While reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, my thoughts kept on returning to the elementary students I work with at an after-school program. Nearly two-thirds have had a parent incarcerated—and just this past spring, one of their parents earned a life sentence without parole. On top of this, more than 30 percent of my students are homeless, and 93 percent live below the federal poverty line. Their community has a 60-plus-year history of drug use, street violence and job scarcity. When people discuss the neighborhood—even as it is gentrifying—they speak about shootings, criminality and a clash between residents and police that occurred half a decade ago.
What’s expected of these youth—most of whom are people of color—is as clear as a two-block walk from the elementary school: a youth detention center. This “center” is a lockdown residential facility. A few blocks in the other direction are some of the city’s “felon flats”—one of the few housing options available to rent even with a felony record.
One of my students already has assault on his record. Another has arson. A third has been labeled as “emotionally disturbed.” The list could go on, but my objective isn’t to shock you or to garner your sympathy. My point is that these children—and they are all still children, none yet even in middle school—are being systematically criminalized.
In an effort to provide these youth with alternative futures—futures that circumvent the juvenile detention center and “felon flats”—I write grant proposals for art classes, sports teams and stipends, among other things, to enhance their public school experience and, hopefully, help them feel valued by their school communities.
I also work with the director of our after-school program to invite guest speakers who come from similar backgrounds—homelessness, incarcerated parents, drugs in the home—to talk about their experiences.
A 37-year-old who recently got his GED and enrolled in college visited the program.
“I’ve got the first real job I’ve ever had,” he told them. “Before that, all I knew how to do was hustle.”
They asked him what it was like being a gangster and hustler and shared stories about uncles who were pimps, fathers who had never had jobs.
“Stay in school,” the guest speaker urged them. “For real, my way of life is no way to live.”
He gestured in the direction of the juvenile detention facility. “And you don’t want to end up there, or in jail.”
“Have you been to jail?” a fourth-grade boy asked him.
“Yes, and you don’t want to go,” the guest speaker replied. “It’s a cage.” He shared that he went to jail in his late teens, for being in the getaway car of a robbery. His voice broke, and my thoughts returned to The New Jim Crow.
None of my efforts feel like enough—not as long as the building most of the youth see on their way to school is the place that’s designed to lock them up. So where does that leave us? Hopeless? Surely not. In the words of Michelle Alexander:
“Given what is at stake at this moment in history, bolder, more inspired action is required than we have seen to date. Piecemeal, top-down policy reform on criminal justice issues…will not get us out of our nation’s racial quagmire…. Taking our cue from the courageous civil rights advocates who brazenly refused to defend themselves, marching unarmed past white mobs that threatened to kill them, we, too, must be the change we hope to create.”
How can we go about enacting change in our communities? One important goal is to bring the school-to-prison pipeline to an end. What should our other priorities be?
Want to know more about The New Jim Crow? Check your mailbox this fall for an interview with Michelle Alexander in Teaching Tolerance magazine. We’ll also bring you a teacher’s guide to using the book with students this fall.
Clift works in an after-school program for youth and as the communications intern for the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
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