Episode 6: 'Please Lock Up My Kid'

Caught

WNYC Studios

Politics, Society & Culture, Documentary, News, True Crime

4.9 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Status offenses are acts only considered crimes if committed by young people – things like running away, not going to school, or missing curfew. They are designed to keep at risk youth safe, but in practice, they can also become a pipeline into the juvenile justice system for kids who might otherwise not end up there. One of those kids is Maria, a young woman living in Walla Walla, Washington, who refuses to attend school. Washington state intensified its status offense laws after a runaway girl was found dead. It now leads the nation in jailing kids for status offenses. Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice is supported, in part, by the Anne Levy Fund, Margaret Neubart Foundation, the John and Gwen Smart Family Foundation, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported, WNYC Studios.
0:10.3	For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system.
0:16.4	It's December 2012, and Senator Dick Durbin is calling to order a Judiciary Committee hearing.
0:22.7	To civil rights advocates, it feels like a huge moment, a turning point.
0:27.2	It's the first ever congressional hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline.
0:31.3	This school-to-prison pipeline has moved scores of young people from classrooms to
0:35.4	courtrooms.
0:36.3	You have surely heard this metaphor, the pipeline.
0:38.3	It's now embedded in our political lexicon.
0:41.3	Too many cases, our criminal justice system ends up being a pipeline from underfunded,
0:47.3	inadequate schools to overcrowded jails.
0:52.3	The problem it describes actually stretches way back to the early 90s.
0:56.6	You'll recall our conversation in episode one of this podcast about super predators and the
1:01.2	law and order crackdown of that era.
1:04.1	They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators.
1:07.9	No conscience, no empathy.
1:09.8	Well, it wasn't just cops and courts that got tough on youth.
1:13.0	It was also schools.
1:14.7	They developed what they called zero tolerance policies.
1:18.3	It's the same idea as with policing.
1:20.2	If you want to stop the big stuff, you've got to come down hard even on the small stuff.
1:24.7	By the end of the 90s, civil rights advocates had begun documenting how this idea
	...

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