring adults with the spiritual and political will to reach out
and pull children at risk out of the Pipeline and never let go and who will make a
mighty noise until those in power respond to our demands for just treatment for children.
This will not happen unless we come together and do the hard work to build a movement to save all our children and nation’s soul. Beginning right now we can:
1. Name and change the Pipeline and work together, recognizing that children do not come in pieces but in families and communities and are profoundly affected by the norms, priorities, policies and values of our nation
and culture. I and my CDF colleagues have convened and participated in many meetings and discussions and best practices institutes over the past three years since this
effort began. There are many wonderful people engaging in effective efforts all across
our land addressing a piece of the Pipeline, some described in this report. Our challenge is to connect all the pieces, understand the whole Pipeline while breaking it
down into manageable pieces for action, always seeing how each piece affects the

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whole child. Our siloed organizational, governmental, policy and funding streams must
comprehensively address the whole child from birth through the transition to adulthood
in the real context of their lives responding to all of the major forces that help shape
them. False either-ors between personal, family, community and societal responsibility
for children need to stop. All of these child shaping forces must collaborate and put
the child’s healthy development at the center of our decision making. Children’s needs
are too often lost or are beside the point as too many adults use rather than serve children for their own professional, organizational, profit-making and private self interests.
2. Call and work for a fundamental paradigm shift in child policy and
practice away from the too frequent first choice of punishment and incarceration to prevention and early intervention and sustained child investment. The only thing our rich nation will guarantee every child is a jail or detention
cell after s/he gets into trouble, fails in school, becomes a child parent or explodes in
rage from undiagnosed and untreated health and mental health, neglect and abuse
problems.
3. We must begin early by ensuring every child a healthy start through
guaranteed comprehensive health and mental health coverage and coverage
of pregnant women wherever they live in America. Children and pregnant
women cannot wait until health coverage for all is debated and enacted. A child has
only one birth and childhood. That children are dying from tooth abscesses and from
conditions exacerbated by bureaucratic barriers and bungling is a national disgrace. That
our President and Congress refuse to invest enough money to provide all nine million
uninsured children the health care they would not deny a single one of their own children
for a single day, and that taxpayers provide them, should be an urgent issue in 2008
and until a national child health and mental health safety net is in place. The lottery of
birth should not dictate child survival.
4. Ensure quality Early Head Start, Head Start, child care and preschool
to get every child ready for school. High quality early childhood programs help
children do better in school, avoid special education and stay out of trouble. Yet only
50 percent of children eligible for Head Start get it.
5. Link every child to a permanent, caring family member or adult mentor
who can keep them on track and get them back on track if and when they
stray. The fabric of community must be rewoven to catch falling children until our torn
family fabric can be repaired. We must bring to scale promising practices that engage
and enrich children during out-of-school time and encourage more minority youths to
see teaching and child advocacy as urgent callings. And every adult who works with
children in our education, health care, child welfare and juvenile justice systems
should love and respect children or go do something else. The most important mentors in children’s lives are those they come into regular contact with. We must be mindful of what we are teaching through our action and inaction.
6. Make sure every child can read by 4th grade and can graduate from
school able to succeed at work and in life. An ethic of achievement and high
expectations for every child must be created in every home, congregation,

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community and school and in our culture and public policies and practices.
Turn off the television and pick up the books. Make reading cool and fun. That only
14 percent of Black, 17 percent of Latino and 42 percent of White 4th graders are
reading at grade level, and 11.8 percent of Black and 23.8 percent of Latino 16- to
24-year-olds have dropped out before graduating from high school imperils America’s
internal stability, future and competitiveness and sentences illiterate children to social
and economic death. No external enemy poses as great a threat to America’s security
as our millions of unhealthy, uneducated, angry children who will fill our prisons rather
than bolster our economy. This ethic must begin in the early years. While parents are
the frontline of responsibility for children, you can’t teach what you do not know and
no one raises a child alone. Research shows that children of welfare mothers when compared with children of more affluent educated parents have an enormous parent-child
word interaction gap by age 3. Yet Early Head Start reaches only 3 percent of eligible
children during this crucial period of brain development.
7. Commit to helping the richest nation on earth end the child and family
poverty that drives so much of the Pipeline process and the racial disparities
faced by Black, Latino and American Indian children who are disproportionately poor. It is not right, sensible or necessary to have 13 million poor children in a
$13.3 trillion economy. No other industrialized nation permits such high rates of child
poverty. Benjamin Franklin said a long time ago that the best family policy is a good
job. A majority of poor children live in working households, yet private sector and government policies do not ensure that work pays enough to escape poverty and get
health care. Parents need a range of work and income supports to make ends meet
including expanded and refundable earned income tax and child tax credits and minimum
wage laws adjusted for inflation. They also need access to education and training to
improve themselves including at least the chance to attend a community college.
8. Dramatically decrease the number of children who enter the child welfare
and juvenile and criminal justice systems, stop detaining children in adult
jails, and reduce the racial disparities in these and other child serving systems. Children need strong and loving families and communities who work together to
keep children safely at home whenever possible: to be moved out of foster care
promptly and into permanent caring families, and to be helped not to reenter care
unnecessarily or get shunted from child welfare to the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Measures to prevent teen pregnancy, provide quality parent-child home visiting
programs, comprehensive and quality community family support programs to prevent
neglect and abuse, and comprehensive family-based substance abuse treatment to
keep children out of the child welfare system are critical.
9. Confront America’s deadly, historic romance with guns and violence
and stress more nonviolent values and conflict resolution in all aspects of
American life. Since 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert
Kennedy were assassinated, more than 1.1 million Americans have been killed by
guns; another 724,000 have died by other violent means. The majority have been
White. This is more internal deaths than American combat deaths in the 20th and 21st
centuries. Since 1979 over 100,000 children have been killed by guns. We also must

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stand for common sense gun control and against excessive violence in the media and
entertainment industry. We must also challenge negative cultural messages inside and
outside our communities and families that spread toxic racial and gender stereotypes
which divide rather than unite us. It is time to provide a counter vision in word and
deed to help our children redefine what constitutes success in life.

CDF’s Next Steps
This CDF report is the beginning of a national and community crusade to engage
families, youth, community leaders and institutions and those in power in every sector
in the development of healthy, educated children. It will be supplemented by:
• Community toolkits for various target groups;
• A moving video presentation of the Pipeline and one positive alternative vision—
the CDF Freedom Schools® program—for house party, congregational and
community discussion and action;
• Annual child and gun violence reports, Protect Children, Not Guns, to track the
killing of children and call for effective gun control measures and nonviolent
conflict resolution training;
• Continuing publication of annual National Observances of Children’s Sabbaths®
manuals for congregations of all faiths to lift up the needs of children in prayer,
worship, service and action each October;
• How-to kits to conduct Beat the Odds® celebrations of the strengths of our
children and provide college scholarships and leadership opportunities to
youths who surmount devastating odds. Beat the Odds programs need to
take place in communities across the country to highlight and reward achievement and combat stereotypes about at-risk young people who many wrongly
write off as beyond salvation;
• How-to manuals for conducting jail and detention Child Watch® visits in communities to experience firsthand the suffering of children in the Pipeline and what
can be done;
• Annual Cradle to Prison Pipeline Best Practices and Leadership Training
Institutes at CDF Haley Farm and ongoing information about best practices across
sectors;
• Connecting and convening our country’s best and most effective women, community and faith leaders, service providers, policy makers and other concerned
adults to share ideas and monitor progress about ways to break up the Pipeline
at the community, state and national levels;
• Conducting spiritual retreats at Haley Farm to connect, renew, inform and motivate our leaders working for children;

Over 60,000 children have had a summer CDF Freedom Schools® reading and
service enrichment experience sponsored by community institutions and taught
by college mentor servant-leaders. About one-third of these young teachers are
Black males who grew up in the children’s communities and are giving back.
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• Training a critical mass of servant-leaders across faith, race, income and
discipline—especially young people—to empower them to stand up for themselves and providing them ongoing structures for service and advocacy
including Freedom Schools; and
• Implementing several long-term pilot community projects to begin to dismantle
the Pipeline in states with CDF offices and where a critical mass of key stakeholders are ready and willing to come to the table for united and sustained action.
We have models to build on thanks to the quiet and persistent sowing and nurturing of seeds by many through the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC)
over the past 15 years. Over 12,000 young servant-leaders have been trained at CDF
Haley Farm; hundreds of children have gone on to college through Beat the Odds
scholarships and are giving back; over 60,000 children have had a summer Freedom
Schools reading and service enrichment experience sponsored by community institutions and taught by college mentor servant-leaders. About one-third of these young
teachers are Black males who grew up in the children’s communities and are giving
back. A safe haven for discussion of sound old and new ideas and strategies will continue at Haley Farm, which helped incubate a number of promising practices. These
have included the Harlem Children’s Zone under Geoff Canada’s wonderful leadership and the CDF-Southern Regional Office’s advocacy and Southern Rural Black
Women’s Initiative empowerment efforts under Oleta Fitzgerald’s fine leadership and
various youth leadership development models. At Haley Farm we connect the Joshua
generation leaders with Moses generation leaders from the Civil Rights Movement.
Young people need to know their history and how children and youth helped change
America and can do so again. And the annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for
Child Advocacy Ministry each third week in July at Haley Farm will continue to bring hundreds of faith leaders together with young people to examine how the religious community can regain its prophetic voice for justice for the young and poor.
But no single or few organizations can tackle this looming national catastrophe
alone. The neglect, underachievement and abandonment of our children manifested
in the Cradle to Prison Pipeline must become the agenda not only for the Black and
Latino communities but for the entire nation for the next decade. New voices for new
choices that protect all our children’s well-being must be the litmus test for all our
actions and votes as we stand up to those in our homes, communities, schools,
neighborhoods, political and cultural life who hurt children. The longer term policy
vision in Chapter 1 can and must be achieved by 2015 but it will require focused and
insistent demands from a critical mass of leaders and citizens until all the components
for healthy child development are in place.

How This Report Is Organized
Chapter 1 of Part I provides an overview of the major factors behind the Pipeline
through stories and statistics and longer term policy goals. Chapter 2 shows the
faces of children in the Pipeline through 30-year veteran Time Magazine photographer Steve Liss’s moving photographs. Part II shares Julia Cass’s and Connie Curry’s

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case studies describing how the Pipeline affects children on the ground in Mississippi
and Ohio at one point in time. They believe that saving children like baby Eric and others, whose families you will meet, is complex yet possible and that while growing a
child to successful adulthood is not silver bullet proof—and obviously not all children
can or will be rescued—many can be saved. Part III calls for the hard work and persistence needed to build a transforming movement to finish the work begun by the
Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign to put the social and
economic foundations beneath all children and families. Part IV-Appendices includes
brief descriptions of some promising approaches to help keep children out of the
Pipeline, research tables and selected state-by-state data of key child indicators.

Dedication
This report is dedicated to Miz Mae Bertha Carter and her husband Matthew who
wanted a better life for their younger children which they believed required a good
education. They challenged Mississippi’s sham “freedom of choice” desegregation
plans by applying to enroll their children in “White” Drew, Sunflower County,
Mississippi, public schools, home of powerful segregationist Senator Jim Eastland. I
was privileged to be their attorney and watched with awe and humility as their family
courageously withstood violence, eviction, daily harassment and abuse. The younger
Carter children, with their parents’ unwavering love and support, weathered the daily
cruelties in school and community, graduated from high school and college, and
became professionals contributing much to our nation. Connie Curry describes the
heroic struggle of Miz Mae Bertha and her family in an inspiring book, Silver Rights.
When Connie told me that Miz Mae Bertha’s grandson, Lorenzo, was in Parchman
Prison in Mississippi, it reignited my determination to sound the alarm against the
growing re-segregation, incarceration and miseducation of Black children and youth,
especially young Black males, that threaten to undo the hard earned racial and social
progress of the Civil Rights Movement, disempower the Black community and stain
our nation’s future. Lorenzo’s story and that of other young Black males in the Pipeline
are shared in Curry’s investigative case study of Mississippi in Part II.
History teaches if racial apartheid happened before, it can happen again unless
we are vigilant and address now the huge disparities Black and Latino and other poor
children of color face. It’s time for a new generation of Miz Mae Bertha Carters to stand
up and be counted and to do whatever is necessary to assure our children the better
life for which she and so many sacrificed and died. I hope you will be one of them.

Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children’s Defense Fund

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A Parent, Community and National Audit

• If we are not supporting a child we brought into the world as a father or mother
with attention, time, love, discipline, money and the teaching of values, then we
are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the family breakdown
today that is leaving so many children at risk.
• If we are abusing tobacco, alcohol, cocaine or other drugs while telling our
children not to, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution in
our overly addicted society.
• If we have guns in our home and rely on them to feel safe and powerful, and
don’t stand up to those who market guns to our children and to those who
kill our children, or glamorize violence as fun, entertaining or normal, then we
are part of the problem rather than the solution in the chronic war of
American against American and family member against family member that is
tearing us apart.
• If we tell our daughters not to engage in premature and irresponsible sex and
not to have children before they are prepared to parent and support them,
and do not tell our sons the same thing, we are a part of the problem rather
than the solution to teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births so many decry.
• If we profess to be people of faith but believe that the Sermon on the Mount,
the Ten Commandments, the Koran, or whatever religious or core beliefs we hold,
pertain only to one-day practice but not to Monday through Saturday home,
professional and political life, then we are a part of the problem rather than
the solution to the spiritual famine and breakdown in community plaguing
America today.
• If we tell, snicker, or wink at racial, gender, religious or ethnic jokes or engage
in or acquiesce in any practices intended to diminish rather than enhance
other human beings, then we are contributing to the proliferating voices of
racial and ethnic division and intolerance staining our land again. Let’s not
repeat the worst lessons of our past but prepare our children for the future
in a globalizing world that is majority non-White and poor.
• If we think being American is about how much we can get rather than about
how much we can give and share to help all our children get a healthy, fair and
safe start in life, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution.

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Are We Part of the Problem or Solution?

• If we think it’s somebody else’s responsibility to teach our children values,
respect, good manners, work and healthy habits, then we are a part of the
problem rather than the solution to parental neglect today.
• If we or our organizations are spending more money on alcohol and entertainment than on scholarships, books, tutoring, rites of passage and mentoring
programs for youths, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution
to ensuring positive visions and alternatives for children in our increasingly
coarse culture.
• If we’d rather talk the talk than walk the walk to the voting booths, school
board meetings, political forums, and congregation and community meetings
to organize community and political support for effective programs for our
children, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution.
• If our children of any color think that being smart and studying hard is acting
White rather than acting Black or Latino and don’t know about the many
great Black and Latino as well as White achievers who overcame every
obstacle to succeed, then we are a part of the problem rather than a part of
the solution to poor self image and racial stereotyping.
• If we are not voting and holding political leaders accountable for investing
relative pennies in children’s health care, early Head Start and education,
and permanent families for abused and neglected children, while investing
pounds in the military budget and protecting welfare for rich farmers, corporate executives and powerful special interests, then we are a part of the problem
rather than the solution to the growing gap between rich and poor.
• If we think corrupt and unaccountable political, corporate and media leaders of any race who neglect and prey on our children and communities for
self interest should not be held accountable, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to pervasive cynicism and apathy.
• And if we think we have ours and don’t owe any time or money or effort to
help children left behind, out of sight and out of mind in prison, then we are
a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric and
violence and inequality that drives the Pipeline that threatens all Americans
and the very meaning and soul of America.

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Part I
Chapter 1

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An Overview of Key Factors
Contributing to America’s Cradle to
Prison Pipeline® Crisis
“Tell them we need hope.”
– a Katrina child’s plea to America

“It is easier to build strong children than to fix broken men.”
– attributed to Frederick Douglass

Children Born into the Pipeline
Baby Eric
Eric came into the world on April 26, 2004, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and already is
in the Pipeline to Prison before taking a single step or uttering a word. In early May,
when he was two weeks old, he was a tiny brown bundle lying across the lap of his
19-year-old mother in the Wynton Terrace housing project on the north side of the
city. She was staying temporarily in a unit rented by one of her sisters because the
electricity and gas had been turned off in her aunt’s house, where she had gone with
Eric and his brother, 19-month-old Tae, when she left the hospital. She doesn’t have
a phone or child care or access to a car so “it’s kind of hard to do anything.” The
closest store is ten blocks away. She said she would like to finish high school and
get a job. She liked school but “I had a lot of problems. I was running away all the
time. I wasn’t getting along with anybody,” she explained, describing ongoing fights
between her and her siblings and her mother, who once called the police to take
her to juvenile detention. She lived with the boys’ 26-year-old father until he
punched her in the stomach when she was eight months pregnant with Eric. She
called the police and he went to jail. “He didn’t get as much time as I thought
because his lawyers said he had some kind of mental illness.” He does not have a
job and has been in jail before.
At two weeks old, Eric should have all possible futures open to him in America,
a culture that believes life outcome is determined by the individual alone. In reality,
this infant boy already is not in the trajectory that leads to college or work; he’s at
the beginning of the pathway to prison—or, if not incarceration, a life on the margins.
If Eric is imprisoned 18 years from now, no one is likely to look at the risks he faced
in his early years or the disadvantages of his childhood circumstances. He will be
another bad youth to be punished for his criminal acts. It will be too late then to think

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of what could have been done back when Eric lacked stimulation and proper nurturing at two weeks old or when he began having behavioral or emotional problems
at school or when he fell behind, got suspended and dropped out, or when he
received little positive attention or guidance from the adults in his community. It will
be too late then to realize that interventions known to make a difference might well
have neutralized the risks and put him on the path to a productive life.
Meet Eric and others in Cass’s and Curry’s case studies in Part II.
Frankie
I watched the flow of children through my courtroom. But it took some time for
me to actually understand the interplay (complicity, if you will) of two primary feeders
into the Pipeline: the juvenile justice system and the child welfare system. Let me
tell you about Frankie who first came before me at the age of 10 (now presumed to
have the capacity to commit a crime). He was charged with Assault 4 (a misdemeanor).
Frankie was born into the child welfare system. Removed from his mother at birth,
Frankie spent his first eight years moving from foster home to foster home, getting
angrier and more depressed. His angry outbursts landed him in a “therapeutic foster
home” placement for kids with behavioral problems. Of course once he was placed,
he continued to demonstrate his behavioral issues. He hit staff. The police were
called. He was arrested and charges were filed. It is clear that the therapeutic foster
home is using the courts to “enforce the rules” and provide much needed respite
care. But this created a criminal record for Frankie. Over the next five years, this pattern
repeats itself several times. I last saw Frankie six months ago. He presented on two
counts of Robbery 2 (felony charges). His lengthy criminal history (created from his
behavior in placement) counts to increase his score for the purpose of sentencing.
Frankie was facing 206–258 weeks in juvenile state “prison.” By the time he is
released, Frankie will be almost 18. He has literally been moved through the
Pipeline from the cradle—next stop, the adult prison system.
–Chief Judge Patricia Clark of the Juvenile
Division of King County Superior Court, Seattle, Washington
The United States of America does not value and protect all of its children equally
or ensure them the basic hope, health care, safety, education and family supports all
children need to envisage and achieve a productive future.
• A child is abused or neglected every 36 seconds, over 880,000 a year.
This is more than the combined populations of Cleveland and Cincinnati. A
child dies from abuse or neglect every six hours, about 1,460 a year.
• A child is born into poverty every 36 seconds. Our 13 million “other
America” poor children far exceed the combined populations of Haiti and
Liberia. Our 5.6 million children living in extreme poverty equals the combined
population of seven U.S. states: Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska,
South Dakota, Delaware and Montana plus the District of Columbia—the cap-

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ital of the “free” world. Children who live in households with annual incomes
less than $15,000 are 22 times more likely to be neglected or abused than
those with incomes of $30,000 or more.
• A baby is born without health insurance every 47 seconds; 90 percent
of the nine million uninsured children live in working families and a
majority in two parent families. Forty American states each have fewer than nine
million people.
• A child or teen is killed by a firearm about every three hours—almost
eight a day. Every four days 32 children and teens die from guns in an invisible,
relentless stream of violence equivalent to the tragic Virginia Tech massacre but
without the outcry. Over 200 million guns saturate our nation’s communities
and homes, leaving none of us safe.
• Every minute a baby is born to a teen mother. Children having children
would fill up the city of Atlanta each year.
• Every two minutes a baby is born at low birthweight. The U.S. ranks
24th among industrialized nations in infant mortality and 22nd in low birthweight
babies. Yet our political leaders in both parties continue to refuse to ensure all
pregnant women prenatal and postpartum care to help assure all children a
healthy start in life.
These statistics reflect children of every race, place and family type. There are
more White poor children and victims of gun violence than Black or Latino children.
But minority children fare far worse and are at greatest risk of being sucked into the
Cradle to Prison Pipeline. The most dangerous place for a child to try to grow
up in America is at the intersection of race and poverty.

Pervasive Poverty and Racial Disparities
Poor children of color are the canaries in America’s deep mines of child neglect
and racial and economic injustice. At critical points in their development, from birth
through adulthood, millions of these children confront a multitude of disadvantages
and risks including poverty and its many stresses: single, teen or unstable families; no
or poor health care; lack of early education and enrichment; child abuse and neglect;
failing schools that don’t teach them to read, write or compute; grade retention, suspension and expulsion; questionable special education placements or dropping out;
unaddressed mental health problems; absent fathers or incarcerated parents; violent
neighborhoods; and disproportionate involvement in the child welfare and juvenile justice
systems. These accumulated and convergent risks form a Cradle to Prison Pipeline,

A Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his
lifetime; a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance; and a White boy a 1 in 17 chance.

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trapping these children in a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment
and often premature death.
• Black babies are almost four times as likely as White babies to have their mothers
die in childbirth and are more than twice as likely as White babies to be born
at very low birthweight and to die before their first birthday.
• Black children are more than three times as likely as White children to be born
into poverty and to be poor, and are more than four times as likely to live in
extreme poverty. One in 3 Latino babies and 2 in 4 Black babies are born into
poverty; 1 in 4 Latino children and 1 in 3 Black children are poor. Between
2000–2006, poor Latino children increased by more than 500,000 (to 4.1 million) and poor Black children increased 132,000 (to 3.8 million).
• Latino children are three times as likely and Black children are 70 percent more
likely to be uninsured than White children.
• Nine in 10 uninsured Latino children and 3 in 4 uninsured Black children have
a working parent. Almost three-quarters of Latino children and more than half
of Black children have a parent who works full-time throughout the year.
• Twice as many Black children are in foster care as we would expect given their
representation among all children. They represent 16 percent of the general
population but 32 percent of the foster care population.
• Children who age out of foster care are less likely to graduate from high school
or college, experience more serious mental health problems, including posttraumatic stress disorder, than children generally; are less likely to receive
adequate health and mental health care; are more likely to experience homelessness; and to be involved in the criminal justice system.
• A Black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a
Black girl has a 1 in 17 chance. A Latino boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 6 chance of
going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino girl has a 1 in 45 chance.
• About 580,000 Black males are serving sentences in state or federal prison,
while fewer than 40,000 Black males earn a bachelor’s degree each year. One
in 3 Black men, 20–29 years old, is under correctional supervision or control.
• Black juveniles are about four times as likely as their White peers to be incarcerated. Black youths are almost five times as likely to be incarcerated as White
youths for drug offenses.
• According to a Harvard Civil Rights Project and Urban Institute report, only 50
percent of Black and 53 percent of Latino students graduated from high school
on time with a regular diploma in 2001.
• When Black children do graduate from high school, they have a greater chance
of being unemployed and a lower chance of going directly to full-time college
than White high school graduates.

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• Only 14 percent of Black, 17 percent of Latino and 42 percent of White 4th
graders are reading at grade level; and only 11 percent of Black, 15 percent
of Latino, and 41 percent of White 8th graders perform at grade level in math.
• Homicide is the leading cause of death among Black males 15–34. Black
males ages 15–19 are almost four times as likely as their White peers to die
from a firearms injury and are six times as likely to be homicide victims. Young
White males are twice as likely to commit gun suicide as young Black males.
• Of the 1.5 million children with an incarcerated parent in 1999, Black children
were nearly nine times as likely to have an incarcerated parent as White children;
Latino children were three times as likely as White children to have an incarcerated parent.
• A child with an incarcerated parent is six to nine times as likely as a child whose
parent was not incarcerated to become incarcerated him/herself.

A Need for a Comprehensive Continuum of
Support from Birth to Adulthood
Children and families do not come in pieces or neat packages that fit one or
another “program” or “strategy.” They are a complex amalgam of biological potential
and environmental realities, of culture and family and community role models, of
assets and risks. Analyzing causes and effects, and understanding the links among
all these factors, requires separating them into subject areas, systems or knowledge
areas. That is how data are gathered and kept, professionals are trained, programs
are funded, budgets are made and services administered. But we must not lose sight
of the whole child.
Like an insurance company’s actuarial chart, it is possible to predict from “risk
factors” the likelihood of a child ending up stuck in the Cradle to Prison Pipeline.
Much research and Cass’s and Curry’s case studies show major risk factors to be:
■ poverty, especially extreme poverty;
■ family composition where single parents, teenage parents, alcohol- or sub-

stance-abusing parents, a parent in prison, a parent abandoning the home—all
predict increased delinquency;
■ lack of health care, from prenatal care for pregnant women to preventive

screening for children and youth of all ages to detect illnesses that block learning,
hearing, seeing or concentrating;
■ babies born at low birthweight, which is a risk factor for later physical, devel-

opmental and learning problems;
■ abuse or neglect during childhood that goes unnoticed or untreated and fueled

by poverty;

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■ foster care placements when families break down (especially in families not

related to the children) risk abuse, neglect, sexual exploitation, low self-esteem,
anger and poor social relationships;
■ poor school quality where not reading at grade level, failing or acting out are

met with police intervention, and suspensions or expulsions leading to dropping out altogether;
■ few timely and quality mental health program interventions in communities to

provide care in a timely manner to prevent or interrupt negative behavior or
remediate problems causing children to get into trouble;
■ the juvenile justice system which cements many children’s sense of hopeless-

ness and offers too few positive programs, too late, to change the Pipeline’s trajectory; and
■ throughout all these major risk factors is the disparate treatment of children of color.

Research also shows that if a child has one or a few of these risk factors, while
potentially harmful, there’s a good chance that the child’s resiliency and some intervention by a teacher, a counselor, a mentor, a relative, a pastor or some other adult
offering encouragement, assistance and guidance can save that child from falling into or
staying in the Pipeline. CDF’s Beat the Odds celebrations of and scholarships for
children overcoming unbelievable obstacles attest to the power of one caring adult in
a child’s life. But a young child exposed to six or more of these risk factors is ten times
as likely to commit a violent act by age 18 as one who experiences only one or a few
risk factors. In a hospital nursery, behind the glass of newborns in 2001, that one in
three Black boy babies and one in six Latino boy babies will end up in the Pipeline
and in prison is a national tragedy. Unless it is addressed head on, it will disempower the
Black and Latino communities and undermine family stability and child socialization.
The challenge for each of us and for the nation is to prevent it—for preventable it is.

Case Study Findings in Ohio and Mississippi: A Guide for Action
Julia Cass’s and Connie Curry’s investigations of children in the Pipeline in Ohio
and Mississippi in 2003 and 2004 and our research underscore the critical need to
devote attention and shift resources from locking up children and youth to getting
them on the right track and helping them stay there. They found:
• Many of the young men and women in the juvenile justice system never were in the
pipeline to college. They were not derailed from the right track; they never got on it.
• Intervention is important in early childhood while the brain is still growing and
behavioral patterns are being formed. A lot of a child’s future life story is written
by the third or fourth grade.
• Many Black and Latino children are behind when they enter kindergarten.
• Mental health and emotional problems are a major gateway to the Prison
Pipeline. When school, family or community resources aren’t there to help, these
children are dumped into the juvenile justice system.

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• Children who have not learned self-control by the age of eight are at high risk
of delinquency and incarceration. Teachers know who they are, but there is no
structure for getting help. These children are more likely to be suspended.
• Children know by about the third grade whether they are part of the mainstream
or of another, more marginal world. Those who are routinely disciplined or
struggle with schoolwork mentally drop out at this point. They actually leave
school in the ninth grade, the major exit ramp from the path to college. The
ninth grade is also the school year when many youth commit their first criminal
offenses.
• The behavior teachers see as disruptive and disrespectful may be difficult to
manage but knowing the children makes their behavior understandable and
reveals other ways to work with them.
• Truancy—being out of school—is the number one predictor of delinquency.
When teenagers drop out of school, they put themselves at the bottom of the
economic ladder, probably for life, and are much more likely to be detained and
incarcerated, especially if they hang out on risk saturated street corners.
• Zero tolerance school discipline policies don’t improve school achievement or
teach a lesson to the offender; they contribute to the Pipeline to Prison by pushing
students out of school.
• School systems are criminalizing school misbehavior, with police officers stationed
at schools arresting students for behavior that used to be handled in the principal’s office.
• America’s deeply ingrained philosophy that just getting tough is the way to stop
misbehavior rarely works, especially with children. The political pendulum
swings from more to less punishment but the paradigm itself is worn out and a
new one has not taken its place.
• Despite the image of super predators and dangerous hallways, most students
suspended from school and most juveniles in detention did not commit violent
offenses or put the safety of others at risk.
• Anger runs like a river through the stories of virtually all the children profiled and
of many of their parents.
• Teenagers will seek respect wherever they can find it.
• Young people may be serviced and diagnosed but they also need real relationships, not just required ones. Thousands of children grow up without a single
adult, apart from a mother or grandmother, taking a sustained interest in guiding
them and sharing their joys and sorrows.
• The juvenile justice system is clogged with cases that don’t belong there.
Judges and veteran public defenders say that perhaps 30 percent of cases that
now are brought to court used to be resolved within families, neighborhoods or
schools.

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• Youth prisons don’t have to be abusive to be effective. Community- and familybased programs are more effective in changing a juvenile’s course.
• The deeper a youth gets into the Prison Pipeline, the harder it is to get out. Not
only do they have fewer choices, they don’t see the choices that do exist.
• Even with sincere resolve to change and stay out of trouble, it is difficult to separate
from an existing network and identity. Youth coming back from incarceration
need a lot of support.
• Racial disproportion runs through every system—the children behind in kindergarten, those who are suspended and expelled, those who drop out and don’t
graduate, and those who go to juvenile detention and adult prison. It is possible
to identify decision points when disparate treatment takes place.

An Ounce of Prevention Is Most Cost-Effective in Long Run
Education costs less than ignorance, preventive health care far less than emergency rooms, preventive family services less than out-of-home care, and Head Start
much less than prisons.
• The average annual per child cost of a mentoring program is $1,000.
• The cost of providing a year of employment training for unemployed youths is
$2,492.
• The annual per child cost of a high quality after-school program is $2,700.
• The average cost of ensuring that a low-income family has affordable housing
is $6,830.
• The average annual per child cost of Head Start is $7,028.
• The annual per child cost for a high quality comprehensive full-day, full-year
early childhood education program is $13,000.
• The average annual per prisoner cost is $22,650. States spend on average
almost three times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil.
It’s time for America to do the right and cost-effective thing by investing in children
now. That will happen only when advocates for children stand up together and make
it happen.

2015 Millennium Development Goals:
A Policy Agenda for Dismantling the Pipeline
Millions of our children are bleeding from many wounds that we have the means
but not the love and will as a nation to prevent and heal. Our Creator did not make
two classes of children. It is our responsibility and within our power to make our nation
see and protect all our children as the sacred gifts they are and not just as fodder for
war, the prison industry or as a consumer market. We adults must regain our moral
bearing and teach our children that the most important things in life are not things but

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love, justice, respect, service and integrity. We must challenge ourselves, our families,
religious, cultural, media and government leaders, and citizens to make our children’s
health, safety, education, family and community life our overarching national purpose.
Nations of the world have agreed on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to,
among other things, reduce child and maternal mortality and end extreme global
poverty by 2015. We hope the United States will lead in assuring their achievement
and set and honor similar goals in our nation for our own poor, uninsured and poorly
educated children. Every citizen must demand that our leaders commit, as a
condition of our vote, to:
• Ensure every child and pregnant woman in America health insurance for all
medically necessary services now.
• Lift every child from poverty by 2015; half by 2010.
• Get every child ready for school through full funding of quality Early Head Start
and Head Start, child care and new investments in quality preschool education
for all.
• Protect all children from neglect, abuse and other violence and ensure them the
permanent families they need when their families break down.
• Make sure every child can read by fourth grade and can graduate from school
able to succeed at work and in life.
• Provide every child safe, quality after-school and summer programs so they can
learn, serve, work and stay out of trouble.
• End child hunger through adequate child and family nutrition investments.
• Ensure every child a place called home and every family decent affordable housing.
• Ensure families the supports needed to be successful in the workplace, including
health care, child care, education and training.
• Create jobs with a living wage.
All of these achievable goals will be costly but we can afford it. We do not have
a money problem in America, we have a values problem. Repealing and not extending the tax cuts for the top one percent of the wealthiest taxpayers could provide $57
billion of the entire estimated $75 billion policy agenda listed above. The war in Iraq
already has cost over $450 billion through 2007.

Overview

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Part I
Chapter 2

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Faces of Children at Risk of or
in the Pipeline

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by Steve Liss, a 30-year veteran
photographer for Time Magazine. We recommend his moving book, No Place
for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention (University of Texas Press, 2005).

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Poverty
Poverty is the largest driving force behind the Cradle to
Prison Pipeline crisis, exacerbated by race. Although a majority
of poor children live in working families playing by the rules,
they cannot earn enough to escape poverty. A minimum wage
job pays only 58.9 percent of the federal poverty level for a
family of four. Livable wages and increases in income supplements like the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits and
work supports like child care and health care can close the
poverty gap.

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Child poverty in America continues to grow. In 2006, 17.4
percent of children in America, 13 million children (one in six),
were poor. Today there are 1.2 million more children living in
poverty than there were in 2000, an increase of 11 percent.
Children under the age of five remain more likely to be poor than
older children, with 4.2 million living in poverty, one out of every
five.
More than half of all poor children live in 10 states:
Ten states with the greatest number of poor
children, 2005-2006
Number
California
Texas
New York
Florida
Illinois
Ohio
Georgia
Pennsylvania
Michigan
North Carolina

1,697,024
1,527,262
888,344
689,315
543,373
508,703
484,525
464,686
445,142
429,169

Percent
18.1%
23.9
20.0
17.5
17.1
18.7
20.2
16.9
18.3
20.2

Ten states (and the District of Columbia)
with the highest child poverty rates, 2005-2006
Number
District of Columbia
Mississippi
Louisiana
New Mexico
West Virginia
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Texas
Alabama
Kentucky
Tennessee

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36,678
220,420
298,228
127,823
96,386
212,672
164,545
1,527,262
253,108
223,296
322,483

Percent
32.6%
29.5
27.8
25.6
25.2
24.3
24.3
23.9
23.0
22.8
22.7

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There are more poor White (4.2 million) than Black
(3.8 million) or Latino children (4.1 million) although Black
and Latino children are disproportionately poor. Poverty
afflicts rural, urban and suburban areas. U.S. child poverty
rates exceed those of all other (and less) wealthy industrialized
nations and are a national disgrace. We need leaders and citizens
who will commit to ending child poverty by 2015 in the richest
nation on earth.
Child poverty is not inevitable. It’s a national choice
that we can change with political and moral leadership.

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In the richest nation on earth, 35.3 percent of Black children,
28.0 percent of Latino children and 10.8 percent of White, nonLatino children live in poverty. Almost half of Louisiana’s and
Mississippi’s Black children are poor.
Number and Rate of Children Living in Poverty in 2006
Ranked by number poor:
State
Number

Rate

Black Children
United States
Georgia
Texas
Florida
New York
Illinois
Louisiana
North Carolina
California
Michigan
Ohio

Ranked by poverty rate:
State
Number

Rate

Black Children
3,776,153
276,929
275,457
266,813
259,728
220,177
201,830
189,568
178,111
171,849
168,021

35.3%

United States

33.6
34.8
32.0
32.0
38.8
48.4
36.1
28.5
40.7
42.0

Louisiana
201,830
Mississippi
160,287
Oklahoma
35,312
Minnesota
36,453
Wisconsin
50,369
Kentucky
38,829
Missouri
84,620
Arkansas
56,589
Ohio
168,021
District of Columbia 33,088

Latino Children (may be of any race)
United States

4,112,200

28.0%

United States

1,133,514
972,344
299,317
193,806
185,672
148,831
95,628
87,013
79,405
70,939

26.3
36.1
34.0
22.3
29.3
22.2
23.7
26.6
31.9
39.2

Montana
Kentucky
Tennessee
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Arkansas
Wisconsin
Texas

United States

4,506,802

Ohio
New York
California
Texas
Pennsylvania
Michigan
Florida
Indiana
Kentucky
Tennessee

287,316
269,581
241,847
240,752
223,096
206,928
204,570
165,054
162,406
161,671

35.3%
48.4
47.6
46.1
45.3
44.9
44.5
43.0
42.6
42.0
41.7

Latino Children (may be of any race)

California
Texas
New York
Florida
Arizona
Illinois
Colorado
New Jersey
New Mexico
Georgia

White, non-Latino Children

3,776,153

4,112,200
3,150
10,622
25,546
34,521
66,609
58,420
14,827
17,541
31,157
972,344

28.0%
42.3
40.1
39.8
37.5
37.1
35.7
35.5
34.8
34.7
33.7

White, non-Latino Children
10.8%

United States

4,506,802

13.6
11.4
8.3
9.9
10.8
11.9
10.3
13.6
19.6
16.1

West Virginia
Kentucky
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Maine
Tennessee
Mississippi
Indiana
Louisiana
Ohio

86,170
162,406
99,078
81,785
41,895
161,671
53,416
165,054
80,406
287,316

10.8%
24.4
19.6
18.1
17.7
16.5
16.1
14.1
13.6
13.6
13.6

Source: 2006 American Community Survey
Note: Poverty measures in the American Community Survey are derived from 12 monthly samples and are not
comparable to the calendar year estimates from the March ASEC. Calculations by CDF.

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Child poverty is costly. Every year that 13 million children live in poverty costs the nation $500 billion in lost productivity. Child poverty could be eliminated for $55 billion
a year and could be paid for by the tax cuts currently received
by the top one percent of taxpayers. The $100 billion a year we
are spending on the Iraq war could lift every child in America
from poverty twice over.

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Race
Racial disparity runs through every major system impacting children’s life chances: limited access to health care; lack
of early Head Start and quality preschool experiences; children waiting in foster care for permanent families; and failing
schools with harsh discipline policies that suspend, expel and
discourage children who drop out and don’t graduate and
push more children into juvenile detention and adult prison.
We must identify key decision points where disparate treatment
of poor children of color can and must be systematically
addressed and monitored.

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A black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going
to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance; and a
White boy a 1 in 17 chance. Black juveniles are about four
times as likely as their White peers to be incarcerated. Black
youths are almost five times and Latino youths are more than
twice as likely to be incarcerated as White youths for drug
offenses. Today, 580,000 Black males are serving sentences in
state or federal prison, while fewer than 40,000 Black males
earn a bachelor’s degree each year.

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Black children are twice as likely as White children to
be put in programs for mental retardation; almost twice as
likely to be retained in a grade; three times as likely to be suspended; and 50 percent more likely to drop out of school.
Although Black children constitute 16 percent of the child and
youth population, they constitute 32 percent of those in foster
care. Minority youth make up 39 percent of the juvenile population but are 60 percent of committed juveniles.

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Single Parents
Black babies are almost twice as likely as White babies
to be born to teen parents and grow up in single parent
households. Single mother households are almost six times as
likely to be poor as two parent households. Latino children
are 40 percent more likely than White children to grow up in single parent homes; 56 percent of Black children, 29 percent of
Latino children, and 21 percent of White children live in single
parent households.

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Each year over 400,000 babies are born to teen mothers.
Teen birth rates dropped significantly between 1991 and
2004 although out of wedlock rates have increased. Today,
35.8 percent of all babies, 68.8 percent of Black babies, 46.4
percent of Latino babies, 62.3 percent of American Indian babies,
and 30.5 percent of White babies are born to unmarried
mothers.

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Although many single parents are successfully raising
children, children need the emotional and financial support
and guidance of fathers as well as mothers. Teen pregnancy
prevention and parenting preparation and support measures
should be addressed to males and females. Poverty and basic
skills levels are the largest predictors of who will become a teen
parent and hope is the best contraceptive. Young people need
both the capacity and the motivation to resist self limiting
actions. They need to have a sense of a positive future they
can attain and the supports to strive for it.

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Grandparents Raising
Grandchildren Need
Support
There are 2.5 million grandparents raising their grandchildren; 963,000 of these children have no parent in the
household. They need support. Strengthening kinship networks
is crucial to keeping children out of the child welfare system
and the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

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Unmet Health and Mental
Health Needs
If your family has money, you get psychiatric intervention…. If they don’t, you get the prison psychologist.
– Ed Latessa, University of Cincinnati criminologist

The future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast does not
depend on structures. Our future depends on our children. If
we do not provide the safe, nurturing, predictable and
enriched experiences these children need, and if we do not
arm our caregivers, educators and mental health providers
with the tools they need to understand, engage, educate and
heal traumatized children, all these new buildings will be filled
with struggling children growing into adulthood expressing
only a fraction of their true potential.
– Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Fellow,
The Child Trauma Academy, Houston, Texas

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In 2006, the number of uninsured children from birth
through age 18 rose for the second year in a row. Another
707,000 children have become uninsured, bringing the total
to more than 9.4 million uninsured children in America.
This increase is more than double the jump from 2004 to
2005. It is a national disgrace that the richest nation on earth
has actually increased the number of uninsured children, preventing them from getting the critical health coverage they
need to grow and thrive.
Tavis Smiley’s Covenant with Black America makes
health security the first covenant. We applaud Rep. Bobby Scott
from Virginia for introducing and the entire Congressional
Black Caucus, as well as other Congresspeople (64 total), for
co-sponsoring the All Healthy Children Act (H.R. 1688) and
Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont for introducing the
Senate bill as S. 1564. This pending child health bill is the
only bill that would cover all nine million uninsured children
and pregnant women now, ensure a national health safety net
with comprehensive benefits including mental and dental
health coverage, and greatly simplify enrollment and retention
procedures. It would cost about three months of the Iraq war
or one half of the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.
More than 1,200 organizations, faith leaders and public
officials across the country have endorsed CDF’s Healthy
Child Campaign. We must finish the job and hold our elected
officials accountable in 2008 if they do not stand up for the
health of all our children now.
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Deamonte Driver,
12 years old, from Maryland –
Died 2/25/07
when bacteria from an abscessed
tooth infected his brain, when a
routine $80 tooth extraction
would have saved him.

Devante Johnson,
14 years old, from Texas –
Died 3/1/07
from kidney cancer after
being wrongfully denied health
coverage and the treatment he
desperately needed.

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A Congressional study found 15,000 children in juvenile
detention facilities, some as young as 7 years old, solely
because community mental health services were unavailable.
Many parents are forced to declare themselves neglectful and
abusive to get their children admitted to institutions in hopes
of getting treatment. Too often, once in care, their children
experience neglect and sometimes abuse. Youth in a Mississippi
detention center were found by the Justice Department and
courts to suffer sexual abuse by guards, cruel shackling,
harassment and inhumane demands to eat their own vomit.
Human rights abuses pervade too many child and youth detention facilities and group homes across America.

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Our nation refuses to provide children and youths or
adults access to crucial mental health coverage and services to
detect and treat early on their problems before they drop out
of school or become a threat to others. Lack of access to mental
health services for parents and children pushes thousands of
poor children into the Cradle to Prison Pipeline every year.
Studies have reported that as many as three-fourths of incarcerated youths have mental health disorders and about 1 in 5
has a severe disorder. Latino children have the highest percentage of unmet mental health needs.

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Every child’s life is of equal value and every child should
have a national health and mental health safety net now as
seniors do. Children’s chances to survive, thrive and grow
should not depend on the compassion of a Governor or wealth
of a state or the fickleness of political winds. A compassionate
and sensible society must ensure thresholds of decency and
protection for every child.

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And Katrina’s children are still waiting for relief from
their post-traumatic stress disorders.

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Criminalizing Children
at Younger Ages
Schools use detention centers as their discipline. I get calls
every week, if not every day, from parents about their children
being taken out of school in handcuffs by police.
–Margaret Burley, Ohio Coalition for the
Education of Children with Disabilities

I sat at a desk and I had kids I couldn’t even see…They
weren’t tall enough. I wondered, “What in the world could you
have done?”
–Mark Reed, Juvenile Court Administrator,
Hamilton County, Ohio

A 5-year-old girl in St. Petersburg, Florida, was arrested and
handcuffed by three police officers after she had stopped her temper
tantrum and before her mother could arrive at school to consult with
teachers. A 10-year-old girl was arrested in Philadelphia for having
scissors in her backpack, which she had brought for use in class.
Have we adults lost our common sense, arresting and handcuffing 5-, 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children on school grounds and
criminalizing children at younger and younger ages for offenses
that used to be handled by schools or in communities?

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One-size-fits-all zero tolerance school discipline policies
need to be re-examined and changed. While it is important
that schools be safe and orderly learning environments, the
majority of suspensions, expulsions and arrests are for nonviolent
offenses. Community and faith leaders need to meet with
school officials to develop more child-appropriate discipline
policies and procedures. Putting troubled children without
treatment out of school just creates more troubled children.

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Homelessness
An estimated 1.7 million children run away or are cast
out of their homes every year; more than 3 out of 4 of them
return home within a week. On any given night, 200,000
children are homeless, 1 in every 4 of the homeless population.
Shelters are no place for children, who need a stable, safe
place called home.

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Many children and teens aging out of the child welfare
system or leaving juvenile or adult detention often lack the most
basic or adequate community transition supports. Targeted
actions to meet the needs of young children at risk of entering the system and of older youth aging out of the
system are crucial.

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Girls in the Pipeline
Boys are five times as likely to be incarcerated as girls.
But in 2003 almost 15,000 girls were incarcerated, 1 of every
7 juveniles in residential placement. While programs targeted
to males are crucial and need to be expanded, attention and
targeted services also must be provided to girls.

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A Black girl has a 1 in 17 chance of going to prison in
her lifetime; a Latino girl a 1 in 45 chance.

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Substance Abuse
Drugs, tobacco and alcohol lead our children down the
wrong path. Disconnected youth, lacking a decent education or
high school degree, or job training skills, and social support
systems or mentors, often resort to self-destructive acts. They
thrive in the underground economy, denied a chance for honest
work, a useful education or hope. In 2003, 74 percent of
adult males arrested tested positive for drugs or alcohol.

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Alcohol and other substance abuse treatment for youth
and for parents and adults is in too short supply.

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Juvenile Detention
A jail or detention cell after a child or youth gets into
trouble is the only universally guaranteed child policy in
America. It’s time to guarantee every child in the richest
nation on earth the health and mental health, early childhood
experience, quality education, safe and stable housing and
safe neighborhoods, and quality out-of-school time care they
need to stay out of trouble and avoid imprisonment.

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Reliance on punishment and incarceration too often as
a first rather than last resort has given the U.S. the largest prison
population in the world. In 2006, the United States’ inmate
population of 2,312,414 exceeded China’s, whose population
is more than four times as large. We need a paradigm change.

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States spend on average nearly three times as much per
prisoner as per public school pupil. In some states, the growth
in prison costs exceeds the growth in higher education spending. It costs more to detain a child than to provide him a
Head Start. What a wrongheaded investment policy.

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At mid-year 2006, 837,000 African American men were
incarcerated—many of them fathers. Zero tolerance drug
laws, unequally applied, combined with poor skills and education, and lack of jobs, often exclude them from contributing
to our economy. Reconnecting disconnected youth through
education, job training and community support is essential.
The increased incarceration of young men of color, disruption
of family ties, and loss of ability to find work and vote after
prison threaten to disempower minority communities and
reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Child Gun Deaths
A child or teen is killed by gunfire about every three
hours—nearly eight a day. Over 101,000 children and teens
have died from gunfire since 1979 with four to five times as
many child gun injuries. In 2004, 2,845 children and teens
died from guns—more than the number of American military
deaths between 2003–2006 in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Black males ages 15–19 are about eight times as likely
to be gun homicide victims as White males; White males ages
15–19 are twice as likely as Black males to commit suicide
with a firearm.
Renewing the assault weapons ban, controlling illegal
gun trafficking, funding more community policing and positive
community alternatives to the streets for children, teaching
nonviolent conflict resolution skills and values in our homes,
congregations and schools, and avoiding and opposing violent
Internet and video games and messages are all needed steps to
controlling the epidemic violence that terrorizes children and
adults all across America in the war zones of our cities and
rural areas.

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Intergenerational
Transmission of Violence
The Boston Globe recently chronicled the tragic life and
death of 8-year-old Liquarry A. Jefferson, killed June 24,
2007—shot to death accidentally by his 7-year-old cousin.
Both boys lived in Grove Hill, a violence saturated neighborhood and in a family in which most of the adults have extensive
criminal records. On the day Liquarry died, the four biological fathers of Liquarry and his four half siblings were all in
prison. The bad news about Liquarry’s premature gun death,
the article noted, is that “crime in many neighborhoods runs
in families, where elders bequeath gang membership, drug
abuse, joblessness and brutality to their offspring like a toxic
inheritance. In Grove Hill, police estimate that 2.4 percent of
the area’s 19,000 residents cause most of the serious crime.
Many of those people, police say, are related.”
While this points to the need for intensive, targeted community law enforcement and social services action in crime
saturated neighborhoods and families, the good news is that
over 97 percent of the children and families are not serious
criminals and can be helped to escape the Pipeline with one or
more interventions. An unusual initiative underwritten by the
Boston Foundation launched in 2003, called the
Comprehensive Community Safety Initiative, targeted high
crime families “not just with patrol cars, but with social services
that might help the next generation break with tradition.”
But the larger need is to ensure a healthy, safe and fair start for
the overwhelming majority of children struggling to grow up
in poor neighborhoods everywhere.

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Community Supports,
Role Models and Mentors
Too many children have too few positive alternatives to
the streets or positive mentors and role models after school
and in summers when parents work. The drug dealers and
gang leaders are available and busy seven days a week, 24 hours
a day. Families and community institutions must compete with
them. The cultural messages that glamorize and normalize gun
violence and prison, abusive treatment of women and disrespectful racial and gender stereotypes are relentless. Counter
messages and values must be transmitted by anchor institutions
in our society so that children have a positive vision of who
they are and can become, and grow up with respect for others
and for life because they are respected and their lives are valued.
Families, faith leaders, women leaders, civil rights leaders,
early childhood teachers and educators at all levels must raise
their voices against demeaning and destructive cultural messages from within and without our communities and must
stop patronizing those who undermine our children’s healthy
and safe development and perpetuate racial stereotypes and
underachievement.

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Equally important, we need to open up our congregational, school and community center doors to the children of
our community and engage them in purposeful and enriching
activities. In summer 2007, 124 CDF Freedom Schools® sites
operated by college mentor-teachers served nearly 8,500 children ages 5–16. Vacation Bible Schools need to become CDF
Freedom Schools sites in every neighborhood where children
need quality summer programs and after-school programs
throughout the year that foster a love of learning and an ethic
of service and achievement.

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All children need mothers and fathers and strong positive
male and female role models and mentors of all colors and
backgrounds in their homes, schools, child serving institutions
and public life. They need permanent family connections.
They need to see sound examples of who and what they can
become from the adults they see in daily life and at important
stages in their development. That so few Black and Latino
male teachers are in our schools and that so many teachers do
not live in the communities of the children they serve needs
to be addressed in our diverse society. In the entire state of
South Carolina, there are fewer than 200 Black male elementary
school teachers.

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Continuing and expanded efforts encouraging talented
and committed young people to enter teaching and to work with
children and youth are crucial—as is stressing the importance
of parenting and family.

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Children need to be empowered and trained to make a
difference and to know the difference between service and
justice. CDF Freedom Schools children in Ohio and all across
the country stood up for health coverage for all nine million
children in America by visiting the local offices of their members
of Congress. In past years, Freedom Schools children have
protested gun violence against children in their communities.

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Part II
Case Studies of
Children in or at Risk
of the Pipeline in Ohio
and Mississippi
by Julia Cass and
Connie Curry

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C H A P T E R

1

Early Childhood
The Pipeline Begins: Brain Development
and the Earliest Years
esearchers in Life Course criminology are moving away from what John
Wright, a professor in the Division of Criminal Justice at the University of
Cincinnati, calls “old clichés that poverty predicts crime or economic cycles
predict crime.” These researchers draw data from neurology, psychiatry, developmental psychology, sociology, and criminology in an effort to understand more precisely the factors from the beginning of life that predict later incarceration.

R

Asked to describe a life course that could lead to chronic delinquency and eventual confinement in prison, Wright began with a child, not yet born, whose mother, a
product of the pipeline herself, uses drugs, alcohol or tobacco during the pregnancy,
explaining that these substances act as poisons to the development of the central
nervous system and can retard brain growth. When the child is born, he or she is less
likely than other children to be supported, guided, and nurtured if the mother remains
addicted, does not get treatment, and other adults are not available to offer support
and protection. “Add to this that this child is born into a neighborhood of concentrated
poverty, where there also may be environmental dangers like lead paint poisoning,
which is another predictor of later criminal behavior,” Wright said. (He and a doctor at
Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati found that 39 to 49 percent of children in Over the
Rhine, a poor neighborhood in the city, are lead poisoned.)1
Wright has found that if these children do not get the early intervention, permanence, and stability they need, they are more likely to act out and fail in school from
day one because they lack the skills they need to succeed. “Think about what school
requires: discipline, the ability to acquire and process information and regurgitate it,
self-control, the ability to move from one social clique to another, and follow directions
from an authority figure. These are complex skills.” Research in neurology, he says,
has shown that skills like delayed gratification and self-control are affected by the

If we could reduce the abuse and neglect in this generation of kids,
it would have huge payoffs for our society, not just in terms
of mental and physical health but in the area of crime.
— Dr. Frank Putnam
Scientific Director, Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children

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injection of drugs and neurotoxins in the fetus and other environmental factors such
as growing up in a chaotic or abusive household where self-control and other social
skills are not taught.
A child who lacks basic social skills and self-control, he says, “will be ostracized
because children are very perceptive about whom they like and don’t like, and this
may make him more aggressive.” Such a child is therefore at greater risk of being disciplined, and having repeated, negative interactions with teachers and schools. In
terms of risks for later delinquency and incarceration, Wright says, the key developmental factor in childhood is the development of self-control. “Most kids have this skill
at a fairly early age; those who don’t—name the problems. Failure to navigate the
social landscape in elementary school places a kid at really high risk of bad outcomes
later in life——chronic unemployment, relationship problems, incarceration.”
In addition to behavioral problems, he will likely be behind cognitively by the age
of five and steadily lose ground after that. This makes it difficult for him to get on to
the path leading to college and is a predictor of later incarceration; two-thirds of men
and women in prison in 2003 had less than a regular high school diploma, more
than twice the rate found in the general adult population. The proportion of prisoners
with a diagnosed learning disability is about three times that of the general adult population. 2
Every researcher of early childhood emphasizes the importance of early childhood nurturing and stimulation for putting a child on a positive path toward adulthood
because they literally help the brain grow, especially between birth and age seven,
and even beyond.
“A study on vocabulary and expression noted that parents in a higher economic
status tend to use a lot of words, and what you see on growth curves of their children
is an exponential growth in what are considered the vocabulary centers of the brain,”
explained Wright. “The brains of children born to parents who don’t have great vocabularies or who don’t talk much to them grow, but at a slower rate.” He said it is hard
to make up for this deficit after brain growth slows. “This may explain the fourth grade
plunge, when schools start to see substantial failures.”
According to Dr. Frank Putnam, a psychiatrist who studies the biological and psychological effects of stress and trauma on child development, enriched early environments are critical not just for learning language but for the capacity to deal with new
things and change. He is the scientific director of the Mayerson Center for Safe and
Healthy Children in Cincinnati, which evaluates children for child abuse and neglect
and assesses prevention programs in the city that send nurses and social workers
into the homes of at-risk first-time mothers. Before coming to the Mayerson Center,
which is associated with Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati, he spent 20 years in developmental traumatology at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in
Washington, D.C.
“The abused kids we studied at NIMH had smaller brains, even when you control
for body size, because they don’t have rich connections among the nerve cells,” he
said. That is why, he explains, “intervention from ages zero to three is so crucial.”3

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Dr. Putnam emphasized that it is well known that being traumatized as a child
increases the risk for committing violent crime or being the victim of violent crime. If
you go into a women’s prison, he noted, you will find over 90 percent of the women
there have been victims of abuse and neglect. “If we could reduce the abuse and neglect in this generation of kids, it would have huge payoffs for our society, not just in
terms of mental and physical health but in the area of crime.”4
Neglect is damaging as well, he cautioned. “You see these kids; no adult is reading with them, working with them. They are parked in front of the TV, left to their own
devices. That’s not the kind of neglect that gets seen by child protective services but
it is one that will cost them IQ points.”
The importance of stimulation in the first years of life is dramatically underlined in
the U.S. Department of Education’s study of 22,000 kindergartners in the kindergarten class of 1998–99, which found that Black and Hispanic children were substantially behind their White counterparts in cognitive skills and knowledge when they
entered kindergarten.
In reading readiness, 15 percent of Black children and Hispanic children were in
the top quartile compared with 30 percent of White children. In math, 10 percent of
Blacks and 14 percent of Hispanics, compared with 32 percent of Whites, scored in
the top range. In general knowledge, 6 percent of Blacks, 12 percent of Hispanics
and 34 percent of Whites were in the top quartile. Associated with high scores were
the mother’s college attendance and graduation, English spoken at home, a two-parent family, and not on public welfare.5

Bianca and Her Baby: Starting on the Right Track
The new mother asks Susan Taylor, a home visitor for the Every Child Succeeds™
program, whether she thinks the landlord of an apartment they visited will wait until
she gets her first paycheck. She is especially anxious because few landlords will rent
to 17-year-olds.
“He said he would,” Taylor assures her. “Let’s take this one step at a time.”
Taylor has been visiting Bianca (not her real name) once a week since Bianca, a
slender, pretty young woman, was seven months pregnant. She now has a twomonth-old baby girl, and Taylor will continue to visit weekly until the baby is three
years old. Taylor, a Black single mother with a two-year-old daughter, visits 30 first-time
new mothers who live in the northwest part of Cincinnati, gently showing them parenting skills, plugging them into community services, and helping them deal with what
she calls “stressors” in their lives. For Bianca, the stressor is living with her mother.
When Taylor arrived at the second floor apartment of a duplex home in early June,
she complimented Bianca on how good the baby looked and picked her up from the
new mother’s lap. She held her close to her chest and said to Bianca, “If you hold her
like this, she feels safer.”

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Mothers get into the Every Child Succeeds™ program through public service ads,
referrals from doctors or child welfare workers, and through word of mouth. They must
be first-time mothers, single, poor (up to 300 percent of poverty level for a family of two)
and have had little or late prenatal care. “Most of our mothers have these risk factors
and more——poor social supports, history of mental illness, drug and alcohol use, lots
of stressors and crises. They don’t come from an environment where good parenting
is the norm,” said Dr. Judith Van Ginkel, the director of the Cincinnati area program.
“Sixty percent have a significant history of abuse and neglect themselves, which puts
them and their children at a lot of risk. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they will
abuse their children but they may associate with men who are abusers.”6
Dr. Putnam, who conducts research for the program, added that a third of the
mothers, who are screened for depression when they join the program, score in the
clinical range. “In the first year, another 15 percent become depressed.” For this reason,
Every Child Succeeds™ has developed a pilot program that brings treatment for
depression into the homes of these mothers. “This should be replicated everywhere
because we know a mother’s depression in the first year profoundly affects attachment and bonding and causes significant problems for these children as they grow
up——conduct problems, school performance, anger. Put together a clinically depressed
young mother with a baby and virtually no resources and it is a prescription for
tragedy.”
Bianca was referred to Every Child Succeeds™ by a caseworker for Children’s
Protective Services. According to her and to Taylor, Bianca’s mother got angry about
Bianca’s boyfriend, who has been in jail for several months, and “she put me out. That
was when I was pregnant. Then she decided she wanted me back home.”
Her mother and a sister came to get her. “I didn’t want to come home and they
dragged me. I’m stubborn.” They took her to the Hamilton County Juvenile Court
Youth Center, the county’s detention center, as a runaway. “When I got there, my
Mom hit me. The lady behind the desk at 2020 (what the youth center is called locally
because 2020 is its address) said to her, ‘Ma’am you’re gonna have to stop.’ And she
smacked me. My eye got black and my lip was busted, plus I had marks on my neck
and scratches where they dragged me. They called the police on my mom. They
accused her of child abuse and called 241-KIDS (the phone number for Children’s
Protective Services). When they found out I was pregnant, they referred me to Susan.”
The tension continued between mother and daughter and, when the baby was
two weeks old, Bianca and her daughter disappeared. “I finally found them at the
baby’s father’s mother’s house,” Taylor said. “She and her mother had gotten into
another argument over the father calling the house.”
Many of Taylor’s mothers have problems with their mothers, she said. “Sometimes
(the older mothers) are so fed up by their daughters’ behavior or so angry that they
got pregnant, which many of them have done, that they won’t help them. I had to
show Bianca how to change diapers. Her mother wouldn’t show her. Her mother said,
‘This is your baby.’” Taylor tries to break the cycle of poor parenting. “When my mothers
talk about what their mothers did that they didn’t like, I tell them, ‘Remember that and
do it differently with your children.’”
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Dr. Van Ginkel says that Every Child Succeeds™ does not ask
the young mothers why they had babies, but from her experience,
“with the young and poor women we serve, it often gives them a
way to feel sort of special for a short period of time. People make
a fuss over them and the baby.” She added that research shows
that women who have been abused as children have a higher rate
of early pregnancy.
Bianca lived in a number of different neighborhoods growing up
but never in public housing, and she went to Montessori schools for
a while, suggesting that her mother made an effort to give her a
good start in education. She said she got a lot of As and Bs “when
I didn’t get in trouble. I got suspended many times but I always
kept my grades up.”
Asked why she was suspended, she said, “Fighting.
Somebody look at me wrong. I don’t get my way. I had a real bad
attitude problem.” At some point, she was sent to Project
Succeed, a program for Cincinnati students who are considered
unmanageable in their schools. She took classes and met once a
week with a psychologist who, she says, “Talked to me and wrote
down what I said for an hour so she could get a check.”
As she spoke, the baby, still held by Taylor, began to squawk
and Bianca got up and went over to her. “Do you want a bottle?”
she asked.

Bianca’s infant
daughter is not
alone in having a
father in jail; one
and a half million
American children
have a parent or
parents in prison.

“You are picking up on cues,” Taylor commented. “That’s good.”
Taylor’s current priority for Bianca is finding her a place of her
own. She doesn’t want Bianca to take off again, and independent
living would make her eligible for more assistance. As it stood, Bianca
was a minor living with her mother, whose income made Bianca
ineligible for vouchers for discounted day care and other services.
When school starts in the fall, she will be unable either to work or
go to school because the girl who takes care of the baby now is
also a high school student and Bianca can’t afford to pay anyone
more. “It is imperative that we get her out by then,” Taylor said.
Her first step was finding an organization that provides funds
for housing for underage mothers and children. But to qualify, the
mothers must be employed. Bianca once had a job at a fast food
restaurant, so Susan drove her there to put in an application. Not yet
18, Bianca needed a work permit from school. She lacks five credits for graduation and is trying to keep up through the city’s computer-based “virtual high school.” Taylor drove her to the school to
get the permit, and then back to the restaurant to give it to them.
Once Bianca had the job, she and Taylor went apartment
hunting. Taylor had identified some buildings and landlords that

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“The mothers I visit
are not aware of
the programs and
community services
out there that can help
them. I wouldn’t
know myself if
I weren’t doing
this job.
–Susan Taylor
Home Visitor, Every Child
Succeeds™ Program

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would allow a 17-year-old to sign a short-term lease. When Bianca
brought the baby out to Taylor’s car, Taylor recounted later, she
asked her, “Where’s the car seat?” Bianca said she didn’t have one.
She then borrowed one from her sister, who was visiting. Later,
Taylor found a car seat at the agency where she works and gave it
to Bianca. This was just one of the extra benefits Taylor often finds
herself providing. Every month, Taylor gives her mothers a parenting
aid bag that contains information, books, and toys geared to each
child’s age.
Looking back on that first day Bianca borrowed a car seat,
Taylor says Bianca got out of the car, picked it up, and jerked it. “I
asked, ‘Remember when you were a child asleep and somebody
dropped something on the bed?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I hated that.’ I
explained that her daughter is a little thing and easily scared. She
said, ‘She’ll get over it,’ and I said that was true but at what cost?
‘Think about how what you do affects her.’”
Bianca’s boyfriend called and she spoke softly to him for a few
minutes. She said they will get married when he gets out of jail. She
would not say why he is there. “My plans for him are: Go back to
school. It’s just one year. I don’t care if you’re 19.” She said he has
been to jail before but he’s not the type that gets in trouble all the
time. (Her infant daughter is not alone in having a father in jail; one
and a half million American children have a parent or parents in
prison.)7
Bianca says she’s too smart to stay at a fast food restaurant for
long. (It is an hour round-trip bus ride.) After she graduates from
high school, she would like to go to mortuary school to become a
coroner or become a certified nurses’ assistant.
“If you work at a nursing home, they will pay for your training
and the fee for the test,” Taylor tells her.
When Bianca turns 18, she will be eligible for public housing
based on her earned income, food stamps, and cash assistance.
“The mothers I visit are not aware of the programs and community
services out there that can help them,” Taylor said. “I wouldn’t know
myself if I weren’t doing this job.” Bianca is planning to return to
school in August and cut back her hours at work, which she will be
able to do with some cash assistance.
About her hopes for her daughter, Bianca said, “She’s going to
a Montessori school or a private school. She’s going to go to the
best schools.”
“Start her at a good day care center,” advised Taylor, describing
the one her daughter attends that has “lots of interaction and structured
learning things that are fun. She’s two and she already can count to

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15, knows her ABCs, and colors. Don’t put her in a place where they plunk them in
front of the TV to watch Barney.”
This good center costs $175 a week for toddlers, nearly a budget breaker for
Taylor and certainly for Bianca. “When you move and get the vouchers, we’ll look into
a good place,” Taylor said.
Bianca smiled. “That’s good!”
Dr. Putnam said that the median reduction in child abuse and neglect that resulted from home visitation programs was almost 40 percent, citing an analysis of these
programs by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.8 The Every Child
Succeeds™ program in greater Cincinnati, which serves about 1,700 mothers at any
given time, covers less than 20 percent of the need, as defined by census data on
first-time single mothers in poverty, because of limited funding. For this reason,
explained Dr. Van Ginkel, the project limits itself to first-time mothers, reasoning that
the benefits will transfer to later children.9
After more than an hour’s visit, Taylor handed the baby back to Bianca, who followed her downstairs. They were still talking when Taylor got in her car to go visit
another young mother. When asked what Taylor has done for her, Bianca said, “She
got me a good pediatrician. She got me a car seat. She’s helping me move out. She
took me to get a job. She helps me set goals for the future. She does a lot.”

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C H A P T E R

2

Mental and Emotional Problems
Early Intakes to the Pipeline
n addition to measuring levels of knowledge and cognitive development, the
Department of Education’s study of American kindergartners sought to gauge the
development of “prosocial” behavior, defined as the ability to form friendships,
accept peer ideas, and comfort others. In terms of the Cradle to Prison Pipeline, comforting others, a measure of empathy, is an important ability; lack of empathy is a common
characteristic of chronic offenders. The study found that Black and Hispanic kindergartners lagged somewhat behind their White counterparts in these social skills.10

I

It is worth noting that problem behavior was relatively infrequent; teachers reported
that only 10 to 11 percent of kindergartners argue or fight with teachers often to very
often or get angry easily often to very often.11 These are the children Wright and Dr.
Putnam consider at high risk for school failure and delinquency.
“Enough is known of certain developmental trajectories that will lead some children to prison or the morgue,” Wright says. “Knowing that, what will we do? When
you have a clear picture that this child has significant developmental delays or problems with self-control, this is the time to dump services onto him and his family.”
In reality, though, it is often the child who gets dumped. Shannon Starkey, senior
director of services at the Children’s Home of Cincinnati, which has a school for children with mental and behavioral problems, says the Home is considering starting an
early childhood day treatment program because of the number of children who are
being kicked out——she calls it “dis-enrolled”——from day care.
“We frequently get calls from day care centers saying, ‘We don’t know what to
do with this child,’” Starkey said. “They’ve got two kids acting out and then others——

“I tell him, ‘Don’t hit back. Tell the teacher.’ He says, ‘I tried to tell the
teacher but she didn’t listen to me.’ He gets so angry he starts crying and
gets so upset it’s hard to understand him, and the teachers won’t try to figure
out what the problem is because they’ve got other students to take care of.”
— Ana Cohen, Mother

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I call them the bubble of risk——act out too, and the parents of the behaving children
complain.”
In Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, kindergartners were
expelled or suspended from school for at least a day more than 200 times in the
2002–2003 school year, according to an analysis of school disciplinary data by the
Cincinnati Enquirer.12
There are many reasons children misbehave in kindergarten or elementary school.
They may come from disorganized households where punishment and reward are
often unconnected to behavior. They may have witnessed a shooting in their neighborhood that day. They may be tired from being kept awake all night. Their parents
may be poor models of behavior. They might be so far behind they don’t feel part of
the group. They might be bright and bored. The teaching style in the classroom may
not suit that child’s learning style.
They also may have mental health disorders or emotional or learning disabilities——
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a mood disorder such as depression,
post-traumatic stress disorder, dyslexia or mental retardation. Mental and emotional
disorders are a major gateway to the Prison Pipeline. In a nationally representative
sample of 95 private and public juvenile facilities, 70 percent of the juveniles reported
mental health problems during screening and 57 percent reported having prior mental
health treatment. Random samples of youth admitted to various states’ juvenile facilities found similar percentages: 57 percent had a history of mental illness in Maryland;
72 percent met the criteria for at least one mental health disorder diagnosis in South
Carolina.13 Children with serious behavioral problems at a young age often are diagnosed as having a “conduct disorder,” said Dr. Michael Sorter, associate professor of
child and adolescent psychiatry at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital. This is a descriptive diagnosis for children with a “persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic
rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated.” The causes of conduct disorder can be physiological——children with organic conditions that
impair impulse control, or environmental——children raised under violent conditions
who imitate the behavior of others in their world.14
“Preschool behavior problems are a strong risk factor for anti-social disruptive
disorders at pre-adolescence,” Dr. Sorter said. “This is a pattern of behavior that
becomes evident before the age of eight.” He said that studies reported in psychiatric
literature find that a very small proportion, about one percent, of well-behaved 8- to
10-year-olds go on to become chronic, recidivistic delinquents while more than a
quarter, about 27 percent, of the behaviorally disturbed children do. The good news,
he added, is that 73 percent do not.15
According to studies by Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist considered an
expert on juvenile violence, the childhood factors most highly correlated with growing
up to be a repeat violent offender are a “combination of severe neuropsychiatric
impairment and a violent, abusive upbringing.”16

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One organic cause of conduct disorder is closed head injury. Children in alcoholic
households are at great risk here because they may get slung around, in addition to
suffering damage in the womb. “We did a study here that followed the offspring of
mothers who drank heavily during pregnancy,” said Dr. Sorter. “These children did not
have the physical symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome but 80 percent of them were
in special ed by the second grade.”
Another disorder overrepresented in the juvenile justice system is oppositional
defiant disorder. “This is when I say ‘Go left’ and you say ‘Why can’t I go right?’ and
you get caught up in the opposition,” Dr. Sorter explained. Some children grow out of
this as they mature, but others go into a rage when someone tries to limit their boundaries. “This will keep you in trouble with peers, adults, authority, everybody,” said
Hunter Hurst, director of the Pittsburgh-based National Center for Juvenile Justice. “If
you don’t do something about the disorder early on, it will get overlaid with enough
‘justice’ that ‘justice’ becomes primary and then good luck in getting the treatment.”
Treatment is often difficult to obtain in any case. Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital
has the busiest psychiatric emergency room of any hospital in the nation. Some 1,698
children were hospitalized there for psychiatric emergencies in 2002.17 As Dr. Mike
Sherbun, senior clinical director of child psychiatry at the hospital, told the Enquirer,
“When they’ve hit that crisis stage, they’ve got to go somewhere, and we’re it.”18
Dr. Sorter says the numbers are high because parents in the greater Cincinnati
area have few options. A severe shortage of psychiatrists in Cincinnati and across
Ohio means children routinely wait three months or longer just for an office visit, he
noted. And local day treatment programs and mental health clinics have been cut
back with state and local funding shortages.
In Mississippi, the lack of resources for children with mental or emotional problems is even more acute. At the time of CDF’s study, the average daily number of children and adults on a waiting list for admission to a psychiatric hospital was 117.19 In
1999, the state legislature approved the construction of seven community crisis centers that would provide emergency psychiatric care for children and adults seven days
a week, 24 hours a day.20 All were built but only one was opened——at half-capacity.
The other six were never staffed and remain vacant. In May 2004, the legislature
appropriated money for the remaining six centers to open and run at half-capacity, but
a proposed six cent raise in the cigarette tax to fully fund the centers did not pass.21
In school, many children with mental health disorders, learning disabilities, and
developmental disabilities are eligible for specially designed instruction, an Individualized
Education Plan (IEP), and related services under the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act (IDEA).
Judging from interviews with parents and others in Ohio, it appears that a parent
must be vigilant to make sure the requirements of the law are upheld. Among them
are restrictions on school suspensions for these children, especially when the bad
behavior is related to their disability. Margaret Burley, who heads the Ohio Coalition
for the Education of Children with Disabilities, says parents often don’t know their

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rights under IDEA. “We try to assist them but there are 250,000 children in Ohio who
have IEPs, and we have 12 advocates.”22
“Schools use detention centers as their discipline,” said Burley. “I get calls every
week, if not every day, from parents about their children being taken out of school in
handcuffs by police.”

Christopher: Kicked Out of School at Age Five
Christopher Rogers was featured on the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer, as
well as by local television stations, because he was removed from three schools and
frequently suspended from a fourth for throwing tantrums, hitting teachers, and fighting
with other children. It was his first year of school.23
Christopher, six years old, lived with his mother, Ana Cohen, in a Section 8 housing
complex of small brick buildings with patches of green grass between them on the
west side of Cincinnati. Their apartment was small and dark, with boxes stacked on
the floor because Ana had just moved there. Her mother, Michelle Thomas-Mitchell,
lived elsewhere but was very involved in Christopher’s life and came over to Ana’s
apartment for the interview.
Christopher was behind when he got to kindergarten. “When he was two, he had
problems with hearing and speech,” said Cohen. “He had an ear infection, tubes in
his ears, and his speech was delayed because of all the months he couldn’t hear.” He
also had seizures between the ages of one and three.
When he went to preschool, she said, he had a “transition period,” then settled in
all right. But she thinks that the particular program he attended “didn’t prepare him
enough for actual school.” After spending two years in preschool, he knew 10 letters
of the alphabet and shapes and colors. “Most of the kids in his kindergarten knew
how to write their names. He didn’t. And they knew their numbers and he didn’t.”
His disciplinary problems began in July 2003 at a year-round charter school in the
Over the Rhine neighborhood. Cohen chose this school because the hours, 7 a.m. to
5 p.m., would provide supervision while she attended classes in graphic design. She
also thought Christopher would enjoy the martial arts and music programs, and she
hoped that the dozen Black male staff workers would be positive role models.24
Almost from the start, he had problems. He was sent to the principal’s office several times for refusing to sit down in class, Cohen said. There, on one occasion, he
took off his socks and shoes and laughed while being disciplined. Later, he hit a girl
he said was picking at his hair while they were standing in line. After more fights and
other trouble, he was suspended several times and then put on probation. “I came to
the office to sign papers for the probation period. The same day they called and
asked me to come get him. They said he was too immature and needed a more structured setting,” recalled Cohen.
Christopher lasted two weeks at a second charter school. “They wanted to send
him home for the least little thing,” Thomas-Mitchell said. “Ana or I were constantly
running up to the school. Some days she’d drop him off at eight and by nine they’d
be calling me to come get him.”
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At his next school, a Catholic school, Christopher hit another student and had
tantrums on the floor. “They would physically remove him from the classroom and he
would sit with the principal,” Cohen said. Christopher was there not much more than
a week when the principal suggested that Cohen send him to a public school,
explaining that he would be able to receive services there for a severe behavioral
handicap, if he was identified as having such.
By then, it was October. At the neighborhood elementary school, Christopher’s
initial teacher told him she was going to call his mother when he wouldn’t sit still in
class. As she walked towards a phone, he grabbed her ankles and she fell. He was
sent home. The next day, Cohen came in for a conference and Christopher was able
to return to school, but the teacher insisted he be placed in another class. “She was
a new teacher, young, 23, no kids of her own, and she was afraid of him,” said
Thomas-Mitchell. She shook her head. “He’s just a little boy. I’m going to the bus stop
to get him and you can meet him and see for yourself. ”
She left, and Cohen said that Christopher continued to get in trouble in the other
kindergarten class, and she and her mother continued to get calls to come get him.
“He gets frustrated very easily and he has trouble controlling his emotions,” she
explained. “Every five minutes, he’s calling the teachers names and they get tired of
that. Maybe that’s because he’s an only child. Sometimes other kids hit him or tease
him and he hits back. I tell him, ‘Don’t hit back. Tell the teacher.’ He says, ‘I tried to tell
the teacher but she didn’t listen to me.’ He gets so angry he starts crying and gets so
upset it’s hard to understand him, and the teachers won’t try to figure out what the
problem is because they’ve got other students to take care of.”
The suspensions did not help Christopher control his behavior. Dr. Sorter, of
Children’s Hospital, says kindergarten students with behavioral problems very often
cannot make the connection between suspensions and their own misbehavior. Cohen
then asked the school to test Christopher for special education. He was found eligible for services and received a completed IEP in February.
At about the same time, the family doctor referred Christopher to the Division of
Developmental Disorders at Children’s Hospital. The psychiatrist said Christopher
has attention deficit disorder and prescribed medication. Cohen said it helped at first
but she thinks the dose isn’t strong enough. “But I haven’t been able to get in touch
with the psychiatrist and I don’t want to increase the dose on my own.”
With his IEP in place, Christopher was no longer being sent home but he often
spent time in in-school suspension (ISS). “He’s always the youngest person there.

“Schools use detention centers as their discipline. I get calls every week,
if not every day, from parents about their children being taken
out of school in handcuffs by police.’”
— Margaret Burley
Ohio Coalition for the Education of Children with Disabilities

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The older ones have a packet of work to do but Christopher is too young to work on
his own.”
The door opened and Christopher came in, followed by his grandmother. He
looked warily at the visitor. “Who she?” he asked. Christopher is a small, mediumbrown boy with short, wiry hair and he wore a backpack almost as big as he is. He
walked over to his mother, and she looked through the bag for a note from the school
to find out what had gone on with Christopher that day. She pulled out a construction paper hat with stars shooting out of it that he’d made in art class. “That’s my alien
hat!” Christopher exclaimed. She noted the word “Nico” written across the band.
“That my alien name!” he said. “Nico!”
She found no note and asked Christopher what he did that day. He said,
“Breakfast and lunch and art and ISS.”
“What happened?’ she asked.
“I was at the door to go to lunch and a boy got on my back and grabbed on my
shirt and I started shaking my shoulders and he started crying and said I pushed him.”
“Did he fall down?”
“He did it on purpose. He pushed hisself and said I pushed him.”
It was unclear from Christopher’s account exactly what had happened, whether
an adult was present or whether the other boy was disciplined. But he spent part of
the afternoon in in-school suspension.
“Did Mr. C. help you with your work?” Cohen asked, referring to an aide the
school had recently assigned to keep an eye on Christopher.
“I didn’t have any work. I sat there coloring on a girl’s paper.”
A few minutes later, he got his skateboard and disappeared down the hallway.
Then came a crash. He had run into a mirror at the end of the hallway and was trying
to pick up the pieces.
“Don’t pick it up,” his mother said. “Come here.”
He came over, sat in a small chair near her, hung his head, and began to cry.
“You want to say something?” his grandmother asked.
He looked up. “I’m soooory.”
“We have told you I don’t know how many times not to skateboard in the house.”
Not long after that late April interview, Christopher was transferred to a special
class at the Children’s Home designed for children with behavioral or emotional problems.
The class has a waiting list because sending a student there costs the school district
$20,000 a year25 compared with the usual $11,000.26
Thomas-Mitchell believes the media attention helped. “We were fortunate,” she
said. Contacted when the school year ended, she said Christopher was doing better
but is still behind academically since he missed at least 30 days of class at his first
four schools. “It’s been a rough first year of school for that little boy.”

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C H A P T E R

3

School Discipline
Zero Tolerance: Unintended Consequences
new, tougher disciplinary code was established by the Cincinnati Public
School system as part of its new teachers’ contract in 1991. Asked why, Tom
Mooney, then president of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, responded,
“I’ll give you a short answer: chaos.” Mooney, who now is president of the Ohio
Federation of Teachers, said that a rising tide of disruptions and assaults on teachers
was not being addressed by school administrators, who “tended to sweep problems
under the rug” to protect themselves.

A

Susan Taylor, who, at the time of CDF’s study, was president of the Cincinnati
Federation of Teachers (and no relation to the home visitor for Every Child
Succeeds™), said she was teaching in a high school at that time. “I remember being
so demoralized walking down the hallways and seeing garbage and students cutting
classes and slamming doors and running and looking into my classroom while I was
trying to teach.”
Like a criminal code, Cincinnati’s Code of Conduct sets up categories of offenses and the mandatory or possible punishments for them. An expulsion puts a student
out of school for no more than 80 school days except when students bring a gun to
school (a mandatory one-year expulsion) or a knife (up to a year). An out-of-school suspension excludes a child for 10 days or less. A removal takes children out of school
without prior notice if “their presence poses an immediate danger to persons or property or an ongoing threat of disrupting the academic process.” Those morning calls to
Christopher’s mother and grandmother in Chapter 2 were removals. Lesser punishments include in-school suspension, after-school detention, and Saturday school.
Until January 2004, when the school system set up an “expulsion school,” students
put out of school had nowhere to go. The Code of Conduct calls for:
Mandatory expulsion for such offenses as bringing alcohol or drugs to school,
physical assault, dangerous weapons, defensive weapons, tampering with the fire
alarm system, sexual assault, robbery or starting a fire.
Mandatory suspension and possible expulsion for fighting, profanity
towards staff, stealing, violent disorderly conduct, gang activity, destruction of property,
and sexual misconduct.

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Possible suspension and/or expulsion for students who
are insubordinate and don’t obey instructions (called unruly conduct), misbehave in a way that causes disruption or obstructs the
educational process (disorderly conduct), cheat, or possess tobacco or an electronic device.27
Cincinnati, the third largest city in Ohio, had the highest rate
of school disciplinary actions in the state——107. 8 per one hundred
students, compared with 17.8 for Cleveland and 93 for
Columbus——and a far higher expulsion rate.28 During the 1990s,
when school shootings in Columbine, Colorado, and a few other
communities took place, zero tolerance sanctions took hold in
many school districts around the nation, nearly doubling the number
of students suspended annually since 1974, from 1.7 million to 3.1
million, with Black students 2.6 times as likely to be suspended as
White students.29 Latino and Native American students are also
more likely to be suspended than White students. Asians are less
likely to be suspended.30
Ironically, these measures, intended to make schools safer,
prevent or reduce crimes on school grounds, and improve the
atmosphere and academic achievement of schools, often have the
unintended consequence of helping push children into the trajectory to delinquency.

Measures intended
to make schools
safer, prevent or
reduce crimes on
school grounds,
and improve the
atmosphere and
academic
achievement of

While no direct, causal link has been established between
school removal and incarceration, a correlation has been found in
studies conducted by Dr. Russell Skiba, director of the Initiative for
Equity and Opportunity at the Center for Evaluation and Education
Policy at Indiana University. Skiba and colleagues found that states
with higher rates of out-of-school suspensions also have higher rates
of juvenile incarceration and that racial disproportion in out-ofschool-suspension is associated with a similar disproportion in
juvenile incarceration.31

schools seem

In a follow-up study, the CEEP researchers also sought to test
whether suspensions were effective. Did they teach the suspended
students a lesson and send a message to others that poor behavior
would not be tolerated? Did they boost academic achievement?
Would zero tolerance result in less racial disparity in discipline? In
all cases, the evidence failed to support zero tolerance assumptions. Higher rates of suspension were associated with less satisfactory school climate and a lower rate of school completion;
schools with higher rates of suspension and expulsion showed
lower rates of academic achievement, and African American students continued to be disciplined more harshly than White students for the same infractions.32

trajectory to

to be having the
unintended
consequence of
helping push
children into the
delinquency.

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Despite the public image of dangerous, drug-filled hallways, the vast majority of
out-of-school suspensions in Cincinnati and elsewhere were not for the most severe
offenses, such as drug use or violence, but for behavior that affects school order and
classroom management.33 Of the approximately 13,200 out-of-school suspensions in
the Cincinnati school district in the 2002–2003 school year, more than half (8,262)
were for “behavioral problems.” Fighting accounted for 4,435; 53 were for use/
possession of a weapon other than a gun or explosive; 19 for use/possession of
drugs. (Because the district keeps discipline records by incident, not individual, it
cannot be determined how many students these suspensions involved; the district
spokesperson believes that less than 10 percent of students were responsible for
most of the incidents.)34
Michael Turner, assistant principal of Taft High School, which serves one of the
poorest areas of Cincinnati, says that in his 18 years in the district, he can’t remember
a time a gun was pulled in school. At Taft, “we have random searches and we find,
maybe, a young lady with mace. But no one has pulled out or used a weapon.”
As the high proportion of high school dropouts in prison suggests, staying in
school is a major predictor of not going to prison and the reasons go beyond gaining the
knowledge and skills needed to go to college or get a good job. According to Ed
Latessa, the chairman of the Division of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati
who has interviewed thousands of delinquents in juvenile jails across the nation, the
most important risk factor in determining whether they become chronic offenders and go
on to adult prison is what he calls “anti-social values and beliefs and peer associations.”
School is the major pro-social institution in a child’s life. This is where children
interact with positive adults, develop skills, and get involved with activities like sports
or music that teach the value of practice and delayed gratification. The Surgeon
General’s report on Youth Violence, released in 2001, found that “commitment to
school” was one of only two protective factors against youth violence. (The other was
a basic unwillingness to tolerate violence.)35 Another recent study found that “school
connectedness” was linked with reduced incidences of substance abuse, violence,
suicide attempts, pregnancy, and emotional distress.36
Dan Joyner, the chief probation officer for Hamilton County, spoke of several
“criminal families” in which the parent or parents and many of the children were in
constant trouble with the law. When there was a child who was not in trouble, this
child almost invariably was involved in school activities. “Recently, I was in the doctor’s office and a guy said to me, ‘You may not remember me but you worked with my
brother, Henry.’ This guy, now grown, was one of 18 children of a family known to
always be in court——for drug addiction, robbery, murder, you name it. He told me his
life story right there in the waiting room. He was involved in sports, and being around
the coach and positive peers apparently made a big difference. He stayed in school,
graduated, joined the military, and now is employed, married, and living in the suburbs. I asked about Henry, who would now be in his late 40s. ‘He’s still in and out of the
system,’ his brother said. ‘Right now, he’s broke and living downtown on the streets.’”

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Parents, students, teachers, psychiatrists, and scholars interviewed for this report
brought up a number of reasons for the behavioral problems and fighting that lead to
so many of the suspensions: mental health problems that make paying attention and
controlling anger difficult; acting out rather than exposing ignorance when called on
to read out loud or do a math problem on the board; parents teaching their children
to stand up for themselves and fight, which may be useful for survival in the neighborhood; students who want to be suspended because they’d rather be watching TV
or hanging out; abuse and chaos in the home; poor behavior management by parents;
poor classroom management by teachers; poor school management by principals;
alienation; boredom.
While there are certainly circumstances where suspension and expulsion are an
appropriate response, they do not address the underlying causes of any of these
problems. In Cincinnati and probably in most other school districts, students who
fight or have behavior problems rarely are given training in conflict resolution, bullying
prevention, psychological counseling, extra tutoring, or creative activities that might
teach appropriate behavior or increase attachment to school.
Often we ask suspended or expelled students what they did during their time out
of school, and they routinely say they watched TV, hung out with friends, or both.
Some use the time to commit crimes. Several juvenile court judges reported having
cases in which suspended or expelled juveniles committed crimes during the hours
they would have been in school. “People think of crime as happening at night, and
this is generally true for murder and drugs, but there are also opportunities in the daytime when homes are vacant and cars are sitting there,” said Mark Reed, administrator of the juvenile court of Hamilton County.
One mother said she asked her son’s high school if he could have after-school
tutoring to help him catch up. The school said it didn’t have the resources to do that.
“But then he got put in after-school detention and all he did was sit there while some
aide watched. My point is: ‘Give them something to do!’” Her son, who also has been
sent to Saturday school, described what goes on there as, “You have to be quiet for
two and a half hours.”
Many who criticized schools for pushing out, rather than helping out, the children
who cause problems, go on to say that the current incentives in national school policy make achievement scores more important than putting resources into helping kids
stay in school and preventing delinquency. Furthermore, teachers are taught to teach,
and parents of behaving children expect them to do this.
“I know some of these schools have it tough,” said Wright, whose wife works in
a public school. “There are problems they don’t have the resources to handle. You’re
teaching a class with 30 kids, several are not following instructions, disrupting the
class, and you want to teach the 27 who are behaving. It’s utilitarian. On the other
hand, if people understood the likely outcomes for these children, there would be a
moral urgency to do something.”

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Latosha: “Why I’m Mean”
Leroy Williams, a disabled maintenance worker, handy man, and preacher in his
mid-50s, played the role of a services facilitator in a neighborhood in north Cincinnati
with many young people in the Pipeline to prison. When families on his block of small
homes, many in poor repair, need some sort of community service, whether for housing,
food stamps or mental health, Williams (not his real name) helps them make the contact and insist on their rights. He advises parents on how to deal with suspensions
and expulsions and is an outspoken critic of the school district’s discipline practices.
Standing on his porch, he points to house after house; each seems to contain a
tale of trouble. And tales of trouble proliferate in his own large family, stories that
reveal some of the underlying causes of the school misbehavior that put his young
family members at risk of a negative life outcome. Most of them are girls, and it is
worth noting that school failure is the number one predictor of delinquency in girls.
Abuse is the second.37 Almost half the juveniles in the Hamilton County detention
center in 2003 were girls.38
Williams’ 14-year-old niece Sharon was expelled for 45 days in December 2003
from Project Succeed, the special program for students with behavior problems that
Bianca in Chapter One also attended. She is a nice-looking girl but has a serious,
almost scowling expression. Before she arrived at Williams’ house for an interview, he
explained that a horrible thing happened to Sharon when she was an infant: Her
father shot her mother in the head while she sat in her highchair. She now is being
raised by her grandmother.
“She’s doing the best she can,” Williams said of the grandmother. “She just can’t
deal with this young people stuff. She is in her own world. She says, ’It’s messing up
my life. I can’t go to bingo when I want to.’” He also learned that the grandmother wasn’t
giving Sharon her medication for hyperactivity because it gave her headaches, so
Williams called a clinic to make an appointment for his niece.
Sharon had been expelled for a more serious violation than routine misbehavior.
She explained, “I was walking into school and a girl ran up on me and hit me and I hit
her back. A teacher tried to break us up and he was pushed and hit a window that
broke.” The window was a plate glass window that cost $2,000, and Sharon and the
other girl were expelled and charged with destruction of school property. The teacher
was not hurt.
Regardless of the severity of the event, “This could have been avoided,” Williams
contends. “The teacher knew they were getting in fights. It was a clique thing.”
When Sharon was expelled, Williams wrote a letter to the school board asking,
“What are we supposed to do with these children, throw them away?” In his view,
“It’s not always the children’s fault. Sometimes it’s the parents’ fault and some of it’s
the teacher’s fault. But everybody is failing this child.”
During those 45 days, Williams got Sharon and the other girl together. “I thought
if they volunteered together, did something with the time, they’d stop hating each
other.” He set them up with a grassroots organization of parents of public school chil-

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dren and went to the school to get their homework and take it back so they wouldn’t
fall too far behind. “The school should have conflict resolution or something for these kids.”
Did this mutual volunteering succeed? Sharon shrugged and said, “We don’t get
along but we’re not fighting.”
Another of Williams’ school battles involves his 13-year-old granddaughter who
has a history of detentions and suspensions and is a year behind in school. “She has
an attitude and teachers don’t like her,” Williams said. “There are times she makes me
mad,” he added. But he understands the reasons for her attitude.
Latosha lives across the street with her mother, Williams’ daughter, Cassandra,
and three younger sisters. Latosha spent a year in foster care after her mother hit her,
threw her on the floor and threatened to toss her out the window, then called the
police and told them to come before she killed her daughter. Cassandra later
regained custody and appears to be trying hard to be a good parent. For a while,
though, she had men in the house who Williams believes “put their hands” on the girls.
When Latosha was in the third grade, Williams said, he took her to Children’s
Hospital when she started crying and couldn’t stop. “She broke down.” She was in
the psychiatric wing for several weeks and now takes an anti-depressant.
Latosha initially comes across as living under a cloud and her conversation is
filled with comments about who she doesn’t like and what’s stupid. She brightened
up when she showed off some of her writing that she keeps in a box under the bunk
bed she shares with a sister. Some are poems that are very clever put-downs of girls
she doesn’t like. One story is entitled, “Why I’m Mean.”
“When I was two, I saw my dad get arrested and he was placed in jail my whole
life,” she wrote. “When I was about eight, I got in fights with my mom because she
has been going through a lot in her life. So she would wop me with cords for nothing.
I told her if she did it again, I would wop her back.”
Before she and her sisters were taken to foster care, they were brought to see
their mother. “She was in a glass thing,” she wrote. “They were telling us to talk to her
before we go to the foster home. My sisters started crying and she started crying but
I didn’t care because she shouldn’t have did it.”
She wrote of being removed from one foster home that was “nicer than my Mom”
because as she put it, “I kissed my foster brother.” The second foster home was
“mean,” and she stole a ring from her foster mother.

“I don’t know why, but I can’t think of myself older.
Not to jinx myself, but I think I’m going to have a short life.”
— Latosha, 13 years old

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In this placement, she went to a different school. “I got along
okay ‘til this ugly girl came to me and told me, ‘That’s why you’re
in a foster home. I’m with my real Mom.’ Oh, her real mom came all
right when I socked her and made her nose bleed.”
At the end, she wrote, “Writing about my life I just kicked three
tons of ornery mess out of my sistum (sic) but I have like 100
more. Bye for now.”

When his niece was
expelled, Williams
wrote a letter to the
school board asking,
“What are we
supposed to do with
these children, throw
them away?”
— Leroy Williams
Preacher

Talking back, essentially, disrespecting adults, is what gets
Latosha in trouble in school. Her story and Sharon’s raise the
question of how many adults in their lives have earned their
respect and what role models, if any, they have witnessed dealing
with conflict.
Not long before the interview, Latosha had been suspended
for an exchange in her classroom that she recounted in detail:
Another student had apparently called her mother and the mother
came to get her. According to Latosha, the mother said, “Pack
your bags,” and made an insulting remark about girls in the class
teasing her daughter.
“I raised my hand and told the teacher I had to pee. ‘If I can’t
get to the bathroom, I might pee on your stuff.’”
The mother said, “Don’t you see I’m talking. This girl should be
smacked.”
“I’ll bring my Mama and she’ll smack you.”
“Bring it on,” the mother said, and gave her address.
“I’m not going to your roach-infested apartment,” Latosha said
she retorted. “I was getting so mad. If anybody said more, I would
have socked them.”
The teacher told her to sit down and when she refused, she was
sent to the principal’s office. “When I told my Mama what happened, she was like, ‘You should of picked up a chair and hit her.’”
She was suspended for five days, but Williams took her out of
that school and enrolled her in a charter school, even though just
a short time remained before the end of the school year.
Suspensions and expulsions engender a sense of grievance not
only in students but in their parents, many of whom did not have
good experiences in school themselves. When parents believe,
rightly or wrongly, that their kids are not being treated fairly——that
their child did not start the fight or other kids do worse and don’t
get punished——they become alienated from the school. This sends
a mixed message about discipline to the child and potentially sets up
a non-constructive teacher versus parent conflict.

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“I understand why these parents get so upset with the schools,” Williams said.
“They aren’t helping these children.” As an example, he says one problem with
Latosha is that the psychiatrist she sees on occasion has encouraged her to express
her feelings. But she does not always do so appropriately or in the appropriate context and, he explains, “When she does that in school, she gets in trouble.”
Sharon was attending summer school in June, but Williams worries about
whether she will be promoted or held back in the fall and whether she will eventually
make it through high school. Latosha, too, is at great risk of getting into more trouble
and not fulfilling her considerable potential. Neither girl imagines herself going to college
or has an image of herself in the future.
“I don’t know why, but I can’t think of myself older,” Latosha said. “Not to jinx
myself, but I think I’m going to have a short life.”

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C H A P T E R

4

Racial Disparities in Education
Disproportionate Educational Opportunities
ur response should be colorblind but for some reason it’s not,” said Alton
Frailey, the Black superintendent of schools in Cincinnati, where Black students were expelled at twice the rate of White students and given out-ofschool suspensions at triple the rate in the 2002-2003 school year.39

“

O

Among the reasons offered by educators and parents:
The kids with the most needs, those who arrive with stimulation or socialization
deficits, get the worst schools with the least experienced teachers. The state of Ohio
has a 3 to 1 disparity between rich and poor districts in per pupil funding. Black students make up 71 percent of Cincinnati students, and many of them attend the
schools within the system that are in “academic emergency” or “academic watch.”
Except for those who pass the test to get into the college prep high school or the audition
for the high school of performing arts, the majority attend neighborhood K–8 and high
schools that are nearly all Black.40
The teaching staff is 70 percent White, and many of them do not live in the city
or send their children to city schools.41 Many Black parents believe that these teachers
often don’t understand or empathize with their children the way they do with White
children.
“We teach our children how to survive. We teach particularly our boys to be
strong,” said Chandra Matthews-Smith, the vice president for programs at Beech
Acres, a social services agency in Cincinnati. “You are in a classroom with a group of
people different from you——African American males who are energetic, who just don’t
follow step one, two, three. Sometimes, so much is going on at home or in the neighborhoods and they get to school and there are a million rules. ‘Sit down. I’ll talk to you
later.’ They don’t get their needs met. It’s read and recite, read and recite. If an energetic

“Once you get out there on the street and start hanging out,
there’s all this different type of trouble you can get into, and
you can get into it without even knowing it.”
— Latoris, 19 years old

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kid is White, it’s ‘Oh, he’s bright. We need to give him something different to do.’ With
our boys, it’s ‘He’s not following rules. We’ve got to watch his behavior.’”
She added, as did others, that Blacks no longer are going into teaching at the
same rate as they did in the past. In 1974, 12.5 percent of full-time public school
teachers were Black; by 1998, the proportion had dropped to seven percent.42
Latinos also do not go into teaching commensurate to their proportion of the student
population.43 In the fall of 1999, 15.6 percent of students were Latino, but Latinos
represented only 5.2 percent of public school teachers.44
The taproot of racial disproportion——in suspensions, dropout rates, incarceration
and other negative life outcomes——reaches south and runs deep in Sunflower County
in the Mississippi Delta, home of the state’s large cotton plantations. The slave system
was not designed to produce the independent, self-reliant citizens celebrated in 19th
century political thought; it was aimed at controlling every aspect of the lives of their
enslaved laborers. Southern slave codes made it a crime to teach a slave to read and
write and levied large fines——100 pounds in colonial South Carolina, which was more
than the reward offered for killing a runaway slave. Not surprisingly, more than 90 percent of slaves were illiterate.45 Illiteracy is one of the most bitter, ongoing effects of
slavery in Mississippi and throughout the United States.
Sunflower County has been known over the years in several historical
contexts. Indianola, the county seat, is where the White Citizens Council was founded
in 1954 in response to the Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools,
the beginning of a movement of “massive resistance” that spread throughout the
South. In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago visiting relatives in the
adjoining county, was kidnapped, brought to a farm in Sunflower County, murdered,
and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. Ruleville, a small town in the county, is where
civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer picked cotton before she was evicted for registering
to vote. Drew is the home of Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter, Black sharecroppers
who were among the first to enroll seven of their children in the previously all-White
schools in 1965.
It is often said that the largest “plantation” in the state is the Mississippi State
Penitentiary located at Parchman, in the heart of Sunflower County. William Faulkner
called Parchman “destination doom.” One of the Carter grandchildren is now in
Parchman Penitentiary.
Drew had a population of about 2,000. When the schools were desegregated by
court order in 1970, the dual system was abolished and there are now three schools,
an elementary, a middle, and a high school, in the municipal school district. After
1970, most of the White children were taken out of the public schools and now
attend the private academies. The five-member school board (majority White) is
appointed by the city council and until last year, the White chairman of the board had
served for over 30 years. In December 2003, the White school superintendent was
replaced by an African American who had been his assistant.46
Despite changes, the legacy of inferior education, deliberately restricted opportunity, and low expectations continue to harm poor Black children in Mississippi, as

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well as their counterparts whose families moved north to cities like Cincinnati. Bob
Moses, a civil rights organizer in Mississippi in the 1960s who now teaches math at
an all-Black high school in Jackson, calls this legacy “sharecropper education”——a
limited education for people assigned manual work.47
“If you think of sharecropper schooling, you went through it, but your options
were: You were going to chop and pick cotton or do domestic work,” he says. “Your
education wasn’t tied to opportunity. The connection between education and a
change for the better in your own life wasn’t made.” Despite the Colin Powells and
Condoleezza Rices, he adds, that link still is not clear among many poor Blacks
because they do not see anyone they know whose success is tied to education. To
get more poor Black children isolated in inner cities or rural pockets like Drew into the
pipeline to college, says Moses, means addressing this question: “How do we shift
the culture and develop these expectations and beliefs for these kids?”

Elton: “Not College Material”
Hazel Harris was a single mother in Drew who worked as a medical records and
front desk clerk at a home health care agency in the nearby town of Cleveland,
Mississippi. She moved to Drew from Memphis in 1991 when her first husband died.
Since then, she said, in a 2002 interview in her home on a nice street in this small
town, her four children and a nephew she is raising have been systematically undervalued and over-punished in their schools. This has hindered rather than helped her
efforts to keep them on the path toward higher education.
One son, Elton, ran track at the high school. When the team went to the state
championship, he placed first in the 100-yard dash and broke a record in that event
and in the long jump. As a result, he became eligible to run in a track meet in Europe,
but his mother had no way to sponsor him. She finally raised the money through
church and community contacts. She had already gone to the school board and written
a letter to the City of Drew. Nobody wanted to contribute. An anonymous donor finally
sent $1,000 and the superintendent donated $200.
In Europe, Elton came in first in the 100-yard dash and second in the 200-yard
race. Although he was the only representative from Mississippi, no one except a few
close friends recognized the accomplishment. Right before he graduated, he says,
his guidance counselor told him that he and his classmates could not go to four-year
colleges because they weren’t “college material.” He went on to Hinds Community
College and graduated in 1998. At the time of the study, he worked two jobs and
helped support his mother and brothers and sister.
Harris’s daughter was suspended from time to time. She was sent home from
high school because her shirt or shorts were considered too short or her pants were
too tight. “I told her that if it takes it, you wear long pants, and if they are falling off,
make sure you wear a belt——just don’t get suspended!” Harris said. She told the
school she wasn’t there to “jump on them or curse them out. But my child’s clothes
don’t keep her from learning or being kind to people. I believe you all have a problem.”

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The child with the most school problems has been her nephew, Latoris, who has
lived on and off with her in Drew. His mother, in Michigan, has served time for drug
dealing. Harris said she saw potential in him and was determined to cultivate it. He
always liked school, and said he still liked it in an interview in 2002 after he had been
suspended a number of times and sent to an alternative school.
“I like most of the teachers and they do try to teach you. Not a day goes by that
when I leave school, I haven’t learned something new.” Sometimes, though, he said,
“A few teachers are just looking for a reason to send you home. They will make something simple into a big issue, and the principal doesn’t want to hear your side.”
In that interview, Latoris, then 19, seemed uncertain as to whether he had a bad
attitude and a bad temper. “At first, I didn’t think I had a bad attitude, but people told
me that so much, sometimes I think it just came down on me. Or maybe you need an
attitude on the streets ‘cause you don’t want nobody to run over you. People also tell
me I have a quick temper and I’m this and I’m that and maybe it all comes true.”
He spent two months in the North Delta Alternative School after an altercation
with a teacher at Drew High School in March 2000, when he was in the ninth
grade. As he tells the story, “The teacher thought I was chewing gum and I kept telling
him I wasn’t but he sent me to detention. I told him I wasn’t coming to detention
because I had no gum in my mouth. He told me to get out of the classroom. While
I’m going to get my books, he grabbed me by the collar and told me to get out. I told
him to get his hands off me. Then he grabbed my book bag and threw it outside and
told me to follow it. I stopped at the door and when I turned around, my elbow must
have hit him in the stomach. He pushed me again and then I went to the office. When
I got there, I was told I had to go to the alternative school for two to three weeks about
my attitude.” Latoris spent the rest of the school year there.
North Delta Alternative School, located in Webb, served children from a sevencounty area, including Drew. It and other alternative schools were created in 1995
with the support of Black administrators and policy makers because they realized that
a large number of mostly Black students, many in special education, were being
kicked out of school and had nowhere to go. In the 2003–2004 school year, every
one of North Delta’s 85 students was Black, according to its principal, Willena White.
Four weeks was the required minimum stay.48
Latoris described North Delta as being “like a juvenile hall ‘cause you have no
privileges. We had four classes, and they teach everybody basically on the same level,
ninth, tenth, whatever, out of the same books. Classrooms were mixed together, and
we didn’t learn anything. You would also get written up and sent home for every little
broken rule like if you made a sound or don’t raise your hand before you speak.
Sometimes I would give up and get sent home for a day or two. Until you come back
with a parent, you can’t get back in. Don’t do that, they call the police and say you
aren’t at the alternative school.”
He described a friend suspended from the school. “He was supposed to bring a
parent but his mama was always working and he just never came back and he started

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selling drugs and stuff.” He added, “It might seem there’s not a lot of trouble to get
into, being so small, but once you get out there on the street and start hanging out,
there’s all this different type of trouble you can get into, and you can get into it without even knowing it.”
White, who had been principal of North Delta since 2000, readily conceded that
the school had limitations. One problem, she said, is that home school teachers and
parents give the image of the school as “a place for bad kids, not a transition place
and period for them to get back on track.” Sometimes when alternative school students
return to their home school, teachers “expect them to keep misbehaving and that kind
of attitude is what defeats our children.”
The school has six teachers, certified in math, science, social studies, language
arts, elementary education and special education, and a computer lab technician.
“Our biggest need is behavior counselors in regular schools and alternative schools.
They are the huge missing piece.” It would help, she said, if schools had a relationship
with a mental health center or had more people trained in psychology. “If a child is
acting out with other than a behavior problem, how are we to know? Our teachers are
not trained in this area. I am not trained. We are looking at problems we can’t solve.”
White said, “Eighty-five percent of my children leave here, don’t make it at the
home school, and end up in Parchman or Walnut Grove.” Walnut Grove is a prison
for youthful offenders.
Latoris did make it, but not before coming up against another obstacle. When he
got back into the high school, he was not able to graduate with his class in 2003
because he had not taken geometry; he said he was not told at the alternative school
that this was a requirement. He returned to school the next year just to take geometry
and he was finally able to graduate. In spring 2004, he was preparing to take the ACT
test in hope of getting into a business college.
Harris cried softly as she told these stories and listened to the children tell theirs.
“It seems like when you take one or two steps up, the system knocks you back
down. It’s so unfair, because there are enough children already on the streets. Some
of us are good parents, and we try to teach our children the right way and how to
respect adults and authority, but sometimes it’s hard within the school
framework. Even when kids try to be respectful, they don’t get that back from the
schools. That’s the reason I always instill in my children, “You are good. God gave you
five senses and the ability to be whatever you want to be, and you can ask Him to
help you.”

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C H A P T E R

5

Criminalization of School Behavior
From Schoolhouse to Courthouse
n recent years, many young people’s first contact with the law has happened at
school. In another aspect of zero tolerance, many schools are criminalizing behavior,
such as schoolyard fights, that used to be handled in the principal’s office. Today,
police officers stationed in schools are taking students directly to local courts and detention
centers, sometimes in handcuffs.

I

“If the rules when I was in grade school were what they are today, I would never
have made it to high school,” said Judge James A. Ray, a juvenile court judge in Lucas
County, Ohio, who also is president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family
Court Judges. “Pauley (a schoolmate) and I fought every week. We were trying to figure
out who was in charge of the playground.”
A 2003 American Bar Association report on juvenile justice in Ohio noted that
while no national data system exists to track the number of school-based arrests, “the
responses of attorneys and judges, as well as the comments and observations of
investigators for this study, suggest that these numbers are increasing in Ohio.”49
Like Ohio, Mississippi does not track school-based arrests, but Jennifer RileyCollins, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice, believes they are common
in that state as well.
A report on this trend in the New York Times in January 2004 cited an analysis
made in the Miami-Dade County, Florida, school system showing that juvenile arrests
in its schools had tripled between 1999 and 2001, primarily for “simple assaults”——
fights that do not involve weapons or serious injury——and “miscellaneous” charges,
including disorderly conduct.50
According to the Times article and ABA report, most of the students charged in
Ohio have mental health or educational disabilities and/or are Black.

“If the rules when I was in grade school were what they are
today, I would never have made it to high school.”
— Judge James A. Ray
Juvenile Court Judge, Lucas County, Ohio

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“What happens is: You can criminalize anything,” said Kim
Brooks Tandy, the director of the Juvenile Law Center in Kentucky
who was a researcher for the ABA report on Ohio. “You don’t go
to school——truancy. You act out——disorderly conduct, malicious
mischief. Special ed kids can commit these ‘crimes’ every day with
their behavior, especially the ones with emotional or mental health
problems. If you want to go after them criminally, you can.”

“The juvenile justice
system has become
the dumping
ground for poor
minority kids with
mental health
and special
education
problems.”
— Laurence Steinberg
Professor, Temple
University

Turning juvenile courts into an extension of the principal’s office
burdens the system with unnecessary cases, Judge Ray said.
Toledo, in Lucas County, has a catch-all “Safe School Ordinance”
that has been used much more readily since police officers were
placed in schools in the mid-1990s. There were 1,727 schoolrelated cases in Lucas County in 2002, up from 1,237 in 2000.51
“The largest single offense that refers kids to our court is the
Safe School Ordinance,” said Judge Ray. “We do have cases where
somebody punches out a teacher or damages a teacher’s car that
would be crimes if they were adults. But many of them are for misdemeanors or just pain-in-the-ass type behavior. We had a girl who
wore a short blouse that showed her belly button, which violated
the dress code. She was obnoxious and refused to put on another shirt and she was arrested for that. This is not something we
would detain somebody for! Another example: Two grade school
boys were brought in for causing disruptions. They were teasing girls
who were going into the bathroom, reaching inside the door and
putting the lights out. We are criminalizing and demonizing otherwise normal but obnoxious adolescent behavior,” he said.
To explain this trend, Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University and the director of the MacArthur
Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and
Juvenile Justice, said that principals are less able to depend on
parents to enforce the discipline schools mete out. “I think in the
past the threat of getting in touch with a kid’s parents was enough
to get a kid to start behaving,” he told the New York Times. “Now
kids feel parents will fight on their behalf.”52
He also explained to the Times that many large urban school
districts have been forced to reduce or eliminate mental health
services, and kids who once were referred to specialists within the
school district now wind up in court. “The juvenile justice system
has become the dumping ground for poor minority kids with mental health and special education problems.”53
Judge Ray said he wouldn’t use the term “dumping ground”
because he refuses to place all responsibility on schools. “They
are dealing with a product that came to them at age five——the

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chaotic homes, the parents who have abdicated their parental responsibilities, lack of
structure, lack of sleep. Kids do not do a good job of raising themselves.”
The major problem with bringing kids to court for minor offenses often isn’t the
punishment they receive, Judge Ray and others said. In Toledo or Cincinnati, they
generally get some sort of slap on the wrist, such as a few days of community service,
but they also get a record. If the youth comes before the court again, this original
charge likely will increase the penalty and minor charges can add up over time.
The punishment itself can be a problem in rural areas where few alternatives other
than incarceration exist. “For Mississippi kids, the story is usually the same,” said
Sheila Bedi, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Once they have
papers (meaning that they have come to court on any charge), they find it very hard
to get out of the system.”

Keisha: Assaulting a Teacher
Latosha’s younger sister, Keisha, sat with her grandfather, Leroy Williams, and her
mother, Cassandra, in the molded plastic chairs in the waiting room of the Hamilton
County Juvenile Public Defender’s office in downtown Cincinnati. They had arrived
early for her appointment with Thomas White, who would be defending her on the
charge of assaulting a teacher, a felony.
Keisha, a wisp of a nine-year-old, a fourth grader, was the smallest of the juveniles
awaiting their defenders. She practiced counting in Spanish, showing off for her
grandfather what she had learned at the charter school she has attended since the
alleged assault in her neighborhood public school.
White emerged and called the family into a small, windowless consultation room.
As soon as they sat down, Cassandra told White that the teacher, a substitute,
choked Keisha. “She did kick and bite her but the woman was choking her. We wanted
the school to charge her but they won’t do it.” Her voice rose in anger.
“She may well have done something wrong,” White said of the teacher. “But my
job is to defend this little girl.” He asked Keisha what happened, and she gave a long,
convoluted account in a high tiny voice. “In the class, I got somebody else’s paper
and then when the girl’s paper came back, she got mad. Her name is D. I said I didn’t
know it was hers. That’s when we was arguing. D’s sister C came and took D out of
the room. She said she can’t fight me because I was littler than her. I was about to
go to the assistant principal to tell what happened. The teacher grabbed my arm. She
thought I was leaving to finish the fight. She dragged me by where the coat hooks
were. She was trying to use the intercom. I scraped my back on one of those hooks.
She wouldn’t let me go. I tried to bite her arms to stop her choking me. I kicked her
too. That’s when Miss K came and took me to the office.”
Williams said he had witnesses that would support Keisha’s account. He had gotten,
in a sense, depositions from some of her classmates. He pulled them out of his pocket
to show them to White. They were written on lined paper in fourth grade-style block
letters. One read: “Miss C choked (Keisha) and (Keisha) was punching and biting her

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and Miss C said, ‘Don’t you ever fucking bite me,’ and she let go and (Keisha) ran out.
The End.”
He had given copies to school officials because he wanted charges brought
against this teacher, he said. A month or so later, he received a letter from the general
counsel for the school district saying that the system’s Office of Security Services
had investigated the “alleged assault” by the substitute teacher. The student witnesses said Keisha was kicking and biting the teacher when the teacher stopped her
from leaving the room. The teacher said she had to hold Keisha to protect herself. “All
the students interviewed demonstrated what looked more like restraint than a chokehold,” the letter states. “Based on these statements, the case is closed.” The teacher,
not the school, filed the assault charge against Keisha.
White glanced quickly at the hand-written depositions and said they weren’t necessary. “We could call them as witnesses but we don’t want to go to trial.” He said
he was going to file for a competency hearing because “it’s not clear that a nine-year-old
can meet the constitutional standard to stand trial.” He explained that two psychologists
would interview her and give their recommendation. “If she’s found not competent,
she dodges the bullet.”
Cassandra fumed. “But then that teacher is going to walk free.”
White nodded yes. “You could sue her, though that would be difficult to win.”
“Then maybe we should go to trial, put on our witnesses to show the teacher
choked her,” Cassandra said.
“That would not be in the best interest of (Keisha),” White said. “Even if you win,
this will do nothing to the teacher, and there is a good chance you will lose. You do
not want her adjudicated for a felony. In my experience, the teachers win 90 percent
of the time against a student.”
Later, White said that the standard used for assault against a teacher is low.
“They don’t have to show physical harm or medical reports. Frankly, the magistrate is
not going to listen to what a nine-year-old and her friends say. If the teacher is presentable and says, ‘I was trying to restrain her and she bit and kicked me.’ The prosecutor asks, ‘Did it hurt?’ She says, ‘Oh yeah,’ and that’s enough. She’s guilty.”
White commented, “Schools, teachers, come on! Manage your own disciplinary
problems! Let’s not charge nine-year-olds with felonies and bring them into court.” He
said he has been in the defender’s office for four years and bringing students to court
“seems to me to be becoming a popular method of dealing with children who are not
behaving.”
In his experience, charges of assaulting a teacher are not “a 200-pound boy slugging a teacher, what you think of as a felony assault. Often, two kids are fighting, a
teacher gets in the middle and is hit.”
White said that occasionally prosecutors will reduce a felony charge but they are
not allowed to reduce felonies to misdemeanors unless the school is willing, and
schools generally take a very tough line.

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Asked about the competency issue, he said that he does not believe that nine-yearolds are capable of understanding the charges against them and participating in their
own defense. Steinberg, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network director, led a
study that tested these elements of legal understanding in children. It found that 30
percent of children under the age of 14 are as impaired in understanding how the
legal system works as mentally-ill adults, who have been deemed not competent to
stand trial.54
White said, however, that the decision in Keisha’s case will depend on the psychologists. “There are some that would only find her competent; others only incompetent. I don’t know what will happen. This morning I was dealing with a competency
hearing of a 14-year-old boy charged with sexual assault. He is mentally retarded,
with a 55 IQ, and he failed first, second, and third grades. He was declared competent
to stand trial. The psychologist’s explanation of why he failed first, second, and third
grade was: He didn’t take school seriously.”
“If she is found competent, she will be found guilty,” he predicted.
Downstairs, standing outside the building waiting for their ride home, Cassandra
was still fuming. Keisha practiced drill team moves on the sidewalk.

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C H A P T E R

6

Education Paradigms
Punishment vs. Development
he Cincinnati public school system at the time of our study was revising its
Code of Conduct and adopting a different approach for school management
and discipline. “We have the highest expulsion rate in the state,” said spokeswoman Janet Walsh. “We recognize that the traditional approach isn’t working.”

T

Under the new approach, called Positive Behavior Support, school committees
identify a small number of school-wide behavioral goals, like calm in the hallways,
which will be taught to students so they know what to do, not just what not to do.
Reinforcement will be positive, not all negative. At the same time, office referrals will
be analyzed to determine when and where infractions occur to discover problem
areas.
“We’ve got to get away from the crime and punishment type of model,” said
Susan Taylor, the Cincinnati teachers’ union president at the time who was on the
committee designing the changes. “This is still a rampant mindset among too many
teachers and administrators. ‘You do the crime, you do the time. If you do this, it’s
Saturday school. Do that, a suspension for three days.’ We’ve got to get where the
consequences of misbehavior are instructive.”
In April, as Cincinnati was preparing to train teachers in the new approach,
Cleveland appeared poised to move in the opposite direction. School officials there,
fed up with students roaming halls, using cell phones, pulling fire alarms, and gathering
in the streets at two city high schools, brought in additional police officers and
announced more stringent disciplinary measures, including five-day suspensions for
students who are chronically tardy or absent.55

“Marginalized children get a control and punishment and low expectation
reaction that sends a message to the child that he or she is not valued or
wanted or smart. This happens at a time when they need confidence
and puts them on a downward track from the beginning of school.”
— Dr. James Comer
Professor of Child Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Center

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If Cleveland codifies tougher disciplinary sanctions, it is not hard to imagine that
a few years from now, it will realize, as Cincinnati has, that it is pushing too many children
out of school. It is also conceivable that if Cincinnati’s new measures don’t work as
well as hoped, if funding is cut for some key elements or attention diverted to a new
problem, and suddenly some school’s management breaks down, there will be cries
for toughening discipline again.
“We go through cycles of putting alternatives and new systems into place,” said
Tom Mooney, the Ohio teachers’ union chief at the time who helped design
Cincinnati’s current disciplinary code. “We have a 3 to 1 disparity (between rich and
poor districts) in per pupil funding in Ohio. Our funding is unreliable and unstable so
systems are always on a roller coaster. If you make a model that costs money——social
services, mental health services——I guarantee you the system can’t afford to keep it
going for long. Even bare bones ones fade away. New administrators come and go and
don’t remember why we have that program. And sometimes what is tried just doesn’t
work. Who knows why? There aren’t any simple answers or solutions.”56
In his book, Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can’t Solve Our Problems and
How We Can, Dr. James P. Comer, the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at
the Yale Child Study Center, writes that school policy that focuses almost exclusively
on curriculum, control and punishment, instruction, and high stakes accountability
based on test scores alone is misguided. If schools are to reach children who are
“undeveloped” when they arrive at school, he writes, they must focus on promoting
development above all else.57
“All children need stimulation, protection, and sustained support to develop and
prepare for successful adulthood. Ideally, this happens in the family and community,
with the schools providing further opportunities for growth. But if the family and community aren’t doing this, the schools need to take responsibility,” he said. “School is
the only organization where a relationship between meaningful people and children
can take place on an ongoing basis and compensate for the difficult conditions that
interfered with the growth of many.”58
In schools centered almost exclusively on instruction——the traditional model——
children from marginalized families, who haven’t had the same experiences and interactions as mainstream children have, are seen as dumb or bad or unable to handle
themselves, said Dr. Comer. “Marginalized children get a control and punishment and
low expectation reaction that sends a message to the child that he or she is not valued
or wanted or smart. This happens at a time when they need confidence and puts them
on a downward track from the beginning of school.”59

Central Fairmount: A School in “Continuous Improvement”
In Cincinnati, the public school system in 2003 moved up from the lowest state
ranking, “academic emergency,” to “academic watch” based on improved achievement
scores. A number of individual schools improved their ratings but 32 of the system's
79 schools remain in “academic emergency” or “academic watch.” Thirty-seven rank
in the third category of “continuous improvement.” Only 12 made the top two cate-

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gories of “excellent” or “effective.”60 Michael Ward, the principal of Central Fairmount
School, is using everything he knows to turn his school around. A kindergarten
through eighth grade school on the western side of Cincinnati, Central Fairmount is
located in a neighborhood that once was 90 percent White and now is 80 percent
Black. Ward, a 30-year veteran teacher and administrator in the school system, was
brought in to lead Central Fairmount three years ago when the school, one of the
many in “academic emergency,” was about to undergo a redesign. A redesign means
starting from scratch with an entirely new staff.
Ward is a multi-tasker in seemingly constant motion. At the beginning of the visit,
he was standing in the wide hallway of the old, traditional school building while the
students were doubled over on the floor, heads facing the walls, for a tornado drill.
When the drill was over, some students high-fived Ward as they walked past him. He
knows their names.
“My goal is: Create an environment in which children feel safe and cared about,”
he said as he headed to another part of the building. He hired a racially and gender
balanced staff and organized them into teams that have common planning periods and
meet with parents together. The school offers a universal breakfast, free adult education,
after-school programs with an after-school bus to take kids home, and a Ready to
Learn class in anger management. He’s also made space available in the building for
community groups. Every day for an hour and half, the school stops for reading. There
are no bathroom breaks, no announcements on the public address system.
In Cincinnati, an instructional leadership team at each school decided how to allocate
the money budgeted to that school. A music teacher or a library? A full-time social
worker or a playground? Computers or an art teacher? Central Fairmount selected a
music teacher, a full-time social worker and computers. The school has no art teacher,
no library, and no playground except a paved area behind the building with two basketball
hoops hung on a brick wall.
We passed the in-school suspension (ISS) room, where six children stood
around an aide. One sat at a desk, scribbling on a piece of paper. “Mr. Ward, I need
to talk to you,” one girl called out. Ward promised to talk to her later.
Twenty percent of the students at Central Fairmount are in special education, and
the school has three severely behaviorally handicapped (SBH) classrooms with 12
students in each. They are small rooms with desks and a blackboard. In the SBH
classroom for fourth to eighth graders, all the students had gone to the cafeteria
except one girl, who was finishing something on the computer. When she left, the
teacher, Jack Black, said she used to rave and threaten others. Now, he’s able to calm
her down most of the time.
“For one thing, I know the family,” he said. When the school year starts, he visits
the homes of his students and communicates with the parents or guardians regularly.
The previous evening, he said, he’d taken a student and his grandmother to dinner
because “the grandmother was doing a lot of good things with the boy.”
Black, a former juvenile police officer who “got tired of seeing the same kids out
of school every day” and returned to college for a degree in special education, said

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his students “always feel they are retarded but they’re not that.
They are low-functioning because of behavior, not because of IQ.
Some of them take medication. They are grade levels behind but
they can move up. I have a boy in the fourth grade who has attended only two and a half years of school. He is very intelligent. I pick
him up everyday and bring him to school. One year, two of my students took second and fifth place in the school spelling bee.”
The SBH designation is supposed to be temporary, with the
student eventually returning to a regular classroom. Black says he
“tries to make sure the teacher is willing to work with them, the child
wants to go, and the parents are supportive.” He confesses to worrying when a student leaves to go to another school. “Maybe the
teacher will not be as patient or understanding. I feel bad—not to
judge other teachers.”
Many of his former students eventually drop out of high school,
he said, “but I’ve seen some successes. One boy is now a college
freshman. He won a national ROTC scholarship. That is really neat.
Some graduate from high school and get jobs. I’ve seen several of
my former students working in restaurants and I’m impressed.
They had such short fuses in school.” He added softly, “I have two
who killed people.”
His approach to discipline is: “Give the parent a call. ‘Michael
is not having a good day. Did something happen? If I have to call
back, I may have to send him home.’ There are times when you have
to send them home.” Having a relationship with parents is crucial
for discipline because parents today tend to take the side of their
children rather than of the school in disciplinary matters, he said. In
the past, it was the other way around.
Principal Ward describes a similar approach to discipline. “I listen
to the kids, talk to the parents and try to handle it.” He long ago
rejected the idea that suspensions and expulsions teach a lesson. “When you put a child out, this does not improve his behavior.
All it does is give the teacher a chance to teach. As far as modifying
behavior, they go home and watch “Sponge Bob” all day. When
they come back, they’re not changed and they’re behind. In addition, it burdens working parents to send a child home.”

“When you put a
child out, this
does not improve
his behavior.
All it does is give
the teacher
a chance to teach.
As far as modifying
behavior, they go
home and watch
“Sponge Bob” all
day. When they
come back, they’re
not changed and
they’re behind.
In addition, it
burdens working
parents to send a
child home.”
— Michael Ward
Principal, Central
Fairmont School

Sometimes, though, he does suspend or expel students. And
sometimes it is hard to know what to do. As we neared the cafeteria, a first grade teacher came up and told him that a boy and a
girl in her class got in a fight again. “This is happening three to five
times a day. Earlier today, he raised his fist at a different student.” She said that her three phone numbers for the girl’s mother
weren’t working, and the phone number she had for the boy was
disconnected.
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“Bring them in,” Ward said, and went into the small office of the assistant principal
who normally handles discipline but who was out for two weeks. Ward knows the two
because they have been in trouble many times before and often fight each other.
He called the school’s social worker and asked her to visit the two mothers and call
him back.
They arrived and sat in chairs facing his desk. She is a Black girl wearing a yellow
sweat suit; he is a White boy wearing slacks and a shirt. They are both small——they’re
first graders——although she is bigger than he is.
“This is my fourth time in ISS!” he announced.
“I missed breakfast,” she said.
“Why?” Ward asked.
“Because I was late.”
Ward asks what happened.
“She hit me first in the eye and I punched her.”
“He hit me.”
The teacher came into the office. She and Ward discussed referring the girl to a
community mental health clinic.
“This is a constant problem,” said the teacher.
“What do you think?” Ward asked her.
“Something needs to be done.”
“They’ve already been in ISS so many times. I hate to put out a first grader.”
The boy and girl, meanwhile, wiggled on their chairs, talking and laughing.
The social worker called with a number for the girl’s mother. Ward wrote it down
and called. “She got in another fight today. I don’t want to put her out of school. She’s
spending time in ISS and not getting an education.” He asked her to come in and talk
to the teacher. “We only have 15 days before the end of the year. I’m going to put her
back in ISS for five days, but we need to get her back in class so she’ll be ready for
next year.”
“Am I in trouble?” the girl asked.
“I’m going to put you back in ISS for five days. Do you know why?”
“Because I’m fighting.”
“What happened last time?”
“ISS.”
“I’m mad at you. We need to get this straightened out and get you on to second grade.”
The boy drew three days in ISS. Ward put out his little finger to crook with the
boy’s little finger. “Are you done with fighting?” he asked.

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“No,” the boy answered.
Ward asked again, “Are you done with fighting?”
Suddenly he frowned. He’s noticed that the boy’s little finger was injured.
“How did you get this hurt finger?”
“My mom cracked me with a spoon.”
“Why?”
“Because I was bein’ bad.”
He called the social worker again and told her to check on this. A short time later,
the boy’s mother called. She said ISS was a good thing for her son.
Ward then headed to the cafeteria to talk to another teacher about another problem.
He considers Central Fairmount a work in progress, and so does the state of Ohio. In
three years, the school moved up to the status of “continuous improvement” in
achievement, halfway between “academic emergency” and “excellent.”

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C H A P T E R

7

Delinquency and Alienation
Dropping Out, Hanging Out
n the third or fourth grade, the sorting begins in earnest between those children in
the pipeline to college and those heading in the direction of prison. Dr. Comer
says that children begin to understand in about the third grade whether they are
part of the American mainstream or part of another, more marginal,
world. Underdeveloped from the start of school and not given the support and attention they need in the early grades, the marginal kids begin to mentally drop out around
the third or fourth grade, when the academic demands of school begin to outstrip
their preschool and early school development.

I

“These children are still in the north woods, without a map, survival skills or tools,”
Dr. Comer writes. “Most will not continue to develop so as to achieve their social and
academic potential. Most go on a downhill course and repeat the marginal experience
of their parents, despite the fact that almost all parents want their children to succeed
in school and in life.”61
While poor academic performance is not a direct cause of delinquency, studies
consistently demonstrate a strong link between marginal literacy skills and the likelihood of involvement in the juvenile justice system. Most incarcerated youth lag two
or more years behind their age peers in basic academic skills and have higher rates
of grade retention, truancy, and suspension and expulsion. A national study found that
more than one-third of youth incarcerated in the juvenile justice system read below
the fourth grade level.62
Mississippi State Senator Willie Simmons, who at the time represented Sunflower
among other counties in the Delta, said that the state of Mississippi once used elementary school achievement scores to project future prison population. Simmons
worked in corrections for 17 years and in 1992 was the deputy commissioner of
Mississippi’s Department of Corrections. In that job, he said, he commissioned a
study to project what the state’s prison population, then about 10,000, would be in
10 years.63

A national study found that more than one-third of youth incarcerated
at a median age of 15.5 read below the fourth grade level.

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“The group in Washington that did the study looked at three factors,” he said.
“The first was our sentencing laws; the second was the crimes that were being committed. The third factor, the key factor, was the reading and math scores in the fourth,
fifth, and sixth grades.” The projection of 21,000 beds proved to be very accurate,
Simmons said.
“My point is: If we can look at those fourth, fifth, and sixth graders and know they
are going to Parchman or another institution, why can’t educators look at them and
put them on a different track. If we don’t do that, we are going to go broke as a state.”
Already by fourth grade, a substantial number of students have failed a grade and
are held back. Grade retention, like suspensions and expulsions, push children out of
school. Although eliminating “social promotions” may seem like a good idea, generally,
simply repeating a grade does not improve achievement, the National Research
Council found in a survey of existing research. In fact, this practice increases the likelihood
of dropping out.64 A longitudinal study of the Baltimore Public Schools found that:
■
■

Of those students retained more than once, 80 percent dropped out.
Of those retained in both elementary and middle school, 94 percent
dropped out.65

The ninth grade is a major exit ramp from the education pipeline. This is the grade
from which many students drop out because after years of negative experiences and
accumulated deficits, they consider themselves too old, too big, too hopeless, or too
alienated to keep going.
In most school districts, ninth grade is the first year of high school, when students
move from smaller middle or K-8 schools into a big and often impersonal setting with
greater academic demands. Educators cite this as the primary reason the ninth grade
has so many retentions and dropouts. Most urban education systems are not organized to provide those students with weak academic skills and poor attendance habits
the intensive support and attention they need during the move to high school.
In a study called “Neighborhood High Schools and the Juvenile Justice System:
How Neither Helps the Other and How That Could Change,” researchers from Johns
Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania describe what goes wrong in
the mid-Atlantic city they studied:
“Students fall through the cracks in good part because no one is responsible for
helping struggling students with the transition from middle school to high school.
Middle schools, in this high accountability era, are increasingly consumed with raising
their eighth grade test scores by focusing on the students just below the threshold
of success in the local accountability system. High-poverty, neighborhood high
schools traditionally view the first 30 to 45 days as an organization period where the
focus is on balancing the number of students in each classroom, not addressing student
needs. The level of institutionalized chaos that is characteristic of many high-poverty,
neighborhood high schools is hard to fathom for those who have not experienced it
first-hand. It is not uncommon, for example, for hundreds of students to be without
courses scheduled for the first two weeks or for students to be assigned to classes
for which no permanent teacher exists. This is often the genesis of scores of students

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who become hall walkers——spending most of the school day roaming the halls and
byways of the school.”66
The ninth grade also is a significant entry ramp into the Prison Pipeline. The Johns
Hopkins and University of Pennsylvania researchers looked at the students dropped
from the rolls of the mid-Atlantic city’s school system when they were incarcerated
and found that the majority were ninth graders, most of whom were repeating ninth
grade for the second or third time. A study of girls incarcerated in the juvenile justice
system in Philadelphia found that the ninth grade is a crucial juncture for girls as well,
the time when many drop out or become fatally disillusioned with school.67
Two categories of risk come into play with teenage dropouts. They are included
in virtually every assessment tool used to gauge the risk of youth entering the juvenile
justice system, like the following from the Ohio Department of Youth Services risk
assessment form for youth entering its juvenile corrections system:
Peer Relations: Delinquent acquaintances or friends/ No or few positive
acquaintances or friends
Leisure/Recreation: Limited organized activities/ Could make better use
of time/ No personal interests 68
Hanging out on a street corner in Cincinnati, Ohio, or in Drew, Mississippi, carries
enormous risk; from these and similar corners in poor urban neighborhoods and
impoverished rural areas around the nation, countless young men and young women
are sucked into the Pipeline to Prison. Often these street corners are in neighborhoods
of concentrated poverty, segregated by class and abandoned by the resourceful and
successful.
Wright, the Life Course criminologist, created a risk portrait of a hypothetical boy
on the corner: “First of all, by dropping out of school, he will be at the bottom of the
economic ladder in terms of jobs and wages, probably for life. Criminologically, he is
cut off from pro-social opportunities and friends and is hanging around a lot of older
guys who often have come out of prison or are in and out of jail. In Hamilton County,
1,000 high-risk parolees from state prisons returned to the county last year, and these
are the networks of information and motivation that facilitate a lot of criminal activities.
One guy hears that the people in the apartment down the street are gone away so
they go burgler it. A lot is opportunistic and some of it leads to violence, especially
when drugs and guns get mixed up in it. Even with boys who are borderline in terms
of criminal propensity, these associations can be enough to push them over.” And
since urban police forces constantly watch activities on these corners, boys hanging
out there are in the police spotlight.
Another part of the risk of corner associations is developing or deepening what
criminologists call “anti-social values and beliefs,” which include not accepting
responsibility, rationalizing harm, and blaming others or the system, said Ed Latessa,
Wright’s colleague at the University of Cincinnati who has interviewed thousands of
incarcerated youth and adult prisoners.

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“Let’s take a guy with anti-social values and beliefs who steals a car or robs a
convenience store and is caught and locked up. He’ll tell me, when I ask why he’s
incarcerated, ‘I was prosecuted but the other guy got away,’ or ‘I had a bad lawyer,’
not ’I’m here because I stole a car or robbed a convenience store,’” Latessa said. “And
he doesn’t see how his actions affect his victims. He says, ‘They’ve got a lot of money.
They’ll get a new car. I was only going to drive it ‘til it ran out of gas. Insurance will
cover it.’ In some cases, he may blame the victim, and say, ‘She wouldn’t give up her
purse so I had to hit her.’ It stands to reason that if you don’t think criminal activities
are wrong and those around you don’t think they’re wrong, chances are great you will
do it when the opportunity arises.”
Much has been written about the lack of positive mentors and activities for young
people in inner cities and impoverished rural areas. Certainly some adults in these
neighborhoods try valiantly to reach at-risk youth but there aren’t enough of them, and
adults who live in better neighborhoods, who make sure their own children keep up
with their schoolwork, go to soccer practice, take music lessons, go to art camp,
attend church, and get to the library, seldom extend their time and concern to youth
in other parts of their communities.
“I sometimes think of the founders of the Boy Scouts in England, who started the
organization not for their youth but the youth in the cesspools of the cities,” said Mark
Reed, the administrator of the Hamilton County Juvenile Court. “We need to be more
aware of the community’s responsibility for all children. Coach a little league baseball
team or something. Just a bus driver who is married and goes to work everyday could
make a difference. People don’t understand the effect they can have just by being
themselves.”

Jamal: The Lost Boy
Go to “Four Way,” an intersection in the Wynton Terrace projects where Baby Eric
lives, and you may see Jamal, an 18-year-old, standing around with his friends. Jamal
(not his real name) personifies the problems of unmet mental health needs, school
failure, a juvenile record, and troublesome peers and leisure activities. His mother
does her best. He has been tested, diagnosed, and serviced but he is a boy who
never got enough attention from adults, particularly male adults, to learn what he
needs to know to grow up to be a productive adult. Most of the influences around
him have led him the other way. Now he is a lost boy.
His mother, a large, sweet-natured woman lives in the Walnut Hills area of
Cincinnati, on the second floor of a duplex, with her daughter, her daughter’s two
babies, an 11-year-old son, a 16-year-old son, and Jamal, when he is not staying with
friends in Wynton Terrace. The family lived in the projects for a few years when she
had a nervous breakdown and lost her job with the city. An older son, 20, was recently
released from a state juvenile correctional facility and lives elsewhere.
Jamal happened to be home when the Children’s Defense Fund consultant visited
and, to his mother’s surprise, agreed to talk. He is medium-dark brown, with short hair,
and he wore a Celtics t-shirt, baggy pants, and open sneakers. Although pleasant and

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polite, he was as closed as a clam. Only rarely did his hard shell open enough to provide
a brief glimpse of the soft vulnerable creature inside.
Earlier, his mother had said that Jamal’s problems began in early elementary
school. He started getting disobedient and aggressive with other kids, misbehaving
all around. “It scared me. I saw him get so angry his face changed. I took him to a clinic,
and they said he had defiant disorder and he was depressed. It was a lot of words,
and they gave him some medications.” Part of the problem, she thinks, was learned
behavior from watching his older brother who had an extreme hyperactivity disorder.
Their father left when Jamal was three and has not been part of his life in any way.
Sitting in the living room, where shelves contain videos but no books, she and her
son reviewed his school history. He attended at least eight schools until he dropped
out during his third repeat of ninth grade. She had to fill in many of the details
because Jamal didn’t remember or want to remember much about his school years.
He did remember suspensions and said that principals and teachers didn’t like him
and other students accused him of things he didn’t do.
Jamal was held back in the third grade and placed in a class for students with
severe behavioral handicaps. In class one year in a school that had a year-round program,
with various vacation breaks, his teacher quit and the students in that class went on
vacation for a big chunk of that year, his mother recalled.
By the seventh or eighth grade, “I kept suspending myself,” he said. “I didn’t care
too much. I just started goin’ with my own crowd.”
“My opinion is: Being out of school was better than being in school,” she said.
“You kept being suspended for the same things. You knew.”
“It wasn’t nothin’ serious. Say a cuss word and get a three-day suspension.”
When pressed, he couldn’t remember any “best time” in school and could name
just one teacher he liked, Miss Saunders. “There was others but I can’t remember
their names.” He couldn’t name a book he enjoyed reading, did not attend church,
belong to the Boy Scouts, or participate in school sports. He did wrestle one season
at a neighborhood center, for a team coached by his uncle. He was there six months,
then quit after a match he was sure he would win. Instead, his loose shoelaces distracted
him and his opponent pinned him. “I could of beat him but he won. I said, ’Forget it,’
and I never went back.”
The interviewer talked about the importance of learning to go on after failure, but
he didn’t understand.
“I failed a lot,” he said.
During his years in ninth grade, Jamal was often truant, began smoking marijuana,
and built a juvenile record. “Our family was not out of control ‘til I had to stop working
and we moved to the projects,” his mother said. “The first week, somebody held a gun
to (her older son’s) head. My boys were picked on. They got off the bus and ran home
crying. I had to do the down home thing. I said, ‘If you don’t fight back, I’m going to
whop you.’ The next day, they took off running, but they had hid a stick. When the kids
came after them, they started swinging and the kids went the other way.”
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The move to the projects brought another trauma she confessed when Jamal wasn’t in the room. A man in the area gave
alcohol and money to the boys, sexually abused them, and videotaped it. When she learned about it, she called the police. She has
never looked at the videos and her boys don’t talk about it, she
said. “I was going to court about child support. I just had a breakdown.” She burst into tears. “I wasn’t a good mother at that point.”
Jamal’s juvenile record is two and a half pages long: two
assaults, curfew violations, driving without a license, unauthorized
use of a motor vehicle, theft, criminal trespass, failure to stay after
an accident, disorderly conduct, domestic violence, and parole
violations. His first criminal charge, assault, came, he said, when
13 kids jumped on him, he got angry, went inside, and got a knife.
When the boys tried to jump him again, “First person came at me,
I cut him.”
“I can understand him going off like that,” his mother said, “but
the judge said it was premeditated because he went back in the
house and came out again. It was the wrong thing to do.”
The domestic violence charge came when Jamal and his older
brother got in a fight that their mother couldn’t stop so she called
the police. Jamal spent months in and out of the Hamilton County
detention center and a juvenile community corrections center.
Although these institutions have education programs, the course
work isn’t what Jamal remembers. “People talk about, ‘This is how
he got caught. This is how he got caught.’ It’s a crime school.”
In February 2004, he stopped going to school. “I’m 18 in the
ninth grade. It’s not worth it.” He says he now is looking for a
job. His mother has driven him to grocery stores and fast food
restaurants that she heard were hiring. He filled out applications
but no one has called.
As Wright pointed out, street corners are good networks for
crime but not for jobs; only one of Jamal’s friends, who are all high
school dropouts, has a job. Asked how one gets a job, Jamal
responded, “Luck.” He doesn’t expect to find one. This is a realistic appraisal given the shortage of jobs, but high school dropouts
like Jamal sometimes have an additional problem. Spending weeks
out of school for suspensions or truancy, they have lost the habit of
showing up. Jamal’s older brother lost several jobs because he
would come in late or get in arguments with the manager.

Jamal spent months
in and out of the
Hamilton County
detention center
and a juvenile
community
corrections center.
Although these
institutions have
education programs,
the course work
isn’t what Jamal
remembers. “People
talk about, ‘This is
how he got caught.
This is how he got
caught.’ It’s a crime
school.”
— Jamal, 18 years old

“Ain’t no way to make money,” Jamal said. “No choice but to
sell drugs.”
“You have a choice,” his mother said. “You don’t have to sell
drugs.”

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“Either that or rob.”
The police seem to believe Jamal is selling drugs or doing something
else illegal. Several times, they have picked him up from around the
Four Way. A week before the interview, he said, the police followed
him when he was bicycling around Wynton Terrace and stopped
and searched him. Finding nothing, they gave him a ticket for riding a bicycle without a light. Now that he is 18, an offense could
send him to adult prison.

There are programs,
though insufficient,
for jobs or recreation
but these boys don’t
see them. They have
traveled so far out of
the mainstream
and so far into the
Pipeline to Prison
that all they see
are the Pipeline
walls. They don’t see
the ways out.

His mother mentioned the Job Corps and a boy he knows who
got a certificate in food service and now has a job. She thinks he
should go to the program in Dayton where he wouldn’t be hanging
out with his friends.
“I’d be stuck all the way out of town and I wouldn’t know
nobody. I’d be broke and I’d have nothing to do.”
“They give you a place to stay and stipend for food and clothing and a lump sum when you finish,” said his mother.
“I know somebody who went there and he said it was crap.”
This conversation underlined a characteristic of lost boys like
Jamal——their narrow world view. There are programs, though insufficient, for jobs or recreation, but these boys don’t see them. They
have traveled so far out of the mainstream and so far into the
Pipeline to Prison that all they see are the pipeline walls. They don’t
see the ways out.
What boys like Jamal need are “long-term real relationships,” said
Hurst, the director at the time of the National Center for Juvenile
Justice. “I interned with a psychiatrist once, and for children with
some sort of conduct disorder who have trouble connecting
actions and consequences, a low frustration tolerance, and a pattern of self-destructive behavior and decisions, the remedy is a
long-term real relationship with a person or people of acceptable
character.” He said that the “most honest” program of this nature
he knows——a mentoring program in Arkansas for parents who had
abused their children——does not ask the mentors to take on more
than one family at a time and their involvement lasts until the children
get to the age of reason and responsibility, “which sometimes
seems to take forever.”69
What would Jamal really like to do if he could snap his fingers
and do and be whatever he wanted?
Jamal shook his head and finally said, “I don’t know.”
Is there something you enjoy doing?

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“Building stuff. A guy who does dry wall showed me a little bit of that. I didn’t get paid.”
He also likes music. He can play the beat machine. He and some friends put
together rap sounds on a machine. “Some guy was going to make a CD of us but he died.”
Do you have anything going for you?
“I ain’t got nothing going for me. Talk to girls. Other than that, ain’t nothing out
there for me.”
Are you worried about ending up in prison?
“Sometimes I think about it. I don’t care no more.”

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C H A P T E R

8

Impact of Drugs
Substance Abuse and Crime
unter Hurst, of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, said that while many
offenders use drugs, drugs do not cause crime. “Researchers have forever
wanted to do research on drugs predicting crime,” he said. “Everyone from
federal judges on down will tell you they do, but from a research standpoint, it’s more
true that if you are an offender, you will be a drug user.” He said that about 80 percent
of juvenile offenders have substance abuse disorders but only 20 percent of drug
users commit offenses.70

H

Of course, drug use itself is a crime that has drawn harsher and harsher penalties
in the last two decades. Since 1980, annual drug arrests have tripled.71 Juvenile drug
arrests have increased 75 percent. In Ohio, for example, juvenile arrests for drug
abuse violations in 2000 numbered 5,715, second only to theft.72 Juvenile drug
arrests in Cincinnati in 2003 also came in second to theft, with arrests for possession
outnumbering those for trafficking by a margin of 9 to1.73
Much has been written on the causes of drug abuse, and the stories of young
people like Jamal and others underline some of them: It is something to do. It is something their friends do. It provides a way to escape the unpleasantness of reality and
feel powerful and important. Once addicted, especially to cocaine, it is hard to
escape. Wright, the life course criminologist, says that studies indicate that cocaine
can damage the structure of the brain. “You think it’s hard to lose weight,” he commented. “Try changing the structure of your brain.” There is no question of the damage
substance abuse does to families——witness the number of children in this report
whose mothers were addicted to drugs——and to teenagers in derailing them from
productive activities and companions.
In selling drugs, another, often economic, dynamic comes into play. It is telling
that the writer William Finnegan began his New Yorker magazine profile of a young,

“The possibility of becoming a statistic in the prison system
is great here, because why? No jobs! No opportunity for a job.”
— Douglas Sproat
Former Warden of youthful offender prison in Mississippi

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Black drug dealer in New Haven, Connecticut, by describing the city’s many businesses
and factories that moved away or closed down in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Several previous generations of Black men had come to New Haven and elsewhere
in the North for jobs in factories and, for a while, their labor was needed. But when the
economy changed and jobs became scarce for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the
unemployment rate for Black men soared and now doubles the rate for White men.74
The Mississippi Delta never had much employment except agricultural work,
which now is done by machines, and some garment factories. Today those factories
are gone and just a few industries like catfish and chicken processing plants remain.
“The possibility of becoming a statistic in the prison system is great here, because
why? No jobs! No opportunity for a job,” says Douglas Sproat, the former warden of
the youthful offender prison in Walnut Grove in Leake County, northeast of Jackson.
Sproat describes the cost-benefit analysis some inmates make about dealing
drugs. America puts a high value on money and material things, he said, and when he
suggests they get a job upon release, “They say, ‘How do you think I afford the
threads that I have?’ and ‘I’m a status symbol in the community because I’ve got
money in my pocket all the time, and you tell me that I’m supposed to work for minimum
wage?… I pushed drugs for seven years. I got caught once. The price to pay is not——
not anywhere near——what it would take for me to stop.’”

Lorenzo: “No Lifestyle to Live”
Lorenzo White is reputed to have been one of the most notorious drug dealers in
the Mississippi Delta. He was 29 years old at the time but looked 22 or 23, very slight
of build and sweet-faced. While in middle school in Drew, Lorenzo’s class was taken
on a field trip to Parchman Penitentiary seven miles away in an effort to scare the students
straight. It didn’t work with Lorenzo, who now is incarcerated at Parchman on drug
charges, or with other young men in his hometown. “Seems like half of Drew’s young
Black men are in Parchman,” he said. Lorenzo’s story is especially sad because his
paternal grandmother, Mae Bertha Carter, was one of the heroes of the Civil Rights
Movement in the Delta, taking great risks to enroll her children in the segregated
White public school.
Lorenzo’s mother, Doris, was 15 when he was born. His father did not live in
Drew and was not around for his childhood. Doris already had a two-year-old son and,
three years after Lorenzo, she had a daughter. They all lived with Doris’s mother,
Minnie White, who worked as a housekeeper for local White people and somehow
was able to take care of her own children and the three grandchildren.
According to Yolanda, Doris’ sister, Doris had relatives in New York and moved
there to find a job. The three kids went with her, but it was hard for them, and they
wanted to come back to the Delta to stay with their grandmother, Minnie White. Mae
Bertha Carter lived next door. Both women tried to steer Lorenzo in the right direction,
but a feeling of abandonment seems to have pervaded the souls of all three children.
Yolanda told the story of Doris promising to send Lorenzo the very latest in tennis

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shoes and of Lorenzo sitting by the mail box, day after day, waiting for shoes that
never came.
He considered himself rebellious against authority from elementary school on,
and although his teachers recognized that he was very smart, he was not fond of
school. His brother Rodney made straight As in high school and was rarely in trouble,
but Rodney took to the streets after graduation and in 2003 shot his girlfriend and
then himself. Lorenzo’s sister moved to Oklahoma and was killed in a car accident.
After an altercation with a teacher in the 11th grade, Lorenzo refused to go to the
alternative school. “That means for bad kids,” he said. In spite of the warnings of both
grandmothers, he joined the street life and became known as a drug dealer. There is
some evidence that part of his motivation was to help his grandmother and all of the
children and young people living with her. Yolanda said her son once needed some
special basketball shoes to play in a tournament, and she didn’t have money to buy
them. She got a call from the coach at one point saying that Lorenzo had been in and had
left money for the shoes as well as money for his cousin’s travel to the tournament.
Lorenzo was interviewed twice, initially in July 2002 and again in June 2004. In
both conversations, he struggled to explain himself, revealing the difficulty of escaping
from the Pipeline and an overwhelming desire to be important and successful.
“After I got expelled, it had a big effect on me, because then I hung out on the
streets for that year,” he said during the first interview in the Sunflower County Jail
where he was awaiting trial for drug possession. “I wasn’t going to school, no jobs,
so I didn’t have nothing to do but sit up there, sell drugs, and drink alcohol. I was
smoking marijuana on the street. I started smoking marijuana when I was, like, 16
years old. On the street, I was drinking, like, a six-pack of beer a day. Me and my
friends, we might go get a case a day and drink. Smokin’ weed. Selling dope. Once
you’re on the streets it’s peer pressure. Watching each other do it. Following behind
them. Ride around in the car, get high, drink beer, go play cards. If you’re in school——
skip school.”
Speaking of Drew, Lorenzo said, “Part of the problem is the kids have no place
to go after school——no recreation place, no basketball court, no swimming pool in
Drew any more. When I was on the streets, kids came up saying they want to be like
me, and want to have a car like I had, make money like I had made. They weren’t good
ideals, and I be telling them, ‘You don’t want to live that lifestyle.’ But you got to show
kids better than you can tell them, and I had wanted to live that lifestyle, too. I grew
up, seems like, with no lifestyle to live.”
In Lorenzo’s experience, money is the motivation for selling drugs in the Delta
“‘cause you’re driving fast nice cars that people like doctors and lawyers drive. Being
cool, hanging out with friends on the streets——you can get some respect. It’s hard to
leave a job where you make $100,000 a year. Same with drugs and fast money. Like
on the street, you make $100,000 a year, it’s hard to leave the environment.”

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Lorenzo continued trying to explain. “Sex and drugs, and teenage pregnancy, and
then these kids figure they can’t take care of their kids if they are in school. They go
out and try to get a job to take care of their kids, and there ain’t no jobs there to get,
not in the Delta. Not around here.”
Like others in this report, Lorenzo talked about attitude and anger. “Seems like
parents ain’t teaching children about anger. This anger business gets you in a world
of trouble before you know it. People ain’t treating you right or something like that——
you might get up in the morning on the wrong side of the bed, and people say something to you, your attitude just comes out. You might think life ain’t treating you
right. You might couldn’t get no money that morning from your momma or somebody. Couldn’t get breakfast, your girlfriend might get into it with you, you just have a
problem. Anger. Or depressed all the time. When I was going to Drew High, I was
depressed all the time——about the education, where I was going to be in life when I
grew up.”
Lorenzo said he wanted his grandmother, Mae Bertha Carter, “to see me as
somebody successful, like her kids was successful in life. She was a great lady. She
wanted everybody, White and Black, to have an education——the best education they
could have. She talked to me all the time, but I didn’t listen. If I’d have listened, right
now I wouldn’t be in the trouble I’m in.”
It seems to be a theme in the stories of the young men that their mothers or
grandmothers do not carry enough weight in a materialistic world with more temptations
than opportunities. The women pull in one direction but the street and money pull
more powerfully in the other direction, aided by popular music that glamorizes gangsters,
violence, and casual sex.
In this first interview, Lorenzo expressed regret for his bad decisions. He said he
had taken classes at a community college for a year but didn’t return the next year
because he got in trouble for selling drugs. “I could probably have gotten a job like
working in Auto Zone, or like I went to school for agricultural mechanics for working
on tractors and stuff like that. I might have been working at John Deere, being a manager
or something like that. But I wanted to go and make money on the streets and have
something——like cars and houses.”
He resolved to “re-invent himself”——“get rid of that anger and read the Bible and
stuff.” His dreams were quintessentially American. “When I leave out of this jail, I want
to be outside of Mississippi, go back to school, get an education, be a doctor or a
lawyer. I got two kids I need to take care of, and I want my kids to grow up to know
me as somebody instead of nobody. I dream of coming back to Mississippi to help
people when I get old, but I don’t want to come back ‘til I get old where I buy me a
house where I can live peacefully.”
Instead, he is still in Mississippi——in Parchman. He did leave the state for a short
time. Connie Curry, who wrote a book about Mrs. Carter, talked to Lorenzo’s lawyers
about having him assigned to a drug rehab program in Atlanta. When Lorenzo came

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“[Mae Bertha
Carter] wanted
everybody, White
and Black, to have
an education—the
best education they
could have. She
talked to me all the
time, but I didn’t
listen. If I’d have
listened, right now I
wouldn’t be in the
trouble I’m in.”
— Lorenzo
Grandson of
Mae Bertha Carter

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before the judge in January 2001, he was sentenced to this twoyear program. But he left after one month, saying he didn’t fit into
the Atlanta program and thought he could “beat the system.” He
went to Memphis to see his daughter, couldn’t find work and
returned to Mississippi. He was arrested after being stopped at a
routine roadblock, where police determined that he was wanted for
skipping out on the program. When he went to trial, the angered
judge sentenced him to 25 years, without parole. He is appealing.
In June, Lorenzo was working in the processing department at
Parchman where inmates bag and freeze the pecans, carrots, and
vegetables raised on the prison farm. He said conditions had
improved from the days of violence and dogs and disappearances
of inmates, partially because of legal scrutiny and lawsuits. He had
his own room in a special building and said he spent most of his
time reading and studying. He was staying away from the younger
guys who, in his opinion, “say and do stupid things.” Some join
gangs for protection but he said he was not scared of gangs on
the street and isn’t afraid of them in prison. “I may not be big,
but they all know who I am, and that I am smart. Everybody knows
me—I have a reputation of being good people, even from some of
the police. I get along with everybody.”
His mentors are the older guys who have been there 25 years
or more, although he said the minds of some of them are gone.
The older ones teach him things, he said, suggesting that Lorenzo
is now learning how to spend his life in prison.
Later that month, Lorenzo was transferred to a private prison
run by the Corrections Corporation of America in Greenwood,
where he can learn a trade like carpentry or plumbing.
Again, he says he plans to leave the Delta when he gets out.

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C H A P T E R

9

The Juvenile Justice System
Clogged with Cases
nly about one-quarter of juveniles in detention nationwide who have been
adjudicated have committed a violent offense.75 The percentage of serious
offenders is even smaller at the doorway to the juvenile justice system, the
courtroom where the police, parents, and schools bring youth by the thousands every
year, clogging the courts with cases that used to be handled in families, schools, and
neighborhoods. Some arise from school-based arrests; others from parents who file
charges against their children or other children.

O

“In the courtroom in 2020, I sat at a desk and I had kids I couldn’t even see,” said
Mark Reed, the Hamilton County, Ohio, juvenile court administrator who formerly
served as a juvenile magistrate. “They weren’t tall enough. I wondered, ‘What in the
world could you have done?’”
Terry Weber, the chief at the time of the Hamilton County juvenile defenders, estimated
that 30 percent of the cases that come to court were resolved elsewhere when he
was young. “One kid kicks the crap out of another kid. That used to be handled in the
school or neighborhood.”
According to Kim Brooks Tandy, the lawyer who directed the Children’s Law
Center in Kentucky, “domestic violence” is often the entry charge for girls, who frequently
are victims of domestic abuse and violence themselves. “A girl fights with her sister.
One punches the other and the parents call the police. Both are taken to the detention
center. The second time around, it’s a felony.”
A Cincinnati youth crisis center run by Lighthouse Youth Services often gets
phone calls from the detention center about young people dropped off there, said
Bob Mecum, the director of the agency. “You would not believe the number of parents
who take their 10-year-olds to juvenile detention because they don’t know how to
handle them.” Lighthouse picks up these kids, who have committed no crime, and
calls the parents to see what can be done.

“In the courtroom in 2020, I sat at a desk and I had kids
I couldn’t even see…They weren’t tall enough.
I wondered, ‘What in the world could you have done?’”
— Mark Reed
Juvenile Court Administrator

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Only about
one-quarter
of juveniles in
detention nationwide committed a
violent offense.
The percentage of
serious offenders is
even smaller at the
doorway to the
juvenile justice
system, where the
police, parents, and
schools bring youth
by the thousands
every year, clogging
the courts with cases
that used to be
handled in families,
schools and neighborhoods. Some arise
from school-based
arrests; others from
parents who file
charges against
their children or
other children.

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In Mecum’s view, some parents and foster parents who criminalize their children’s behavior are acting selfishly and irresponsibly, but others just don’t know what to do about their children’s
misbehavior, especially children who are mentally or emotionally
disturbed, and hope the judges can somehow change them or
they can get mental health treatment.
In its 2003 report on juvenile justice in Ohio, the American Bar
Association attributed the “heavy reliance on the juvenile justice
system for treatment or punishment” in Ohio to “the lack of
resources to treat children with mental illness, public schools in
academic emergency, a mortality rate from child abuse higher than
the national average, and a high poverty rate.” Ohio’s juvenile
incarceration rate at the time ranked fifth in the nation.
“Increasingly, it is not so much the criminality of the behavior
but the lack of alternatives for children with severe emotional and
behavioral problems, children who have been expelled from school,
and children whose families cannot provide adequate care that
brings them into the juvenile justice system,” the report stated.76
A U.S. Senate committee hearing in Washington, on July 7,
2004, heard evidence of this problem on a national scale.
Congressional investigators reported that 15,000 children with
psychiatric disorders were improperly incarcerated in 2003
because no mental health services were available. A nationwide
survey of juvenile justice centers, presented at the hearing, found
that children as young as seven were incarcerated because of lack
of access to mental health care. More than 340 detention centers,
two-thirds of those that responded to the survey, said youths with
mental health disorders were being locked up because there was
no place else for them to go while awaiting treatment. Seventy-one
centers in 33 states said they were holding mentally ill youngsters
with no charges.77
“We are in a much better position to diagnose and treat mental
illness than we were just 15 years ago,” Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein,
president of the American Psychiatric Association, testified. “Many
kids who get in trouble should be in treatment. But because of the
lack of money and the lack of services, they end up in the criminal
justice system.”78
The ABA report, titled “Justice Cut Short,” devotes pages to
the inadequacy of counsel for indigents at all stages of the juvenile justice process in Ohio. Many poor youth in Ohio had no attorney at all, waiving their right to have one without even the most
basic understanding of what they were giving up. They included
one in five sentenced to community corrections and 15 percent of
those incarcerated in state juvenile corrections facilities in Ohio.79

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In addition, the report stated, court-appointed attorneys or public defenders often
meet with their clients for the first time the day of their hearings and, therefore, don’t
know them well enough to argue meaningfully on their behalf for the least restrictive
outcome.
Jennifer Riley-Collins, an attorney at the time with the Mississippi Center for
Justice, said that many youth defenders in Mississippi represent juveniles on a part-time
basis, as court-appointed attorneys, as part of a general law practice. Riley-Collins,
who was conducting a statewide assessment of 18 youth courts, said attorneys there
often do not spend much time with their young clients. “I’ve seen some court-appointed
representatives not even going back into the detention facility to see who they will be
representing that morning,” she said.
With a few exceptions, a juvenile judge or magistrate has broad discretion in
ordering the “disposition,” or sentence. In cities in Ohio, dispositions range from fines,
restitution, community service, parole or intensive parole, electronic monitoring,
placement in a “staff secure” but not locked community corrections facility or confinement in a locked state corrections facility. Parole may require attendance not only
at school but at counseling sessions or drug treatment programs.
Ohio’s nine juvenile correctional facilities run by the state Department of Youth
Services were the most confining for juveniles tried as juveniles; only juveniles convicted of felonies were sent there. The 40 detention centers were run by county
courts. Most of the youth confined there were awaiting trial or sentencing, but
judges can order a confinement of up to 90 days as a sentence. Hybrids between
the two are the 12 community correctional facilities, run by the counties but financed
by the state. Additional options are residential schools, which are not locked facilities. Ohio juveniles tried as adults are held in a separate unit at an adult prison.80
Mississippi judges have similar discretion but fewer alternatives to incarceration. Just 23 of the state’s 82 counties have Adolescent Offender Programs, which
include after-school programs, individual counseling, family counseling and drug
abuse treatment. Started by the state’s Department of Youth Services in 1994, all are
non-residential and community-based.81
Sheila Bedi, the attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that judges
use these alternatives when they are available. “As a matter of fact, in January of
2004, a group of judges came to the Juvenile Justice Committee of the Mississippi

“Increasingly, it is not so much the criminality of the behavior but the lack of
alternatives for children with severe emotional and behavior problems,
children who have been expelled from school, and children whose families cannot provide adequate care that brings them into the juvenile justice system.”
— American Bar Association 2003 report on juvenile justice in Ohio

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state legislature and said, ‘If you gave us more alternatives, we wouldn’t have all these
children in the training schools.’”
In most counties in Mississippi, the choices for disposition of juveniles come
down to just three: Do nothing, lock them up, or put them on probation, although
Riley-Collins believes judges could be more creative in coming up with alternatives
on their own.
“How about figuring out some community service?” she asked. “Or a big brother/
big sister mentoring program? Or ‘read a book and provide me with a book report.’
There’s one judge that does that. Or ‘write a letter of apology.’ It’s like when you have
a child at home you don’t want to punish but you know you need to. You come up
with something.”
Mississippi had two training schools: Columbia, in Columbia, and Oakley, in
Raymond. Some 97 percent of juveniles incarcerated there committed minor offenses.82
Youth who commit felonies generally are tried as adults and sent to the Walnut Grove
Youth Correctional Institution.
With so few alternatives, judges in Mississippi lock up young people on some
charges that likely would draw community service, electronic monitoring or other
alternative sanctions in cities in Ohio. Of the 347 youth incarcerated in Mississippi’s
two training schools on March 15, 2004, 12 were there for running away, nine for truancy,
nine for possession of alcohol or public drunkenness, eight for trespassing, seven for
shoplifting, one for breaking the curfew, one for defrauding a cab driver, 20 for contempt
of court, and 45 for disorderly conduct.83
The most common charge against juveniles incarcerated in Mississippi’s training
schools was violation of parole.84 Often the violation involved was for not attending
school, which was almost routinely set as a condition in every state. Defense attorneys in Mississippi and Ohio contended that parole was over-used as a sanction and
could trap kids in the system.
“You get a kid identified as having emotional problems or a history of abuse or a
disorganized family,” said Tandy, the Kentucky attorney. “They get on probation and
there are 1,500 conditions they will never comply with. They violate probation and are
put into or sent back to detention.”
Judge Ray, of Toledo, agrees. “The deeper you get into the justice system, the
harder it is to get out. Probation is designed in most cases to identify inappropriate
behavior. In some ways, we are watching for something to go wrong.” Ray said that
the Lucas County Juvenile Court does not put juveniles on probation for truancy anymore.
While truancy is the top predictor of delinquent behavior, he said, “We could not document that school attendance was improved on probation. What often happened was
that truants on probation would be truant again, and would face a harsher sanction for
violating a court order. A lot of research says that is counterproductive. Overreacting
to that kind of behavior may increase delinquency, rather than decrease it,” he
explained.

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In Mississippi, where probation officers often double as youth court counselors,
“parents sometimes think they are there to help the child, and the parent becomes
the informant,” said Riley-Collins. “‘He’s not coming home at 9:30 like he’s supposed
to.’ If a curfew was a condition of parole, the youth court officer may bring that child
back to court on a violation of a court order and the judge may send him to one of the
training schools.”

Marcus: A Day in Court
The waiting area for juvenile court on the ninth floor of the Franklin County courthouse in Columbus was standing room only by 9:30 a.m. Attorneys said that on some
days, especially Mondays, they could barely walk through the room. It was a long
space with row upon row of black plastic chairs; along one wall were six courtrooms,
each with a printout of its morning cases tacked up near the doorway.
Mornings, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., were devoted to guilty pleas and violations of probation
or other court orders. Since only about 10 percent of juvenile cases go to trial, mornings
are when the immediate fate of hundreds of Columbus area juveniles is decided.
Perhaps 300 people were in the room——juveniles, mostly male, with their mothers,
along with court officers, probation officers, and lawyers calling out the names of
their clients.
“Jerome Batson! Jerome Batson! Are you here?”
“Dawan Smith! Dawan Smith!”
Above this din, a court officer shouted the names of the juveniles and lawyers
who were next up before one of the six magistrates.
Michael Hayes, an attorney in private practice, was appointed by the court to represent
a 16-year-old boy charged with violation of probation for running away from home
while on electronic monitoring. To get more information, he went downstairs to pick
up the “discovery” files in the case.
Another attorney, meanwhile, came up to a mother and son. “Here’s what we’ll
do,” he said. “He can plead to attempted assault. We’ll have another hearing in
September and if he gets in no more trouble, the charges will be dismissed.”
The mother frowned. “That’s not what I want. That boy has jumped on my son six
times.”
“But he’s charged with assault,” the lawyer said.
“No, he isn’t.”
“Are you the mother of Gregory?”
“No,” she said and named her son. Realizing that he had approached the mother
of his client’s victim, the attorney apologized and retreated.
Nearby, a teenager with a pale face, pimples, and dark hair, looked at the floor
while his mother and grandmother had a conversation suggestive of the way delinquent
and criminal activity sometimes passes from one generation to the next. “This is his

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seventh time here and it is going to be the last,” the mother declared, giving her son
a determined look. Her mother——the boy’s grandmother——laughed.
“What?” the daughter asked.
“I was just thinking of all you put me through. What goes around comes around.”
Hayes returned with the file and walked along the rows of seats, calling his
client’s name. A tired-looking woman wearing glasses and her hair pulled back looked
up and waved. Her son sat next to her, a lanky boy, wearing jeans, a T-shirt from his
school, and a sport-type jacket. He wore a black electronic monitoring band around
one ankle. Like virtually all the other juveniles there, he sat in silence and stared forward
blankly, as if a curtain had dropped down over his eyes.
Each courtroom has two small rooms near its entrance where lawyers can confer
with their young clients. Hayes invited the boy and his mother into one of them. Other
lawyers were doing the same with their clients, while others talked to their clients in
the waiting area.
Hayes quickly read through the file. Marcus (not his real name) has a record of
chronic truancy, receiving stolen goods, aggravated endangerment, and theft. He was
placed on electronic monitoring after pleading guilty to stealing a purple Dodge minivan
parked by a Dollar store with the keys in the ignition. The next day, he drove it to
school, where the school’s police officer, noticing a car parked without a permit,
found out it had been reported stolen. Marcus was identified as the student who
parked the car and readily admitted what he had done. When he ran away from home,
where he had been ordered to stay on an electronic monitor, he spent two weeks in
the county detention center.
“Why did you steal the car?” Hayes asked.
“Show off. Transportation. Tired of walking.”
“How do you feel about it now?”
“Stupid. I wish I never took it. I’m tired of coming down here and my mom is too.”
His mother says he ran away from home because “he didn’t want restrictions on him.
He went to his sister’s house and the police came and got him and put him in jail.”
“Maybe that woke him up,” Hayes commented. Marcus nodded yes.
Hayes asked about Marcus’ friends. His mother says she likes only one of them.
His other friends smoke marijuana.
“Do you?” he asked Marcus.
“Not anymore.”
“Well, you better not. They may test you for it. You’ve got to stay in school, obey
the rules at home, and no drugs.”
He asked how Marcus was doing at school. “Better than I used to,” Marcus said.
“They moved me to a different school. The special ed school I used to go to, every
time I went there I got in a fight. Walk the hall, get in a fight. Go to the bathroom, get
in a fight and get put in the locked-in room. I used to kick and scream to get out.”
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Later, his mother explained that Marcus began going to a school for kids with
behavior and learning problems when he was in the first grade. He was hyperactive——
often got up out of his seat and moved around. He was put on medication but it made
him mean and aggressive, she said, so she discontinued it. She thought he needed
a smaller classroom, so she requested special education. “I wanted it for academic
reasons but he was in for behavior and he became like them——fighting and angry. His
behavior wasn’t that bad at home. It was one nightmare after another. They had a
lock-up in the school. They were training them to be in jail.”
Eventually, problems in that school were exposed in the local newspaper and on
television, she noted. At a previous hearing on another charge, she said, she brought
the newspaper clippings to show the magistrate. The magistrate’s “whole attitude to
him just shifted and compassion jumped in.”
In the little conference room, Hayes said his main goal was to keep Marcus from
being sent to a county or state facility. “I’m going to talk to his probation officer. If she
thinks he’s doing well, we might be able to get him off the monitor. But we’ve got [he
named the magistrate] and she’s tough.”
Hayes went off to look for the probation officer, who would testify in Marcus’ hearing.
Outside the courtroom, he stopped to greet an attorney for Franklin County
Children’s Services. In addition to “delinquency” cases, juvenile magistrates also
make decisions in child abuse and custody cases. The attorney had two cases that
morning. One was a termination of parental rights. “I guess it’s uncontested because
the parent didn’t show up,” she said, adding, “Crack mom.”
She said Franklin County has 300 to 400 such cases at a time, many of them
involving mothers who are addicted to drugs. “I know some of the kids,” she said,
explaining that they have a multitude of behavioral problems. “I’d hate to see them
when they get to be teenagers.”
Asked about her other case, she shook her head slowly from side to side. “Just
when you think you’ve heard everything bad that can happen, you hear something
worse. This is a case of a father, brother, and uncle sexually abusing children——and
the mother held them down.”
The magistrates’ courtrooms contain a table on one side for the juvenile, the
defense attorney, and the parent or guardian and a table on the other side for the
prosecutor and a probation officer, if the juvenile was on probation or the probation
department was asked to make a report. The magistrate sits behind a desk on a stage
so that he or she looks down on the others. Judging from several hours spent in one
magistrate’s courtroom, the hearings go quickly——10 to 20 minutes a piece. The
probation officers did most of the talking, the defense attorneys raised a few points,
and the magistrate asked questions and then delivered her decisions in a stern voice,
facing the juvenile.
The probation officers covered much the same ground with each juvenile: the
delinquent history, whether the youth was attending school, obeying the rules of the
home, or had gotten additional charges. If drug testing or treatment had been
ordered, the probation officer told the magistrate the results.

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In the case of a young man brought in for violating intensive probation, the probation officer told the magistrate that the boy had not called the probation officer in
three weeks, and the officer could not contact the family.
The magistrate turned to the defense table and the boy’s mother said, “I called to
say we got put out of the apartment and we had to stay with different relatives.”
The probation officer went on, “Also he’s been put out of drug treatment for not
cooperating.”
The magistrate asked about his record. “Attempted burglary, breaking and entering,
lots of disorderly conduct,” the probation officer responded.
The defense attorney spoke up. “You’ve heard the bad news. The good news is:
There are no new offenses.”
The magistrate told the young man the possible penalties for this violation, beginning
with a fine and ending with 90 days in detention. “I’m going to put you on electronic
monitoring. And you better beg to get back in that treatment program and see your
probation officer once a week.” He groaned, and she added, “If there are any more
violations, I will bring you back and lock you up.”
The juveniles who had been held in detention awaiting their hearings arrived
through a back door wearing green sweatshirts, tan pants, and handcuffs and leg
chains. One boy, who was sentenced to 60 days in the detention center for assault,
turned around as he was being led out. “Bye, Mom,” he said.
The only youth accompanied by a father was a Korean boy charged with carrying
a concealed weapon at school. The defense attorney explained that it was a small
knife in a case on his keychain that the boy had received as a gift. He had been home
schooled before that and didn’t realize that this would be considered a weapon. He
was expelled for 45 days. The lawyer said the boy’s only prior record was for breaking
and entering. “But this was to get his own CD player back when his friend wasn’t
home. He just got a slap on the wrist for that.”
The boy, dressed in a well-pressed shirt and slacks, sat quietly next to his father,
who told the magistrate that his son was “very respectful” at home.
“I’ll dismiss it, and I hope you don’t get in trouble again,” she said.
Outside the courtroom, a woman was yelling, “Lock him up! We’re not coming
back to this damn place! Lock him up!” Her son was represented by Marla Barrick, a
Franklin County public defender. “This is a 17-year-old with an IQ of 63,” Barrick
explained. She said she had expected to be handling a plea on unauthorized use of
a car——a friend had taken it and told him he could use it——but when she got to court,
she learned that his mother had told the police he attacked her, and he was charged
with domestic violence.
“I checked and Children’s Services was involved with the family,” Barrick said.
“The boy was not in school. His parents didn’t enroll him, and he has been supporting them by working at a pizza place. The father is an alcoholic. The mother is mad at
him because he has a girlfriend and he wants to live with her. He’s a good kid. He

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says he wants to enroll himself in school. I got a continuance, and
that’s when the mother started yelling.”
Meanwhile, Marcus’ case was not called until almost 1 p.m.
The probation officer said he was attending school and his mother
said he was behaving well at home. Hayes asked that he be
removed from electronic monitoring, and the magistrate agreed.
He would remain on probation until the end of the summer.
Outside the courtroom, Marcus smiled and said he wanted to
go to the YMCA, where he sometimes played basketball.
Remarkably, this 16-year-old, who was still in the ninth grade and
already fairly deep into the Pipeline to Prison or to a marginal adulthood, had hopes of getting into college. He said it would be paid
for since his father, who lives in Michigan, is a disabled veteran. It
was impossible not to hope, but also to doubt, that he will make it.

Disparities in the Juvenile Justice System
James Bell, director of the San Francisco-based W. Haywood
Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice, Fairness, and Equity, tells a
story about hosting a group of Romanian diplomats interested in
the workings of local juvenile justice systems. As he was taking
them to a different court after several days of visits, the diplomats
asked him, “Are we going to the White court today?”85
The Romanians’ impression is understandable. Dark faces predominate in the crowded waiting room of the juvenile court in
Columbus, Ohio. The white faces stand out like dots against a
black background. African American youth between ages 10 and
17 constitute about 16 percent of the population nationwide yet
account for 27 percent of juvenile arrests, 36 percent of juveniles
detained, and 37 percent of juveniles committed to secure institutions. Overall, minorities account for 60 percent of juveniles committed to secure facilities, 50 percent more than their proportion in
the juvenile population.86
Without a doubt, risk-saturated African Americans like Jamal
are more likely to commit crimes than White youth growing up with
more attention, more stimulation, better schooling, and more
opportunities.

African American
youth between
ages 10 and 17
constitute about
16 percent of the
population
nationwide, yet
account for
27 percent of
juvenile arrests,
36 percent of
juveniles detained,
and 37 percent of
juveniles committed
to secure institutions.
Overall, minorities
account for
60 percent of
juveniles committed
to secure facilities.

Part of the disproportion, however, arises from living in poor
neighborhoods and in urban areas. Interestingly, property crimes in
affluent neighborhoods are less likely to be prosecuted than those
in poor neighborhoods because the owners have insurance to cover
the loss and consider their time too valuable to keep showing up
in court, Hurst said. In addition, urban areas, whether Black or
White, have far more crime reported and more arrests so that

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states like Minnesota, where most African Americans live in cities, have a greater
racial disproportion than Alabama, where the Black population is more evenly distributed between urban and rural areas.87
In addition, disparate treatment plays a role in every decision point in the justice
system from arrest through incarceration. For example, national data show that Black
and White teens report using drugs at a similar rate but Blacks are arrested at a much
higher rate for drug offenses and are incarcerated at an even greater disproportion.88
And the penalties for possessing or selling crack cocaine, more prevalent in Black
communities, are much harsher than those for the powder cocaine more popular with
White drug users.89
In April 2004, NBC Dateline aired a show about racial profiling, focused on
Cincinnati, which illustrated the way policing policies in the war on drugs can push
more Blacks than Whites into the justice system. The police officer who the NBC
reporter accompanied one night saw a young Black man in a baggy sweatshirt turn
and walk away, which made the officer suspicious. He did what the Cincinnati Police
Department calls “a stop and talk”——ask a few questions and see if the suspect consents
to a search. “How much money you got?” he asked. “You got a job? Where do you
work? Spread your legs.”
The officer said that he targeted this young man because he “thought he had a
warrant for marijuana based on the fact he turned away and the fact he lived in Over
the Rhine.” He found no drugs or outstanding warrants and let him go. The officer did
not consider his action racial profiling but “good proactive police work. The community
wants it. They want me to take drugs off the street, and this is how we do it,” he said.
Weber, the Hamilton County juvenile defender at the time, provided another example
of disparate treatment at the arrest stage: “A store calls the police about a juvenile
shoplifter. The offender, Black or White, may be charged but if he lives in Indian Hill
(a wealthy White neighborhood) the police probably will take him home while the
Black kid from Over the Rhine goes to 2020,” Weber said. Even if the police officer
attempts to take the Over the Rhine juvenile home, the single mother may be working
and not home. This decision is important because juveniles who are detained prior to
adjudication are much more likely to be incarcerated than youth who have not been
detained, regardless of the charges against them.90
One Ohio juvenile defender uses the phrase, “I’m a Colt’s fan, your honor,” to
describe the advantages that youth from families with resources have in juvenile
court. This quote comes from a movie, when a guilty man without much going for him
is asked by a Baltimore judge if he has anything to say. “I’m a Colt’s fan, your honor,”
he says and the judge gives him a break. “Kids from families with resources can tell
the judge what he wants to hear,” the defender explains. “We’re sending him to counseling, your honor. We’ve put him in drug treatment, your honor. He has a job after
school. He’s grounded for a month. We’re going to send him to military school.”
Jennifer Kinsley, a former juvenile defender who at the time represented juveniles
(and others) in private practice in Cincinnati, said, “Oh absolutely,” when asked if she

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had seen disparate treatment between her two classes and races of clients for similar
offenses. “The kids I represent now get much better treatment. When I was a public
defender, a magistrate once called my client ‘a little shit.’ That doesn’t happen now.
They are more respectful when they see a private attorney and a White father and
mother and a kid who is better dressed. With a public defender-type child, you’re
sometimes lucky to have the mother there, and my families now are more pro-active
about finding alternatives for their children. Judges and probation officers factor in the
positive influence of a stable family on addressing a juvenile’s problems. That is true,
but my point of view is: These are factors beyond the kid’s control.”
Riley-Collins, of the Mississippi Center for Justice at the time, reported similar disparate treatment in court by race and also by social class in that state. “I remember
two different sets of White youth——kids who lived near the golf course and kids who
came from a trailer park——who had been charged with similar crimes: loitering and
public intoxication. All were first-time offenders. The golf course kids came into the
courtroom with their parents. One parent was a doctor who played golf with the
judge. They obviously were friendly. These kids were admonished and sent home: ‘I
don’t want to see you in the courtroom again,’ the judge told them. ‘You should not
have your mothers and fathers down here.’ The trailer park children were threatened
with training school and put on probation.”
Similar problems account in part for the overrepresentation of youth with mental
and emotional disabilities in the juvenile justice system. Attitude is important to the
police, magistrate and other decision makers, and “These kids have deficits in social
skills,” said Tandy, who has represented special needs youth in court. They may
behave in ways that are viewed as remorseless or disrespectful.
In general, youth with mental health, emotional or learning disabilities are susceptible to involvement in the juvenile justice system because they are prone to make
poor decisions that lead to involvement in crime, have weak or no avoidance techniques so they get caught more often, have social skills deficits that result in harsher
treatment once in the justice system or have learning difficulties that almost ensure
recidivism, according to a training curriculum of the American Bar Association’s
Juvenile Justice Center.91
Being Black and having disabilities is double jeopardy. According to Daniel
Losen, who at the time was a legal and policy research associate at the Civil Rights
Project at Harvard, Black youth with disabilities are more than four times as likely as
Whites with disabilities to be in a correctional institution,92 and the former National
Mental Health Association, now called Mental Health America, reported that youth of
color have often not received services or have been poorly serviced by the mental
health system prior to their entry into the juvenile justice system.93
“If your family has money, you get psychiatric intervention,” said Latessa, the
University of Cincinnati criminologist. “If they don’t, you get the prison psychologist.”
Looking at the many factors that result in so many children of color spending their
youths locked up in correctional facilities may produce a sense of hopelessness. The

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W. Haywood Burns Institute, which works to reduce racial disparity in juvenile detention,
does not concern itself with the “why” but with the “how” of disparate treatment,
examining, step by step, the process that takes an offender from the scene of the
crime to the detention center in 10 target cities.
“When you say, ‘It is caused by poverty,’ or ‘It is caused by racism,’ you are saying
the problem is intractable. And then you go home,” says Bell, the Institute’s director.
“But in fact, the juvenile justice system is just a series of decisions that are made——
and we are examining them to see where they have a disproportional impact on kids
of color, in ways that have nothing to do with public safety.”94

“When you say, ‘It is caused by poverty,’ or ‘It is caused by racism,’
you are saying the problem is intractable. And then you go home. But in fact,
the juvenile justice system is just a series of decisions that are made––and
we are examining them to see where they have a disproportional impact on
kids of color, in ways that have nothing to do with public safety.”
— James Bell
Director, W. Haywood Burns Institute

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C H A P T E R

1 0

Juvenile Incarceration
Behind the Barbed Wire
2003 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into conditions at the Oakley
and Columbia Training Schools in Mississippi found that juveniles were being
hog-tied with chains, physically assaulted by guards, sprayed with chemicals
during military exercises, forced to eat their own vomit, stripped naked, and put in
dark, solitary confinement cells.95

A

“We’ve been dealing with scores of institutions across the country although none——
none nearly as bad as the two facilities here in Mississippi,” said Brad Schlozman,
deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division,
during a town hall meeting in Jackson in July 2004.96
As part of a court order, Sheila Bedi visits juveniles at Oakley once a week. She
works for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, which now represents
incarcerated children in a decades-old case that resulted in a court order requiring
numerous improvements at the Oakley Training School. She lives in Mississippi and
works with the Mississippi Center for Justice on conditions at both training schools.
“They’re not hog-tying anyone anymore but we still have reports of staff getting
violent with children, hitting children, choking children,” she said. “And there still are
gross educational deficiencies and no mental health treatment. Suicidal children are
being held in isolation, not being seen by doctors. Children come in on psychotropic
meds that are immediately discontinued. If they act out, they get more time tacked
onto their sentences.”
Recently, Bedi said, a staph infection common to prisons and hospitals broke out at
Oakley and the 13 youths who had it were isolated in the prison part of the
institution, locked in the cells without a staff member assigned to watch them. The

A 2003 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into conditions at
Oakley and Columbia found that juveniles were being hog-tied with chains,
physically assaulted by guards, sprayed with chemicals during
military exercises, forced to eat their own vomit, stripped naked,
and put in dark, solitary confinement cells.

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infection produces enlarged boils and is related to poor hygiene, but the juveniles
were not let out to take showers every day. “One of the children asked a guard,
‘What’s going on with me? Am I going to die?’ The guard said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’”
Similarly shocking revelations had emerged in Arkansas, California, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, and South Dakota.97
In Bedi’s view, abuses happen——and may be almost inevitable——when “your
whole point is order” and correctional officers are taught to respond aggressively. This
can escalate, rather than defuse, conflicts with juveniles who can’t control their anger.
Blocking access to lawyers and other advocates facilitates abuse by hiding it from view.
A 2004 request by the Children’s Defense Fund for interviews with juveniles in
Oakley was denied. Scheduled interviews with juveniles at the Ohio Valley River
Correctional Institution in Franklin Furnace, Ohio, were abruptly cancelled following a
brief tour of the facility. This youth prison, built in 1996 in the “campus style” of many
new correctional facilities, looks like a junior college, with connected brick cottages
and an education and administration building facing a central grassy area.
Incarcerated there in early June 2004, were 240 boys between the ages of 13
and 21, with an average age of 17.5, who were convicted of a wide range of felony
offenses. Most were two or more years behind in school and many had mental health
problems.98 Some 70 of the 240 boys were on some kind of psychotropic medication, the nurse said. And this institution had a general population; one of Ohio’s nine
correctional facilities, all operated by the state Department of Youth Services, was
exclusively for youth with mental health problems.
Giving a tour, Aldine Gaspers, the warden, began at one of the living units——a
large hexagonal space with two-person cells along the walls that contain a bunk bed
and a rack for clothes. A correctional officer stood at a computer in the center of the
room from which he could watch the video monitors and unlock the cell doors.
The education building looks like any other school. Several classes are special
education, said Patrick Buchanan, the education director, adding that his assistant
used to teach a severely behaviorally handicapped class in the nearby town of
Ironton. He says that of the seven or eight kids he taught, all but one he’s seen in
DYS, Department of Youth Services. In addition to regular school classes, Ohio River
Valley has vocational programs in masonry, horticulture, and computers as well as
substance abuse treatment, anger management, a fatherhood group, and a grief
group.
“Many of our youth have been abused and never grieved their own loss of innocence and childhood,” Gaspers said. “They need to understand their own grief and
their victims’ grief.” A program called “Thinking for a Change” tries to create awareness
of consequences, address rationalizations for criminal behavior, and produce a sense
of responsibility.

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The interviews with youth at this facility had been requested to
learn their trajectories into incarceration. The Children’s Defense
Fund promised not to use names, and a staff member was going
to sit in on the conversations. Department of Youth Services officials
were nervous because the Ohio Public Defenders office, which had
conducted interviews in Ohio’s juvenile correctional facilities for a
report on legal representation, afterwards asked the Children’s Law
Center to investigate conditions at the institution for girls because
girls reported being slapped and shoved by guards, put in straightjackets, touched sexually, and discouraged or threatened if they
filed grievances.99 Questions asked during the tour, such as the
number of juveniles on psychiatric medication, raised the suspicion
that the Children’s Defense Fund interviewer had a hidden agenda.
She was asked to leave the institution.

Thomas: The Abuse Continues
In 2001, Thomas, a Mississippi boy who was adopted and had
been beaten and abandoned as a young child and then labeled as
a troublemaker in school, was sent to the Columbia Training School
for two months and two days for “attempting to put another student
in fear of bodily harm.” Several times, the school system brought
him to youth court for truancy, infuriating his adoptive mother
because suspensions were the reason he wasn’t in school. He was
placed on probation on one occasion. Thomas has an
Individualized Education Plan (IEP) but this did not minimize disciplinary actions against him.
In February 2004, Thomas was charged with stealing a cell
phone, which belonged to the school district, from a school bus. It
is not entirely clear what evidence was presented to the judge, but
apparently the bus driver sent an unsigned letter to the court stating
that other children said it was Thomas. He was sent to Columbia
for two months and two weeks.

“Many of our youth
have been abused
and never grieved
their own loss of
innocence and
childhood.”
— Aldine Gaspers
Warden, Ohio River Valley
Correctional Institution

The family’s 14-year-old son, Walter, was charged with possessing the cell phone after it was stolen. A police officer testified
that she took the phone from him. Previously, he and another boy
were charged with calling in a bomb threat that evacuated the
school. Other students said that one of the two did it and the other
one knew about it. The judge sent both boys to Columbia. Walter
(not his real name), who attends the high school, makes good
grades and is on the football team, says he had nothing to do with
the bomb threat or the cell phone theft. Like Thomas, he was given
a sentence of two months and two weeks in Columbia.

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In Columbia, Thomas got in an altercation with a guard. It started, he said, when
another boy “pushed me and I pushed him back. We were going to the classroom.
After that, I was mad ‘cause he pushed me for no reason.” In the hallway, a guard
“asked me what happened. I was telling him. He said I wasn’t telling him what he
wanted to know and he grabbed me by my arm and pushed me down the hall and
into a room.” Another guard arrived and asked what happened. The first guard “said
I said something smart and he pushed me again. After that, I was balling my fist
because I was mad. He pushed me one more time. The other guard thought I was
about to swing. He pushed me against the wall, hands behind my back, and his arm
around my neck. He grabbed me by my neck and the first one put some handcuffs on me.”
Thomas was taken to disciplinary lock-up for four days, he said. “After that, I had
to go to some kind of court thing. They gave me three extra weeks saying I had
assaulted the two officers.”
When his adoptive mother came for a visit, she saw red marks and scratches
around Thomas’ neck and bruises on his wrists. She was furious and called the president of the local NAACP chapter, who told her to contact Sheila Bedi. She went to
Columbia to see Thomas but was refused entry. She filed a lawsuit in federal court
for access and the court ordered the training school to let her in. “We interviewed
(Thomas) and arranged to go back there every week.” Before a second visit, she said,
both Thomas and Walter were released, without explanation, before they had completed their sentences.
With just a few weeks remaining in the school year, Walter nonetheless passed
the final exams. “He scored higher than some children who were there all semester,”
his mother said. Walter, whose favorite subject is math, said that the schooling at
Columbia is mediocre. “They didn’t teach me anything there, but what they were
teaching in the school here I already knew. So I wasn’t behind.” He is concerned,
though, that his time in Columbia might derail his plan to join his 18-year-old brother
at Alcorn State University, where he wants to study engineering.
He also finds himself with a shorter temper, quicker to anger, he said. “People
holler and curse at you. You want to retaliate but you know you will get in trouble. So
it builds up.”
Thomas will be repeating the ninth grade next year, in part, because the records
of his education at Columbia were not sent to his school district.
“I’m not a child psychologist, but I feel they need some counseling to deal with
what they went through there,” said their mother.
She gave Thomas a pep talk about showing the people who don’t think he will
amount to anything. “Prove them a liar.” Thomas listened but appeared unconvinced.
What are his plans for the future?
He looked down and after a long pause answered, “I don’t know.”

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Rehabilitation: What Works?
While conditions certainly matter, correctional facilities do not have to be abusive
to be effective. Even with hardened public attitudes towards juvenile offenders——
Barry Feld, a University of Minnesota juvenile justice expert, calls them “the Willie
Hortons of the 90s”——the philosophy remains that young people, or at least some of
them, can be rehabilitated, and juvenile facilities generally offer more therapeutic programs
than adult prisons do.
The question is: Do they work? Do they help juveniles get off the prison track?
Mark Lipsey of Vanderbilt University reviewed the findings of 401 scientific evaluations of juvenile justice intervention programs in the late 1990s and found that juvenile
justice programs do reduce the recidivism of delinquent youth——but only by six percent.
Looking further, though, he discovered that programs with certain characteristics
worked much better than that, lowering recidivism by 20-25 percent, while others
made no difference or even exacerbated future offending.100
One problem, experts say, is that many programs for delinquent juveniles aren’t
what Judge Ray calls “research-based and outcome-oriented.” Many institutions do
what they have traditionally done or what they believe works, without any research
findings to validate their effectiveness. For example, military-type drills are required at
Oakley and Columbia because they are believed to instill discipline. However, evaluations of the popular juvenile boot camps in the mid-1990s found that the recidivism
rate for these institutions was higher than those associated with traditional juvenile
corrections, and the U. S. Department of Justice, which had initially championed boot
camps, reported that “the efficacy of these programs is questionable at best.”101
The programs Lipsey and other researchers have found to be most effective are
those that are community- and family-based.102
At the time of our study, the state of Missouri was considered to have the best
juvenile correctional system in the nation. It closed its youth prisons in 1983 and
divided the state into five regions so that confined juveniles would remain within driving distance of their homes. Each region had two facilities, housing no more than 40
youths each. One served as a day treatment clinic to prevent the escalation of criminal
behavior; the other was a lock-up for more serious offenders. Instead of punishment,
the state focused on intensive individual and family counseling, academic and vocational education, and behavior modification. The guards——college educated “youth
specialists”——did not wear uniforms, and there was no pepper spray, no solitary confinement, no barbed wire.103
Comparing recidivism rates is tricky, but Missouri clearly was a standout among
states, according to Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and
Delinquency. A 2003 study found that of the 1,400 teenagers released in 1999, only
eight percent wound up in adult prison.104
One of the most effective types of therapeutic programs focuses on thinking; it
was called cognitive skills training or cognitive behavior modification.105 Latessa, the

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chairman of the Division of Criminal Justice at the University of
Cincinnati and a national expert on these programs, said he comes
at the problem of juvenile offenders from the opposite end as his
colleague, Wright, the life course researcher. “John’s looking at the
early predictors and pathways and the development of anti-social
behavior early on. He’s looking at prevention. I’m looking at intervention: After they are in the system, how do we fix them?”

“Some problems
involve skills
more than values.
Tough-on-crime
advocates often say
that longer and
harsher sentences
will make offenders
‘think twice’ before
they commit crimes.
In fact, many
offenders, especially
juvenile offenders,
don’t think once....
They don’t see or
consider the likely
consequences.”
— Ed Latessa
University of Cincinnati
criminologist

He describes the kinds of values and thinking that lead to continued criminal behavior. Some involve setting yourself or your
group apart: “Society’s rules are not meant for me.” “We have our
own set of rules.” This could apply to Enron executives as well as to
the Bloods and the Crips. Offenders very often avoid taking
responsibility by minimizing the harm they do to their victims——“They
have other TVs”——and by seeing themselves as victims. “My parents were alcoholics.” “Joe did it too and he didn’t get caught.”
“The police were out to get me.” “It’s racism.”
“A lot of the talk is system bashing,” Latessa said. “Everybody
does it. I’m not saying the system is fair. It does discriminate. But my
work is to reduce your risk of re-offending, not to change the system. Whatever happened in your childhood happened. Whatever
other people do, they do. It’s your behavior that matters if you want
your life to change.”
Mecum, the director of the Lighthouse agency that ran a
Department of Youth Services (DYS) facility primarily for sex
offenders, said it uses cognitive behavioral therapy. Since
Lighthouse also operated residential facilities for foster children
and other troubled youth, Mecum said he understands root causes, but “these kids are moving down the Pipeline rapidly and the
stakes are high. Our approach is: Regardless of your disadvantages, it is not okay to hurt people. This offends the community,
and the community is afraid of you.”
Some problems involve skills more than values. Tough-oncrime advocates often say that longer and harsher sentences will
make offenders “think twice” before they commit crimes. In fact,
“many offenders, especially juvenile offenders, don’t think once,”
Latessa said. “They don’t see or consider the likely consequences—
like Marcus stealing a car and then parking it in a school lot that
requires permits, or Lorenzo skipping out on the rehabilitation program in Atlanta and returning to Mississippi.”
Cognitive skills programs take apart the thinking process leading to a decision to break the law and use exercises to build the
skills needed to stop and think the next time: Is it worth it? Latessa

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thinks it would be “great” to use the dead time of in-school suspension or Saturday
school to teach thinking skills. Followers need a different kind of training——assertiveness training to say “no” to being drawn into activities they know are wrong.
Cognitive programs work much better in the community because the juveniles can
go out and apply the skills in their real lives, come back, and discuss what happened,
said Latessa. “Family-based interventions are the most effective, where all are
involved.”
“It’s hard to intervene effectively in an institution because it’s an artificial setting,”
he explained. “All the risks are managed. When you leave and go back to your former
world, they hit you in face.”

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C H A P T E R

1 1

End of the Pipeline
Clifton: Getting Stuck
hris Myers, director of the Sunflower County Freedom Project for young people, was sent to the Mississippi Delta 10 years ago by Teach for America.
Asked about young men in the Pipeline to Prison, he immediately responded, “Clifton Carter.”

C

“Clifton Carter was and is my favorite student,” he wrote in an email message. “He
seemed to latch on to me from the first day I began teaching. He was 10, I was 21,
and I was his new fifth grade teacher. His dad was never around, his mom was in and
out of his life, and he lived with his grandma in a house with countless people roaming about. Despite the circumstances, he managed to be a curious, bright child,
though he often got into trouble because he rarely could control his energy. I taught
him in fifth and sixth grades, and then he went off to middle school and started having
serious problems.”
By the time Clifton was 15, he had failed ninth grade and “seemed to be going
nowhere,” Myers wrote. He had become so fond of Clifton that he talked with Clifton’s
grandmother and she agreed to let Clifton live with Myers in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, where Myers was in graduate school at the time. Clifton enrolled at Chapel
Hill High School but within six months, he went back home and “things went downhill from there,” according to Myers. In June 2000, Clifton and a friend, who had been
robbing houses together, attempted another robbery and the victim was shot to
death. Clifton, then 16, was tried as an adult, convicted of murder and sentenced to
life in prison.
“It breaks my heart to think about what has happened to Cliff and about what Cliff
has done to wind up where he is now,” Myers concluded. “He’s finally starting to see
things more clearly and to his credit, he really has made a strong effort to educate
himself while in prison. I hope you will get a chance to meet him.”

“I learned in here—too late—that you don’t have to be violent
or mean to get respect. You can have a lot up here
in your head, and that will do.”
— Clifton, 18 years old

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At 20, Clifton was imprisoned in the Walnut Grove Correctional Institution, which
houses juveniles convicted of felonies. Brought into a glassed-in interview room, he
was tall, neatly groomed, and had a kind, serious face and large expressive eyes. In
the adjoining room, two defense trainers were giving lessons to correctional officers.
Their shouts and the crashing of baseball bats could be heard as Clifton talked about
the life course that brought him to this locked room and a future behind bars.
Clifton and his four sisters were raised by their grandmother in the tiny town of
Sunflower. “My mother was using at the time and drinking some. I was 10 when I met
my father. I didn’t ask him where he had been. He told me. He explained he didn’t
want me as part of his life because he was a drug dealer. He wanted me to be able
to make choices about how I would live.”
Clifton believes he started on the wrong path when his grandfather died. “I was
eight, and there was nobody to guide us, nobody to control us, to give us whippings
when we deserved them. Then my cousin Michael left. He was a good bit older and
he was like a father to me. There were cousins and sisters and we were all at my
grandmother’s. Grandmother tried, but I started getting in lots of trouble for talking
back at school. I still went to school everyday in spite of the trouble.”
Clifton said his real problems began in the ninth grade when the Sunflower kids
had to go to school in Ruleville. “I started skipping school a lot and the older guys
were passing the trouble down. There were the Ruleville gangs and the Sunflower
gangs and the rivalry was fierce and I had started smoking marijuana at 12. So much
of it was about reputation and proving yourself——that you and your gang were
tougher.” He failed the ninth grade.
When he moved in with Myers in Chapel Hill, he started off quite well, appearing
to enjoy the classes at Chapel Hill High School and hoping to join the football team.
But since he was repeating the ninth grade, he was not allowed to play sports and
soon found the classes more difficult than exciting. After a while, he began smoking
marijuana and skipping school to hang out with dropouts or soon-to-be dropouts. By
February, Myers and Clifton’s grandmother decided that he was no longer getting
anything beneficial from Chapel Hill High and should come home.
Chapel Hill High represented a possible exit from the Pipeline to Prison and
proved to be Clifton’s last chance. What happened? “I didn’t fit in,” Clifton says. Dr.
Comer, the Yale University child psychiatrist, explains that “Children who are not
doing well in school, or whose families are not well connected to the mainstream,
view themselves as different from those in it——their teachers and fellow students with
higher levels of achievement. When called on to achieve, they are being asked, in a
very real sense, to be different from their parents and their own network culture. This
produces identity problems that have to be worked through if they are to move into
mainstream culture.”106 Clifton, whose intelligence undoubtedly made being behind
very frustrating, clung to the familiar.
When he came back to Mississippi, he went to live with a cousin in Indianola. “I
was 16 and got into robbing houses. It was like, ‘I will just do it this one time. If I can
do it this one time and get away with it, I won’t do it again,’ but you always do. Then

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one night in June 2000, my friend Bobby and I were out in the streets and the same
idea came to us at the same time. I won’t get into the details, but during a robbery,
Leon Brown, a gambler, was shot and killed.”
Pressed several times, Clifton said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and would not
explain why.
He was arrested a short time later. “Bobby told my cousin about it, and she called
the police and they came and got me from a friend’s house. The Indianola police
called my mother since I was a juvenile. They made me write a statement and appointed two White public defenders. I was charged with capital murder and Bobby was
charged with conspiracy and as an accessory to murder.
“The lawyers told me they had an overload of cases, and when we had a conference with my mother, my sister Jennifer, and two cousins, the lawyers told me that all
I could do was plead out or I would get the death penalty. There were no other options
because the D.A. had five witnesses and Bobby had written a statement naming me as
the shooter. They never did produce a gun, but they told me I had no case, so I signed
a confession and took the plea because I didn’t want to die.”
He spent the first eight months in maximum security at Parchman and said he
used that time to “learn about being locked up. I knew I was going to be in for a long
time. Then they sent me to another unit and I started spending a lot of time reading,
because that was my weakest subject. That really helped and that is also when I started
writing——writing poems——that’s how I expressed myself. In the beginning, it was so
hard and I thought, ‘Well, it can only get better,’ and I try to smile. If you don’t, people
may think you are a threat.”
Clifton now is in the general population at Walnut Grove. “It is okay but you have
to be careful, because both guards and inmates think everyone is trying to gain something
or put something over on everyone else. And there are gangs in here, just like the
ones on the outside, and that means you have someone on your side, but it doesn’t work
just one way. It means that you owe them.”
By his own and Chris Myers’ accounts, Clifton has latched onto every training and
education program in the prison. He learned to cut hair, his job at Walnut Grove, and is
trying to learn to be a carpenter’s assistant. He passed the GED test and “almost
made a good score on the ACT. I will be taking it again soon.”
He has also been working on an appeal charging inadequate representation. “I
got letters from the lawyer saying that everything in my letters was false and the D.A.
said she doesn’t believe any of the things I said. The only thing I can prove is that the
lawyers told my mother that if I went to court, I would receive the death penalty. They
should have given me other options.”
As he spoke, a group of inmates marched by the window in a column. Clifton
pointed to them and said, “That’s where the racism starts. See how most of them are
White? They are here for just six months and if they complete the program, they are
out on probation.”

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Clifton says he hasn’t had many disciplinary write-ups at Walnut Grove. He tries
to associate with everyone and not make trouble. “I don’t want to get close to anyone.
I am young myself but these younger guys here can be trouble——feel like they need
to prove themselves——just like in gangs.” When he starts feeling depressed, he says,
he writes about things that make him feel good. “I write about my sadness and seems
like when I get it all out, I am all right.” This is a poem he wrote:
Can’t Take Everything
You could take my eyes, so I couldn’t see.
You could shackle me in chains and throw away the key.
You could take my feet so I couldn’t walk.
You could fill my mouth, so I couldn’t talk.
You could take my ears, so I couldn’t hear.
You could take my heart, and replace it with fear.
You could take my life and place it in a grave oh so cold.
No matter what you take, you can never take my soul.
Next year, when he is 21, Clifton will be transferred to Parchman or another adult
penitentiary. “I came in under the law saying that felons had to serve 85 percent of
their sentences before parole so I guess I will be there until I am 65.”
He does dream of getting out, of studying astronomy because he reads about
space and the stars and moon. He’s going to take a correspondence course in
physiology and Spanish. Chris Myers is helping him set this up. If released, he’d like
to get a “simple job. Start small and believe me, I have got patience. I don’t blame my
family for any of this. I knew what was going on and chose it anyway. Why? Because
I wanted recognition and control and I learned in here——too late——that you don’t have
to be violent or mean to get respect. You can have a lot up here in your head and that
will do. I don’t act crazy in here, I encourage other guys to read. They see me writing,
and they think, ‘He’s in for life and he’s trying.’”

Jewel: Looking Forward to Her Future
Jewel, at the time, was an 18-year-old girl whose early childhood memories
included walking the streets in the early morning looking for food, and waking up in a
strange man’s house after her mother, a drug addict, had left. When she and her siblings were taken away from her mother, they were split up. She went to a Catholic
group home. Although she says it “wasn’t that bad,” she followed the predictable trajectory——and her mother’s example——into a lifestyle of drugs and hustling and bad
company. As Wright put it, “It is naive to believe that simply by changing environments,
all the memories, all the learned behavior, won’t matter anymore. These kids take their
problems with them, and the foster care system varies tremendously in quality.”

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At 12, she went to live with her father and his girlfriend in Covington. She said he
worked hard and provided for her. “The only part was, he wasn’t loving. I guess I
needed that. Me not having that, I felt I could do whatever. I was really alone. I felt
alone.”
She “always struggled in school,” she said. “In some parts, I do have strengths
but in other parts, I don’t. It got harder and harder as the years went past.” She was
held back in the ninth grade. At about that time, she began running away from home
and skipping school. “I would leave, be gone two or three days, home a week and
then back out again.”
She hung out with a group older than she was on “street corners, certain blocks.
They were grown and I was trying to do what they did. They were people I could talk
to. Even though they did bad things, they were there and I looked up to them. I felt
like somebody was always there for me.” What were they doing? “Drugs, hustling to
get money, gang activities.”
She said this life was “fun in the sense of I was able to do whatever I wanted to
do. I could stay out as long as I wanted to. I had freedom. Nobody was telling me to
do this or that. There was really no authority there.” Her father, she says, didn’t know
what to do and let her do what she wanted.
The others had long since dropped out of school, but Jewel kept returning from
time to time. “Sometimes, honestly, I would go to school because I was tired of walking
the streets all day. Sometimes I could sit down and do the work. But I felt I was different from everybody. Some other kids were doing the same thing I was but not as
severe.” She did, though, have a teacher who believed in her and sometimes came to
court to support her when she got in trouble.
The law first “got interested in me,” as Jewel put it, for the so-called status
charges of runaway and truancy, the typical first offenses for girls. Later, she was
charged with possession of marijuana and assaults for “hitting people,” including a
teacher. This happened, she said, at a basketball game. A boy hit her and she told a
teacher about it. “She didn’t punish the boy so, I don’t really know, one thing led to
another. I started yelling and the teacher started yelling. I went towards her, and she
pushed me down. I kept trying to get back up to get at her and when I did, I hit her.
They grabbed me and took me to the principal’s office. My father came and then the
police.” She pled guilty and went to the Campbell County Detention Center for a month.
Jewel said her anger was “really scary in a way. If you tried to stop me I would not
stop till I felt like stopping.” She now believes her anger wasn’t so much against the
teacher as against everything around her. “It was just…anger out of nowhere. Anytime
I had a chance to blow up, I would blow up and I would feel better afterwards. Then
again, I would have to face the consequences and it was more and more piling up
and more anger.”
At the detention center, she felt as if her life had shut down, yet she was “learning some things. Some people, mostly Black male and female authorities, would tell
me what was wrong. At least they talked to me, and it did some good. That was just
like the first step.”

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When she was released and went back to her father’s house, she spent two or
three days staying home “trying to listen and do right,” but after a week, she went out
to the streets again. “I didn’t have goals,” she says. “My thinking was: ‘This is the only
thing I have. What else am I supposed to do?’”
The judge had told her that if he saw her again, he would give her more time. “But
I didn’t care. I was going to do what I wanted.” The next time she came before him, at
16, she was sentenced to a year and six months in the Kentucky equivalent of Ohio’s
juvenile correctional facilities, also located in a rural area. “That is when I started
goals. What did I want to do for my future? That’s when I started to find out about my
talents. I always knew I could sing, but poetry? First, I wrote down what I was feeling.
That was the way the people there helped me, to talk about and write down my feelings, and than I started with poetry.” Staff at the institution published some of her
poetry on the Internet.
Interestingly, Wright says that research into resiliency——why some kids in terrible
circumstances manage to come out all right——shows that one factor is being able to
verbalize feelings. “I’m not talking about touchy feely stuff. This is a real survival skill.”
Jewel’s excitement was palpable as she described her breakthrough into possibility. “That’s when it came to me, ‘You can do anything! I want to be a poet but then
again, what about electrical engineering? Wow! I can be anything!’ That’s when I
started to think I wanted to get a job and go to school. I wanted to do the best for
myself. I didn’t have to go back there on the streets. I could show people. Almost all
my life, people didn’t expect me to be anything. I’d be like the rest of my mother’s
family, which is known in Covington.”
Once again, she resolved to change her life. When she got back home, she went
to school, took the required drug tests and did all right for awhile. “But it was like:
‘Where can I go from here? Where can I start?’ And I went right back into it, started
smoking weed again, running away, hustling. I didn’t have a job. I was so scared out
there now, since I was getting older. I was more afraid to die.” Jewel decided to turn
herself in.
This is an image that comes to mind about Jewel. She is walking on a road, a
pathway, the one that ends in prison, hand in hand with others going in the same
direction. At a way station along the way, people tell her there is a cut-off ahead to
another path, one that leads to a brighter place. She doesn’t like the road she’s on so
she listens, and when she sees the cut-off, she detaches herself from her companions
and takes her first steps on the other path. She doesn’t get very far. Her companions
reach out to pull her back. She is alone and uncertain on this new path and no one
there is reaching out to pull her forward.
Re-entry, in a word, is difficult for those who have been in the Pipeline to Prison
for a long time and this is all they know. Usually, they are released on probation or
parole, but it appears that this often does not provide enough support. And sometimes, the tolerance for failure is very limited.

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Sproat, the former warden at the Walnut Grove prison in Mississippi, used to be
an administrator for the Job Corps and said it was hard to persuade principals to
allow offenders back into their schools after release from a training school. “Our staff
would meet with the principal and even put themselves on the line by saying, ‘Look,
if you give him a chance, or you give her a chance, to get back in the school system,
the first time that they get in trouble, if you’ll call me, I’ll come and get them.’”
“So this kid gets back into the mainstream of the local school system,” instead of
an alternative school. “When somebody’s purse comes up missing or something at
the school is damaged, they think, ‘Well, we just got so-and-so who was released
from the training school.’ He’s the first one that they bring in and question.” Sproat
said it was hard for these juveniles to accept being singled out if they had nothing to
do with what happened, even though he and others tried to tell them to “‘Keep a cool
head. If you had nothing to do with it, it is not a problem.’”
Their ingrained defense mechanism, Sproat says, is to get angry at the principal.
“So what does the principal say? ‘Wait a minute, you’ve been incarcerated for three
months, six months, at the training school and it didn’t do a bit of good. You’ve got an
attitude problem. We don’t need you in this school system.’ And what does the kid
say? ‘Well, then you can kiss my you-know-what!’ and the principal says, ‘You’re out
of here!’ and the kid is back at square one.”
The study, cited earlier, of a cohort of ninth graders who were dropped from the
rolls of their high schools in a mid-Atlantic city when they became incarcerated, found
that most went to a different school when they returned to the school system. They
arrived at any time of year, depending on when their sentences ended, with virtually
no transition and few graduated.107
Jewel was sent to a juvenile residential treatment center. “That’s when I started
working really seriously on how I was going to put my dreams in action.” The most
important decision she made was not to return to Covington this time. “I wasn’t
strong enough yet to handle that,” she decided. She was almost 18 by then, and
could legally live on her own, although she didn’t know where or how.
At that point, Angela, one of her younger sisters came to see her. This sister, who
had been very badly burned by fireworks when their mother left the children alone,
had been placed in a foster home when she got out of the hospital. The director of
an agency for troubled youth was Angela’s volunteer mentor. The foster parents, used
to caring for medically fragile children, couldn’t handle the girl when she got well, and
the foster mother telephoned the mentor at 3:00 a.m. and said they were going to put
the girl in an institution.
“I said, ‘Well, no. Let me come get her,’” the mentor recalled. She and her husband
were not licensed as foster parents at that time but quickly became licensed, took the
girl in and later adopted her. Of Jewel’s siblings, this girl, now 17, has done the best;
she will graduate from high school next year and plans to attend Kentucky State
University. (Another sister, the eldest, has three children and has been in and out of
prison, as has their mother. A brother just spent his 16th birthday in a juvenile correctional facility.)

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Jewel had visited her sister from time to time, when the sister’s adoptive family
would pick her up at her father’s house. “She was living there and doing good, and I
wanted the same thing she had,” Jewel said. “Really, I was jealous. When I told her I
didn’t want to go home, she said, ‘Why don’t you come live with us?’ I said, ‘They
won’t let me live with ya’ll.’ But she asked and they said yes.”
Jewel moved in June 2003 to the family’s nice, comfortable home in suburban
Cincinnati. The interview took place around the dining room table. Her new guardian
said she was always fond of Jewel but “couldn’t keep up with her. It was hard not to
bond. I could not let her go into a bad situation.”
Her guardian had not previously heard Jewel talk about her experiences to others.
When Jewel said, “Now that I’m here, I have people who love me. That’s what I was
looking for,” tears welled up in her eyes. “When I think of the pipeline, I think about the
adults in their lives or lack of,” her guardian said. “We want to talk about the pipeline
to prison after our kids are already there. We need to take initiative at the grassroots
level to see the strengths in our kids, to nurture that, and commit ourselves to helping
them grow. Sometimes we forget, as we design systems, the crucial importance of
caring, competent adults.”
Jewel attends high school. She is not in a class for those with severe behavioral
handicaps, as she was before when she was angry and acting out, and she is working
hard and doing well. She is a junior and this year is going to a vocational program
where she will begin studies to become a registered nurse that she can continue in
college afterwards. She won’t graduate until she is 20 but “the good news is: it doesn’t
matter,” her guardian said. “She’s going to accomplish her goals and do something
with her life.”
Jewel says she now has “more like a normal life. I’m ready to take driver’s training.
I have a job on weekends. I’m starting to bring boys home.” “Decent boys,” her
guardian interjects, who can hold a conversation and are in school. She knows that
Jewel will have some “falls and bumps but we are laying the foundation for her to
make it out there. She is becoming a new (Jewel).”
Says Jewel: “I feel good. I feel like there is going to be a future for me. I can’t wait
to see what it is.”

“We want to talk about the Pipeline to Prison after our kids are already there.
We need to take initiative at the grassroots level to see the strengths in our kids,
to nurture that, and commit ourselves to helping them grow.”
— Jewel’s Guardian

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Epilogue

I

n June 2004, three weeks after the interview with baby Eric’s mother,
Children’s Protective Services charged her with child abuse. Her aunt
said that Eric had bruises, but she does not believe his mother was
the one who hurt him. “People were always grabbing on him and telling
her she’s babying him,” the aunt said.
Eric and his brother, Tae, were taken away. “Nobody in our family
could take them,” the aunt said, “so they’re going to be put in foster care.”

Every American must stand up and do everything in his/her power to pass on to
our children and grandchildren a nation and a world that are better and fairer than the
one we inherited. There is no more important work at this time in our history. Engaging
and energizing the adults our children so desperately need, and developing and
implementing comprehensive program and policy solutions that keep our children on
the road to successful adulthood is the only way we will create a world that is safe,
free, and filled with the opportunities too many children only dream about.
This is the path that will allow all our children to reach their full potential and
become the people they were born to be. It is their birthright. And it is our common
responsibility to deliver it.

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Endnotes
Interview with John Wright, Criminal Justice Undergraduate Program Director, University of Cincinnati,
Division of Criminal Justice.

1

2
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Literacy Behind Bars: Results from
the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey (May 2007), Table 3-1. Calculations by
Children's Defense Fund.
3

Interview with Dr. Frank Putnam, Scientific Director, Every Child Succeeds.

4

Interview with Dr. Frank Putnam, Scientific Director, Every Child Succeeds.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, America’s Kindergarteners, Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, NCES 2000-070 (February 2000), Tables 2,
3 and 4.
5

6

Interview with Dr. Judith Van Ginkel, Department Head, Every Child Succeeds.

Christopher J. Mumola, “Incarcerated Parents and Their Children,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special
Report (August 2000), at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/iptc.htm.
7

Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “First Reports
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Early Childhood Home Visitation and Firearms
Laws,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 52, No. RR-14 (Washington, D.C.: October 3, 2003), p. 6.

8

9

Interview with Dr. Frank Putnam, Scientific Director, Every Child Succeeds.

U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics, supra note 5 at ix. From parent ratings,
at least 82 percent of the kindergartners engaged in prosocial activities; in teacher rating, 75 percent. Problem
behavior was relatively infrequent; teachers reported that 10 to 11 percent of kindergartners argue or fight
with teachers often or get angry easily often to very often. Teachers rated a smaller percentage of African
American children than White children in the “often/very often” column in all three categories of prosocial
behavior: 68 percent (Black) to 76 percent (White) in accepting peer ideas, 71 to 80 percent in forming
friendships, and 44 to 55 percent in comforting others. The rating for Hispanic children fell between the Black
and White groups.
10

11

Ibid. at ix.

12

Jennifer Mrozowski and John Byczkowski, “Kicked Out of Kindergarten,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, February
22, 2004.
13
ABT Associates, Inc., Conditions of Confinement: Juvenile Detention and Corrections Facilities
(Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1994). As cited in Children’s Law
Center, Inc., The Special Needs of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System: Implications for Effective Practice
(Covington, Ky.: June 2001), p. 20.
14

Interview with Dr. Michael Sorter, Director, Psychiatry, Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati.

Dorothy Otnow Lewis, “Conduct Disorder,” The Comprehensive Textbook of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry, 3rd Edition, Melvin Lewis, Ed. (Baltimore, Md.: Williams and Wilkens, 2001), p. 566.

15

16

Ibid. at 566.

17

Debra Jasper and Spencer Hunt, “Cases Swamp Children’s Hospital,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, March 22, 2004.

18

Debra Jasper and Spencer Hunt, “Cases Swamp Children’s Hospital.”

19

Julie Goodman, “Mental Health Facilities May Open in September,” Clarion-Ledger, May 12, 2004.

Senate Bill No. 3119 (1999) as cited in the Mississippi State Department of Health Annual Report (1999),
at http://www.msdh.state.ms.us/msdhsite/index.cfm/19,45,89,pdf/agencyannrpt99.pdf.
20

21

Julie Goodman, “Mental Health Facilities May Open in September.”

Interview with Margaret Burley, Ohio Coalition for the Education of Children with Disabilities, at
http://www.ocecd.org/index.html.
22

Jennifer Mrozowski and John Byczkowski, “Kicked Out of Kindergarten,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, February
22, 2004.

23

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24

Jennifer Mrozowski and John Byczkowski, “Kicked Out of Kindergarten.”

25

Interview with Shannon Starkey, Director of Children’s Home.

Provided by Christine Wolff, Assistant Communications Manager in the School and Community Engagement
Department, Cincinnati Public Schools. The exact per pupil figure is $10,981.
26

Cincinnati Public Schools Code of Conduct, at http://www.cps-k12.org/general/discipline/Codes/
CodeConduct.html.

27

28

Ohio Department of Education, at http://www.ode.state.oh.us/Data/default.asp.

Johanna Wald and Dan Losen, “Defining and Redirecting a School-to-Prison Pipeline,” New Directions for
Youth Development, 2003 Fall (99), pp. 9-15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University).
29

30 R.J. Skiba, A. Simmons, I. Staudinger, et al., Consistent Removal: Contributions of School Discipline to the
School-Prison Pipeline. Paper presented at the Harvard Civil Rights Project’s School-to-Prison Pipeline
Conference, Cambridge, Mass. (May 16-17, 2003).
31
R.J Skiba, M.K. Rausch and S. Ritter, “Children Left Behind: Series summary and recommendations.”
(Bloomington, Ind.: Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, 2004), at http://ceep.indiana.edu/
ChildrenLeftBehind.
32
L.M. Raffaele Mendez and H.M. Knoff, “Who Gets Suspended from School and Why: A Demographic
Analysis of Schools and Disciplinary Infractions in a Large School District,” Education and Treatment of
Children, 26 (1) (2003), pp. 30-51.
33

Jennifer Mrozowski and John Byczkowski, “Kicked Out of Kindergarten.”

34

Jennifer Mrozowski and John Byczkowski, “Kicked Out of Kindergarten.”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 2001).
35

36
Johanna Wald and Dan Losen, “Defining and Redirecting a School-to-Prison Pipeline,” New Directions for
Youth Development, 2003 Fall (99), pp. 9-15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University)
citing C.A. McNeely, J.M. Nonnemaker and R.W. Blum, “Promoting School Connectedness: Evidence from the
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,” Journal of School Health, Vol. 72 (4), 2002.

Sandra B. Simkins, Amy E. Hirsch, Erin McNamara Horvat and Marjorie B. Moss, “The School to Prison
Pipeline for Girls: The Role of Physical and Sexual Abuse,” Journal of Children's Legal Rights, Vol. 24, No. 4
(Winter 2004), pp. 56-72.

37

Hamilton County Juvenile Court Annual Report 2003, at http://www.hamilton-co.org/juvenilecourt/
Annual_Report/Stats.htm, p. 42.

38

Jennifer Mrozowski and John Byczkowski, “Black Students Disciplined More,” The Cincinnati Enquirer,
February 22, 2004.

39

40

Interview with Janet Walsh, Chief Officer for School and Community Engagement, Cincinnati Public Schools.

41

Interview with Janet Walsh, Chief Officer for School and Community Engagement, Cincinnati Public Schools.

42
M.L. Froning, Employment Opportunity in the Schools: Job Patterns of Minorities and Women in Public
Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1974. Research Report No. 51 (Washington, D.C.: Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, 1976). “Just the Facts: Educators for the New Millennium,” a report prepared by
Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute.

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2001.
(Washington, D.C.: 2001), Supplemental Table 42, at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d01/dt042.asp.

43

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey
(SASS) 1999-2000. (Washington, D.C.: 2001), Supplemental Table 100, at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/
digest/d03/tables/xls/tab100.xls.

44

45

Leon A. Higgenbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial
Period (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1978).
46

The Intolerable Burden, documentary, 2004. Directed by Chea Prince. Produced by Constance Curry.

47

Interview, “The Moses Factor,” Mother Jones Magazine, May-June 2002, p. 60.

48

Interview with Willena White, Principal of the North Delta Alternative School.

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49
American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Center, National Juvenile Defender Center, Justice Cut Short:
An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in Ohio
(March 2003), p. 49, at http://www.njdc.info/pdf/Ohio_Assessment.pdf.
50

Sara Rimer, “Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention,” New York Times, January 4, 2004.

51

Interview with Judge James A. Ray, Lucas County, Ohio, Juvenile Court.

52

Sara Rimer, “Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention.”

53

Sara Rimer, “Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention.”

Laurence Steinberg, “Juveniles on Trial: MacArthur Foundation Study Calls Competency into Question,”
American Bar Association, Criminal Justice Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 13 (1993), at http://www.abanet.org/
crimjust/juvjus/cjmag/18-3ls.html.

54

Ebony Reed and Lila J. Mills, “East, South High Schools Add Security, Tighten Rules,” Cleveland Plain
Dealer, April 2, 2004.

55

56

Interview with Tom Mooney, President, Ohio Federation of Teachers.

James P. Comer, Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can’t Solve Our Problems and How We Can
(New York: Plume, 1998), p. 89.
57

58

Interview with James Comer, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center.

59

Interview with James Comer, Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center.

60

Interview with Janet Walsh, Chief Officer for School and Community Engagement, Cincinnati Public Schools.

James P. Comer, Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can’t Solve Our Problems and How We Can
(New York: Plume, 1998), p. 89.
61

62
Johanna Wald and Dan Losen, “Defining and Redirecting a School-to-Prison Pipeline, New Directions for
Youth Development 2003 Fall (99), pp. 9-15 (Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University),
citing “Abandoned in the Back Row: New Lessons in Education and Delinquency Prevention,” Coalition for
Juvenile Justice, 2001 Annual Report.
63

Interview with Mississippi State Senator Willie Simmons.

Jay Heubert and Robert M. Hauser, High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion and Graduation, Board on
Testing and Assessment, Commission on Behavior and Social Sciences and Education, National Research
Council (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 129.
64

65
Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Nader Kabbani, “The Dropout Process in Life Course Perspective: Early
Risk Factors at Home and at School,” Teacher’s College Record, Vol. 103, No. 5 (New York: Teachers
College, Columbia University, October 2001), p. 775.

Robert Balfranz, Kurt Spiridakis, Ruth Neild, et al., “High Poverty Secondary School and the Juvenile Justice
System: How Neither Helps the Other and How That Could Change,” New Directions for Youth Development,
2003 Fall (99), pp. 71-89 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University, 1999).

66

Sandra B. Simkins, Amy E. Hirsch, Erin McNamara Horvat and Marjorie B. Moss, “The School to Prison
Pipeline for Girls: The Role of Physical and Sexual Abuse,” Journal of Children's Legal Rights, Vol. 24, No. 4
(Winter 2004), pp. 56-72.

67

Robert D. Hoge and D.A. Andrews, “Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory” (Ottawa, Ontario:
Carlton University).

68

69

Interview with Hunter Hurst, Director, National Center for Juvenile Justice.

70

Interview with Hunter Hurst, Director, National Center for Juvenile Justice.

The Sentencing Project, Drug Policy and the Criminal Justice System 2001 (Washington D.C.: The
Sentencing Project, 2001), p. 3, at http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/5047.pdf.

71

72
American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Center, National Juvenile Defender Center, Justice Cut Short:
An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in Ohio
(March 2003), p. 4, at http://www.njdc.info/pdf/Ohio_Assessment.pdf.

Hamilton County Juvenile Court Annual Report 2003 (Cincinnati, Ohio: 2004), p. 8, at http://www.hamilton-co.org/
juvenilecourt/Annual_Report/Stats.htm.

73

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74
United States Department of Labor, “Employment Situation Summary” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department
of Labor, September 2004), at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm.
75
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenille Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in
Residential Placement Databook, “Detailed Offense Profile by Placement Status for United States, 2003” at
http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/cjrp/asp/offense_Adj.asp. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.
76
American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Center, National Juvenile Defender Center, Justice Cut Short:
An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in Ohio
(March 2003), p. 1, at http://www.njdc.info/pdf/Ohio_Assessment.pdf.

United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Minority Staff Special
Investigations Division, “Incarceration of Youth Who Are Waiting for Community Mental Health Services in the
United States” (July 2004), at http://govtaff.senate.gov/_files/040707juvenilereport.pdf.

77

78

Robert Pear, “Many Youths Reported Held Awaiting Mental Help,” New York Times, July 8, 2004.

American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Center, National Juvenile Defender Center, Justice Cut Short:
An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in Ohio
(March 2003), at http://www.njdc.info/pdf/Ohio_Assessment.pdf.
79

Children’s Defense Fund interview with Dave Schroot, Deputy Director of Ohio’s Department of Youth
Services, in March 2004.

80

81

Interview with Sheila Bedi, attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center.

82

Eric Stringfellow, “Lawmakers Must Listen to Juvenile Justice Ideas,” Clarion-Ledger, July 1, 2004.

83

Mississippi Department of Youth Services, Division of Youth Services, statistics as of March 15, 2004.

84

Mississippi Department of Youth Services, Division of Youth Services, statistics as of March 15, 2004.

Ford Foundation Report interview with James Bell, attorney, Youth Law Center, Spring 2003, at
http://www.fordfound.org/publications/ff_report/view_ff_report_detail.cfm?report_index=398.
85

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Annual Estimates of the Population, 2003, at
http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/NC-EST2006-asrh.html; U.S. Department of Justice, Federal
Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States 2003 (October 2004), Table 43; and U.S. Department of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement Databook, at
http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/cjrp/. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

86

87

Interview with Hunter Hurst, Director, National Center for Juvenile Justice.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, Office of Applied Statistics, 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Table 1.74B, “Illicit
Drug Use in Lifetime, Past Year, and Past Month among Persons Aged 12 to 17, by Racial/Ethnic Subgroups:
Percentages, Annual Averages Based on 2002-2003 and 2004-2005”; National Center for Juvenile Justice,
“Juvenile Arrest Rates by Offense, Sex, and Race” (March 19, 2007), at http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/
ojstatbb/crime/excel/JAR_20070222.xls; and U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement Databook, “Offense Profile of
Committed Residents by Sex and Race/Ethnicity for United States, 2003: Rate per 100,000 juveniles,” at
http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/cjrp/asp/Offense_Committed.asp?state=0&topic=Offense_Committed&ye
ar=2003&percent=rate.

88

The Sentencing Project, “Federal Crack Cocaine Sentencing” (July 2007). Under the mandatory minimum
sentencing laws established by Congress in 1986, defendants convicted of selling 500 grams of powder
cocaine or five grams of crack cocaine receive five-year sentences. For five kilos of powder cocaine and 50 grams
of crack, the penalty is ten years. Thus there is a 100:1 ratio. Simple possession of any quantity of powder
cocaine by first-time offenders is considered a misdemeanor, punishable by no more than one year in prison.
Simple possession of crack cocaine is a felony, carrying a five-year mandatory sentence.

89

90
American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Center, National Juvenile Defender Center, Justice Cut Short: An
Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in Ohio
(March 2003), p. 17, at http://www.njdc.info/pdf/Ohio_Assessment.pdf.
91
American Bar Association, Juvenile Justice Center, Understanding Adolescents: A Juvenile Court Training
Curriculum, Module 5, Special Ed Kids in the Justice System (2000), p. 12.

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92
Interview with Dan Losen, Harvard Civil Rights Project. The data used for this calculation were from 2001,
U.S. Department of Education, Office for Special Education Programs (OSEP). Raw data at
www.ideadata.org.

Michael Faenza, Christine Siegfried and Jenifer Wood, Community Perspectives on the Mental Health and
Substance Abuse Treatment Needs of Youth Involved in the Juvenile Justice System (National Mental Health
Association, n.d.).

93

94
Youth Law Center, Ford Foundation Report interview with James Bell, attorney, Spring 2003 issue,
at http://www.fordfound.org/publications/ff_report/view_ff_report_detail.cfm?report_index=398.
95
Letter dated June 19, 2003, to Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove from Ralph F. Boyd, Jr., Assistant
Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, at www.usdoj.gov/crt/split/documents/oak_colu_miss_
findinglet.pdf.
96

John Fuquay, “Juvenile Centers Called ‘Worst’ in U.S.” Clarion-Ledger, July 2, 2004.

97

Children’s Defense Fund research of major U.S. newspaper articles.

98

Interview with Aldine Gaspers, Superintendent of the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility.

99

Carrie Spencer, “Abuses Alleged at Prison for Girls,” Columbus Dispatch, July 30, 2004.

Annie E. Casey Foundation, “A Matter of Choice: Forks in the Road for Juvenile Justice,” AdvoCasey, Vol. 5,
No. 1 (Spring 2003), p. 16, at http://www.aecf.org/upload/Publication Files/juvenile justice at crossroads.pdf
100

Douglas W. Nelson, “On Adolescent Crime: Time to End Fad Justice,” AdvoCasey, Vol. 5, No. 1
(Spring 2003), p. 2.

101

102

Annie E. Casey Foundation, “A Matter of Choice: Forks in the Road for Juvenile Justice,” p. 17.

103

Jenifer Warren, “Spare the Rod, Save the Child,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2004.

104

Jenifer Warren, “Spare the Rod, Save the Child.”

Interview with Hunter Hurst, Director, National Center for Juvenile Justice, and Ed Latessa, Director of
Division of Social Justice, University of Cincinnati.

105

James Comer, Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can’t Solve Our Problems and How We Can.
(New York: Plume, 1997), p. 90.

106

107
Robert Balfranz, Kurt Spiridakis, Ruth Neild, et al., “High Poverty Secondary Schools and the Juvenile
Justice System: How Neither Helps the Other and How That Could Change,” New Directions for Youth
Development, 2003 Fall (99), pp. 71-89 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University, 1999). Johanna Wald and
Daniel J. Losen, Eds., Deconstructing the School-to-Prison Pipeline: New Directions for Youth Development
#99 (Jossey-Bass, 2003).

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Part III
Afterword

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The Next Movement: Saving Our Children and
Youth and Our Nation’s Future and Soul
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet deprecate agitation… want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing
without a demand. It never did and it never will.
—Frederick Douglass

othing short of a transforming movement bubbling up from every nook and
cranny of America demanding that every child be able to live, learn, thrive and
reach safe adulthood and their highest potential will transform America’s values and priorities. Those Black and Latino citizens waiting for the next Dr. King or
Cesar Chavez to come and save us need to recognize they are not coming back. We
are it and need to get on with the business of protecting children. And we need to
stop waiting on political leaders to take care of children’s problems. They will respond
to what we demand. The ball is in our court!

N

Movement building is very, very hard. Discouraging. Unpredictable. Requires
deep faith and great perseverance. Deep inner reserves. Unwavering commitment to
a heartfelt vision. A sense of call worth fighting and risking all for. It requires discipline,
focus and long range planning, yet a willingness to turn on a dime and seize the
moment, and an ability to live with ambiguity and complexity.
Movement building for children requires openness to many different kinds of people with different needs, approaches, interests and talents without losing sight of the
overarching goal: to dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and to truly Leave No
Child Behind. It requires zeal and iron will to keep moving ahead when others yell
stop and throw up roadblock after roadblock, drag their feet or repeatedly pronounce
you politically unrealistic. It requires hanging in until we reach the finish line and have
addressed all of the crucial needs of children and their families. We must not be satisfied with a foot of child care, a leg of health care, a thigh of nutrition, a hand of housing,
a neck bone of education, a backbone of after-school care, a toe of gun control, a
shoulder of parental education and training. We must address the needs of the whole
child who does not come in pieces but in families and lives in communities shaped
by cultural and national values that must become more just in practice and honored by
responsible adults with power.

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Movements are not built in a day, year or decade. They are a long time coming.
They burst forth from many seeds planted in many places over time and from many
grievances that simmer, boil over and erupt, after being ignored or inadequately
addressed, into a mighty stream. Many decades before Brown v. Board of Education
and the Montgomery bus boycott, Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall and a small
band of brilliant Black lawyers quietly began developing legal theories and with courageous Black parents filing test cases to crumble the seemingly impenetrable walls of
legal segregation and inequality in public education in America. Black veterans
returned home from World War II fighting for a freedom they were denied at home.
A. Philip Randolph pushed for nondiscriminatory employment opportunities. Ida Wells
and the NAACP campaigned against lynching violence and discrimination against Black
citizens. All these and other things heated up the pot for social change. Myles Horton
at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee was bringing people of every race and
faith together for fellowship, community building and citizenship education. Eleanor
Roosevelt, Dr. King, Septima Clark and Mrs. Rosa Parks were among the many leaders, some prominent and some unknown, who gathered there and who helped lead
and seed the nonviolent army needed to overturn racial segregation in the south and
nation. Other training centers developed as safe havens for people seeking racial and
social change to come together to share experiences and strategies and find renewal.
Alex Haley’s former farm in Tennessee is CDF’s gathering place for spiritual
renewal, leadership training and community building for our 21st century movement
for children. It is where leaders participating in the Black Community Crusade for
Children (BCCC) met and debated and planted a number of seeds that have sprouted
including the CDF Freedom Schools® program, the Harlem Children’s Zone, annual
child gun violence reports, Beat the Odds® celebrations and scholarships for high
school youths who are joining with other young leaders to change the odds! Over
12,000 young leaders have been trained to become child advocates and teacher-mentors.
And more than 60,000 children have experienced the CDF Freedom Schools message
that they can make a difference and can achieve!
Building a children’s movement will require a critical mass of effective servantleaders of all ages, faiths, races and disciplines playing their role—each of us trying to
complement not duplicate or reinvent the wheel; to collaborate not compete; to serve
children and not just ourselves, our organizations or our political interests. I hope each
and all of us will pray daily to get ourselves out of the way for a bigger good and ask
only to be used to do whatever is needed to build a movement to save our children.
Adults must hold ourselves and others accountable and empower our children to
stand up to make a difference with us. We must not let words and photo-ops be substitutes for action or fig leaves for policies and budget choices that hurt children.
People who profess to care for children but who don’t do the hard work, or who promote or tolerate policies and budgets that leave millions of children behind must be
challenged. The litmus test for political leaders should be whether their votes close
the gap between the rich and the poor and ensure all children a Healthy Start, a Head
Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and the chance for a successful

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transition to adulthood. Children cannot eat or be housed or educated by promises.
Before the coffers of wealthy corporations and individuals, already overflowing with
massive federal tax breaks, are extended, children who are hungry, homeless, trying
to learn in crumbling schools, and in need of health care and child care should be protected. Every adult must vote and speak truth to power in all political parties and at
all levels of government and in every sector of American society until all of our young
are able to grow up healthy, nonviolent, respectful, educated and safe.

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Appendices

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Examples of Promising Approaches to Help
Children Avoid and Escape the Pipeline
The Abecederian Project

T

he Abecedarian Project was a carefully controlled scientific study of the potential
benefits of early childhood education for poor children. It provided high quality,
early educational full-day, full-year intervention programs to children from low-income
families from infancy through age 5. Low teacher-student ratios enabled students to
receive individualized attention. Emotional support and cognitive stimulation were at
the core of the educational experience. Children’s progress was monitored over time
with follow-up studies conducted at ages 12, 15 and 21. These studies consistently
found that low-income children who participated in this project had higher scores on
reading and math tests, and more advanced language skills than those children who
did not participate in the project. Abecedarian children also were more likely to attend
four-year colleges and delay parenthood. The program also benefited the mothers of
children who participated in the project. They achieved higher educational and
employment status than mothers whose children were not in the program. These
results were especially pronounced for teen mothers.
For additional information, visit http://www.fpg.unc.edu/~abc/

Amachi Program

T

he Amachi Program provides school-based, community-based and churchbased mentorship support to the children of incarcerated parents primarily
through faith-based congregations in the children’s own neighborhoods. Amachi partners with over 75 secular and faith-based institutions to screen mentors, monitor relationships and provide stipends to participating churches and organizations. Faith
institutions work with human service providers and public agencies (particularly justice
institutions) to identify children of prisoners and match them with caring adults. The
Amachi Training Institute provides hands-on training for local organizations mentoring
children of incarcerated parents. Currently there are 273 programs in 48 states that
use the Amachi model or were inspired by it. They have partnered with more than
6,000 churches and served more than 60,000 children.
For additional information, visit http://www.amachimentoring.org/index.html

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The Arizona Families F.I.R.S.T. (AFF) program

T

he Arizona Families F.I.R.S.T. (AFF) program is one of the successful examples
of Comprehensive Family Treatment. It is administered by the Department of
Economic Security in partnership with the Department of Health Services to promote
permanency for children and stability in families, protect the health and safety of
abused and/or neglected children, and promote economic security for families. AFF
provides an array of structured family-centered interventions to reduce or eliminate
abuse of and dependence on alcohol and other drugs, and to address other adverse
conditions related to substance abuse. AFF programs also include concrete support
services such as child care, transportation and housing. Some residential programs
also allow children to remain with their parents during treatment. Evaluations of the
AFF programs have shown positive results. Among the 3,931 clients participating
in AFF during fiscal year 2006, 98 percent had not experienced a subsequent substantiated report of abuse or neglect after enrollment in the AFF program.
Programs that adopt the Comprehensive Family Treatment approach provide services for parents and their children to help break the cycle of parental alcohol and drug
dependence and help families stay together. They are a cost-saving alternative to foster care. Such programs typically provide the following services or referrals for these
services: substance abuse treatment, children’s early intervention services, family
counseling, legal services, medical care, mental health services, nursery and preschool, parenting skills training, pediatric care, prenatal care, sexual abuse therapy,
relapse prevention, transportation, and job/vocational training or GED classes. These
services are offered by a number of providers. Evaluations of such programs show
positive outcomes for mothers and their children such as a decrease in alcohol abuse
and decline of arrests.
For additional information, visit http://www.azdes.gov/dcyf/first/

Beech Acres Parenting Center

B

eech Acres Parenting Center (Cincinnati, Ohio) offers a variety of services and
information to strengthen families for children. These services include parenting
education classes, a once-a-year conference on practical parenting called For the
Love of Kids, mediation services for families facing the challenges of divorce or conflicts between parents and teens, and a wide range of programs designed for families
of children with mental health issues, serious behavior problems, or drug and alcohol
addiction.
Three of their programs that specifically focus on children at risk are Therapeutic
Mentoring, Treatment Foster Care and the KONNECT project.
Beech Acres’ Therapeutic Mentoring Program is a community-based service
specifically designed to meet the individual needs of children at risk. Mentors help
youth identify and attain their mutually agreed upon treatment goals. Mentors also
guide youth through their daily experiences. Through these relationships, youth are

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also encouraged to identify their career goals, develop character and engage community resources. Therapeutic Mentoring is complemented by Family Mentoring,
which provides assistance to the entire family.
Treatment Foster Care provides temporary or emergency substitute family care
for emotionally, sexually or physically abused children. This program enables children to
experience safe, loving and nurturing home environments. Foster parents are licensed
and trained, and share in the goal of stabilizing children and reunifying families.
The KONNECT project (Konnecting Our Neighborhoods and Nurturing Each
Child Together) offers one-to-one mentorship for children ages 4–15 with one or both
parents in state or federal prison. Through quality weekly mentorship, KONNECT
aims to improve the child’s academic success, self concept, and social interactions
and values. It is a partnership between Beech Acres and S.O.A.R. Development
Corporation of Word of Deliverance Ministries for the World. Beech Acres provides
the mentorship recruiting and training for the program. In 2005, KONNECT had over
50 mentors and mentees.
For additional information, visit www.beechacres.org

Big Brothers Big Sisters

B

ig Brothers Big Sisters is the oldest and largest youth mentoring program in the
United States. Through the program, at-risk youth, ages 6–18, are paired in oneon-one professionally supported mentoring relationships with adult volunteers in a
community-based or school-based setting. In both cases, the volunteer and the young
person meet for one hour a week to talk, or read together or just do something fun.
These intentionally unstructured meetings are meant to cultivate relationships that will
help the youth navigate through everyday challenges. Research shows that youth participating in the program are less likely to use illegal drugs, skip school or engage in
violent acts. In 2005, more than 84 percent of teachers polled reported Little
Brothers and Sisters in school-based mentoring programs improved in at least one
academic subject. More than 80 percent of both Bigs and parents said Littles in community-based mentoring improved their self-confidence. In 2005, the organization
served 234,000 youth across 50 states including 10,000 children with at least one
incarcerated parent.
For additional information, visit
http://www.bbbs.org/site/c.diJKKYPLJvH/b.1539751/k.BDB6/Home.htm

Black Babies SMILE
(Start More Infants Living Equally Healthy)

B

lack Babies SMILE (BBS) is a maternal and infant health program aimed at

reducing the rate of infant mortality among African Americans in Montgomery
County, Maryland. Any African American woman living in Montgomery County is eligible to receive the program’s free services, including nurse visitation and case manAppendices

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agement. The program was created in 1999 in response to increasing concerns
about the lack of health care in the African American community. The African
American Health Program, which administers BBS, partners with churches, clinicians’ offices and early childhood programs to provide maternal and infant health
services. BBS offers education and training to women before pregnancy, nurse management during pregnancy, and campaigns to keep infants safe after pregnancy.
Nurse management focuses on providing services that are culturally competent,
strength-based and comprehensive. Nurses, together with the mothers, create a care
plan for the infants to ensure their safety and continued good health.
Currently, Black Babies SMILE serves more than 150 mothers and 90 infants.
The average age of the mothers is 27. Over 70 percent of participating mothers are
single parents and unemployed. Since the program’s inception, no pre-term or lowbirthweight babies have been born to mothers enrolled for prenatal care.
For additional information, visit www.onehealthylife.org

Boston Ten Point Coalition

T

he Coalition is an ecumenical group of Christian clergy and lay leaders working
to mobilize the Christian community around issues affecting Black and Latino
youth, especially those at risk for violence, drug abuse and other destructive behaviors.
The Coalition aims at making the local church more effective in rebuilding communities. It also seeks to build partnerships with community-based, governmental and
private sector institutions, which are also committed to the revitalization of the families and communities. The Ten Point Plan calls upon churches and faith-based agencies in the Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and Jamaica Plain communities of Boston
to work collaboratively to develop a ten point action plan aimed at reducing violence
and helping youth to develop more positive and productive life styles.
Among the services provided by the Ten Point Coalition is a community re-entry
initiative that provides mentoring and basic services to ex-offenders who were labeled
high-impact players and are considered least likely to succeed on their own as they
prepare to re-enter community life. Preliminary results demonstrated a 10 percent
recidivism rate with ex-offenders who normally exhibit an average 44 percent recidivism rate.
The Second Chance/Adopt a School program is another successful example of
the Ten Point Coalition’s work. In partnership with the Boston Police Department’s
Youth Violence Strike Force and Boston School Police, clergy and volunteers from
area churches make anti-violence presentations at local schools. Trained volunteers
also provide counseling on topics such as peer conflict and gang mediation. Teams
make weekly visits to the homes of youth at high risk for criminal behavior before they
actually get into trouble.
For additional information, visit www.bostontenpoint.org

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CASASTART

C

ASASTART (Striving Together to Achieve Rewarding Tomorrows) was developed by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University. It is a community-based, school-centered program designed to keep highrisk 8- to 13-year-old youths free of substance abuse and criminal involvement. The
program coordinates services by bringing together key stakeholders in community
schools, law enforcement agencies, social services, and health agencies. CASASTART uses a positive youth development framework and intensive case managers,
each of whom serves 15 children and their families. CASASTART is composed of
eight components designed to reduce neighborhood, family, peer group and individual risk factors. Program sites are able to adapt the program to fit their specific needs
and strengths. The style and level of implementation across the sites is not uniform.
Initially the program was first implemented in six cities; CASASTART currently operates in nearly 40 schools around the country.

Assessment of CASASTART programs operating in Austin, Texas; Bridgeport,
Connecticut; Memphis, Tennessee; Savannah, Georgia; and Seattle, Washington,
demonstrated that one year after program completion, compared with youths in the
control group, CASASTART youths were less likely to: use gateway and stronger
drugs; be involved in drug trafficking; commit violent offenses; and be negatively influenced by peers or to associate with delinquent peers. Children in the program were
more likely to be promoted to the next grade in school.
For additional information, visit http://www.casacolumbia.org

The Comer School Development Program

T

he Comer School Development Program (SDP) is the organization charged with
implementing the Comer Process in school communities. The Comer Process, a
school- and system-wide intervention formulated by Dr. James P. Comer, Maurice Falk
Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine’s Child Study
Center, aims to bridge child psychiatry and education.
School Development Programs, also known as Comer Schools, merge child and
adolescent development outcomes into the curriculum. Teachers shape classes
around ways to advance overall development, not just achieve certain test scores.
Another unique feature of Comer Schools is their emphasis on parent involvement in
major school decisions. Each school forms management teams composed of administrators, teachers and parents to handle routine tasks and serious concerns. All
major school decisions are made by this group. SDP also brings together school personnel, parents and students to take responsibility for children’s individual development and, consequently, their readiness to learn. These teams meet to address specific
concerns with student behavior. They also discuss how to make the school environment more conducive to learning.

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Relationships are key to the students’ success. SDP does not just focus on cognitive development, but on all developmental pathways. School districts fully adopting SDP have been able to significantly increase student academic performance in
math, reading and writing. Over the past 25 years, SDP has been used in over 1,000
schools. The program is now in place in more than 50 school districts nationwide.
For additional information, visit http://www.schooldevelopmentprogram.org/

El Paso County Department of Human Services

T

he El Paso County Department of Human Services in Colorado ensures that the
County’s residents are able to live and grow in an environment free of extreme
poverty, abuse or neglect. It has a common philosophy that begins with a vision to
eliminate poverty and family violence and builds on the community’s capacity to serve
families before calling upon government; it emphasizes prevention, early intervention,
protection and family strengths. Department staff provide integrated services in a culturally respectful, competent manner based on specific principles of service delivery.
Each division has its primary function but also links with other divisions for increased
effectiveness, efficiency and child and family services. Primary service areas provided
through public/private community partnerships include:
Prevention: Supporting economic self-sufficiency and independence, and preventing the need for more intensive services.
Preservation: Assisting families, youth and children in need, maintaining children in
their own homes or with relatives and working to keep fathers involved with their children.
Protection: Protecting at-risk or abused and/or neglected children, youth and adults
and providing permanency in the form of family reunification, guardianship or adoption.
Administrative Services: Providing services in support of the direct client services
and benefit programs.
For additional information, visit http://dhs.elpasoco.com/

Every Child Succeeds

E

very Child Succeeds (Ohio) is designed to ensure an optimal start for children by

providing education, support and counseling services to mothers. To date ECS
has served more than 8,500 families with over 177,500 home visits. Based on scientific principles correlating appropriate brain stimulation during the first three years
with the achievement of full social, mental and physical development, ECS maximizes
the development of high-risk children. The program provides intensive home visitation
for first-time, high-risk mothers and their infants for three years. ECS strives to
decrease abuse and neglect, reduce unintentional injuries, strengthen the parentchild relationship, improve utilization of diagnostic services, encourage health promotion, link families with primary care services and promote an optimal environment for
learning and emotional growth.

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While enrolled in this program, home visitors, who are recruited and trained, visit
families two to three times per month for the first year. If needed, the program also
offers mothers monthly visits during the second and third years. During the visits,
home visitors provide information, training on infant health, development, environmental safety and parenting, and access to health and human services. Parents are
also given a chance to meet other first-time parents. More than 20 community agencies provide home visitation services through the Every Child Succeeds program.
Preliminary findings include: ECS prenatal referrals have increased from 40 percent when the program began to almost 60 percent at the present time. Ninety-three
percent of ECS infants function at developmentally normal levels. Ninety-eight percent
of mothers in the ECS program have a medical home. Of mothers with smoking histories, 79 percent quit or drastically reduce tobacco use during pregnancy. Of the 29
percent of mothers who enter ECS with clinically significant levels of depression, half
are no longer depressed after nine months in the program; and observational data
suggest that the ECS injury prevention component significantly reduces hazards to
the child.
For additional information, visit www.everychildsucceeds.org

Federation of Families for Children’s
Mental Health (FFCMH)

T

his national family-run organization provides leadership and technical assistance
to family-run and other child services and focuses on building and sustaining
family-professional partnerships. FFCMH helps to engage families of children with
emotional, behavioral and mental challenges at all levels of program planning, implementation and evaluation. The Federation pays particular attention to the development
of partnerships between family-run, youth-centered organizations and mental health
services and juvenile and criminal justice systems. In addition, the Federation provides
advocacy at the national level for the rights of children and youth with emotional,
behavioral and mental health challenges and their families. Currently the Federation
has chapters or state organizations in 48 states.
For additional information, visit http://www.ffcmh.org/

Functional Family Therapy, Multisystemic Therapy and
Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care

W

hile there was a general consensus among researchers in 1990 that “nothing
worked” for serious juvenile offenders, research over the last 15 years has
proven that three treatment models are particularly effective for at-risk youthful offenders and their families: Functional Family Therapy (FFT), Multisystemic Therapy (MST)
and Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC).
All three programs are evaluated as “model programs” by the Blueprints for
Violence Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado. All three programs offer
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comprehensive, family-focused interventions aimed at the avoidance of incarceration
or other institutionalization of youth.
The effectiveness of Functional Family Therapy was recognized by the Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Center for Substance Abuse
Prevention, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Surgeon
General’s Report on Youth Violence. The program targets youth, ages 10 to 18, and
their families, whose problems range from acting out to conduct disorder to alcohol/
substance abuse. FFT can be provided in a variety of contexts, including schools,
child welfare, probation, parole/aftercare, mental health, and as an alternative to incarceration or out-of-home placement. Intervention ranges from, on average, eight to 12
one-hour sessions up to 30 sessions of direct service for more difficult situations.
Multisystemic Therapy provides treatment on a highly individualized basis that
addresses the factors in a youth’s environment contributing to behavior problems.
MST services are delivered in the natural environment (e.g., home, school, community). The treatment plan is designed in collaboration with family members. The typical
duration of home-based MST services is approximately four months, with multiple
therapist-family contacts occurring each week. Studies show these programs produce long-term reductions in recidivism and decrease psychiatric symptoms and
drug use.
Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care is an alternative to regular foster care,
group or residential treatment, and incarceration for youth who have problems with
chronic disruptive behavior. The MTFC treatment model can be implemented by any
agency or organization providing services to children with serious behavior problems
and their families. The intervention occurs in multiple settings and ranges from behavioral parent training and support, to foster parents, to school-based academic support and medication management. There are three versions of MTFC serving children
3 to 5, 6 to 11 and 12 to 17 years old.
All three programs are highly cost-effective. A cost-benefit analysis by the
Washington State Institute for Public Policy found that, for every dollar spent, these
three models ultimately save $6.85 (FFT), $8.38 (MST) and $14.07 (MTFC).
For additional information, visit:
FFT: http://www.fftinc.com/
MST: http://www.mstservices.com/
MTFC: http://www.mtfc.com/

The Incredible Years Series

T

he Incredible Years Series (IYS) are research-based, proven effective approaches
for reducing children’s aggression and behavior problems and increasing social
competence at home and at school. The Incredible Years Training Series offers comprehensive curricula designed to promote social competence and prevent, reduce
and treat aggression and related conduct problems in young children (ages 4 to 8

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years). The interventions that make up this series—parent training, teacher training
and child training programs—are guided by developmental theory concerning the role
of multiple interacting risk and protective factors (child, family and school) in the
development of conduct problems.
The IYS programs have been highly evaluated by a number of studies, including
six randomized control group evaluations of the parenting series by the program
developer and the University of Washington, as well as five independent replications
by other investigators. These evaluations indicated significant changes, such as
increases in parent use of effective limit-setting by replacing spanking and harsh discipline with non-violent discipline techniques and increased monitoring of children,
reductions in parental depression and increases in parental self-confidence, increases
in positive family communication and problem solving, reduced conduct problems in
children’s interactions with parents, and increases in their positive effect and compliance to parental commands.
For additional information, visit www.incredibleyears.com

King County System Integration Initiative

T

he King County System Integration Initiative was initiated in March 2004 to
improve the coordination and integration of the child welfare and juvenile justice
systems in King County, Washington. Child protection and well-being were seen as
a shared responsibility of communities, agencies, individuals, institutions (formal and
informal) and families. Similarly, responsibility for guidance and accountability for
delinquent youth requires the engagement of many supportive entities. Achievement
of desired outcomes for children and youth being served by child welfare and juvenile
justice agencies requires concerted effort and communication among many organizations and individuals, and the active engagement and support of their families.
The King County System Integration Initiative aims to reform the culture, policies,
practices, programs and protocols that currently make up a sometimes fragmented
method of service delivery. With the consultative and facilitative support of the Child
Welfare League of America (CWLA), it engaged in a comprehensive, strategic planning process to improve the coordination and integration of the juvenile justice, child
welfare, and other relevant youth-serving systems. CWLA developed a five-phase
strategic planning framework to help guide states and local jurisdictions in efforts to
establish a more coordinated, integrated child welfare and juvenile justice system that
more effectively impacts outcomes for dual jurisdiction youth and families. In 2007,
the King County Systems Integration Initiative continued to progress through the persistent efforts of a dedicated group of youth-serving professionals. The Executive
Committee and several subcommittees and task force groups have finalized additional critical components that will reshape the way in which King County reacts to
dual jurisdiction youth.

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This effort brought together a comprehensive representation of county and state
officials and personnel to conduct a thorough examination of data (both existing and
that which must be developed to better inform effective services), information sharing
processes, information management systems, program and fiscal resources, and
applicable federal and state statutes. The initiative developed a set of protocols
designed to support coordination and integration of case planning and service delivery for children and young people connected to multiple systems—with a primary
focus on child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
For additional information, visit
http://www.cwla.org/programs/juvenilejustice/jjkingcounty.htm

Life Long Family Connections, Families for Teens and
The California Permanency for Youth Project

Y

outh permanency programs across the country provide long-lasting support to
youth leaving foster care. Such programs search for family members or other
adults with whom youth feel safe and connected. Often youth get reconnected with
extended families, sometimes staff they have known and liked in the past. At other
times, new connections are made.
Life Long Family Connections for Adolescents in Massachusetts is a statewide initiative operated by Massachusetts Families for Kids with the state of Massachusetts.
The program uses seven approaches to develop lifelong relationships for adolescents
in the foster care system. All components are youth-driven, strengths-based and culturally competent. Staff members help youth make connections that will remain intact
after they leave care. One key component is the Speak Out Team, comprised of teens
and young adults who were once adopted or are currently in foster care who talk to
policymakers and practitioners about their need for a permanent family, offer support
to older youth still in care and help to train staff on permanency planning for older youth.
Families for Teens, operated by the New York City Administration for Children and
Families, works to ensure that no child ages out of foster care without a life-long connection to a caring adult committed to functioning in a parental capacity. The city
requires that youth be involved in efforts to identify committed adults with whom they
would like to be connected with whether through reunification, adoption, guardianship
or custody. Special attention has been focused on youth in residential treatment and
other congregate care settings.
The California Permanency for Youth Project (CPYP) is a project of the Public
Health Institute. Its Task Force—a statewide group with broad representation, including public and private organizations, youth and founders—provides technical assistance to 14 counties to develop a youth permanence plan that includes the following
target areas: administrative practices, permanency practice, identification of the project target group, staff development, partnerships, involvement of youth in finding their
own permanency, and integration with other initiatives.

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For additional information, visit
http://www.csrox.org/programs/family-connections.php
http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/home/home.shtml
http://www.cpyp.org

Missouri Department of Social Services,
Division of Youth Services

T

he state of Missouri is widely considered to have the best juvenile correctional
system in the nation. It closed its youth prisons in 1983 and divided the state
into five regions so that confined juveniles would remain within driving distance of
their homes. Each region has two facilities, housing no more than 40 youths each.
One serves as a day treatment clinic to prevent the escalation of criminal behavior;
the other is a lock-up for more serious offenders. Instead of punishment, the state
focuses on intensive individual and family counseling, academic and vocational education, and behavior modification.

While many states are adding mental health treatment as an occasional service,
Missouri infuses mental health into every aspect of its correctional programs.
Comprehensive treatment services include case management, family therapy, residential
care, juvenile court diversion, intensive case supervision, school-based day treatment
and aftercare.
From the first day of entering a Missouri DYS (Department of Youth Services)
facility, youth spend virtually every moment with a team of 10 other teens. They eat
together, study together, live together—all under the supervision of two trained youth
specialists. Any time a youth is troubled about anything, they can call a meeting of the
team to discuss the problem and work out solutions.
DYS youth also show promising educational progress. In 2002, 75 percent of the
youth made more progress than a typical public school student and 222 youth earned
their GEDs. Moreover, Missouri’s success has not come at the expense of the budget.
In 2002, DYS spent $103 per youth, while Louisiana spent $270 per youth, Maryland
spent $192, and Florida spent $271. All three states have youth recidivism rates dramatically higher than Missouri’s.
The most recent DYS recidivism report, compiled in February 2003, shows that
70 percent of youth released in 1999 avoided recommitment to a correctional program
within three years. The state has flatly disproved traditional concerns that public safety
will be compromised if services and treatment are emphasized over incarceration.
For additional information, visit http://www.dss.mo.gov/dys/index.htm

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Nurse-Family Partnership

T

he Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by licensed nurses to first-time
mothers (primarily young and single) throughout their pregnancies and during
the first two years of the babies’ lives. The program primarily targets low-income
women and those facing other risk factors, whose children are extremely at risk. The
nurses assist families in becoming economically self-sufficient by helping mothers
plan future pregnancies, continue their education and find jobs. The client’s partners,
extended family and friends, are encouraged to participate in the home visits. NurseFamily Partnership Implementing Agencies provide services at the community, city,
county or state level and are administered by a range of public and nonprofit entities
including state and county departments of public health, community-based health
centers, nursing associations and hospitals. Among the multiple positive program
effects found in the first trial of children at age 15 were a 48 percent reduction in
child abuse or neglect, and a 90 percent reduction in those identified as needing
supervision for incorrigible behavior. A 2005 RAND study reported a net benefit to
society of $34,148 per participant, with the bulk of the savings accruing to government, which equates to a $5.70 return per dollar invested in the Nurse-Family
Partnership. The Nurse Family Partnership is currently established in more than 290
counties in 23 states. Funding for the program comes from a variety of sources,
including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid and child abuse prevention dollars.
For additional information, visit http://www.nursefamilypartnership.org

Olweus Bullying Prevention Program

T

he violence and victimization that occur in schools today negatively affect both
individual students and the overall school environment. They decrease student
performance, attendance, safety and well-being. The Olweus Bullying Prevention
Program (BPP) seeks to decrease school violence by focusing on school-wide, classroom and individual interventions and involvement of parents. It offers a comprehensive
approach designed for use in elementary, middle or junior high schools.
School policies, rules against bullying behaviors, and predetermined consequences are part of the school-wide interventions. The anonymous bully/victim questionnaire provides schools with rich data that show where increased supervision of
school violence “hot spots” is needed. School-wide interventions focus on assessment, staff training and the development of coordinated supervision systems.
Classroom-level interventions consist of regular class meetings where students and
teachers discuss bullying and peer relations.
The program provides guidance for individual interventions for children who bully
others, for children who are bullied, and for those who watch the bullying of their
peers. The sessions also involve parents of these children. The commitment of school
teachers and administrators to implement BPP is a vital part of the success of the
program.

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The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program in the U.S. also includes a community
component that encourages schools to work with community violence prevention programs to take their anti-bullying messages beyond the schoolyard boundaries.
BPP has resulted in substantial reductions in both boys’ and girls’ reports of bullying, victimization, and overall anti-social behavior (i.e., vandalism, fighting, truancy,
etc.). It also has led to significant improvements in classroom order, social relationships and attitudes toward school and academics.
For additional information, visit www.clemson.edu/olweus

Operation Ceasefire

O

peration Ceasefire is considered a national model for effective and dramatic
youth and gang violence reduction. In one year, after record high levels of youth
homicides, the youth homicide rate (ages 15–24) in Boston, Massachusetts, dropped
by two-thirds, a phenomenon called “the Boston Miracle.” Similar success has been
achieved in other cities (Indianapolis; Minneapolis; Stockton, California; High Point
and Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Portland, Oregon; and Rochester, New York).
This happened when a broad coalition of federal, state, and local governmental agencies, nonprofit community service organizations, businesses, religious leaders, parents and resident stakeholders came together and agreed on “Operation Ceasefire,”
a coordinated city-wide strategy to deter youth and gang firearm violence. The strategy included regular meetings of law enforcement officers with groups responsible for
the violence to reiterate that violence would not be tolerated. This element of the program reversed the street pressure in which groups egged on their members to commit
violence. Community and faith leaders sent a loud, clear and consistent moral message to gangs, as fellow community members, that the killing was wrong and must
stop. Participants and evaluators reported that the message was effective even with
the most hardened offenders. This confirmation made the position of the community
clear, validated any subsequent steps by law enforcement, and made it impossible for
violent offenders to believe that they had community support. Finally, working with
community partners, cities built a network of extensive services, targeted first at the
core group of members of violent groups and gangs. These youths and young adults,
in effect, “moved to the front of the line” for services. This measure focuses help on
any violent offenders who will take it.
For additional information, visit
http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/pubs/gun_violence/profile21.html

PACE Center for Girls

P

ACE Center for Girls (Florida) provides a non-residential delinquency prevention
program in 21 locations statewide, targeting the unique needs of females 12–18
who are identified as dependent, truant, runaway, ungovernable, delinquent or in need

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of academic skills. PACE accepts referrals from the juvenile justice system, the
Department of Children and Families, school personnel, community services agencies,
parents, family members and friends as well as self-referrals. Its purpose is to intervene and prevent school withdrawal, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, substance
abuse and welfare dependency.
The success of the PACE program is based on two key factors: a focus on understanding the relationship between victimization and female juvenile crime, and a
strength-based approach that focuses on the unique potential of each girl, not on mistakes or poor choices she has made. Components of the PACE program include:
academic education, individualized attention, gender-specific life management skills,
mental health treatment, parental involvement, community volunteer opportunities and
a three-year, comprehensive follow-up program.
In fiscal year 2005–2006, PACE provided quality social and educational services for 2,312 Florida girls and their families. Currently there are 19 PACE centers,
three outreach programs and a pre-teen center operating in Florida.
For additional information, visit http://www.pacecenter.org

Parent Institute for Quality Education

T

he Parent Institute for Quality Education (California) offers a free nine-week parent involvement education course to help parents understand how they can
become an integral part of their children’s education. PIQE is a culturally sensitive
parent training program taught by credentialed teachers trained by PIQE. Classes are
offered in the parent’s primary language so that they can feel comfortable and confident in their interactions with other parents and the instructor. The program’s intent
is to provide parents with information, knowledge, skills and a personal commitment
to improve the conditions surrounding the educational and personal development of
their children.
Since the program started in Sherman Elementary School in San Diego,
California, in October 1987, more than 375,000 parents from 1,500 elementary, middle and high schools, in districts within San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose,
Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Monterey, Sacramento, Stanislaus, Alameda,
San Francisco and Shasta counties, have graduated from PIQE’s parent involvement
training classes. In addition, approximately 20,000 parents have participated in
PIQE’s follow-up “coaches” program, which provides one-on-one information to parents during a four-month period about how to access school services and promote
the aims of PIQE for parent involvement.
For additional information, visit http://www.piqe.org/

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Perry Preschool Project

T

he Perry Preschool Project (PPP) provides disadvantaged children with the
opportunity to receive high-quality early childhood education. Children ages
three and four who come from low-income families are eligible for the program. The
program lasts for two years and operates for 2.5 hours each day, Monday through
Friday. In addition to providing quality education, teachers also make periodic home
visits. The project offers a developmentally centered curriculum that engages children
as active, self-initiated learners; small classroom settings with 20 children and at least
two staff who are trained in early childhood development and education and actively
communicate with parents; sensitivity to the specific needs of disadvantaged children
and their families, which includes providing meals and recommending other social
service agencies; and ongoing monitoring and evaluation of both teachers’ activities
and children’s behaviors and development.
The longitudinal study conducted in 2005 found that adults at age 40 who had
participated in the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold
a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high
school than adults who did not have preschool. Overall, the study documented a
return to society of more than $16 for every tax dollar invested in the early care and
education program.
For additional information, visit
http://www.highscope.org/Research/PerryProject/perrymain.htm

State Reentry Services for Youth

R

eintegration back into school and the community is a critical transition for youth
who have been adjudicated. Studies have established that lower recidivism rates
are directly related to youths’ positive level of engagement with their community. Youth
returning from incarceration have many needs that must be addressed, including educational, mental health, vocational and recreational. Because there are multiple state
agencies involved, the likelihood of information being delayed or even lost is great.
Parents and family members must also be integral partners in this process. Many states
have developed effective strategies for assisting adjudicated youth.
The West Virginia Division of Corrections designed a reentry program to include academic and vocational education assessment and opportunities, substance abuse
treatment, sex offender treatment, crime victim awareness training, cognitive restructuring and life skills planning. The program targets high-risk convicted felons and
parolees ages 18–24.
The West Virginia Division of Juvenile Services has a Reentry Court Program currently being implemented in several counties throughout the state. Collaborative partnerships with various local government agencies, community service organizations
and faith-based organizations are used to provide institutional and community-based

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transition services to offenders ages 14–21 who are returning to the northeastern
region of the state.
The New York City school system places students who are in residential/detention placement on a parallel list to facilitate tracking and to ensure that students are
not removed from school enrollment during the residential/detention period.
Kentucky requires that each school district have a “bridge coordinator” who facilitates and manages cross-agency and parental involvement in transitioning adjudicated children back into school. The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice’s reentry initiative provides institutional and community-based services to male offenders
ages 14–16 returning to counties throughout the state. The transitional services
include employment training and job placement, educational services, vocational
training, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, healthcare services,
counseling, family support services, community support services, housing assistance,
mentoring, aftercare planning and services, monitoring and supervision, and intensive
case management.
For additional information, visit http://www.reentry.gov/sar/welcome.html
and see “A Summary of Best Practices in School Reentry for Incarcerated Youth
Returning Home,” by Virginia’s JustChildren.

Wings of America

W

ings of America (WOA) aims to increase the self-esteem, health, wellness and
leadership skills of American Indian and Alaskan Native youth. Through youth
development programs incorporating running, Wings has found a unique way to help
Indian youth overcome their life challenges, and to nurture and maintain their proud
heritage. Running has an integral place in the spiritual and ceremonial traditions of
American Indian people.
WOA coordinates several programs throughout the year. In addition to sponsoring cross-country teams in events around the country, WOA also coordinates minirunning and fitness camps for youth ages 6–14. The week-long camps incorporate
traditional Native American games, fitness and running exercises, substance abuse
prevention and nutrition education to teach youth about positive and healthy life
choices.
Overall, WOA participants have lower rates of arrests and substance abuse. They
also attain higher levels of education and maintain healthier lifestyles. Ninety-nine percent of Wings’ participants graduate from high school. Ninety-four percent of participants enter a 2- or 4-year college.
For additional information, visit www.wingsofamerica.org

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Wraparound Milwaukee

W

raparound Milwaukee is a unique type of managed care program operated by
the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division. It is designed to provide
comprehensive, individualized and cost-effective care to children with complex mental
health and emotional needs. Wraparound Milwaukee is one of over 10 “wraparound”
programs across the country.
Wraparound Milwaukee serves families living in Milwaukee County who have a
child with serious emotional or mental health needs, is referred through the Child
Welfare or Juvenile Justice System and is at immediate risk of placement in a residential treatment center, juvenile correctional facility or psychiatric hospital.
The program serves more than 800 youth, the majority of whom are adjudicated
delinquent. Seventy percent of Wraparound Milwaukee’s population is male. Sixty-five
percent are African American, 28 percent are Caucasian, and 7 percent are Hispanic.
Most of the youth live below the poverty line and come from female-led, single parent
homes. In 2002, the average age at intake was 13.2.
Wraparound Milwaukee emphasizes the importance of parental choice and family
independence. In addition to partnering with families, the program also closely works
with several other government agencies including juvenile justice, child welfare and
education, allowing families to receive various services and resources at one central
location.
Another essential element of the Wraparound program is the Care Coordination
program. Each child and family is assigned a care coordinator who meets with the
family, completes a strength-based evaluation and develops a care plan. The coordinator also serves as a liaison between the family and the Wraparound Milwaukee
Provider Network, completing all formal authorization requests. Care plans are
revised every 90 days and include such activities as peer groups, recreation activities,
parenting classes and mentoring relationships.
For additional information, visit
http://www.milwaukeecounty.org/display/router.asp?docid=7851

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Poverty
• In 2005, almost 13 million children, more
than one in six, lived in poverty.1
• Fourth-graders in U.S. public elementary
schools with the highest poverty levels
have significantly lower reading scores
compared to their counterparts in
schools with lower poverty levels.2
• Being raised in poverty contributes to a
greater likelihood of involvement in crime
and violence.3
• Low family income has repeatedly been
associated with self-reported teen violence
and convictions for violent offenses.4

• In 2005, more than one in three Black
children—3.8 million—lived in poverty;
almost 3 in 10 Hispanic children—4.1
million—and 1 in 10 White, non-Hispanic
children—4.3 million—were poor.5
• The poverty rate for Black and Hispanic
children is far higher than it is for White
children. Thirty-four percent of Black
children were living in poverty in 2005,
as were 28 percent of Hispanic children
and 10 percent of White, non-Hispanic
children.6
• From 2000 to 2005, the number of Black
children living in extreme poverty
increased by 22 percent from 1.6 million
to over 1.9 million. The number of
Hispanic children living in extreme
poverty increased by 45 percent, from
1.2 million to 1.7 million.7
• The income levels for Black and Hispanic
families with children were about half the
level of White families with children in
2005. The median income for White,
non-Hispanic families with children was
$66,235 compared to $31,705 for Black
families and $36,403 for Hispanic families with children.8
• Black and Hispanic workers holding the
same educational credentials as White
workers experience higher unemployment
rates.9
• In 2005, 29.2 percent of Black and 23.7
percent of Latino children lived in families
that were hungry or at risk of hunger.10

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline (continued)
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Family and Community
• Being born to a teenage mother is a
strong predictor of later delinquency.11
• Economic hardship and stressful life
events are associated with a lack of parent-child involvement and attachment.12

• A Black child is more than twice as likely
as a White, non-Hispanic child to live
with a single parent, almost three times
as likely to live with neither parent, and
almost twice as likely to be born to a
teenaged mother.15

• A lack of parental involvement and
interaction with children may increase
children’s future risk of violence.13
• Social disorganization and concentrated
poverty within the community lead to residents’ decreased willingness to intervene
when children are engaging in antisocial/
unlawful acts.14

Health Care
• About 1 in 12 babies born in the United
States—8.1 percent, or over 331,000
babies, in 2004—is low birthweight. This rate
has been increasing steadily since 1984.16
• A child born at low birthweight is about
50 percent more likely to score below
average on measures of both reading
and mathematics at age 17. 17
• A child born at very low birthweight is
more likely to experience educational disadvantages that can persist into early
adulthood.18
• Adolescents with elevated blood lead
levels at birth report higher levels of
delinquency and anti-social behavior.19
• A history of lead poisoning has been
associated with male adult criminality.20
• Children with disabling asthma have
almost twice as many restricted activity
days and lost school days as children
with impairments due to other types of
chronic conditions.21

206 Children’s Defense Fund

• Black and Hispanic babies are more likely
than White babies to be born to mothers
who did not receive early prenatal care.23
• The percentage of Black babies born at
low birthweight, putting them at risk for a
range of postnatal complications, is
almost twice that of White babies.24
• Black children are 69 percent more likely
than White children to be uninsured.
Latino children are more than three times
as likely as White children to be without
health insurance.25
• Black and Mexican-American children living
in older housing (pre-1946) are more
likely to have elevated blood lead levels
than White children living in comparable
housing—22 and 13 percent as
opposed to seven percent.26
• Minority children with asthma were more
likely to have inadequate care to control
their asthma due to socioeconomic
factors as well as disparities in physician

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline (continued)
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Health Care (continued)
• More than 1 in 8 teens ages 12-17 is a
current tobacco user; 1 in 6 teens is a
current alcohol user, including 1 in 10
who is a binge drinker.22

prescribed treatment, preventive treatment,
and lack of patient access to quality
health care.27
• Black children and children from poor
families are not only more likely to have
asthma than White or Latino children and
children from higher income families, they
also are more likely to suffer from disabling
asthma.28
• Tobacco and alcohol use are most common among White, non-Hispanic teens
ages 12-17, and least common among
Black teens in the same age group.
Alcohol use among Hispanic teens is
similar to that among White, non-Hispanic
teens.29

Early Childhood
• At-risk toddlers not enrolled in a quality
child care and development program
were more likely to become chronic law
breakers as adults than their peers who
were in the program.30
• Even mild undernourishment, the kind
most frequently found in the United
States, impairs cognitive function and
can do so throughout the life of a child.31
• Children participating in high quality early
education had lower rates of juvenile
delinquency, fewer arrests, and fewer
juvenile court petitions than children who
did not participate in the program.32
• At-risk children who participated in a high
quality early education program were
more likely than their peers who did not
participate in the program to own their
own homes at age 40; men who participated in the program were more likely to
be living with their children.33

• 45 percent of Latino and 50 percent of
Black three- to five-year-olds are read to
every day compared to 68 percent of
White children.35
• Only one-third of Black and two-fifths
of Latino kindergarteners have home
computers.36
• In a study of entering kindergarteners in
Fall 1998, 15 percent of Black and
Hispanic children were in the top quartile
on reading readiness, compared to 30
percent of White children. Ten percent
of the Black children, 14 percent of the
Hispanic children, and 32 percent of the
White children were in the top range in
math. On a general knowledge test, only
6 percent of Blacks and 12 percent of
Hispanics were in the top quartile,
compared to 34 percent of Whites.37

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline (continued)
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Early Childhood (continued)
• Children who have graduated from Head
Start are less likely to repeat a grade,
less likely to need special education, and
more likely to graduate from high school
than their peers who have not participated in Head Start.34

Education
• Low academic achievement and academic
failure in the elementary grades increase
the risk for later violent behavior.38
• Research shows that repeating a grade
can result in negative academic outcomes for those retained compared to
those with similar academic problems
who are not retained. Among those
negative outcomes is a significantly
increased dropout rate.39
• Numerous studies demonstrate that
students who are suspended or expelled
are more likely than their peers to drop
out of school altogether.40
• One study found that being suspended
or expelled is one of the top three schoolrelated reasons for dropping out.41

• Among fourth graders, 41 percent of
Whites are reading at grade level compared to 16 percent of Latinos and 13
percent of Blacks. In math, 39 percent of
White eighth graders perform at grade level
compared to 13 percent of Latinos and 9
percent of Blacks.45
• 9.3 percent of White students have
been retained in grade at least once,
compared to 18.0 percent of American
Indian, 17.5 percent of Black, and 13.2
percent of Hispanic students.46
• 14.6 percent of White students have been
suspended or expelled in grades seven
through 12 compared to 38.2 percent of
Native Americans, 35.1 percent of
Blacks, and 19.6 percent of Latinos.47

• Higher suspension rates are associated
with higher rates of juvenile
incarceration.42

• Black youth represent a disproportionate
percent of students who are suspended;
they also are disproportionately
incarcerated.48

• One study found that more than 30 percent
of sophomores who dropped out of
school had been suspended, a rate three
times that of peers who stayed in school.43

• In 1999, 59 percent of Black men in their
early thirties who had dropped out of
high school had prison records.49

• Two-thirds of adult prisoners in 2003 had
less than a regular high school diploma,
more than twice the rate found in the
general adult population.44

• Black children are more than twice as
likely as White, non-Hispanic children to be
placed in programs for mental retardation,
and two-thirds more likely to be placed in
programs for emotional disturbance.50

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline (continued)
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Education (continued)
• Black 10-year-olds are almost twice as
likely as White, non-Hispanic 10-yearolds to be two or more years behind
modal grade level for their age. Black 16year-olds are more than twice as likely as
their White, non-Hispanic peers to be
two or more years behind.51

Child Abuse and Neglect
• Low family income is the single best
predictor of child abuse and neglect.
Children who live in families with annual
incomes less than $15,000 are 22 times
as likely to be abused or neglected as
children living in families with annual
incomes of $30,000 or more.52
• Abused and neglected children are up to
six times as likely to be delinquent and up
to three times as likely to be arrested as
an adult as children who are not abused
or neglected.53
• Children involved in the juvenile justice
system are more likely to have a history of
child abuse and neglect than children
outside the system. Abuse rates ranging
from 25 percent to 66 percent have been
reported in studies of youth in the juvenile
justice system.54
• Children in foster care have higher rates
of grade retention, lower scores on standardized tests, and higher absenteeism,
tardiness, truancy and dropout rates.55

• Black children make up 16 percent of the
child population, yet they represent 23
percent of substantiated cases of child
abuse and neglect and 32 percent of
children in foster care.59
• Children of color enter foster care at
higher rates, even when their families
have the same characteristics as comparable White children and families.60
• Children of color remain in foster care for
longer periods of time—a median stay of
17 months for African American children
versus nine months for White children.61
• African American children in foster care
have a much lower probability than White
children for reunification and adoption.
Analyses of national data show that
White children are four times as likely as
African American children to be reunified
and twice as likely to be adopted.62

• 15-year-old students in out-of-home care
are about half as likely as other
students to have graduated from high
school five years later; significantly higher
percentages of those in care have dropped
out (55 percent) or been incarcerated
(10 percent).56

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline (continued)
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Child Abuse and Neglect (continued)
• Youth in foster care are at a higher risk
for homelessness, unemployment, public
assistance, and juvenile or adult court
involvement after leaving care.57
• Young adults who have been in foster
care suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) at nearly five times the
rate of the general population, and higher
even than rates reported among
American war veterans.58

Mental Health
• The U.S. General Accountability Office
reported that thousands of families have
relinquished custody of their children to
the child welfare or juvenile justice systems so they could get treatment.63
• A report by the House Committee on
Government Reform found that two-thirds
of the youth detention facilities in 47
states held youth waiting for mental health
services who had not been charged with
a crime. Over a six-month period in
2003, nearly 15,000 incarcerated youth
waited for mental health services.64
• Recent studies have consistently found
65 to 70 percent of youth in the juvenile
justice system have at least one diagnosable mental health disorder; approximately
one-fourth have disorders so severe that
their ability to function is significantly
impaired.65
• A national study of children ages 2 to
14 who are involved in the child welfare
system, either at home or in foster care,
found that nearly half had clinically significant emotional or behavioral problems
but only about one-quarter received
specialized mental health treatment.66

210 Children’s Defense Fund

• Black and Hispanic children in foster
care are less likely than White children in
care to receive specialized mental health
services.67
• Poor families underutilize mental health
services, often reflecting lack of access
and appropriateness of available services.
The 1999 Surgeon General’s Report on
Mental Health noted that the relationship
between the underutilization of mental health
services and poverty is especially significant for minority children and families.68

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Selected Research on Risk Factors Contributing
to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline (continued)
Cradle to Prison Pipeline
Indicators

Impact on Poor and
Minority Children

Juvenile Delinquency
• Compared to individuals arrested as
adults but not arrested as juveniles,
those arrested as juveniles were two to
six times as likely to be arrested as
adults.69
• Income has a significant effect on youth
participation in serious criminal activity
(including using a weapon, robbery,
assault, or selling hard drugs). Youth from
low-income households have an
increased likelihood of participating in
serious crimes compared to those from
high-income households.70

• In 2005, Black juveniles ages 10-17 were
more than twice as likely as White juveniles
to be arrested. Black juveniles were almost
five times as likely as White juveniles to
be arrested for violent offenses, and
twice as likely to be arrested for drug
offenses.71
• Although they represent just 39 percent
of the U.S. juvenile population, minority
youths represent 60 percent of committed
juveniles.72
• Black juveniles are nearly four times as
likely as White juveniles to be in secure
residential placement. Hispanic juveniles
are almost twice as likely as Whites to
be in such placement; American Indian
juveniles more than twice as likely.73

1

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in
the United States: 2005,” Current Population Reports, P60-231 (August 2006), Table B-2.

2

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, “Public
Elementary/Secondary School Universe Study,” 1999-2000, at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2004/pirlspub/9.
asp?nav=2.

3

Robert J. Sampson and Janet L. Lauritsen, “Violent Victimization and Offending: Individual-, Situational-, and
Community-Level Risk Factors,” Understanding and Preventing Violence, Vol. 3, Social Influences, Albert J.
Reiss and Jeffrey A. Roth, eds. (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994), pp. 1-114.
4

Bill Henry, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt and Phil A. Silva, “Temperamental and Familial Predictors of
Violent and Nonviolent Criminal Convictions: Age 3 to Age 18,” Developmental Psychology, Vol. 32, No. 4
(1996), pp. 614-623.
5

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in
the United States: 2005,” Current Population Reports, P60-231 (August 2006), Table B-2.

6

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in
the United States: 2005,” Current Population Reports, P60-231 (August 2006), Table B-2.

7

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,” Table 2: Age, Sex, Household Relationship, Race
and Hispanic Origin by Ratio of Income to Poverty Level: 2000,” at http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032001/
pov/new02_003.htm; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Table POV01: Age and Sex of
All People, Family Members and Unrelated Individuals Iterated by Income-to-Poverty Ratio and Race: 2005,
Below 50% of Poverty—Black Alone,” at http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032006/pov/new01_50_06.htm;
and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Table POV01: Age and Sex of All People, Family

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211

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Members and Unrelated Individuals Iterated by Income-to-Poverty Ratio and Race: 2005, Below 50% of
Poverty—Hispanic Origin,” at http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032006/pov/new01_50_09.htm. Calculations
by Children’s Defense Fund.
8

U.S. Census Bureau, “Table FINC-03. Presence of Related Children Under 18 Years Old—All Families, by
Total Money Income in 2005, Type of Family Work Experience in 2003, Race and Hispanic Origin of
Reference Person,” at http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032006/faminc/new03_000.htm.

9

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Table 7: Employment status of the civilian noninstitutional population 25 years and over by educational attainment, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity,” at
http://stats.bls.gov/cps/cpsa2006.pdf.

10

Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews and Steven Carlson, Household Food Security in the United States, 2005,
Economic Research Report No. 29, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service (November
2006), Table 6.

11

Amy Conseur, Frederick P. Rivara, Robert Barnoski and Irvin Emanuel, “Maternal and perinatal risk factors
for later delinquency,” Pediatrics, Vol. 99, No. 6 (June 1997), pp. 785-790.

12

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, OJJDP Fact Sheet #103
(April 1999), “Highlights of Findings from the Rochester Youth Development Study.”

13

David P. Farrington, “Early Predictors of Adolescent Aggression and Adult Violence,” Violence and Victims,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (1989), pp. 79-100.

14

Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush and Felton Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime:
A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science, Vol. 277 (August 15, 1997), pp. 918-924.

15

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, March 2006 Current Population Survey, America’s
Families and Living Arrangements, Table C2, at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam/
cps2006.html; and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics,
National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1 (September 29, 2006), Table 14. Calculations by Children’s
Defense Fund.

16

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, “Births: Final Data
for 2004,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1 (September 29, 2006), Tables 32 and 34.

17 Naomi Breslau, Nigel S. Paneth and Victoria C. Lucia, “The lingering academic deficits of low birthweight
children,” Pediatrics, Vol. 114, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 1035-1040.
18

Maureen Hack, Daniel J. Flannery, Mark Schluchter, Lydia Cartar, Elaine Borawski and Nancy Klein,
“Outcomes in young adulthood for very-low-birth-weight infants,” The New England Journal of Medicine,
Vol. 36, No. 3 (January 17, 2002), pp. 149-157.

19

David C. Bellinger, “Lead,” Pediatrics, Vol. 113, No. 4 (April 2004), pp. 1016-1022.

20 Ibid., citing Deborah W. Denno, Biology and Violence: From Birth to Adulthood (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
21 Paul W. Newacheck and Neal Halfon, “Prevalence, impact, and trends in childhood disability due to asthma,”
Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Vol. 154 (March 2000), pp. 287-293.
22

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, Office of Applied Statistics, “2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Detailed Tables,”
at http://oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k5NSDUH/tabs/Sect2peTabs1to57.htm, Tables 2.27B and 2.53B.

23

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital
Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1 (September 29, 2006), Tables 26a and 26b.

24

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital
Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1 (September 29, 2006), Table 23.

25

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Revised 2006 Annual Social and Economic
Supplement to the Current Population Survey (revised April 2007). Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

26

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Healthy People 2010, 2nd Ed. (November 2000), Vol. 1,
pp. 8-21.

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27

Alexander N. Ortega, Peter J. Gergen, A. David Paltiel, Howard Bauchner, Kathleen D. Belanger and Brian
P. Leaderer, “Impact of site of care, race, and Hispanic ethnicity on medication use for childhood asthma,”
Pediatrics, Vol. 109, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. e109-e114; Edwin D. Boudreaux, Stephen D. Emond, Sunday
Clark and Carlos A. Camargo, Jr., “Race/ethnicity and asthma among children presenting to the emergency
department: Differences in disease severity and management,” Pediatrics, Vol. 111, No. 5 (May 2003), pp.
e615-e621; and Lara J. Akinbami and Kenneth C. Schoendorf, “Trends in childhood asthma: Prevalence,
health care utilization, and mortality,” Pediatrics, Vol. 110, No. 2 (August 2002), pp. 315-322.

28

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, “Summary Health
Statistics for U.S. Children: National Health Interview Survey, 2005,” Vital and Health Statistics, Series 10, No.
213 (2006), Table 1; and Newacheck and Halfon, “Prevalence, impact, and trends in childhood disability due
to asthma.”

29

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, Office of Applied Statistics, “2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Detailed Tables,”
at http://oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k5NSDUH/tabs/Sect2peTabs1to57.htm, Tables 2.27B and 2.53B.

30

Lawrence J. Schweinhart, The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40: Summary,
Conclusions, and Frequently Asked Questions (Ypsilanti, Michigan: High/Scope Educational Research
Foundation. 2005).

31

Kathleen S. Gorman, “Malnutrition and Cognitive Development: Evidence from Experimental/QuasiExperimental Studies among the Mild-to-Moderately Malnourished,” The Journal of Nutrition, Vol. 125 (1995),
pp. 2239S-2244S; and Ruth Morley and Alan Lucas, “Nutrition and Cognitive Development,” British Medical
Journal, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1997), pp. 123-134.

32 Lawrence J. Schweinhart, The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40: Summary,
Conclusions, and Frequently Asked Questions (Ypsilanti, Michigan: High/Scope Educational Research
Foundation. 2005).
33

Ibid.

34

W. Steven Barnett, “The Battle Over Head Start: What the Research Shows,” Science and Public Policy
congressional briefing on the impact of Head Start (September 13, 2002).
35

Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of
Well-Being 2007 (2007), Table ED1.

36 Valerie E. Lee and David T. Burkam, Inequality at the Starting Gate: Social Background Differences in
Achievement as Children Begin School (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2002).
37

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, America’s Kindergartners, Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, NCES 2000-070 (February 2000),
Tables 2, 3 and 4.

38 U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Predictors of Youth
Violence, NCJ 179065 (April 2000), p. 4.
39 Jay P. Heubert and Robert M. Hauser, Eds., High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion and Graduation,
Board on Testing and Assessment, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National
Research Council (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 129.
40 Terry Keleher, “Racial Disparities Related to School Zone Tolerance Policies,” Testimony to the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights, February 18, 2000. Applied Research Center, at http://www.arc.org/
content/84/36/.
41

Ruth B. Ekstrom, Margaret R. Goertz, Judith M. Pollack and Donald A. Rock, “Who Drops Out of High
School and Why? Findings from a National Study,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Spring 1986),
pp. 356-373.

42

Russell Skiba, Ada Simmons, Lori Staudinger, Marcus Rausch, Gayle Dow and Renae Feggins,
“Consistent Removal: Contributions of Discipline to the School-Prison Pipeline,” Paper presented at
the School-to-Prison Pipeline Conference, The Civil Rights Project, May 16-17, 2003, at
http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/pipeline03/Skibbav3.pdf.

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43

Ruth B. Ekstrom, Margaret R. Goertz, Judith M. Pollack and Donald A. Rock, “Who Drops Out of High
School and Why? Findings from a National Study,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Spring 1986),
pp. 356-373, Table 1.

44 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Literacy Behind Bars: Results from
the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey (May 2007), Table 3-1. Calculations by
Children’s Defense Fund.
45

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of
Educational Progress, The Nation’s Report Card: Mathematics 2005 (October 2005), Figure 2, at
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006453; and U.S. Department of Education, National
Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress, The Nation’s Report Card:
Reading 2005 (October 2005), Figure 2, at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006451.

46

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Status and Trends in the Education
of Blacks (September 2003), Supplemental Table 3.2.

47

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Status and Trends in the Education
of Blacks (September 2003), Supplemental Table 3.2.

48 Russell Skiba, Ada Simmons, Lori Staudinger, Marcus Rausch, Gayle Dow and Renae Feggins,
“Consistent Removal: Contributions of Discipline to the School-Prison Pipeline,” Paper presented
at the School-to-Prison Pipeline Conference, The Civil Rights Project, May 16-17, 2003, at
http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/pipeline03/Skibbav3.pdf.
49 Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in
U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 151-169.
50 U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2004 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights
Survey, unpublished tabulations. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.
51

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “School Enrollment—Social and Economic
Characteristics of Students: October 2005,” Table 2, at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/
school/cps2005.html. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

52

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children, National Center on Child
Abuse and Neglect, Executive Summary of the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect
(1996), at http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/statsinfo/nis3.cfm.

53

Cathy S. Widom and Michael G. Maxfield, An Update on the “Cycle of Violence,” U.S. Department of
Justice, National Institute of Justice (February 2001); Carolyn Smith and Terence P. Thornberry, “The
Relationship Between Childhood Maltreatment and Adolescent Involvement in Delinquency,” Criminology, Vol.
33, No. 4 (1995), pp. 451-481; and Matthew T. Zingraff, Jeffrey Leiter, Kristen A. Myers and Matthew C.
Johnsen, “Child Maltreatment and Youthful Problem Behavior,” Criminology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1993), pp. 173-202.

54 Randy K. Otto, Jonathan J. Greenstein, Michael K. Johnson and Robert M. Friedman, “Prevalence of Mental
Disorders Among Youth in the Juvenile Justice System,” in Joseph J. Cocozza, Ed., Responding to the Mental
Health Needs of Youth in the Juvenile Justice System (November 1992), pp. 7-48; and Richard Wiebush,
Raelene Freitag and Christopher Baird, Preventing Delinquency Through Improved Child Protection Services,
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (July 2001).
55

National Conference of State Legislatures, Children’s Policy Institute, Educating Children in Foster Care
(December 2003).

56 Cheryl Smithgall, Robert Matthew Gladden, Eboni Howard, Robert Goerge and Mark Courtney,
Educational Experiences of Children in Out-of-Home Care (Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University
of Chicago, 2004).
57 Peter J. Pecora, Jason Williams, Ronald C. Kessler, A. Chris Downs, Kirk O’Brien, Eva Hiripi, and Sarah
Morello, Assessing the Effects of Foster Care: Early Results from the Casey National Alumni Study
(December 2003), at <http://www.casey.org/Resources/Publications/NationalAlumniStudy.htm>.
58 Assessing the Effects of Foster Care: Mental Health Outcomes from the Casey National Alumni Study (no
date), at http://www.casey.org/Resources/Publications/NationalAlumniStudy.htm.
59 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007
(2006), Table 14; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families,
Child Maltreatment 2005 (2007), Table 3-11; and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,

214 Children’s Defense Fund

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Administration for Children and Families, AFCARS Report 13, Preliminary FY 2005 Estimates as of
September 2006 (October 2006), at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/tar/
report13.pdf. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.
60 Robert B. Hill, Synthesis of Research on Disproportionality in Child Welfare: An Update (Casey-CSSP
Alliance for Racial Equity in the Child Welfare System, October 2006), at http://www.caseyfamilyservices.org/
pdfs/0226_CC_BobHillPaper_FINAL.pdf.
61

Dorothy E. Roberts, Racial Disproportionality in the U.S. Child Welfare System: Documentation,
Research on Causes, and Promising Practices, The Annie E. Casey Foundation (August 20, 2002), at
http://www.chs-wa.org/AECFDRobertsDispWorkingPaper4.pdf.

62

Robert B. Hill, Synthesis of Research on Disproportionality in Child Welfare: An Update (Casey-CSSP
Alliance for Racial Equity in the Child Welfare System, October 2006), at http://www.caseyfamilyservices.org/pdfs/
0226_CC_BobHillPaper_FINAL.pdf.

63

U.S. General Accounting Office [sic], Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice: Federal Agencies Could Play a
Stronger Role in Helping States Reduce the Number of Children Placed Solely to Obtain Mental Health
Services, GAO-03-397 (April 2003), at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03397.pdf; and U.S. General
Accounting Office [sic], Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice: Several Factors Influence the Placement of
Children Solely to Obtain Mental Health Services, GAO-03-865T (July 2003), at
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03865t.pdf.

64 U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Minority Staff Special
Investigations Division, Incarceration of Youth Who Are Waiting for Community Mental Health Services in the
United States (July 2004), at http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20040817121901-25170.pdf.
65 Kathleen Skowyra and Joseph J. Cocozza, A Blueprint for Change: Improving the System Response to
Youth with Mental Health Needs Involved with the Juvenile Justice System, National Center for Mental Health
and Juvenile Justice (June 2006), at http://www.ncmhjj.com/Blueprint/pdfs/ProgramBrief_06_06.pdf.
66 Barbara J. Burns, Susan D. Phillips, H. Ryan Wagner, Richard P. Barth, David J. Kolko, Yvonne Campbell
and John Landsverk, “Mental health need and access to mental health services by youths involved with child
welfare: A national Survey,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol. 43,
No. 8 (August 2004), pp. 960-970.
67 Michael S. Hurlburt, Laurel K. Leslie, John Landsverk, Richard P. Barth, Barbara J. Burns, Robert D.
Gibbons, Donald J. Slymen and Jinjin Zhang, “Contextual Predictors of Mental Health Service Use Among
Children Open to Child Welfare,” Archives of General Psychiatry, Vol. 61 (December 2004), pp. 1217-1224.
68 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General, Mental Health: A Report
of the Surgeon General (1999), at http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/mentalhealth/home.html; and U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General, Mental Health: Culture, Race, and
Ethnicity: A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (2001), at http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/mentalhealth/cre/sma-01-3613.pdf.
69 Guyonne Kalb and Jenny Williams, The Relationship between Juvenile and Adult Crime, Melbourne
Institute Working Paper No. 4/02 (April 2002), Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research,
The University of Melbourne, Australia, at http://www.melbourneinstitute.com/wp/wp2002n04.pdf.
70 David Bjerk, “Measuring the Relationship between Youth Criminal Participation and Household Economic
Resources,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 23 (2007), pp. 23-39.
71

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Juvenile Arrest Rates by
Offense, Sex, and Race (1980-2005),” at http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/crime/excel/JAR_20070222.xls.
Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

72 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Annual Estimates of the Population, 2003, at
http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/NC-EST2006-asrh.html; and U.S. Department of Justice, Office
of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement Databook, at
http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/cjrp/. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.
73 U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in
Residential Placement Databook, at http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/cjrp/. Calculations by Children’s
Defense Fund.

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13 million poor children—1 in 6—were living in the United States in 2006.
Since 2000, the number of poor children has increased by 1.2 million.
Table 1A: Population and Poverty
Poor Children
All Children, 2006
Percent
of total
Number
population
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

1,114,301
181,434
1,628,198
691,186
9,532,614
1,169,301
818,286
203,366
114,881
4,021,555
2,455,020
298,081
394,280
3,215,244
1,577,629
710,194
695,837
999,531
1,090,001
280,994
1,360,531
1,448,884
2,478,356
1,257,264
759,405
1,416,592
217,848
445,033
634,520
297,625
2,089,338
508,930
4,514,342
2,155,387
144,934
2,770,035
894,034
856,259
2,804,873
237,451
1,039,653
194,681
1,442,593
6,493,965
791,198
133,389
1,806,847
1,526,267
389,071
1,312,530
121,794
73,735,562

24.2%
27.1
26.4
24.6
26.1
24.6
23.3
23.8
19.8
22.2
26.2
23.2
26.9
25.1
25.0
23.8
25.2
23.8
25.4
21.3
24.2
22.5
24.5
24.3
26.1
24.2
23.1
25.2
25.4
22.6
23.9
26.0
23.4
24.3
22.8
24.1
25.0
23.1
22.5
22.2
24.1
24.9
23.9
27.6
31.0
21.4
23.6
23.9
21.4
23.6
23.6
24.6

2005-2006
Percent of
children
in the
Number
state
253,108
26,445
311,863
164,545
1,697,024
180,080
88,582
31,565
36,678
689,315
484,525
33,155
58,441
543,373
276,950
95,696
106,645
223,296
298,228
48,492
129,551
177,620
445,142
151,605
220,420
259,551
37,134
63,022
87,111
27,988
244,074
127,823
888,344
429,169
18,234
508,703
212,672
141,001
464,686
35,456
226,292
31,857
322,483
1,527,262
93,049
17,459
216,399
231,026
96,386
191,952
14,092
13,285,569

1999

County with highest
child poverty rate

Percent of
children
in the
county

23.0%
15.1
19.5
24.3
18.1
15.7
11.0
15.8
32.6
17.5
20.2
11.4
15.1
17.1
17.9
13.7
15.6
22.8
27.8
17.6
9.7
12.4
18.3
12.2
29.5
18.6
17.3
14.4
13.9
9.6
11.8
25.6
20.0
20.2
13.0
18.7
24.3
16.8
16.9
15.1
22.1
16.8
22.7
23.9
11.9
13.2
12.2
15.4
25.2
14.9
12.0

Perry County
Wade Hampton Census Area
Apache County
Phillips County
Tulare County
Costilla County
New Haven County
Sussex County
District of Columbia
Hamilton County
Hancock County
Hawaii County
Butte County
Alexander County
Crawford County
Page County
Sheridan County
Owsley County
East Carroll Parish
Washington County
Baltimore city
Suffolk County
Lake County
Beltrami County
Holmes County
Pemiscot County
Roosevelt County
Rock County
Mineral County
Coos County
Hudson County
Luna County
Bronx County
Halifax County
Sioux County
Vinton County
Harmon County
Malheur County
Philadelphia County
Providence County
Allendale County
Buffalo County
Hancock County
Starr County
San Juan County
Orleans County
Clifton Forge city
Okanogan County
McDowell County
Menominee County
Fremont County

49.2%
29.6
43.0
45.6
33.0
32.4
13.3
15.3
31.7
36.0
45.4
21.7
28.5
39.1
25.7
22.3
27.9
56.4
56.8
23.0
31.0
25.2
29.2
22.4
52.4
43.6
41.8
36.6
21.9
11.9
22.4
47.1
41.7
33.3
45.2
28.3
38.2
26.0
31.6
22.7
48.1
61.8
37.7
59.5
34.9
19.0
39.8
29.0
53.0
39.9
24.4

18.3

Buffalo County, South Dakota 61.8

Sources: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Estimates of the Population by Selected Age Groups for the United States
and States, and for Puerto Rico: July 1, 2006 (SC-EST2006-01), at <http://www.census.gov/popest/states/asrh/SC-EST2006-01.html>; U.S.
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, American Community Survey, 2006, Table B17001, at <http://factfinder.census.gov/>;
and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Summary File 3 (SF3),
at <http://factfinder.census.gov>. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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More than half of all poor children live in ten states.
Table 1B: Child Poverty
Ten states with the greatest number of poor children, 2005-2006
Number

Percent

California

1,697,024

18.1%

Texas

1,527,262

23.9

New York

888,344

20.0

Florida

689,315

17.5

Illinois

543,373

17.1

Ohio

508,703

18.7

Georgia

484,525

20.2

Pennsylvania

464,686

16.9

Michigan

445,142

18.3

North Carolina

429,169

20.2

Ten states (and the District of Columbia) with the highest
child poverty rates, 2005-2006
Number
District of Columbia

36,678

Percent
32.6%

Mississippi

220,420

Louisiana

298,228

27.8

New Mexico

127,823

25.6

West Virginia
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Texas

29.5

96,386

25.2

212,672

24.3

164,545

24.3

1,527,262

23.9

Alabama

253,108

23.0

Kentucky

223,296

22.8

Tennessee

322,483

22.7

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Black and Hispanic babies are more likely than White, non-Hispanic babies
to be born to mothers who did not receive early prenatal care.
Table 2: Prenatal Care, 2004
Percent of babies born to mothers who received early prenatal care or late or no prenatal care
Early Prenatal Care*
Late or No Prenatal Care**
Total,
White,
Black,
Total,
White,
Black,
all races non-Hispanic non-Hispanic Hispanic all races non-Hispanic non-Hispanic Hispanic
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
NewYork (excluding
New York City)
New York City
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

84.0%
80.7
76.3
82.3
87.1
80.2
87.2
85.1
77.8

90.1%
85.4
87.2
85.4
90.7
86.2
92.3
90.0
91.8

77.2%
85.2
77.8
76.1
83.5
72.0
77.4
81.7
72.8

53.4%
78.1
67.1
71.7
85.0
69.7
75.6
69.5
68.6

3.7%
4.5
7.5
4.4
2.6
4.5
1.9
3.6
6.0

1.7%
3.5
3.1
3.2
1.9
2.8
1.2
2.0
2.2

4.5%
—
6.9
6.9
3.5
6.8
4.5
4.3
8.0

21.2%
5.7
11.1
8.3
3.1
7.3
3.1
9.9
5.9

83.9
81.8
71.6
85.5
80.8
88.4
86.5
74.5
85.5
88.5
82.3
89.6
85.9
86.3
84.4
88.2
83.2
82.9
75.0

90.3
85.2
74.9
90.8
84.3
90.0
89.8
76.0
91.5
88.9
90.2
92.2
89.8
90.4
90.6
90.2
86.4
86.0
83.8

79.4
87.4
70.6
74.2
68.5
76.3
78.3
68.6
77.4
80.2
74.7
80.4
71.9
74.0
77.6
80.4
93.6
72.5
68.8

70.6
80.2
55.6
80.3
62.6
76.6
72.7
56.4
84.3
77.8
64.1
82.3
78.6
69.9
77.6
80.0
80.2
70.9
64.6

4.0
3.7
5.7
2.7
4.0
2.2
2.6
5.4
2.9
1.6
3.9
2.2
3.0
2.3
2.7
2.3
2.9
3.3
7.3

2.3
3.0
4.5
1.5
2.9
1.9
1.8
4.8
1.4
1.6
1.9
1.5
2.0
1.4
1.4
1.8
1.9
2.5
4.3

5.0
—
—
6.3
7.6
5.3
4.8
8.9
5.0
—
6.4
5.5
7.1
5.2
4.0
4.8
—
5.8
10.6

8.6
3.0
11.0
3.1
8.9
4.4
5.8
11.0
3.1
—
7.2
3.6
4.4
5.2
7.4
3.3
—
6.5
10.5

79.1
69.4

88.4
76.5

63.3
66.9

66.5
67.6

4.7
8.3

2.3
5.5

10.6
7.1

6.9
9.1

77.2
79.9
84.0
85.7
87.8
78.1
80.5
73.2
90.0
68.0
77.9
69.8
81.8
80.0
90.0
85.6
71.4
86.0
85.3
85.2

82.3
88.3
90.4
88.7
89.9
82.3
84.0
78.4
92.5
75.5
83.4
76.8
88.2
83.7
90.4
90.5
75.1
86.4
88.7
87.0

61.3
74.1
76.5
81.1
78.6
72.2
73.6
55.9
82.4
60.1
63.6
54.2
78.4
60.5
71.7
79.0
66.0
76.2
76.9
83.3

61.0
78.1
69.9
78.8
79.0
64.6
69.3
56.4
87.5
46.8
63.2
40.8
77.3
64.6
76.8
71.8
61.0
77.2
72.0
79.3

4.4
4.9
2.9
2.8
2.4
4.7
4.1
6.7
1.5
7.5
4.0
8.2
4.5
4.5
1.5
3.4
6.1
2.1
2.9
3.1

3.1
2.1
1.5
1.9
1.9
3.7
3.3
5.1
1.0
5.0
1.9
5.1
2.6
3.4
1.4
1.9
4.8
2.0
2.3
2.6

9.6
7.6
4.7
—
4.9
6.4
6.8
12.7
3.3
10.0
—
14.5
5.3
17.3
—
5.0
8.8
5.3
5.1
—

7.3
5.4
5.6
—
4.2
7.2
6.2
10.8
2.1
15.6
9.6
23.8
5.9
8.5
—
7.3
8.9
—
5.1
4.2

*Care begun in the first trimester (first three months) of pregnancy.
**Care begun in the last trimester (last three months) or pregnancy, or not at all.
—Number of births too small to calculate a reliable rate.
Note: Prior to 2003, information on start of prenatal care was obtained from the mother. Starting in 2003, some states began to use medical
records for this information. These two methods produce different results, and hence the data from these two systems cannot be combined to produce
national estimates of prenatal care. In addition, two states (Florida and New Hampshire) switched systems during 2004; no annual percentages can
be calculated for these states. Finally, New York City’s vital statistics system is separate from that of the rest of New York State. New York State
switched to the new system for 2004; New York City used the old system. No overall percentages can be calculated for New York.
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1
(September 29, 2006), Tables 26a and 26b.

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Black babies are about twice as likely as Hispanic or White, non-Hispanic babies to be born
at low birthweight. Since 1984, the incidence of low birthweight has increased by 21 percent.
The United States now ranks 22nd out of 29 industrialized nations in the world.
Table 3: Low Birthweight,1 2004
Total,
all races2
Percent
Rank
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

10.4%
6.0
7.2
9.3
6.7
9.0
7.8
9.0
11.1
8.5
9.3
7.9
6.8
8.4
8.1
7.0
7.3
8.8
10.9
6.4
9.3
7.8
8.3
6.5
11.6
8.3
7.6
7.0
8.0
6.8
8.3
8.1
8.2
9.0
6.6
8.5
8.0
6.0
8.2
8.0
10.2
6.9
9.2
8.0
6.7
6.4
8.3
6.2
9.3
7.0
8.6
8.1

1

Birthweight less than 2,500 grams (5 lbs. 8 oz.).

2

Includes races other than White and Black.

48
1
16
43
8
39
19
39
50
35
43
21
10
34
26
13
17
38
49
4
43
19
30
6
51
30
18
13
22
10
30
26
28
39
7
35
22
1
28
22
47
12
42
22
8
4
30
3
43
13
37

White
non-Hispanic
Percent
Rank
8.5%
5.1
7.3
8.1
6.3
8.7
6.7
7.4
5.6
7.3
7.4
6.2
6.6
7.3
7.5
6.9
7.0
8.4
8.0
6.4
7.4
7.2
7.1
6.0
8.7
7.3
7.6
7.0
7.8
6.9
7.2
8.0
6.9
7.7
6.4
7.5
7.8
6.0
7.1
7.3
7.9
6.9
8.2
7.4
6.3
6.3
7.0
5.7
9.1
6.2
8.5
7.2

47
1
26
44
8
49
14
31
2
26
31
6
13
26
35
15
19
46
42
11
31
24
22
4
49
26
37
19
39
15
24
42
15
38
11
35
39
4
22
26
41
15
45
31
8
8
19
3
51
6
47

Black
non-Hispanic
Percent
Rank
15.1%
—
12.0
15.5
12.4
14.6
12.7
13.8
14.1
13.1
14.0
10.2
—
14.6
13.6
11.0
13.7
13.3
15.2
—
13.2
11.8
14.5
10.5
15.5
14.0
—
11.8
13.8
—
13.7
14.7
13.0
14.2
—
14.0
13.0
10.6
13.5
11.0
15.3
—
13.8
13.9
10.8
—
12.8
11.1
14.3
13.6
—
13.7

38
—
10
41
11
35
12
24
31
16
28
1
—
35
20
5
22
18
39
—
17
8
34
2
41
28
—
8
24
—
22
37
14
32
—
28
14
3
19
5
40
—
24
27
4
—
13
7
33
20
—

Hispanic
Percent
Rank
6.8%
5.4
6.8
6.0
6.1
8.6
8.5
6.2
7.8
7.0
6.0
7.9
7.0
6.7
6.3
6.1
6.3
7.2
7.7
—
7.3
8.6
6.4
6.3
7.4
6.6
8.6
5.9
6.3
—
7.2
8.2
7.5
6.4
—
7.0
6.6
5.2
9.3
8.3
6.3
—
6.0
7.2
7.6
—
6.4
6.1
—
6.4
8.4

23
2
23
4
7
42
41
10
36
25
4
37
25
22
11
7
11
28
35
—
31
42
16
11
32
20
42
3
11
—
28
38
33
16
—
25
20
1
45
39
11
—
4
28
34
—
16
7
—
16
40

6.8

—Number of low birthweight births too small to calculate a stable rate.
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1
(September 29, 2006), Table 35. Ranks calculated by Children’s Defense Fund.

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There were 9.4 million uninsured children and
teens living in the United States in 2006, 700,000 more than in 2005.
Table 4A: Uninsured Children
Uninsured children and teens younger than 19, 2004-2006
Estimated number

Percent

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

74,000
19,000
282,000
71,000
1,330,000
176,000
63,000
26,000
10,000
755,000
315,000
17,000
47,000
354,000
150,000
47,000
51,000
88,000
127,000
19,000
133,000
89,000
147,000
92,000
119,000
124,000
33,000
35,000
112,000
21,000
254,000
95,000
384,000
280,000
15,000
216,000
131,000
108,000
242,000
16,000
109,000
18,000
129,000
1,413,000
107,000
9,000
174,000
122,000
35,000
81,000
12,000

6.3%
9.8
16.5
9.7
13.2
14.3
7.2
12.0
7.8
17.8
12.2
5.5
11.4
10.4
9.0
6.2
7.0
8.4
11.0
6.4
9.2
5.8
5.6
6.9
14.9
8.3
14.3
7.4
16.8
6.6
11.5
17.7
8.0
12.3
9.5
7.4
13.9
12.0
8.1
6.3
9.9
8.9
8.5
20.7
12.8
6.3
9.1
7.6
8.5
5.8
9.5

United States, 2006

9.4 million

12.1

Note: The 2006 U.S. percentage and number of uninsured are from the 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social & Economic
Supplement (ASEC) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The estimated percentage of uninsured children in each state is an average of the percentage of uninsured children in that state over three years. Three-year averages are used because of small sample sizes in some states. In March
of 2007, the Census Bureau changed the way health coverage was determined and issued revised data for the 2005 and 2006 ASEC. Prior to that
revision, errors in weighting were corrected in the 2005 ASEC. The average percentage of uninsured children in this table is based on the revised
and corrected 2005 ASEC, the revised 2006 ASEC, and the 2007 ASEC. The estimated number of uninsured in each state is calculated by applying that average percentage to the most recent Census estimates of children younger than 19 in the states.
Sources: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Revised 2005, Revised 2006, and 2007 Annual Social and Economic Supplement
to the Current Population Survey; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Estimates of Persons by Race/Ethnicity and State for
Single Year of Age as of July 1, 2006. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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Seven out of 8 uninsured children have at least one working parent.
Table 4B: Uninsured Children
Of the 9 million uninsured children:
Race/Ethnicity*
Hispanic
White
Black
Asian/Pacific Islander
American Indian
Other (multi-racial)
Total
Age
Birth through age 5
Age 6 through age 12
Age 13 through age 18
Total
Income
100% poverty & below
Over 100% through 200%
Over 200% through 300%
Total, 300% and below
Over 300% through 400%
Over 400%
Total
Family Structure
Two parents in household
Single parent household
Child has no parent in household
Total
Parental Work Status***
At least one working parent
No working parent
Total
Citizenship
Child is a U.S. citizen
Child is not a U.S. citizen
Total

Percentage of
the uninsured

Uninsured
number**

38.9%
37.5
16.0
4.5
1.6
1.6
100.1

3.4 million
3.3 million
1.4 million
389,000
140,000
136,000
8.7 million

Percentage of
the uninsured

Uninsured
number

29.1%
31.7
39.2
100.0

2.5 million
2.8 million
3.4 million
8.7 million

Percentage of
the uninsured

Uninsured
number

31.9%
32.5
18.3
82.8

2.8 million
2.8 million
1.6 million
7.2 million

$ 20,650
41,300
61,950
61,950

617,000
887,000
8.7 million

82,600
—

7.1
10.2
100.0
Percentage of
the uninsured

Uninsured
number

54.5%
37.3
8.2
100.0

4.8 million
3.3 million
720,000
8.7 million

Percentage of
the uninsured

Uninsured
number

86.8%
13.2
100.0

Upper limit, annual
income for family of 4

7.0 million
1.1 million
8.0 million***

Percentage of
the uninsured

Uninsured
number

87.4%
12.6
100.0

7.6 million
1.1 million
8.7 million

Note: Children are ages birth through 18.
* Hispanic children are in a separate category and are not included in the White and Black categories.
** Numbers may not add to total because of rounding.
*** Of children who have at least one parent in the household.
Sources: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Revised 2006 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) to the Current
Population Survey (revised April 2007); and Federal Register, Vol 72, No. 15 (January 24, 2007), pp. 3147-3148.
Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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About 7 out of 10 public school fourth graders cannot read or do math at grade level;
for Black, American Indian, and Hispanic children, these rates are dramatically higher.
Table 5: Reading and Math Achievement of 4th Graders
Percent of fourth-grade public school students performing below grade level, 2005
Reading

Total

Math

American
American
Asian, Indian,
Asian, Indian,
Pacific Alaska
Pacific Alaska
White Black Hispanic Islander Native Total White Black Hispanic Islander Native

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

78%
74
76
71
78
64
61
65
89
70
74
77
67
70
70
67
67
70
80
64
68
56
69
62
82
68
64
67
79
61
62
79
66
70
65
65
74
70
64
70
74
67
73
71
65
62
63
65
74
67
66

68%
64
63
63
63
54
53
54
30
61
63
63
63
58
65
64
63
67
68
65
55
49
62
57
69
62
61
60
72
61
54
64
57
61
62
59
70
66
58
64
64
63
67
56
62
62
55
60
74
62
62

92%
76
88
90
89
82
88
85
92
87
88
79
—
91
88
88
90
85
91
—
88
80
90
90
93
86
—
90
90
—
85
76
83
87
—
90
90
85
85
85
89
—
89
85
—
—
85
80
85
90
—

—
81%
89
79
90
83
85
78
88
75
86
73
89
86
89
85
86
—
—
—
79
89
—
82
—
79
64
88
88
—
81
86
83
83
—
76
83
90
81
89
71
—
87
81
86
—
74
86
—
80
84

—
81%
64
—
65
58
51
45
—
57
43
81
—
56
—
60
45
—
—
—
45
53
—
72
—
—
—
—
76
—
43
—
50
69
—
—
—
65
53
71
—
—
—
53
70
—
47
60
—
66
—

—
91%
—
—
77
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
87
—
—
—
—
92
—
—
91
—
78
—
—
—
—
86
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—

79%
66
72
66
72
61
57
64
91
64
70
73
59
68
62
63
53
73
76
61
62
51
63
53
81
69
61
64
74
53
54
81
64
60
59
57
72
63
59
69
64
60
72
60
63
57
60
58
74
60
58

70%
56
57
58
54
51
47
50
22
51
57
58
56
56
55
60
48
71
62
61
47
43
54
46
68
63
59
56
62
52
45
66
51
48
57
49
64
58
50
63
47
55
65
40
59
56
50
52
75
52
55

93%
80
87
90
88
82
89
85
95
84
88
84
—
91
87
85
76
91
91
—
86
82
92
85
93
91
—
93
90
—
83
94
87
83
—
84
89
88
87
91
87
—
91
82
—
—
86
74
83
93
—

—
77%
86
75
86
82
85
82
89
72
78
79
83
86
79
83
70
—
—
—
74
86
—
85
—
90
70
90
87
83
75
87
83
74
—
79
84
86
84
91
70
—
74
72
87
—
78
83
—
84
69

—
64%
57
—
49
58
43
30
—
34
43
75
—
34
—
—
29
—
—
—
41
36
—
60
—
—
—
—
58
—
26
—
39
37
—
—
—
46
—
61
—
—
—
28
67
—
36
54
—
71
—

—
85%
—
—
73
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
83
—
—
—
—
91
—
—
87
—
79
—
—
—
—
87
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—

United States

70

61

88

85

60

81

65

53

87

81

46

78

—Data not reported; number of students too small to calculate a reliable rate.
Sources: U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Education Progress, The Nation’s Report Card: Reading 2005 (2005), Figure
11 and Table A-4; and U.S. Department of Education, National Assessment of Education Progress, The Nation’s Report Card: Mathematics
2005 (2005), Figure 11 and Table A-4. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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The suspension rate among Black public school students is three times that for
White students; the rates are also higher for American Indian and Hispanic students.
Table 6: Out-of-School Suspensions, by Race/Ethnicity, 2004
Suspensions per 100 students
Total,
all races
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

American Indian,
Alaska
Native
Hispanic

White,
non-Hispanic

Black,
non-Hispanic

Asian

9.6
6.2
5.6
6.6
7.4
6.2
6.5
10.5
3.7
9.2
9.6
3.5
3.6
6.2
8.6
3.7
5.8
7.0
11.9
4.8
7.2
5.7
7.7
4.0
10.1
6.0
4.6
3.8
6.9
5.9
5.6
5.3
4.0
11.1
1.7
6.1
5.8
5.9
6.5
10.1
11.8
2.6
8.8
5.2
2.6
5.2
7.3
6.0
10.7
5.1
3.7

5.5
5.2
4.5
5.0
6.2
4.6
3.2
7.5
0.3
6.9
5.2
3.4
3.4
3.8
6.6
3.0
3.9
6.7
6.9
4.7
5.4
4.5
6.1
2.6
5.9
4.1
3.7
2.6
5.6
5.7
3.9
3.7
3.5
6.8
1.3
4.1
4.7
5.7
3.8
8.8
7.4
1.7
5.8
3.0
2.2
5.2
4.9
5.4
10.3
3.2
3.4

17.1
10.9
10.6
12.6
16.9
14.2
16.8
17.1
4.3
16.8
16.1
5.1
3.4
14.5
20.9
16.1
17.4
10.5
17.7
9.0
10.9
10.7
15.1
16.3
13.9
14.7
4.7
13.5
14.4
9.1
11.9
7.4
7.1
20.2
4.1
16.1
15.2
8.8
20.6
17.5
19.3
5.5
18.5
11.9
5.5
5.4
14.5
11.7
19.9
18.4
6.2

3.5
4.9
2.6
2.8
3.3
3.4
2.1
3.3
0.0
2.9
3.2
3.5
1.5
1.8
2.2
2.6
3.1
2.4
3.7
2.6
2.0
3.8
2.9
3.3
4.8
2.3
2.5
2.1
4.3
2.2
1.5
1.7
1.0
3.5
0.5
2.2
2.3
2.6
2.0
5.9
2.0
2.8
3.4
1.9
4.0
2.7
2.3
3.7
2.1
2.8
1.7

3.9
7.6
9.7
6.4
9.0
8.9
3.5
5.7
0.0
6.2
3.0
2.7
4.1
4.3
3.9
4.4
5.9
4.5
8.5
5.8
7.2
4.6
6.5
8.7
15.5
4.7
12.7
11.6
7.7
8.6
3.3
7.5
5.2
10.0
6.4
3.0
4.4
9.5
3.0
8.6
5.3
8.4
5.4
3.3
7.3
1.2
4.6
10.4
7.9
9.6
7.6

3.5
6.2
5.9
4.2
7.6
8.5
12.8
8.8
0.9
6.8
6.1
3.4
4.8
5.6
8.7
3.6
8.8
4.5
6.3
4.1
4.8
9.1
8.1
6.0
4.8
4.8
5.1
4.7
7.1
11.8
6.8
5.7
3.0
7.8
3.6
5.8
6.7
6.6
11.6
13.0
5.9
3.9
5.8
5.3
5.0
4.5
6.2
6.9
7.9
8.1
6.0

6.8

4.8

15.0

2.8

7.2

6.5

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2004 Elementary and Secondary Civil Rights Survey.
Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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Black students are more likely than any other students to be in special education
programs for children with mental retardation or emotional disturbance.
Table 7: Special Education Enrollment, by Race/Ethnicity, 2004
Percent of students in special education programs
Mental Retardation

Emotional Disturbance
American
American
White, Black,
Indian,
White, Black,
Indian,
Total,
nonnonAlaska
Total,
nonnonAlaska
all races Hispanic Hispanic Asian Native Hispanic all races Hispanic Hispanic Asian Native Hispanic
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

1.7%
0.5
1.2
2.5
0.8
0.5
0.6
2.0
2.0
1.3
2.0
1.0
0.8
1.4
3.3
3.4
1.1
3.7
1.7
0.7
0.7
2.0
1.6
1.8
1.3
1.2
1.2
2.3
0.5
0.7
0.7
0.6
0.7
2.2
1.3
2.5
1.2
0.7
1.3
1.0
2.2
0.9
1.4
0.8
0.7
1.4
1.5
0.6
3.4
1.5
1.1

1.1%
0.4
1.1
2.0
0.7
0.5
0.4
1.4
0.2
0.9
1.4
0.6
0.7
1.1
3.1
3.3
1.0
3.7
1.0
0.7
0.5
1.2
1.3
1.7
0.7
1.0
1.0
2.3
0.4
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.5
1.3
1.2
2.2
1.1
0.7
1.2
0.9
1.3
0.8
0.9
0.6
0.7
1.5
0.8
0.6
3.4
1.3
1.1

2.8%
0.5
1.9
4.7
1.1
1.1
1.0
3.3
2.3
2.7
3.1
0.7
1.2
2.9
5.4
5.2
2.4
4.5
2.5
0.6
1.1
5.1
3.3
2.8
1.8
2.2
1.2
3.3
1.0
1.0
1.5
0.7
1.3
4.1
1.8
4.0
2.7
1.4
2.1
1.4
3.7
2.2
2.9
1.5
1.3
1.2
3.4
1.0
4.2
2.8
0.6

0.4%
0.3
0.6
0.6
0.7
0.3
0.3
1.0
0.0
0.5
0.5
1.1
0.4
0.7
0.7
4.6
0.5
0.7
0.5
0.1
0.3
0.9
0.8
1.0
0.4
0.4
0.8
1.0
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.6
0.3
0.6
0.7
0.7
0.7
0.5
0.5
0.8
0.5
0.6
0.3
0.4
0.4
0.2
0.5
0.4
0.2
1.0
0.9

1.4%
0.8
1.2
1.5
0.8
0.7
0.3
0.3
0.0
0.9
1.3
0.4
0.9
0.9
2.8
2.1
1.1
2.5
1.0
1.0
0.4
2.1
1.5
2.6
0.4
0.5
2.6
3.8
0.8
2.3
0.8
0.6
1.3
3.7
2.3
2.5
1.0
0.9
1.3
0.8
0.7
1.4
1.2
0.6
0.9
2.7
1.1
1.0
1.1
3.8
1.1

0.5%
0.4
1.2
1.4
0.8
0.6
0.8
1.9
0.7
0.9
1.0
1.1
1.0
1.1
1.8
3.4
0.9
1.8
0.6
0.5
0.4
4.6
1.3
2.3
0.5
0.7
1.5
1.9
0.5
1.2
0.6
0.6
0.7
1.2
2.0
2.2
0.9
0.7
1.6
1.1
1.0
1.0
0.5
0.7
0.7
0.2
0.7
0.7
1.8
1.5
1.0

0.3%
0.5
0.7
0.2
0.4
1.0
1.0
0.7
2.2
1.2
1.4
1.2
0.4
1.3
1.3
0.6
0.8
0.9
0.7
1.4
0.8
1.0
1.2
1.9
0.2
0.8
0.6
0.8
0.6
1.1
0.7
0.9
1.2
0.8
1.3
0.8
0.8
0.8
1.1
1.2
0.8
0.5
0.4
0.9
0.5
1.8
0.9
0.5
0.6
1.8
1.3

0.3%
0.4
0.9
0.2
0.5
1.1
0.8
0.6
0.3
1.2
1.4
1.6
0.5
1.2
1.3
0.6
0.8
0.7
0.4
1.5
0.7
0.9
1.1
1.7
0.3
0.7
0.6
0.7
0.7
1.1
0.6
1.2
0.9
0.6
1.2
0.7
0.9
0.9
1.0
1.2
0.6
0.5
0.4
1.1
0.5
1.9
0.9
0.5
0.6
1.7
1.2

0.3%
0.9
1.3
0.1
0.9
1.9
1.6
1.0
2.6
2.0
1.8
1.3
1.2
2.1
2.0
1.3
1.6
2.0
1.0
1.5
1.2
2.0
1.5
4.0
0.2
1.4
1.3
1.9
1.2
0.8
1.4
2.1
2.3
1.4
2.7
1.6
1.3
1.7
1.8
1.8
1.1
0.7
0.4
1.3
1.7
0.5
1.4
1.3
0.8
2.6
2.4

0.1%
0.2
0.2
0.0
0.1
0.3
0.1
0.1
0.0
0.1
0.3
1.1
0.1
0.4
0.2
1.8
0.2
0.2
0.0
0.3
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.1
1.5
0.2
0.0
0.4
0.2
0.3
0.2
0.3
0.1
0.1
0.1
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.2
0.2

0.1%
0.5
0.7
0.2
0.6
1.6
1.5
1.1
0.0
0.9
1.7
0.9
0.3
0.8
1.2
0.6
1.1
0.4
0.3
1.4
0.8
1.3
1.2
5.9
0.4
0.4
0.8
2.6
0.9
0.7
0.5
0.9
2.4
0.8
2.4
0.6
0.7
0.8
1.1
1.6
0.5
0.8
0.4
1.5
0.7
1.6
0.6
0.7
0.0
5.3
2.1

0.1%
0.3
0.3
0.1
0.2
0.7
1.7
0.3
0.6
0.6
0.4
1.9
0.2
0.7
0.4
0.3
0.4
0.3
0.3
1.2
0.3
1.4
0.7
1.2
0.1
0.4
0.7
0.2
0.2
0.5
0.5
0.7
1.2
0.2
1.2
0.6
0.3
0.4
1.1
1.1
0.2
0.4
0.1
0.6
0.4
1.4
0.6
0.2
0.4
1.0
1.3

United States

1.3

1.2

2.6

0.6

1.2

0.9

0.9

0.9

1.5

0.2

1.1

0.5

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2004 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Survey, unpublished tabulations.
Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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Black public school students are least likely to be in programs for the gifted and
talented, one-third as likely as Asian students; American Indian and Hispanic
students are about half as likely as Asian students to be in the programs.
Table 8: Enrollment in Programs for Gifted and Talented Students, by Race/Ethnicity, 2004
Percent of students in programs for gifted and talented
Total,
all races
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

White,
non-Hispanic

4.8%
4.1
5.9
9.9
8.4
6.7
3.0
4.6
0.0
4.5
8.9
5.7
3.9
5.4
7.1
8.5
3.3
13.0
3.9
3.0
13.8
0.8
3.9
8.1
6.0
3.8
5.6
11.4
1.9
2.3
6.9
10.7
2.2
10.9
3.1
7.4
14.0
7.1
4.8
1.8
12.7
2.2
3.3
8.0
4.6
0.8
12.1
3.8
2.2
6.8
3.2

6.3%
5.8
8.4
11.2
12.0
7.9
3.5
6.1
0.0
5.7
13.6
7.7
4.4
6.7
7.7
9.0
3.9
14.2
5.5
3.1
17.0
0.8
4.1
8.3
9.1
4.3
6.0
12.8
2.8
2.3
8.4
12.6
3.4
15.7
2.8
7.6
16.6
8.0
5.3
2.0
17.8
2.4
2.9
11.2
4.5
0.8
14.9
4.2
2.2
7.8
3.5

6.7

7.9

Black,
non-Hispanic

Asian

2.4%
2.1
3.5
7.1
4.6
5.2
1.7
2.2
0.0
2.0
3.7
2.9
1.7
2.5
3.8
4.6
1.1
5.2
1.9
1.3
6.7
0.7
3.0
5.2
3.3
1.7
2.8
6.4
0.8
0.6
3.3
9.6
0.8
3.9
2.3
6.5
7.7
3.6
2.7
1.5
5.9
1.2
4.5
4.9
5.1
0.4
4.6
1.4
1.4
2.0
1.5

9.4%
4.5
13.9
10.6
14.6
9.6
5.7
11.5
0.0
8.8
18.8
5.5
6.9
13.1
15.5
13.5
5.5
20.2
11.7
3.8
33.8
1.9
10.1
13.7
10.7
9.0
9.9
17.0
2.8
5.8
12.2
13.6
1.7
16.5
8.1
13.6
23.6
11.6
9.5
2.2
21.6
3.3
7.9
16.4
11.7
0.2
24.5
5.0
9.3
6.7
3.6

3.5

11.9

American Indian,
Alaska
Native
Hispanic
4.9%
1.0
4.0
4.7
6.5
4.5
1.7
3.4
0.0
4.6
7.6
4.3
1.2
5.4
6.7
3.6
1.5
6.6
2.6
0.8
9.8
0.9
1.4
3.8
3.7
2.0
2.9
4.6
1.0
0.9
3.3
2.2
1.4
6.3
7.0
5.6
11.3
3.6
2.2
0.9
8.3
1.3
2.9
7.1
2.6
0.0
8.3
1.6
3.9
4.6
0.7

2.3%
2.3
3.3
5.8
5.1
3.9
1.4
1.7
0.0
4.0
2.6
2.6
0.9
2.8
3.8
3.7
1.0
4.6
4.2
1.2
14.5
0.8
2.7
4.5
5.0
1.4
3.3
4.5
0.8
1.0
3.4
11.4
0.4
3.0
1.5
3.5
7.0
1.8
1.8
1.2
5.1
0.6
1.6
5.6
4.4
0.0
6.7
1.8
1.6
2.4
1.2

5.2

4.3

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2004 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Survey, unpublished tabulations.
Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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Over 880,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect in 2005.
Almost 2 out of 3 were victims of neglect.
Table 9: Child Abuse and Neglect, 2005
Child abuse and neglect, total substantiated victims, 2005
Type of abuse or neglect (percentage distribution)2
Child victims of
abuse and neglect
Number
Rate1

Neglect

Medical
neglect

Physical
abuse

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

9,029
2,693
6,119
8,124
95,314
9,406
11,419
1,960
2,840
130,633
47,158
2,762
1,912
29,325
19,062
14,016
2,775
19,474
12,366
3,349
14,603
35,887
24,603
8,499
6,154
8,945
2,095
6,630
4,971
941
9,812
7,285
70,878
33,250
1,547
42,483
13,941
12,414
4,353
3,366
10,759
1,442
18,376
61,994
13,152
1,080
6,469
7,932
9,511
9,686
853

8.3
14.3
3.9
12.0
9.8
8.0
13.7
10.0
25.2
32.1
20.0
9.2
5.1
9.0
11.9
20.9
4.1
19.9
10.8
12.1
10.4
24.6
9.7
6.9
8.2
6.5
10.2
15.4
8.0
3.1
4.5
14.9
15.6
15.5
11.3
15.4
16.3
14.6
1.5
13.7
10.5
7.7
13.2
9.8
17.7
8.1
3.5
5.3
24.9
7.5
7.5

44.5%
61.8
75.0
55.7
70.8
63.2
74.1
28.0
84.2
30.2
70.3
15.0
71.9
66.2
70.6
78.5
21.4
85.0
76.2
65.9
61.8
91.1
75.1
76.4
56.6
51.7
74.3
83.1
82.8
66.4
49.6
70.4
91.5
64.3
80.1
55.0
82.4
30.8
3.5
82.9
69.8
87.0
53.3
70.7
20.7
5.6
59.8
83.1
54.9
28.4
71.0

NR
3.7%
NR
3.3
NR
1.7
3.1
2.0
NR
1.6
5.0
2.2
1.6
2.7
2.5
1.0
2.9
NR
NR
NR
NR
NR
1.8
1.6
2.9
3.8
2.4
0.0
1.7
2.6
9.4
2.4
4.1
1.5
NR
0.0
3.5
2.5
2.0
2.5
4.0
NR
2.0
4.4
0.4
1.9
2.7
NR
1.2
NR
1.6

40.5%
14.6
21.3
19.3
12.7
17.3
7.1
27.8
16.1
12.0
10.4
11.1
18.0
26.5
13.8
13.4
21.7
12.4
27.7
22.4
26.7
14.1
17.9
16.9
21.2
27.5
10.7
14.0
17.8
20.4
33.4
14.5
11.2
3.5
16.7
20.9
18.3
8.6
32.4
14.2
30.0
13.0
33.3
23.4
14.7
48.4
27.4
16.5
27.2
12.7
7.0

United States

883,647

12.0

63.0

2.0

16.5

1 Number

Sexual
abuse

Psychological
maltreatment Other

23.5%
4.5
6.2
29.2
7.4
10.1
4.6
9.3
5.7
4.0
4.6
5.6
6.1
18.9
21.3
5.8
23.4
5.1
7.2
12.7
13.4
2.7
4.8
10.7
15.0
26.2
6.9
8.9
4.3
19.7
8.8
5.3
3.9
3.8
7.7
18.6
6.4
8.7
62.5
5.0
8.4
4.1
20.4
11.9
19.3
46.5
15.0
6.0
4.7
37.8
7.4

0.7%
29.4
0.9
1.3
17.9
5.1
30.5
22.6
NR
1.8
21.4
0.9
0.4
0.1
NR
0.7
15.4
0.6
3.4
44.9
0.3
0.2
2.2
0.8
11.0
6.2
20.4
5.5
7.9
1.0
1.5
22.1
0.7
0.4
53.3
9.9
22.6
2.8
1.1
0.3
1.3
3.7
0.5
1.5
42.5
1.1
1.1
NR
22.8
0.3
13.2

9.4

6.9

NR
NR
NR
0.0%
0.1
8.1
3.7
10.4
NR
69.2
1.1
89.6
7.4
NR
NR
9.9
25.0
NR
0.2
NR
NR
0.0
2.6
NR
0.5
2.1
0.4
NR
NR
NR
0.1
0.2
24.8
26.6
NR
NR
NR
58.9
NR
2.4
0.2
NR
NR
NR
19.2
NR
0.0
NR
7.9
25.0
6.0
15.6

of child victims per 1,000 children.
may be greater than 100 percent because some victims were subject to multiple types of maltreatment.
NR — no data reported by state.
Note: Because of differences in definitions and reporting requirements, data may not be comparable from state to state.
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Child Maltreatment 2005 (2007),
Tables 3-3 and 3-6. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.
2 Totals

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506,000 children were in foster care in 2005. The percentage of Black children
in care was more than twice their proportion of the child population.
Table 10: Foster Care, FY 2000 – FY 2005
Number of children in care on last day of year
Children in care, FY 2003, by race/ethnicity (percent)

FY
2000
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of
Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

5,621
2,193
6,475
3,045
112,807
7,533
6,996
1,098

United States

544,303

3,054
36,608
11,204
2,401
1,015
29,565
7,482
5,068
6,569
6,017
5,406
3,191
13,113
11,619
20,034
8,530
3,292
13,181
2,180
5,674
1,615
1,311
9,794
1,912
47,118
10,847
1,129
20,365
8,406
9,193
21,631
2,302
4,525
1,215
10,144
18,190
1,805
1,389
6,789
8,945
3,388
10,504
815

FY
2001

American
Native Two
Black
White Indian,
Hawaiian, or Unknown
nonnon- Alaska
Pacific more
or
Hispanic Hispanic Hispanic Native Asian Islander races missing

FY
2002

FY
2003

FY
2004

FY
2005

5,859
5,883
1,993
2,072
6,050
6,173
2,959
2,971
107,168 100,451
7,138
9,209
7,440
6,007
1,023
886

6,079
2,040
7,469
3,014
97,261
8,754
6,742
814

5,934
1,825
9,119
3,097
92,344
8,196
6,803
849

6,913
1,791
9,685
3,230
81,174
8,213
7,032
962

49.9%
7.5
8.7
31.0
29.0
12.0
33.4
59.7

1.5%
2.6
35.9
3.5
39.4
33.0
28.1
6.5

47.6% 0.2%
24.7
63.7
46.0
2.5
57.5
0.2
25.4
0.8
50.4
1.3
33.6
0.1
33.7
0.1

3,092
30,677
13,578
2,886
1,401
21,608
8,815
5,011
5,781
6,895
4,541
2,760
11,521
12,608
21,376
6,770
2,721
11,900
1,866
5,148
3,525
1,217
12,800
2,122
37,067
9,534
1,238
19,323
9,226
9,117
20,845
2,357
4,801
1,537
9,487
21,880
2,033
1,409
7,046
9,213
4,069
7,824
1,055

2,608
28,864
14,216
2,953
1,565
19,931
9,778
5,384
6,060
7,000
4,397
2,584
11,111
12,562
21,173
6,540
2,989
11,681
2,030
6,292
4,050
1,236
12,702
2,150
33,445
10,077
1,314
18,004
10,572
10,048
21,944
2,414
4,635
1,582
9,590
24,529
2,108
1,432
6,869
9,368
3,990
7,812
1,209

2,505
29,312
13,965
2,766
1,818
19,431
11,257
6,794
5,835
7,287
4,833
2,309
10,867
12,197
20,498
6,978
3,269
11,344
2,222
6,231
4,670
1,178
12,042
2,316
30,420
10,698
1,364
17,442
11,393
11,021
21,691
2,509
4,757
1,712
9,017
28,883
2,285
1,436
7,022
10,068
4,331
8,109
1,263

85.1
42.4
51.1
1.1
1.7
67.7
34.3
12.3
21.3
17.5
56.7
1.7
75.3
18.0
50.7
21.7
50.9
34.2
1.3
15.4
23.5
3.9
60.5
5.0
47.2
43.1
2.5
44.3
17.0
7.5
48.5
18.5
54.5
1.8
33.1
25.6
3.9
1.6
45.5
11.3
6.6
44.0
3.6

2.3
9.0
4.0
1.7
14.1
5.6
5.5
5.0
4.9
0.7
0.9
2.7
1.5
24.7
4.0
6.9
1.0
1.9
5.7
7.9
14.7
5.0
6.4
52.0
18.9
6.1
4.0
2.7
8.8
9.9
8.2
18.3
2.2
5.8
2.8
36.8
21.4
1.1
4.9
12.7
1.2
7.6
7.6

0.2
45.8
41.3
9.0
72.5
24.4
55.6
71.0
65.5
74.6
40.3
82.5
20.3
49.4
40.6
49.8
40.2
62.3
52.4
65.0
54.1
82.9
23.7
29.8
18.6
45.9
60.6
48.3
46.4
58.5
39.3
54.1
40.5
30.9
60.4
33.2
65.8
96.2
44.4
58.3
79.4
40.1
82.1

35

17

39

3,339
32,477
13,175
2,584
1,114
28,202
8,383
5,202
6,409
6,165
5,024
3,226
12,564
11,568
20,896
8,167
3,443
13,394
2,008
6,254
2,959
1,288
10,666
1,757
43,365
10,130
1,167
21,584
8,674
8,966
21,319
2,414
4,774
1,367
9,679
19,739
1,957
1,382
6,866
9,101
3,298
9,497
965

3,321
31,963
13,149
2,762
1,246
24,344
8,478
5,238
6,190
6,814
4,829
3,084
12,026
12,510
21,251
8,052
2,686
13,029
1,912
5,724
3,291
1,291
11,442
1,885
40,753
9,527
1,197
21,038
8,812
9,101
21,410
2,383
4,818
1,396
9,359
21,353
2,025
1,526
7,109
9,669
3,220
8,744
929

536,138 524,538 511,853

508,965 506,345

<.1%
0.4
0.2
<.1
1.3
0.5
0.2
0.0

0.0%
0.0
0.1
<.1
0.4
<.1
<.1
0.0

0.0%
0.0
0.1
<.1
0.4
<.1
<.1
0.0

0.2%
1.2
2.0
0.3
0.5
0.3
1.0
0.0

<.1
0.2
<.1
0.4
9.3
0.1
0.2
2.1
1.0
0.2
0.4
1.1
0.2
0.1
1.0
12.3
<.1
0.3
33.4
8.8
0.9
0.5
0.1
7.5
0.2
2.1
28.1
0.2
12.6
8.8
0.1
1.1
0.1
55.8
0.1
0.2
6.0
<.1
<.1
8.9
0.0
2.4
1.9

0.2
0.2
0.1
14.3
0.0
0.1
<.1
0.8
0.3
0.1
0.3
0.4
0.3
1.8
0.2
1.5
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.3
0.6
<.1
0.3
<.1
0.4
0.3
1.4
0.1
<.1
0.7
0.5
1.9
0.2
0.1
0.2
0.4
1.1
0.2
0.3
0.7
<.1
1.1
0.3

0.0
<.1
<.1
29.2
0.2
0.0
<.1
0.1
<.1
<.1
0.0
<.1
<.1
<.1
0.2
<.1
<.1
<.1
0.0
<.1
0.9
<.1
<.1
0.1
0.0
0.2
0.2
<.1
0.1
0.2
0.0
0.0
<.1
0.1
0.0
0.0
1.3
<.1
<.1
0.3
<.1
<.1
0.0

0.0
<.1
<.1
29.2
0.2
0.0
<.1
0.1
<.1
<.1
0.0
<.1
<.1
<.1
0.2
<.1
<.1
<.1
0.0
<.1
0.9
<.1
<.1
0.1
0.0
0.2
0.2
<.1
0.1
0.2
0.0
0.0
<.1
0.1
0.0
0.0
1.3
<.1
<.1
0.3
<.1
<.1
0.0

11.6
0.5
0.4
7.9
0.5
2.0
0.3
7.7
4.5
3.1
0.6
10.1
1.4
3.4
0.2
1.5
6.8
0.8
4.4
1.6
1.6
3.9
7.2
3.1
14.6
0.2
0.0
1.0
0.1
14.0
3.3
2.0
0.2
0.0
1.5
0.7
0.4
0.7
0.6
1.1
4.9
1.0
3.6

2

1

0

0

3

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, at
<http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/statistics/entryexit2005.htm>; and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, Child Welfare Outcomes 2003: Annual Report (2006),
at <http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cwo03/cwo03.pdf>. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

Appendices

229

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One in 14 teens ages 16 to 19 are school dropouts. Dropping out increases
the risk of unemployment, arrest and incarceration.
Table 11: Youth at Risk
Youth
Number of
Dropouts,
unemployment juvenile
2
2004-2005
rate ,
arrests3,
Number
Percent
2004
2005
1

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

21,973
4,014
28,488
11,734
134,361
19,005
6,849
3,540
1,281
74,528
48,857
1,863
7,047
44,482
27,472
8,058
8,765
18,351
21,258
4,465
21,287
14,292
35,240
11,358
14,299
22,961
3,535
4,617
12,764
3,761
24,843
11,394
60,976
37,043
1,417
37,380
18,148
12,207
39,345
3,544
19,607
2,801
24,309
98,338
10,289
1,505
20,985
24,110
7,337
16,070
2,148
1,114,301

9.5%
9.3
9.2
7.8
6.8
8.2
4.0
9.1
8.3
8.5
10.4
3.1
8.5
6.8
8.7
5.4
6.2
9.0
8.4
6.7
7.2
4.9
6.5
4.2
9.0
7.8
7.2
5.1
10.7
5.8
5.5
9.6
6.5
8.9
4.5
6.4
9.7
6.8
6.5
7.7
9.3
6.8
8.2
7.8
7.1
4.9
5.6
7.3
8.8
5.6
8.0
7.3

15.7% 11,484
22.5
4,532
21.1
50,371
24.1
12,380
20.8
217,158
20.6
46,030
16.4
20,811
9.9
7,449
30.4
347
15.4
120,082
16.3
28,429
15.0
8,261
16.9
9,864
18.0
37,470
14.4
34,293
12.2
19,926
15.2
6,555
21.7
13,857
21.2
23,806
13.9
7,112
14.6
49,297
13.4
14,841
18.9
45,934
12.4
46,818
20.7
11,372
17.4
26,874
11.0
6,493
12.6
15,219
13.0
15,749
12.3
8,417
13.8
59,154
18.9
9,696
16.3
48,377
19.2
47,488
10.9
6,599
16.3
41,082
12.2
19,813
22.3
28,107
18.4
101,608
14.5
5,286
16.8
27,736
10.3
3,096
14.4
34,316
18.5
173,568
17.0
26,481
11.8
1,599
10.9
32,980
21.9
35,315
16.0
3,033
11.9
69,037
11.2
6,548
17.0

1,582,068

Juveniles in juvenile
and adult corrections
facilities, 2000
Juvenile
Adult
facilities
facilities

Total

1,731
357
1,872
898
14,644
2,013
894
91
46
6,320
4,125
193
597
3,903
2,895
1,215
1,159
1,531
2,396
389
1,782
2,250
4,364
1,819
1,431
2,434
365
1,405
889
417
2,189
553
6,896
2,172
285
3,954
1,480
1,497
6,219
365
1,705
965
2,548
7,811
1,202
120
3,107
2,280
477
1,837
392

236
37
898
353
1,604
159
452
14
39
1,455
910
10
72
868
571
74
111
186
632
4
295
195
778
112
369
372
69
49
218
27
110
312
1,739
743
6
606
89
207
440
6
527
126
142
3,420
168
18
405
198
25
618
56

1,967
394
2,770
1,251
16,248
2,172
1,346
105
85
7,775
5,035
203
669
4,771
3,466
1,289
1,270
1,717
3,028
393
2,077
2,445
5,142
1,931
1,800
2,806
434
1,454
1,107
444
2,299
865
8,635
2,915
291
4,560
1,569
1,704
6,659
371
2,232
1,091
2,690
11,231
1,370
138
3,512
2,478
502
2,455
448

112,479

21,130

133,609

1 Youth ages 16-19 not enrolled in school and not high school graduates.
2 Youth ages 16-19.
3 Data incomplete for the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois and New York.
Sources: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 2005 American Community Survey, Table C14005; U.S. Department of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment status of the civilian noninstitutional population by sex, race, Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, marital status,
and detailed age, 2004 annual averages,” at <http://stats.bls.gov/gps/home.htm>; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004
Annual Averages, Table 3, “Employment status of the civilian noninstitutional population by age, sex, and race,” Employment and Earnings, January
2005; U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States 2005 (October 2006), Tables 41 and 69; and U.S.
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, SF1. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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States spend on average almost 3 times as much per prisoner
as per public school pupil.
Table 12: Cost Per Prisoner and Cost Per Pupil
Cost per
pupil,
2000-2003
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

Cost per
prisoner,
FY 2003

Ratio,
per prisoner
to per pupil

$ 6,300
9,870
6,282
6,482
7,552
7,384
11,057
9,693
11,847
6,439
7,774
8,100
6,081
8,287
8,057
7,574
7,454
6,661
6,922
9,344
9,153
10,460
8,781
8,109
5,792
7,495
7,496
8,074
6,092
8,579
12,568
7,125
11,961
6,562
6,870
8,632
6,092
7,491
8,997
10,349
7,040
6,547
6,118
7,136
4,838
10,454
7,822
7,252
8,319
9,004
8,985

$ 9,320
36,240
18,222
16,408
28,914
23,108
27,383
22,350

1.5
3.7
2.9
2.5
3.8
3.1
2.5
2.3

20,236
15,644
21,934
21,763
23,441
25,512
27,205
24,496
21,096
9,980
37,687
23,649
52,637
28,260
29,971
10,309
17,921
17,009
19,035
16,496
27,948
32,606
33,557
27,785
23,487
27,543
26,538
8,825
25,441
30,451
41,441
15,415
12,509
13,227
16,642
37,567
42,625
19,046
31,261
36,594
26,846
38,967

3.1
2.0
2.7
3.6
2.8
3.2
3.6
3.3
3.2
1.4
4.0
2.6
5.0
3.2
3.7
1.8
2.4
2.3
2.4
2.7
3.3
2.6
4.7
2.3
3.6
4.0
3.1
1.4
3.4
3.4
4.0
2.2
1.9
2.2
2.3
7.8
4.1
2.4
4.3
4.4
3.0
4.3

8,044

22,523

2.8

Sources: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2005 (July 2006),
Table 166; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, State Government Finances: 2003, at <http://www.census.gov/
govs/www/state.html>, extracted May 2006; and U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison and Jail Inmates
at Midyear 2003 (May 2004), NCJ 203947, Table 2. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

Appendices

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Minority youth ages 10 to 17 are far more likely to be confined in juvenile or
adult correctional facilities than are White, non-Hispanic youth.
Table 13: Disproportionate Minority Confinement, 2000
Population ages 10-17
Minority
as percent
Total
Minority
of total
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

512,085
89,355
594,692
311,560
4,036,968
494,862
374,200
87,243
47,071
1,668,799
958,500
132,624
170,631
1,439,044
707,908
342,622
328,711
449,659
565,627
147,490
611,461
671,935
1,178,581
601,406
353,903
658,896
113,230
209,749
216,660
145,340
919,244
236,775
2,098,833
861,985
78,467
1,317,063
411,482
389,047
1,366,472
112,021
459,719
97,094
627,828
2,607,947
316,287
72,433
781,196
693,628
189,438
646,932
63,806

185,134
35,252
282,101
85,477
2,521,012
152,607
108,221
29,700
41,819
731,512
414,108
113,245
24,746
547,603
117,592
31,522
66,607
56,270
251,802
7,240
261,446
157,965
298,752
95,895
168,845
130,062
16,955
32,495
91,677
8,367
362,564
154,842
919,817
311,133
9,257
253,443
137,525
79,409
276,433
28,149
193,364
17,220
161,091
1,430,561
49,378
3,532
272,130
179,700
12,094
113,362
8,638

32,568,509 12,039,671

36.2%
39.5
47.4
27.4
62.4
30.8
28.9
34.0
88.8
43.8
43.2
85.4
14.5
38.1
16.6
9.2
20.3
12.5
44.5
4.9
42.8
23.5
25.3
15.9
47.7
19.7
15.0
15.5
42.3
5.8
39.4
65.4
43.8
36.1
11.8
19.2
33.4
20.4
20.2
25.1
42.1
17.7
25.7
54.9
15.6
4.9
34.8
25.9
6.4
17.5
13.5
37.0

Juveniles in juvenile and
Ratio, minority
adult corrections facilities
percent confined
Minority
to minority
as percent
percent of
Total
Minority
of total
population
1,967
394
2,770
1,251
16,248
2,172
1,346
105
85
7,775
5,035
203
669
4,771
3,466
1,289
1,270
1,717
3,028
393
2,077
2,445
5,142
1,931
1,800
2,806
434
1,454
1,107
444
2,299
865
8,635
2,915
291
4,560
1,569
1,704
6,659
371
2,232
1,091
2,690
11,231
1,370
138
3,512
2,478
502
2,455
448

1,104
253
1,889
638
12,551
1,220
954
74
84
4,580
3,234
175
133
2,812
1,347
355
572
557
2,306
33
1,475
1,112
3,051
835
1,243
1,150
150
606
597
53
1,768
675
6,155
1,666
148
2,129
744
633
3,857
201
1,413
718
1,189
7,581
388
18
2,088
1,189
84
1,344
129

56.1%
64.2
68.2
51.0
77.2
56.2
70.9
70.5
98.8
58.9
64.2
86.2
19.9
58.9
38.9
27.5
45.0
32.4
76.2
8.4
71.0
45.5
59.3
43.2
69.1
41.0
34.6
41.7
53.9
11.9
76.9
78.0
71.3
57.2
50.9
46.7
47.4
37.1
57.9
54.2
63.3
65.8
44.2
67.5
28.3
13.0
59.5
48.0
16.7
54.7
28.8

1.55
1.63
1.44
1.86
1.24
1.82
2.45
2.07
1.11
1.34
1.49
1.01
1.37
1.55
2.34
2.99
2.22
2.59
1.71
1.71
1.66
1.94
2.34
2.72
1.45
2.08
2.31
2.69
1.27
2.05
1.95
1.19
1.63
1.58
4.31
2.43
1.42
1.82
2.87
2.16
1.50
3.72
1.72
1.23
1.81
2.65
1.71
1.85
2.61
3.13
2.13

133,609

79,260

59.3

1.60

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, SF1. Calculations by Children’s
Defense Fund.

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2,825 children and teens were killed by firearms in 2004. Black teens are 8 times as
likely as White teens to be victims of firearm homicides; White teens are about
twice as likely as Black teens to commit suicide with a firearm.
Table 14A: Firearm Deaths of Children and Teens, by Age,
Manner, and Race/Hispanic Origin, 2004
Under
1

Ages
1-4

Ages
5-9

Ages
10-14

Ages
15-19

Total under
age 20

All races
Accident
Suicide
Homicide
Undetermined intent

7
1
0
6
0

51
14
0
36
1

61
13
0
45
3

239
35
59
139
6

2,467
80
787
1,578
22

2,825
143
846
1,804
32

White
Accident
Suicide
Homicide
Undetermined intent

4
1
0
3
0

17
6
0
11
0

33
6
0
26
1

149
31
49
66
3

1,365
57
676
617
15

1,568
101
725
723
19

Black
Accident
Suicide
Homicide
Undetermined intent

3
0
0
3
0

30
7
0
22
1

25
7
0
16
2

77
2
8
65
2

1,014
19
74
914
7

1,149
35
82
1,020
12

American Indian, Alaska Native
Accident
Suicide
Homicide
Undetermined intent

0
0
0
0
0

3
1
0
2
0

2
0
0
2
0

8
2
1
4
1

44
4
23
17
0

57
7
24
25
1

Asian, Pacific Islander
Accident
Suicide
Homicide
Undetermined intent

0
0
0
0
0

1
0
0
1
0

1
0
0
1
0

5
0
1
4
0

44
0
14
30
0

51
0
15
36
0

Hispanic*
Accident
Suicide
Homicide
Undetermined intent

3
0
0
3
0

7
0
0
7
0

13
2
0
11
0

33
3
2
27
1

518
7
97
412
2

574
12
99
460
3

*Persons of Hispanic origin can be of any race.
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and
Control, WISQARS, at <http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars>, accessed December 2006. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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Each day, nearly 8 children and teens were killed by firearms in 2004.
Table 14B: Firearm Deaths of Children and Teens, by Manner, 2002-2004
Total*
2002 2003
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
United States

68
18
101
39
406
53
15
10
36
120
104
1
19
146
69
17
17
33
100
3
92
25
100
29
58
72
15
11
25
4
32
32
91
71
5
83
38
36
113
10
40
7
79
220
17
2
72
40
20
49
4

59
26
64
27
429
32
12
10
28
109
83
1
13
158
54
12
26
34
88
9
80
22
79
40
38
53
14
17
27
5
36
35
131
100
7
75
34
15
130
6
50
9
58
244
25
4
83
48
14
63
11

Homicide*
2004

2002

52
22
76
16
468
48
11
9
40
111
89
0
16
143
56
16
26
40
88
10
71
32
104
39
43
61
12
15
27
4
48
28
89
70
10
80
29
21
132
4
44
10
73
236
15
3
76
49
12
43
8

36
7
58
18
337
20
10
4
34
81
65
1
3
127
31
6
6
12
70
0
77
22
60
9
28
45
2
5
19
1
24
15
74
47
0
52
13
14
73
8
26
0
47
140
3
1
50
17
7
24
1

2003
34
10
38
11
355
20
10
6
28
81
58
1
4
131
32
1
10
9
57
1
67
17
49
17
23
32
5
6
13
0
35
18
94
59
4
49
12
7
81
4
36
0
32
146
3
1
58
17
7
31
2

Suicide
2004

31
7
43
8
406
23
9
7
39
76
57
0
3
123
33
2
13
18
54
0
61
26
57
15
23
38
1
4
18
1
41
11
69
40
1
46
13
12
87
2
19
1
30
144
4
0
50
18
4
14
2

2,867 2,827 2,825 1,830 1,822 1,804

Accident

2002 2003 2004
22
10
30
12
54
30
4
3
1
33
28
0
12
15
28
9
9
13
19
3
14
1
36
18
21
25
10
6
6
3
5
16
14
21
4
22
22
17
35
2
9
4
22
72
14
1
17
21
10
23
2

17
13
21
9
55
10
1
3
0
23
24
0
9
20
15
11
13
13
22
7
13
5
25
19
8
18
9
10
12
3
1
15
32
33
2
21
21
7
41
1
10
8
19
85
18
2
22
25
6
26
7

16
15
25
4
49
24
2
1
0
30
27
0
10
17
19
13
12
20
25
10
9
6
34
24
15
21
10
9
7
3
7
17
16
22
6
28
13
6
39
2
18
7
29
79
11
2
21
27
8
27
4

828 810 846

Undetermined
Intent

2002 2003 2004 2002 2003 2004
10
1
8
6
13
1
1
3
1
5
9
0
4
3
9
2
2
6
10
0
1
2
4
1
7
2
1
0
0
0
3
1
3
1
1
6
3
2
4
0
4
2
8
7
0
0
4
1
3
2
0

7 4
2 0
3 6
5 3
15 10
1 1
1 0
0 1
0 1
3 5
1 4
0 0
0 3
7 3
6 4
0 1
3 1
10 2
8 8
1 0
0 1
0 0
2 8
3 0
7 4
1 2
0 1
1 2
1 2
1 0
0 0
1 0
5 4
7 5
1 1
5 5
1 3
0 3
4 5
0 0
3 6
1 2
6 10
10 10
4 0
1 1
2 4
3 4
1 0
5 1
2 2

167 151 143

0
0
5
3
2
2
0
0
0
1
2
0
0
1
1
0
0
2
1
0
0
0
0
1
2
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
3
0
3
1
0
1
1
2
1
0
0
1
1
0
0
1

1
1
2
2
4
1
0
1
0
2
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
2
1
0
0
0
3
1
0
2
0
0
1
1
0
1
0
1
0
0
0
1
4
1
1
0
1
3
0
0
1
3
0
1
0

1
0
2
1
3
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
5
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
2
1
0
0
1
0
1
0
4
3
0
0
1
0
0
1
0

42 44 32

*Total firearm deaths and homicide firearm deaths exclude firearm deaths by legal (police or corrections) intervention.
Sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Table III: Deaths from 358 Selected Causes,
2002-2003; and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control,
WISQARS, at <http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/>, data accessed January 2007. Calculations by Children’s Defense Fund.

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“If we could reduce the abuse and neglect in
this generation of kids, it would have huge
payoffs for our society, not just in terms of
mental and physical health but in the area
of crime.”
—Frank W. Putnam, M.D., Mayerson Center for
Safe and Healthy Children, Cincinnati

“Schools use detention centers as their discipline.
I get calls every week, if not every day, from
parents about their children being taken out of
school in handcuffs by police.”
— Margaret Burley, Ohio Coalition for the
Education of Children with Disabilities

“I sat at a desk and I had kids I couldn’t
even see…They weren’t tall enough.
I wondered, ‘What in the world could you
have done?’”
— Mark Reed, Juvenile Court
Administrator, Hamilton
County, Ohio

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