The Fate of Children in the
Amerian Police State
John
Whitehead in the article below points out that American public schools are like
prisons. The wardens of the schools focus on punishment and ruining the lives
of children, not on education.
Parents who
can afford it put their children in private schools, and those who can’t
homeschool their children if they have the capability and do not have to work
several part time jobs in order to make ends meet.
The
situation that John Whitehead describes is real. The schools today bear no
resemblance whatsoever to the schools I experienced. The horrors inflicted on
children and parents by the public schools tell us a lot about ourselves. While
Americans waved the flag and mouthed plattitudes about “freedom and democracy,”
they were rounded up and confined to a police state.
The United
States today has every characteristic of the gestapo police state, except that
the US is more corrupt than was Nazi Germany.
The ugly
reality of America today is beginning to dawn on some Americans. Those who have
come into contact with the American police state and have been brutalized by it
are forced by reality out of their Matrix-like belief that America is the best
and most free country on earth.
Foreigners
remain deluded by American propaganda and believe the US is where freedom and
opportunity reside. This is especially the case with youth in former communist
countries.
The
propaganda image of America and the reality of American could not be more
different.
We have
lost our country. It is not here anymore.
Public School Students Are
the New Inmates in the American Police State
John W. Whitehead
“Every
day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the
majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to
resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors
to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic
surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a
society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.”—Investigative
journalist Annette Fuentes
In the
American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled,
monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not
your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy,
profiteer, etc.).
Indeed, at
a time when we are all viewed as suspects, there are so many ways in which a
person can be branded a criminal for violating any number of laws, regulations
or policies. Even if you haven’t knowingly violated any laws, there is still a
myriad of ways in which you can run afoul of the police state and end up on the
wrong side of a jail cell.
Unfortunately,
when you’re a child in the American police state, life is that much worse.
Microcosms
of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of
the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic,
surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the
“outside.”
From the
moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment
she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance
policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying
statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with
disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized
testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically
correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around
them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the
rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of
thought, speech or movement.
If your
child is fortunate enough to survive his encounter with the public schools, you
should count yourself fortunate.
Most
students are not so lucky.
By the time
the average young person in America finishes their public school education,
nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested.
More than 3
million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for
minor misbehavior, such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination.” Black
students are three times more likely than white students to face suspension and
expulsion.
For
instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two school teachers and a member
of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for a year after school officials
found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his backpack that they suspected was
marijuana. Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana (a fact
that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked out
of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in an
alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches for
drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.
As the
Washington Post warns: “It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a real
pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf—okra,
tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if
another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that’s grounds for expulsion.”
Many state
laws require that schools notify law enforcement whenever a student is found
with an “imitation controlled substance,” basically anything that look likes a
drug but isn’t actually illegal. As a result, students have been suspended for
bringing to school household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth
control pills and powdered sugar.
It’s not
just look-alike drugs that can get a student in trouble under school zero
tolerance policies. Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones,
hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner,
imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a
student in detention.
Acts of
kindness, concern or basic manners can also result in suspensions. One
13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by
sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for
shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to
chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for
saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.
Unfortunately,
while these may appear to be isolated incidents, they are indicative of a
nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like suspects and
criminals, especially within the public schools.
The schools
have become a microcosm of the American police state, right down to the host of
surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners,
iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, employed to keep
constant watch over their student bodies.
Making
matters worse are the police.
Students
accused of being disorderly or noncompliant have a difficult enough time
navigating the bureaucracy of school boards, but when you bring the police into
the picture, after-school detention and visits to the principal’s office are
transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court,
handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.
In the
absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in
to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief
physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a
visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and
temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”
Thanks to a
combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the
use of armed police officers to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically
in the years since the Columbine school shooting (nearly 20,000 by 2003).
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SROs)
have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling
out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with
the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.
The horror stories are legion.
One SRO is
accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria
line. That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly
knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury. In Pennsylvania, a
student was tased after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.
Defending
the use of handcuffs and pepper spray to subdue students, one Alabama police
department reasoned that if they can employ such tactics on young people away
from school, they should also be permitted to do so on campus.
Now
advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry will tell you that school
safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy
Hook. What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare. As one
congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places
for children.
In their
zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for
police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative,
multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser
International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and
$100,000 shooting detection systems.
Indeed, the
transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military
has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted
with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and
other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member
SWAT team.
According
to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school
districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they rival
the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety
division in New York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local
police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”
The
ramifications are far-reaching.
The term
“school-to-prison pipeline” refers to a phenomenon in which children who are
suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in
jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a student nearly
three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system
within the next year.”
Not content
to add police to their employee rosters, the schools have also come to resemble
prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, drug-sniffing
dogs, random locker searches and active shooter drills. The Detroit public
schools boast a “‘$5.6 million 23,000-sq ft. state of the art Command Center’
and ‘$41.7 million district-wide security initiative’ including metal detectors
and ID system where visitors’ names are checked against the sex offender
registry.”
As if it weren’t bad enough that the nation’s schools have come to resemble
prisons, the government is also contracting with private prisons to lock up our
young people for behavior that once would have merited a stern lecture. Nearly
40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private
prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations
above all else.
Private
prisons, the largest among them being GEO and the Corrections Corporation of
America, profit by taking over a state’s prison population for a fee. Many
states, under contract with these private prisons, agree to keep the prisons
full, which in turn results in more Americans being arrested, found guilty and
jailed for nonviolent “crimes” such as holding Bible studies in their back
yard. As the Washington Post points out, “With the growing influence of the
prison lobby, the nation is, in effect, commoditizing human bodies for an
industry in militant pursuit of profit… The influence of private prisons
creates a system that trades money for human freedom, often at the expense of
the nation’s most vulnerable populations: children, immigrants and the poor.”
This
profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile
prisons and financial incentives for jailing young people. Indeed, young people
have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from
criminalizing childish behavior and jailing young people. For instance, two
Pennsylvania judges made headlines when it was revealed that they had been
conspiring with two businessmen in a $2.6 million “kids for cash” scandal that
resulted in more than 2500 children being found guilty and jailed in for-profit
private prisons.
It has been
said that America’s schools are the training ground for future generations.
Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be
busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are
being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep
with the government’s dictates.
As I point
out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every
school police raid and overzealous punishment that is carried out in the name
of school safety, the lesson being imparted is that Americans—especially young
people—have no rights at all against the state or the police.
I’ll conclude with one hopeful anecdote about a Philadelphia school dubbed the
“Jones Jail” because of its bad reputation for violence among the student body.
Situated in a desperately poor and dangerous part of the city, the John Paul
Jones Middle School’s student body had grown up among drug users, drug
peddlers, prostitutes and gun violence. “By middle school,” reports The Atlantic,
most of these students “have witnessed more violence than most Americans who
didn’t serve in a war ever will.”
According
to investigative reporters Jeff Deeney, “School police officers patrolled the
building at John Paul Jones, and children were routinely submitted to scans
with metal detecting wands. All the windows were covered in metal grating and
one room that held computers even had thick iron prison bars on its exterior…
Every day… [police] would set up a perimeter of police officers on the blocks
around the school, and those police were there to protect neighbors from the
children, not to protect the children from the neighborhood.”
In other
words, John Paul Jones, one of the city’s most dangerous schools, was a perfect
example of the school-to-prison, police state apparatus at work among the
nation’s youngest and most impressionable citizens.
When
management of John Paul Jones was taken over by a charter school that opted to
de-escalate the police state presence, stripping away the metal detectors and
barred windows, local police protested. In fact, they showed up wearing Kevlar
vests. Nevertheless, school officials remained determined to do away with
institutional control and surveillance, as well as aggressive security guards,
and focus on noncoercive, nonviolent conflict resolution with an emphasis on
student empowerment, relationship building and anger management.
The result:
a 90% drop in serious incidents—drug sales, weapons, assaults, rapes—in one
year alone. As one fifth-grader remarked on the changes, “There are no more
fights. There are no more police. That’s better for the community.”
The lesson
for the rest of us is this: you not only get what you pay for, but you reap
what you sow.
If you want
a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.
If you want
young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like
prisons.
But if you
want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate
with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and
their government, then run the schools like freedom forums. Remove the metal
detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start
treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates
in a police state.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West
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