ACLU Forum: Is There a“Schools to Prison Pipeline”?

More than 200 concerned activists and citizens turned out at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church on Tuesday night for a public forum hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss the idea that certain groups of students are funneled to prison without ever having a chance to succeed in the classroom.

“This is a big, huge idea, the cradle to prison pipeline,” said panel moderator Saudeka Shabazz of the Los Angeles Children Defense Fund.

Shabazz told the audience that the problem is systemic and actually starts in the womb, not at school.

“We say cradle instead of school because we want to show how many factors will affect the lives (of the youth) before they are born,” she said. “It’s these sets of policies and guidelines that are failing our children.”

Tuesday evening’s ACLU public forum was aimed at creating a dialogue on the issue in an attempt to discover new alternatives.

Among the key issues discussed at the meeting:  an increase in dropout rates at schools within the Pasadena Unified School District and the increased presence of police officers on campuses throughout the city.

“The solution isn’t to catch these kids after they have failed, it’s to fundamentally change the experience they receive early on,” Edwin Diaz, PUSD Superintendent and one of the four panelists, said during the forum.

Shabazz told everyone at the public forum that a black male born in 2001 has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, whereas a Latino boy born in the same year has a one-in-six chance of ending up behind bars.

“All of these factors of the system are colluding against (students) before they even have control over what they can do,” she added. “A lot of these things can be caught and brought back.”

Miriam Krinsky, a former prosecutor, said the community has to do more as collective units in order to better serve the youth — not just at school, but at home, as well.

“It is incumbent upon all of us to do more with less to help the most vulnerable in our society,” she pleaded at the forum. “Every time you open a school door, you can slam shut a prison door and effectively block the pipeline. We can work together to make sure (the youth) live up to their potential.”

Dr. Mikala Rahn, CEO of Learning Works!, a Pasadena Unified charter school for dropouts, added similar thoughts, saying sometimes it is easy to ignore the progress of an individual after falling behind in the system.

“There is not enough credit for improvement,” she said. “How does one start over? All youth have a right to reform and to have hope.”

According to Diaz, the dropout rate of students between grades 9 and 12 within the district has increased from 18.1 percent in 2006-2007 academic year to a preliminary estimate of about 24 percent last school year, roughly equal to the state average.

However, students expelled from Pasadena Unified were at a five-year low of 17 last year, Diaz added.

“This state and this district have not done a good job of tracking kids,” he said. “We are at a point that I am really beginning to believe these numbers.”

To help address the matter, Diaz told the audience that the district has instilled intervention programs and attendance review boards at its schools.

“The real solution around changing dynamics of the cradle to prison paradigm is to change the way we deliver educational service,” he added. “The most important aspect of what we do every day is (promoting) the interaction between teacher and student. The whole community with all of its resources needs to be organized around the student.”

Overall, Pasadena as a whole experienced a 17 percent decrease in violent crimes between 2007 and 2008, according to a FBI report released earlier this year. In that report, only 621 violent crimes were reported through all of last year, compared to 744 similar crimes in 2007.

There were only three murders in Pasadena in 2008, compared to 11 in the year before, according to the FBI’s preliminary statistics in its “Crime in the United States” report.

The only type of crime that experienced an increase in 2008 was burglary. Last year, there were 858 reported burglaries in the Pasadena area, compared to 827 in 2007.