Jackson Free Press

Not to be a drama queen here, but hanging out at the Mississippi Legislature can really shatter one's faith in humanity. After doing years of research on harmful youth policies (zero tolerance, adult sentencing, "superpredator" rhetoric, media demonization of youth), I'm already convinced that most people don't give a damn about young people they didn't raise. And too many don't really care enough about the ones they did.

Somehow they expect young people to be perfect and pristine, to pass high-stakes tests many of us would have flunked (check out the reasoning in local opinion pieces if you don't believe me), to not make three mistakes, or they're out. Certainly, if you judge a society by how we treat our most powerless members, we should get life without parole.

Thus, I realize that what I've witnessed under the dome this session shouldn't have shocked me. But it still did.

First, public education funding. The fat lady is really singing in recent weeks—the way they make back-room deals, using the poor and children—CHILDREN—as pawns is breathtaking. OK, you get money to pay your teachers if we get $250,000 damage caps for our donors. Our prisons, your schools (if you're lucky).

Ah, life in the fast lane.

Pay attention: Ideology at the Capitol has reached a fevered pitch with Haley Barbour in the governor's mansion. I had a fleeting hope, optimist I can be, that maybe Barbour had raked in enough money, was tired of K Street games, missed Marsha and was going to come on home to Mississippi and put aside the extreme ideology that he was paid to hawk up north. I even gave him the benefit of the doubt in an Editor's Note. And meant it.

But, no. Barbour came out of the gate, in effect, swinging at kids. His first action was shoring up private prisons—to be filled with former children who fell through the cracks that a decent support system could have caulked. Then the Adequate Education funding games. Haley then: Who, me? That was the Congressional Budget Office that recommended that public education be under-funded. Now: How dare school districts start laying off teachers that we haven't released the money to pay?

Then there's the niggling issue of juvenile justice. The issue this session has been the federal lawsuit filed in 2003 against the Columbia and Oakley training schools for "cruel and unusual punishment" of children. (Duh: A legislative PEER committee warned lawmakers in 2002 that reform was needed). These schools are bad news, whether for the kid sent for truancy or for worse crimes. Health and mental services are uneven at best, non-existent at worse.

The report? Picture, say, your little sister being hog-tied face down in a dark room for hours, or being stripped naked and locked in a blackened room for days with her requests for water denied. If she has to pee or worse, she can just squat over the drainage hole in the middle of the floor. There is no flushing option. Or your sister must run through a field with old tires around her waist in the hot sun; if she throws up, she must swallow her own vomit. Or say your sister is only 10, and is slapped by a guard. Or she is sprayed with OC spray when she acts up, or is shackled to a pole … you get the mortifying picture.

One would hope that a federal lawsuit and such a report (48 shocking pages) would get the attention of each and every legislator, regardless of ideological bent. Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, who is chairing the House juvenile justice subcommittee established to look at the training-school mess, is certainly upset and declares he's going to bring change. But he's up against it. Lawmakers refused to even approve a Juvenile Justice Task Force made up of a variety of organizations that understand youth problems that could help them put in solutions that would lead to a manageable legal settlement. Groups such as Southern Echo, and the Mississippi Center for Justice and the Children's Defense Fund, and the Ole Miss Law School civil legal clinic are actually making suggestions that would cost the state less, and help the children more (like community-based intervention instead of looming "reform" schools, fixing the youth court process, finding alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders and delinquency prevention—not passing the buck by privatizing the schools. Terrible idea, so don't even think about it.)

But this task force didn't make it out of the Appropriations Committee (and it didn't even have money attached to it). One of the children's advocates told me it has been a remarkable ride to see just how cold-hearted some people in the Legislature can be. She's right. I've seen it on their faces over the last few months: the coldness, the ideological determination not to help people who can't help themselves, the refusal to face facts that their parties (or their funders) don't like. It's as if they believe that if they don't think about these children, much less spend any money on them, that they'll just fade away. But they won't.

The children. IT'S ABOUT THE CHILDREN, OUR CHILDREN, I want to scream, knowing full well that they won't hear me, or her, or you. Many of them are just plain deaf, as well as dumb and blind.

God bless them all.

Donna Ladd is editor of the JFP.