Jackson Free Press

A coalition of children's advocates are declaring 2005 the "Year of the Child" in Mississippi. It's about damned time. It's way past the point that we Mississippians must start standing up for our weakest residents. Young people have rights. They have needs. They make mistakes. It's not all about them respecting us; it's about us treating them with dignity and compassion and understanding, helping them instead of inflicting further harm.

This should be obvious, but it's not to too many people. Just go read a bit of the U.S. Department of Justice report that Brett Potter and I quote in our cover story this issue. How in the name of what's good and right in the world can the people hired to guard and rehabilitate our children strip their clothes off and lock them up in a dark room "to teach them a lesson"? Or shackle them like hogs in the mud? Or make them defecate into a drainage hole in the floor—and then smell it all day in hot rooms?

Little sickens me more than reading this report. Except maybe that lawmakers, judges and citizens alike have turned their backs on these young people. "They're bad kids, you know" is a common refrain. Meantime, many of these kids are in training schools hundreds of miles from home because, get this, they got into a fight on the playground. I remember getting into a scuffle at school—the teacher separated us, talked to us and sent us back to class.

Like too many other patterns of injustice throughout the nation's history, Mississippi suffers from an inordinate share of the abuse and humiliation of our young people. Yes, nonsensical zero-tolerance policies are a problem in many states, or were before they wised up. But they're worse here, where the school-to-jail pipeline is clogged with kids who grew up in dire poverty. Yes, juvenile injustice—and plain old dumb and mean policies that research consistently shows lead to recidivism, like trying kids as adults—is a problem around the U.S., but it is worse in Mississippi. Even John Ashcroft's Justice Department told us that.

And, yes, demonization of youth has been a nationwide epidemic perpetuated by a sensationalist media, but as with too many other issues, Mississippi's scribes are often the last to catch onto the new trend of giving kids a break now and then (and of reporting the actual facts about them).

It's true: Here in the Magnolia State, we treat our children like dirt. Or at least other people's children who get in trouble, or have trouble with a test, or get mixed up with the wrong folks. Then, too often, we turn our busy heads. People who don't have children in the public schools, or in the juvenile-justice system, think it's other people's problem. I even get asked, being that I've never had children, just why am I so interested in public education and the children's rights. This question confounds me. "Why the hell do you think?!?" I want to scream. Because I care about people. And most of them go through a period when they're under 18 and make dumb-ass mistakes. I sure did. I still do from time to time. We all need a break and compassion.
Had I been a minor in this vindictive day and age, I would have been locked up in Columbia Training School for something or another. I came from a "rough" life of poverty. I would have been kicked out of school for consuming some sort of substance I shouldn't have. Or I would have been hauled into youth court for getting into a scuffle with three black girls who wanted to push me and yank on my blonde ponytails. (No baggage there: I forgave the obnoxious twits, and we later became friends—fortunately we weren't shackled to a light pole somewhere together, seething with hatred for each other, in the interim.)

Such over-reaction, in turn, leads to poor self-esteem for kids and, too often, a life of actual crime. It, indeed, feeds the jail pipeline. What are we thinking? Maybe it's just a bunch of self-loathing that we're turning on people too powerless to fight back. I don't know, but it needs to stop.

One good place to begin is for every adult to start believing that children are good until proven otherwise, innocent until proven guilty. Young people right now in their teens and preteens are the best to come along in a long time, as a group. They're involved, they care about issues that matter, they work hard. Meantime, they are tested to death in schools, they're dumped on by media simply to sell newspapers and raise ratings, they're marketed to incessantly, they're blamed for the jittery results of the television and video games their parents used to baby-sit them, and the corporate sodas poured into their schools. They're pumped full of Ritalin if they are bored and can't sit still, and they're told every day that they're bad, bad, bad because (a) they listen to rap, (b) they pierce something, (c) they grew up in the wrong 'hood or (e) just because they're younger than the person making the proclamation. They are pawns in an unsavory game—the next time the governor whines about putting "discipline back into the classroom," know that it has a whole lot to do with people not wanting to pay to educate special-education students. More on that one soon, we promise, in our Year of the Child series over the next year.

This dumping on young people needs to end right here. Start with the obvious stuff: The state of Mississippi must cease and desist torture of children sent to training schools. Yes, torture. We need to stop prosecuting children as adults. We need to fully fund their schools—the books, the roofs and the teachers. We need to stop policies that sweep innocent children into a wide net or youth curfews that assume that all children are going to get into trouble. We need to cancel subscriptions to newspapers that dump on children from poor neighborhoods. We need to tell the president of the United States that it doesn't help a whole lot to identify groups of children who aren't testing well if you're not going to then do anything to help them. We need to tell the right-wing zealots to get their greedy paws off our public schools: Our schools are stayin', damn it.

Let's step up and make the Year of the Child one that people who hurt our children won't soon forget. Lock and load, friends. It's time to stand by our young'uns.