224 pages
ISBN-10: 0415957117
ISBN-13: 978-041595711
List price: $130

Coincidence…or trend? This morning’s issue of Common Dreams includes an article titled “ACLU Report Exposes Unjust Detention of Youth: Pre-Trial Juvenile Lockup in Massachusetts Disproportionately Impacts Youth of Color” (May 12, 2008). (http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0512-01.htm) Last weekend my social worker daughter railed at length about the hostility—abusiveness, actually—of a New York City judge who consistently refuses to release juvenile offenders to a demonstration program designed to keep them permanently out of jail. The judge is impervious to the fact that the city’s recidivism rate for juveniles who have been imprisoned is 80%, clearly demonstrating that what jail time most reliably yields…is more jail time. Meanwhile, on my nightstand awaiting review is Erica Meiners’ Right to Be Hostile, a microscopic look at juveniles, the justice system—and schools.

Anyone exposed to media and in the habit of thinking would see the above as indicating trend, not coincidence. Pieces on juveniles and the justice system routinely appear in news media. In February of this year, for example, the New York Times editorialized on the fact that the U.S. leads the world in the number of youthful offenders sentenced to life imprisonment, a situation headlined as “A Shameful Record.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/opinion/06wed5.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) In March, a United Nations panel called for the United States to disallow life sentences for offenders under 18. (http://abcnews.go.com/US/WireStory?id=4408351&page=2) While most people equate “juvenile offenders” with “males,” researchers have meanwhile reported that girls are at increasing risk in the justice system, most often for behaviors that wouldn’t be considered criminal if they were adults (including running away and promiscuous behavior). (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=747671&page=1)

Educators, of course, are generally aware of the problem and often lament the youthful promise squandered by a punitive justice system; often, too, they philosophize about who and what is responsible for the growing problem, rightfully implicating issues of poverty and parenting as well as the role of No Child Left Behind, responsible for increasing the numbers of school push outs and drop outs. As a body, however, education professionals will react with horror and disbelief when Meiners points an accusing finger in a new direction: at the education establishment itself. We are, she says, complicit in the massive production of fodder for the growing prison industrial complex (PIC). And, when she says we, she is inclusive: personnel in K-12 schools as well as teacher educators, she argues—persuasively—serve an important function in readying young people for incarceration. Precisely because her charge is so horrifying, it must be carefully examined. While readers are likely to immediately and vehemently deny any complicity, if there is any truth in Meiners’ claims, conscientious educators will want to know. Unhappily for readers, the author’s arguments are so carefully considered and constructed that after reading the book no thoughtful educator will be able to persist in outright, energetic and all-encompassing denial.

By page 2, Meiners is detailing the context of her discussion with statistics that command attention. The United States has 5% of the world’s people, yet 25% of the world’s incarcerated—over two million human beings, not including those on probation or parole, or those housed in Immigration and Naturalization facilities or U.S facilities outside the U.S. African American and Latina women are imprisoned far more often than white women, but 75% of all women imprisoned are prosecuted for nonviolent offenses. Some 12% of all African American males between 20 and 34 are imprisoned; the South has some states in which one-third of African American males cannot vote. Prison is a “growth industry,” big business, and getting bigger. As a nation, we are building more prisons than schools. Meiners’ essential argument is that schools play a large role in identifying and preparing the young people who will eventually fill those prisons. Because it is not possible to adequately summarize this carefully constructed argument in a review, readers are cautioned not to draw conclusions about the validity of Meiners’ arguments without reading the full text, something every educator interested in social justice should do as soon as possible.

Each of the book’s six chapters examines a particular element of schooling that serves to help channel select youth onto a path toward incarceration. Chapter 1 discusses how reasonable emotional reactions to oppressive social and institutional conditions, most specifically anger, are characterized as “outlaw” emotions and used as pretext for excessive control of oppressed populations by authority: “If you do not have the right to be hostile, anger can be read as violence, disruption, disrespect, or as evidence of inherent deviancy, or cognitive and behavioral impairment” (p. 30). Once justifiably angry students, aware of how poorly and inequitably served they and their communities are not only by schools but by other institutions, are branded with such negative labels, they are ripe to suffer the expulsion that commonly results from widespread “zero tolerance” policies. Expulsion is a strong predictor of dropping out—itself an indicator of likely eventual imprisonment. Expulsion rates are higher for boys than girls, and much higher for African Americans than Latinos, Caucasians or Asian Americans. This racialized expulsion trend begins in preschool; in one study, 37 out of 40 states reported that their preschool expulsion rate exceeded the K-12 expulsion rate.

It is also well documented that African American boys are disproportionately placed into special education, a placement that also decreases the chance that a child will graduate (although, as the author takes care to mention, some students do benefit substantively from special education programs). Meiners believes that such channeling may be traced, at least in part, to the fact that the teaching force is overwhelmingly white and female, unfamiliar with other cultures, subject to cultural stereotypes, and quick to feel threatened and intimidated by the Other—especially the African American male, and apparently at any age—and to impose the most severe sanctions.

Chapter 2 traces the systematic reallocation of resources from education to incarceration, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it?) that the more time a child spends in school, the less likely imprisonment becomes. That is, more schools would mean fewer, more expensive prisons—but we choose instead to build more prisons, concurrently calling for “less government,” widely translated as less money available for social welfare programs and popularly justified on such old stereotypes as the lazy welfare queen. This chapter also explores in detail the relationship between not only schools and prisons, but among those institutions and an economic sector that characterizes prisons as a growth “industry” promising new jobs and profits to depressed (white) communities (as long as the flow of new prisoners continues uninterrupted). To the extent that white educators fall prey to stereotypes and discount anger and hostility as legitimate emotions, they are likely to support and participate in school policies that ensure a steady stream of prisoners and revenue to the PIC.

Chapter 3 traces the role of the media in mischaracterizing prisons and incarceration, further ensuring continued public ignorance about the realities of prison populations and conditions while simultaneously promoting racial and other stereotypes, including suggestions that violence is characteristic of race. Chapter 4 is a sensitive, nuanced and especially thought-provoking examination of rhetoric around the need to protect innocent children from predators, especially sexual predators, which has led to Sex Offender Registries and the hyper-vigilance they promote. Of course, Meiners does not defend molestation of children; what she does point out, however, is that children are most often assaulted not by strangers but by family members and friends, people known to them. The author seeks in this chapter to move the reader to ask how the extreme focus on the area of “stranger danger” distracts attention from far more pervasive and systemic dangers to children. Among these, she cites evidence that poverty is the greatest of all such dangers.

xxxI know this fact, I teach this fact. Yet it persistently gets obscured. In a nation with no adequate or affordable childcare system, no universal health care, expensive to prohibitive costs for higher education, and a minimum wage that is not a living wage, we have no registries for the politicians, and employers, who routinely implement or execute policies that actively damage all people, including or even particularly children. (138)xxx

One can’t help but be reminded of writers like Lippman and Chomsky and to think again about how media loves spectacle (the relatively rare but sensational rape and murder of children) and how spectacle functions to distract the bewildered herd of the public from more systemic and pervasive problems.

Chapter 5 examines the ways that special education and recovery groups function to institutionalize and legitimize concepts of normalcy and, in doing so, concurrently determine what constitutes deviance. Moreover, deviance is associated with some problem in the individual—a congenital learning disability, or the disease of addiction. When such problems are assigned to individuals, attention is again distracted from social policies that create oppressive conditions and rational resistance. Blessedly, this chapter also contains examples of programs (Boarding School Healing Project and Prison: A Site for Resistance) that offer a stark contrast to the norm and suggest possibilities for change.

Chapter 6 is a thorough discussion of the author’s own goal: prison abolition. With extensive experience in talking to groups, Meiners is well-equipped to voice and answer a reader’s most likely, immediate questions as the book nears its close: “What about the really bad people?” and “How do I get involved?” Her answer in each case is detailed and extremely helpful to anyone new to and overwhelmed by her line of argument.

Of course, many writers have been exploring the explosion of the PIC, so many readers will be familiar with some of the trends and statistics Meiners uses to build her case. What is new, and startling, however, is her clear-eyed indictment of the education system and its personnel. She is not insensitive to the good intentions and hard work of many educators (and others in the “helping professions”), nor is she unaware that many critical educators are already on paths leading to the one she charts. She is, always, sensitive to the difficulties inherent in telling people things they don’t want to hear and are loathe to believe. Given how formidable her task, the result is nothing short of remarkable. No educator can read this book and be unchanged by it.

Recommended Further Reading and Viewing

Advancement Project and Civil Rights Project. (2000, June). Opportunities suspended: The devastating consequences of zero tolerance and school discipline policies. Available: http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/discipline/opport_suspended.php

Baker, B. (2002). The hunt for disability: The new eugenics and the normalization of school children. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 663-703.

Polakow, V. (Ed.) (2000). The public assault on America’s children: Poverty, violence, and juvenile injustice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

UCLA/IDEA. (n.d.) Suspension and expulsion at-a-glance. Available from http://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/suspension/index.html