Criminalization of Youth Quotes

Negro children are still sent to prison with adult criminals, and that they leave it half devil and half beast.

There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.

The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last.

We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.

Ideally, schools should be supportive environments for students. Unfortunately, zero-tolerance policies tend to funnel vulnerable students out of schools and into prisons, low-income jobs, and poverty.

A symptomatic example of the way in which violence has saturated everyday life can be seen in the increased acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public schools. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors and school administrators are now dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system.

A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.

Surely, we've got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.

Any society's insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children. And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it's utterly failing. You have young people basically who - in schools that are increasingly modeled after prisons. You have their behavior being increasingly criminalized. And one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors' prisons for children.

School is now a place where punishment and discipline are prioritized over serving students and educating them. Any moment where a student falls outside scripted behavior becomes an opportunity for law enforcement to come in, criminalizing ordinary things people do every day.