This is Zero Tolerance in effect…

Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children – Police state madness – more and more children being arrested for trivial things….fueling the school to prison pipeline, mass incarceration…Zero Tolerance in full effect.

 

 

#1 At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume

#2 A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.

#3 Another student down in Albuquerque was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket. The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.

#4 A security guard at one school in California broke the arm of a 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.

#5 One teenage couple down in Houston poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up. Instead of being sent to see the principal, they were arrested and sent to court.

#6 In early 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith” was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.

#7 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.

#8 One student down in Texas was reportedly arrested by police for throwing paper airplanes in class.

#9 A 17-year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.

#10 In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security officer even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender.

#11 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.

#12 Back in 2009, an 8-year-old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.

#13 A police officer in San Mateo, California blasted a 7-year-old special education student in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture.

#14 In America today, even 5-year-old children are treated brutally by police. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California a while back….

“Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old”.

#15 At one school in Connecticut, a 17-year-old boy was thrown to the floor and tasered five times because he was yelling at a cafeteria worker.

#16 A teenager in suburban Dallas was forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using foul language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.

#17 A few months ago, police were called out when a little girl kissed a little boy during a physical education class at an elementary school down in Florida.

#18 A 6-year-old boy was recently charged with sexual battery for some “inappropriate touching” during a game of tag at one elementary school in the San Francisco area.

#19 In Massachusetts, police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl.

HERE ARE THE LINKS:

http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/notitas-de-noticias/details/texas-student-sa rah-bustamantes-12-arrested-for-spraying-perfume/13250/

http://abcnews.go.com/m/blogEntry?id=150 77292

Check out this video on YouTube:<br/><br/>http://youtu.be/wk2b_twCCdw

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools?cat=world& type=article

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/18/new.york.doodle.arrest/index.html?hpt=C1

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2010/feb/11/port-st-lucie-schools-confines-6-year-old-with/

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/12/29/nc-high-school-senior-suspended-charged-possesion-small-knife-lunchbox/#

http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/2009/june09/zero-tolerance-states.html

http://m.tauntongazette.com/wkdTGazette/pm_/contentdetail.htm?contentguid

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Mateo-pays-family-of-boy-pepper-sprayed-by -cop-2384518.php

http://django.medianewsgroup.com/mobile/interstitial/?r=http%3A%2F%2F www.middletownpress.com%2Farti cles%2F2011%2F06%2F14%2Fnews%2 Fdoc4df7b12331ec9768149316.txt %3Fmobredir%3Dfalse&d=iphone

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/cops-called-for-school-kiss-657831

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/01/27/hercules-family-battles-playground-sex-assault-claim-against-6-year-old/

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/01/02/charlton-library-sends-police-to-collect-overd ue-books-from-5-year-old/ — with Your Son or Daughter next

 

Related articles

• In Texas, Police in Schools Criminalize 300,000 Students Each Year (alternet.org)
• More and More Children Being Arrested For Trivial Things… (revivalandreformation.wordpress.com)
• Texas Student Sarah Bustamantes, 12, Arrested for Spraying Perfume (hispanicallyspeakingnews.com)

A Handful of States Lead the Way on Juvenile Crime Prevention

By Ted Gest

Photo by banspy, via Flickr

States are “surprisingly slow” in adopting proven methods to deal with violent or delinquent youth and their families, a national juvenile justice conference was told today.

Failure to use the programs has been shown to result in higher crime rates and higher costs—placing youths in facilities or programs that are unproved or may cause youths’ behavior to worsen, said Peter Greenwood of the organization Advancing Evidence-Based Practice.

Greenwood spoke at the Models for Change annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Models for Change, started by the MacArthur Foundation in 2004, has invested more than $110 million in 16 states and 35 localities to support juvenile justice reforms.

Many of the efforts have centered in four states: Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana, and Washington.

Greenwood released a survey of states’ use of the three most well regarded programs for family therapy that aim at reducing future delinquency. The model programs are called functional family therapy, multi-systemic therapy, and multidimensional treatment foster care.

They involve sending teams of therapists to meet with youth and family members in their homes over a 4-to-9-month period, costing bertween $2,500 and $10,000 per case.

All three programs, which together have been used at more than 700 sites, have been proved to reduce recividism substantially.

The five states that have led by far in the use of these methods are Connecticut, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, and New Mexico, which overall make them available five times more than do other states.

Four of the five states started exploring these evidence-based practices in the late 1990s. Louisiana did not adopt them until 2006.

Greenwood and his co-authors, Brandon Welsh and Michael Rocque of Northeastern University, said the five leading states had turned “crisis into opportunity.”

Three states were sued by the U.S. Justice Department over substandard conditions in juvenile institutions. In the two other states, “there was a growing political consensus that  many youth being sent to placement did not belong there,” he said.

In all five places, key stakeholders were assembled to take charge of reforms.

The researchers said a main aim of using evidence-based practices was to reduce “excessive use of institutional placements for juvenile offenders.”

They took a look at what has happened in the five states. Connecticut has seen a marked decline in juvenile placements compared to the national average. Maine and Hawaii already were below the national average, and their rate has been stable.

Louisiana, which started the process late, had been above the national placement average but has declined to the national rate.

Only in New Mexico have placements increased in recent years, but the 2010 total is well below that reported in 2001.

“Given the obvious and well documented benefits of evidence-based family therapy programs” in the five states, the study’s authors said, other states should adopt similar changes to improve the cost-effectiveness of their crime prevention efforts.

The study is due to be posted later this week at http://advancingebp.org

Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Matters and Washington, DC-based contributing editor of The Crime Report.

Via The Crime Report

Related articles

• Commission pens recommendations for juvenile reform (onlineathens.com)
• Panel agrees on juvenile reform recommendations (chronicle.augusta.com)

A Terrifying Way to Discipline Children

Happening more and more at schools across the country… kids are being arrested for minor infraction of rules,  restrained, hand cuffed,  and placed in rooms all alone.  Our ‘challenged” children are often the targets-are your kids safe from this type of treatment?  What would YOU do if  this happened to your child?

By BILL LICHTENSTEIN

IN my public school 40 years ago, teachers didn’t lay their hands on students for bad behavior. They sent them to the principal’s o  ffice. But in today’s often overcrowded and underfunded schools, where one in eight students receive help for special learning needs, the use of physical restraints and seclusion rooms has become a common way to maintain order.

It’s a dangerous development, as I know from my daughter’s experience. At the age of 5, she was kept in a seclusion room for up to an hour at a time over the course of three months, until we discovered what was happening. The trauma was severe.

According to national Department of Education data, most of the nearly 40,000 students who were restrained or isolated in seclusion rooms during the 2009-10 school year had learning, behavioral, physical or developmental needs, even though students with those issues represented just 12 percent of the student population. African-American and Hispanic students were also disproportionately isolated or restrained.

Joseph Ryan, an expert on the use of restraints who teaches at Clemson University, told me that the practice of isolating and restraining problematic children originated in schools for children with special needs. It migrated to public schools in the 1970s as federal laws mainstreamed special education students, but without the necessary oversight or staff training. “It’s a quick way to respond but it’s not effective in changing behaviors,” he said.

State laws on disciplining students vary widely, and there are no federal laws restricting these practices, although earlier this year Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote, in a federal guide for schools, that there was “no evidence that using restraint or seclusion is effective.” He recommended evidence-based behavioral interventions and de-escalation techniques instead.

The use of restraints and seclusion has become far more routine than it should be. “They’re the last resort too often being used as the first resort,” said Jessica Butler, a lawyer in Washington who has written about seclusion in public schools.

Among the recent instances that have attracted attention: Children in Middletown, Conn., told their parents that there was a “scream room” in their school where they could hear other children who had been locked away; last December, Sandra Baker of Harrodsburg, Ky., found her fourth-grade  son, Christopher, who had misbehaved, stuffed inside a duffel bag, its drawstrings pulled tight, and left outside his classroom. He was “thrown in the hall like trash,” she told me. And in April, Corey Foster, a 16-year-old with learning disabilities, died on a school basketball court in Yonkers, N.Y., as four staff members restrained him following a confrontation during a game. The medical examiner ruled early last month that the death was from cardiac arrest resulting from the student’s having an enlarged heart, and no charges were filed.

Continue Reading @ NY Times

Related articles

• School Discipline Alternatives Explored In Harkin Hearing (huffingtonpost.com)
• A National Issue on the Local Level: Use of Seclusion and Restraint to Control Student Behavior in KC-Area Districts (kceducationenterprise.org)

What a Second Chance Looks Like – Perspectives on SB9

Do you believe that youth should be given a second chance? Call Governor Brown and urge him to sign SB9! (916) 445-2841

 

 

Related articles

• Help Give California’s Youth Another Chance (womensphilanthropy.typepad.com)

Update on James Prindle

James Prindle was sentenced yesterday to 22 years, no parole. This is not justice by any means……
http://wandervogeldiary.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/bad-movie/

RALLY for Davontae Sanford-Detroits Forgotten Child

Two governors and attorney generals have ignored Davontae’s plight of being coerced into falsely confessing to the impossible – carrying off a quadruple homicide although blind in one eye, developmentally disabled, and only 14, proving that conviction corruption is bipartisan and high-level, and stubbornly protects the self-sullied reputations of police and prosecutors that deserve to lose their freedom along with their jobs.

Davontae Sanford should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea so that he can go to trial based on the newly discovered evidence that a hit man says he and another person committed murder and Davontae was not there.

An Associated Press Article interview – conducted by Ed White on January 30, 2012

A Detroit hit man in prison for eight murders said he’s willing to publicly take responsibility for four more to help clear a young man who claims he’s innocent of the slayings and confessed at age 14 only to satisfy police.

Vincent Smothers’ testimony would be the most crucial evidence yet to try to persuade a judge to throw out Davontae Sanford’s guilty plea and free him from a nearly 40-year prison sentence. In an interview with The Associated Press, Smothers declared: “He’s not guilty. He didn’t do it.”

RALLY to support Davontae’s journey to FREEDOM will be held

April 23rd, 2012  8am

in front of the Recorders Court

1441 Saint Antoine St # 104 

 Detroit, MI 48226

Recorder’s Court - Directions

For more information & details, Please contact  Darcy Delaproser, Davontae’s advocate & family friend through the Facebook page created on his behalf

https://www.facebook.com/people/Davontae-Sanford/100002107776225

Davontae Sanford-684070
Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility
1576 W. Blue Water Highway
Ionia, MI 48846

Feel free to google “Davontae Sanford” to find out the injustices perpetrated on this 14 yr old child by the state of Michigan.

PLEASE sign the petition ……

http://www.change.org/petitions/new-trial-for-davontae-sanford?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition

http://voiceofdetroit.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/FREE-DAVONTAE-SANFORD-Voice-of-Detroit.pdf

http://freedavontaesanford-irishgreeneyes.blogspot.com/

8 Years In Prison for a Harmless Prank? Handcuffed for Doodling? The Increasing Criminalization of Students

Young people are being suspended, expelled and charged with criminal offenses for behavior as innocuous as doodling on a desk

A few months back, 18-year-old Tyell Morton was enjoying his senior year at Rushville High in Indiana. Today, he faces the prospect of being labeled a felon for the rest of his life for a harmless senior prank.

Morton was arrested for putting a blowup doll in a bathroom stall on the last day of school. He was caught when video footage showed a man entering the high school in a hooded sweatshirt and leaving a package in the bathroom. Fearing the package might be a bomb, school officials evacuated the premises and called the Indiana State bomb squad. Although no one was injured, no property damaged and no dangerous materials found, Morton, who had not been in any trouble prior to this incident, is being charged with disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor) and institutional criminal mischief (a class C felony), carrying the potential of two to eight years in prison.

Tyell Morton’s case has received nationwide media attention and there is even a website called Free Tyrell Morton. Unfortunately, his case is hardly the only one of its kind. The overzealous response to Morton’s harmless, albeit immature senior prank, is just the most recent in a long string of over-the-top punishments visited upon American students.

In Pearl, Mississippi, Pearl High School’s rivalry with Brandon High School dates back to 1949. Last year, when big paw prints and the letters B H S were scribbled in bright red spray paint all over Pearl High’s new field house, Brandon High officials launched an investigation. Tyler Dearman and Adam Cook, both 17, were arrested at school and charged with felony malicious mischief.

Young people across America are being suspended, expelled and charged with criminal offenses for behavior as innocuous as doodling on a desk, skipping class, and in the case of Tyell Morton, participating in the well-established American tradition of “senior pranking.”  Suspension and expulsion are poles apart from arrests and criminal charges, but all of these disciplinary measures stem from a zero-tolerance culture that promotes harsh punishment for common childhood mistakes. Why is this happening?

‘Zero-Tolerance’

In cases of violent or dangerous behavior, most everyone can agree that suspension or expulsion may be required by law or necessary for the safety of other students and school staff. But the zero-tolerance culture that spread throughout the American school system following a string of highly publicized school shootings in the ’90s has had unintended consequences.

A few months back, 18-year-old Tyell Morton was enjoying his senior year at Rushville High in Indiana. Today, he faces the prospect of being labeled a felon for the rest of his life for a harmless senior prank.

Morton was arrested for putting a blowup doll in a bathroom stall on the last day of school. He was caught when video footage showed a man entering the high school in a hooded sweatshirt and leaving a package in the bathroom. Fearing the package might be a bomb, school officials evacuated the premises and called the Indiana State bomb squad. Although no one was injured, no property damaged and no dangerous materials found, Morton, who had not been in any trouble prior to this incident, is being charged with disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor) and institutional criminal mischief (a class C felony), carrying the potential of two to eight years in prison.

Tyell Morton’s case has received nationwide media attention and there is even a website called Free Tyrell Morton. Unfortunately, his case is hardly the only one of its kind. The overzealous response to Morton’s harmless, albeit immature senior prank, is just the most recent in a long string of over-the-top punishments visited upon American students.

In Pearl, Mississippi, Pearl High School’s rivalry with Brandon High School dates back to 1949. Last year, when big paw prints and the letters B H S were scribbled in bright red spray paint all over Pearl High’s new field house, Brandon High officials launched an investigation. Tyler Dearman and Adam Cook, both 17, were arrested at school and charged with felony malicious mischief.

Young people across America are being suspended, expelled and charged with criminal offenses for behavior as innocuous as doodling on a desk, skipping class, and in the case of Tyell Morton, participating in the well-established American tradition of “senior pranking.”  Suspension and expulsion are poles apart from arrests and criminal charges, but all of these disciplinary measures stem from a zero-tolerance culture that promotes harsh punishment for common childhood mistakes. Why is this happening?

‘Zero-Tolerance’

In cases of violent or dangerous behavior, most everyone can agree that suspension or expulsion may be required by law or necessary for the safety of other students and school staff. But the zero-tolerance culture that spread throughout the American school system following a string of highly publicized school shootings in the ’90s has had unintended consequences.

Continue Reading @ AlterNet

Without A Smoking Gun

By Angela Caputo

Atreyu Spears fidgeted anxiously as he sat in the bullpen, a corner of the Cook County courthouse where detainees wait for the bailiff to walk them to the judge’s bench.

The past 69 days had been a blur. After leaving basketball practice on April 9, 2009, the 17-year-old headed to his friend Michael’s house. The two had struck up a friendship back in the third grade when Michael was the new kid in school. He was just one of nearly a dozen boys who lived within shouting distance of each other on a Chatham block packed tight with apartment buildings. Over the years, the group grew inseparable. “We’d hang out, spend the night at each other’s house playing video games, riding bikes, chasing girls,” Spears said.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Spears arrived at the aging brick walkup that cool spring evening. He headed upstairs to Michael’s bedroom to shoot hoops on Xbox. Five other teens were already in the second-floor apartment playing video games and watching television. Shortly after, Michael walked one of the boys downstairs.

At the same time, police were responding to a call for gunshots fired in the area. Patrolmen arrived at the building on the 8100 block of South Maryland Street and said they saw two males run inside clutching hand guns.

Continue Reading @ The Crime Report

Starting young, in prison forever in California

By Elayne Clift

I’ve been corresponding with an incarcerated woman in California for nearly 15 years.

My friend T.C. is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence for a crime she admits to committing when she was barely out of her teens: She accidentally killed her stepfather while he was sexually assaulting her.

She should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter, in which case she’d be free by now. Instead, because of poor legal representation by a public defender, she was convicted of premeditated murder. Although a model prisoner who has earned a two-year college degree and been an educator herself within the prison where she resides, she has twice been denied parole. Her friends are working tirelessly to secure her release.

T.C. sends out a quarterly newsletter to that network of supporters. The one I just received had something in it that bears reading. The situation described is a real eye-opener. If you are moved by this story as I was, share it and ask that legislators, no matter what state they’re in, act to give kids another chance:

“My name is Elizabeth Lozano. I’ve been incarcerated for 16 years. I’m serving a life without parole (LWOP) sentence for a crime that happened when I was 16 years old. I was sentenced under a murder felony ruling, which means that I was not the one who physically committed the murder. The murder felony law does not require that a person know a murder will take place, or that another participant is armed.

“Approximately 227 youth have been sentenced to die in California’s prisons although they have not been sentenced to death because the death penalty was found to be unconstitutional for juveniles by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. Instead, we have been sentenced to prison for the rest of our lives, with no opportunity for parole and no chance for release.

“Our crimes were committed when we were teenagers, yet we will die in prison. Remarkably, many of the adult co-defendants who took part in crimes for which teens have been sentenced to life received lower sentences; one day they will be released from prison. But youth LWOP is an effective death sentence carried out by the state slowly over a long period of years. In fact, most juveniles serve life sentences without any hope of being released. We feel it’s worse than death.

“Neuroscience has found that teens continue to develop in ways particularly relevant to assessing criminal behavior and an individual’s ability to be rehabilitated. The focus on this discovery has been on teenagers’ limited comprehension of risk and consequences, and the inability to act with adult free will. Societies make decisions about what to weigh when determining culpability. California’s law as it stands now fails to take into consideration a person’s legal status as a child at the time of the crime. Those who cannot buy cigarettes or alcohol, sign a rental agreement, or vote are nevertheless considered culpable to the same degree as an adult. Experts say that even at 16 or 17, when compared with adults, juveniles on averages are more impulsive, aggressive, emotionally volatile, likely to take risk, reactive to stress, vulnerable to peer pressure, prone to focus on and overestimate short-term payoffs and underplay long term consequences. They are likely to overlook alternative courses of action.

“Why is [California] so quick to throw away its youth?

Continue Reading….

New ruling for Jordan Brown sends his case back to county court

On Friday, the Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled to remand 13-year-old Jordan Brown‘s case to county court for Judge Dominick Motto to reconsider his view on whether or not Jordan should be tried as a juvenile.

Pennsylvania law requires that all juveniles ten and older, who commit an offense such as homicide, must be tried as adults. The only way a child or teenager may receive relief from this is if a judge rules to decertify their case, allowing the legal process to take place in the juvenile justice system instead of the adult system. Jordan Brown was 11 years old when he was arrested in the early morning hours for the murders of his father’s fiancée, Kenzie Houk, and her unborn son. The police only spent five hours investigating alternate leads before arresting the young boy based on finding a shotgun in Jordan’s room that smelled as though it had been fired recently. On January 29th, 2010, Judge Motto overheard arguments relating to whether Jordan should be tried as a juvenile or adult. The judge eventually ruled that Jordan’s case should commence in adult court. In the judge’s decision, he wrote:

“Experts from both the Defendant and the Commonwealth have agreed that in order for rehabilitation to occur in the Juvenile Court System, Defendant must take responsibility for the offense and at this juncture, has failed to do so. The court can only conclude upon this record that Defendant has failed to meet his burden to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the transfer of this case to juvenile court will serve the public interest.”

On March 11th, 2011, the Superior Court ruled that this original decision was unconstitutional because it violated Jordan’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Arguments for and against the decertification of Jordan’s case will occur before Judge Motto at an unspecified time, further delaying his Sixth Amendment constitutional right to receive a speedy trial. Those in support of Jordan hope that this ruling is a step in a positive direction for Jordan. On a discussion and informational forum pertaining to Jordan’s case, a supporter wrote in reference to the Superior Court ruling to remand the case back to Judge Motto: “That certainly is great news. I hope they get it right this time.”

Continue Reading….