Marian Wright Edelman: The injustices of the juvenile justice system

Recently, an 8-year-old boy in Williamsburg, Virginia, became one of the latest casualties in our nation's tendency to criminalize childhood. The second grader, whose name has been withheld because of his age, was handcuffed and led away from Rawls Byrd Elementary School after an incident in which he allegedly threw a tantrum, overturned desks and head-butted the teacher.
According to local reports, police were considering whether to file disorderly conduct and assault and battery charges against the child, who is 4 feet tall and weighs approximately 75 pounds.
He also was suspended from school for 10 days. His mother said the boy had been sexually assaulted by a relative when he was 5 years old and had witnessed the drowning death of his half-sister. She also said she had been in prison from the time her son was a newborn until shortly before the classroom incident, and that she believes living with several different caretakers has taken a toll on his young life.
This is a child who has suffered more emotional trauma in eight years than any child ought to experience in a lifetime. The triggering event at school was described by his mother as a spelling worksheet her child couldn't successfully complete.
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What is wrong with this picture? This 8-year-old child is in imminent danger of becoming stuck in a pipeline to prison. Children need to have hope that they can succeed, and they need family stability and adults they can trust. They also need counseling when trauma affects them.
At critical points in their development, however, from birth through adulthood, a disproportionate number of poor children of color lack access to these important keys to healthy development and struggle to compete on an unequal playing field. Many fall inexorably behind.
The pipeline to prison robs children of their God-given birthrights to opportunity, fulfillment and self-actualization, making it far more likely that they will end up behind bars.
The Williamsburg boy's mental health is endangered because of factors completely out of his control. Without knowing the particulars of his eight years, it is safe to say that he needs comprehensive help that isn't going to come from the juvenile justice system.
About 70 percent of children in the juvenile justice system have mental health problems, and in 2003 alone, 15,000 children were incarcerated for the sole reason that mental health services were unavailable in their communities.

Children with mental health problems are not the only ones being funneled into the juvenile justice system, but zero tolerance discipline policies in some school districts regularly toss out all kinds of “problem” children without seeing them as children with problems that need addressing. Many one-size-fits-all discipline policies fail to meet the test of basic common sense.
A 10-year-old girl in Philadelphia was handcuffed in front of her classmates and hauled off to a local detention center for carrying scissors in her backpack. A 5-year-old girl in St. Petersburg, Fla., had her wrists and ankles shackled after a temper tantrum at school.
Don't you think adults should be able to handle small children without such extreme measures?
Increased criminalization of children is occurring despite a recent federal report that shows violent crime in schools fell 50 percent between 1992 and 2002. The growing reliance on police and courts to manage children with mental health, behavioral, learning and other issues merits the attention of parents, educators, faith leaders, and lawmakers.
We must prevent the juvenile justice system from continuing as a dumping ground for poor and minority children with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Minority youth make up 34 percent of the adolescent population but 62 percent of youth in detention.

The Williamsburg mother said the police officers who arrested her son were “nice” and did everything they should have. The painful truth, however, is that the moment the police were called in and the 8-year-old was hauled off in handcuffs, it was just one more in a long line of abandonments this child in need suffered. He, like hundreds of thousands of children at risk of being caught in the pipeline to prison, have no say over the circumstances of their birth and no vote to influence our nation's priorities that favor the desires of millionaires and billionaires.
We are the adults, and we need to step up to the plate to protect our abandoned children who are desperately crying out for help. They need treatment, consistent and positive adults and a stable home environment with love and safety and limits, and schools with enough counselors.
They need to know they are not alone. They do not need criminal charges. They do not need to become statistics in a juvenile justice system that increases the likelihood that they will end up in prison as adults.

There are no easy solutions to such painful and complicated life stories. Unfortunately for our at-risk children, passing the buck to an ill-prepared juvenile justice system is increasingly becoming the easiest answer of all.

Marian Wright Edelman,
CEO and founder of the Children's Defense Fund
14 April 2005

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