Keeping Juvenile Offenders and Their Families Connected

Arizona’s legislature recently passed a law charging prison visitors a onetime $25 fee as a way to help close the state’s $1.6 billion budget deficit. Middle Ground Prison Reform, a prison advocacy group, challenged the law in court as a discriminatory tax, but a county judge upheld its constitutionality.

Fees like that, slapped on prisoners and their families, couldn’t be more counterintuitive. But then again, so many of our criminal justice policies are just that. Since it is mostly the poor, the desperately poor who fill US prisons, the $25 fee is one more economic hardship offenders’ families have to struggle with. It becomes another bill they have to scramble to pay—that is if they can.

These kinds of charges (and Arizona isn’t the only jurisdiction trying to shift the cost of incarceration to the poor) have even graver consequences. When a family can’t pay the fee their contact with their loved one is limited, essentially cutting an offender off from the only supports he or she has in the outside world.

Psychologists have long known how central it is for an individual to have nurturing people in his or her life in order to develop emotionally, psychologically and socially. This need for a supportive network is even more essential when we talk about the young people who are locked away from family and loved ones in our nation’s prisons and detention centers.

As anyone who has worked with kids in the penal system knows on a gut level, it is crucial to have families and other supportive community members involved in young offenders’ lives as they serve their time. Now, that commonsense intuition has been given empirical strength by studies done by such juvenile justice groups as the Vera Institute of Justice which have demonstrated that maintaining young people’s connection to families is a major factor in helping kids stay out of jail once they are released.

But it’s easy to question whether these families are really such a positive influence. After all, if they were doing such a great job what are their kids doing in jail?

It’s an easy assumption to make until you see some of those family members in the prison visiting room with their sons and daughters. I got to do that at least twice a year when the jailhouse high school where I taught for ten years in a county adult facility had its open house for families and caregivers.

The place was packed with mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters, or the people who stepped into those roles when circumstances—AIDS, death, addiction, incarceration, abandonment, all the things that ravage the lives of the poor and disenfranchised—demanded it. It wasn’t easy for many of them to get there. Meals had to be missed. Second jobs skipped. Long cross-county bus rides with tickets to pay for, transfers to be negotiated, at night, often in bad weather. The grandmother of one of my students, Leon, a skinny 15 year old who was finally making progress in class, had to travel over an hour on three buses to get there. It was a trip I knew she faithfully made twice a week to see her grandson. “I wouldn’t miss a visit with my boy for anything,” she told me, reaching over and giving Leon’s hair a playful tug. “But now you tell, Mr. Chura, how’s he doin in class?” That set Leon squirming.

It was a conversation I had over and over during those family visits. Miguel’s uncle who gave me his phone number and urged me to call him if Miguel wasn’t in school. Luis’ mother, frail and  in a wheelchair, holding her son’s hand, telling me how when Luis got out of jail she was moving her whole family out of state to get away from the gangs that ran wild in the streets. “I just want my boys to be safe,” she said, her English halting but her fear and determination palpable.

It was hard to hear in the visiting room sometimes with people chattering in several different languages, children running around, little brothers squealing when their big brother in his funny orange jump suit picked them up, mothers crying, locked-up sons trying to explain, promise, console. It was hard to hear but it was easy to know what was going on: Families—fragile, fragmented, strained, mending—were desperately trying to stay a family.

Many of those visitors would be willing to admit that they hadn’t done such a good job at maintaining the family bond, but that they did the best they could given the problems they had to face. Like Luis’ mother the determination was there but the resources weren’t. If we as a nation are serious about reducing crime (and not just by increased incarceration) it is important that we not put more obstacles in the way of young inmates’ families but rather that we give them the opportunities and resources to develop and sustain those crucial connections. It’s an investment that’s worth losing 25 bucks over.

Originally appeared on Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Changing the World for Kids, One Book At a Time

She was pretty upfront about it: she didn’t want me there.

“It’s not you personally,” Marge explained. “It’s the book.”

Marge was the moderator, researcher, engine, really, of a local reading group. She was good at what she did, I was told, and I believed it. She was pretty thorough at listing all the reasons why she didn’t want to read or recommend to the group my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, about my ten years teaching teenagers in adult detention.

“The title, for one. It’s all wrong. Even the third graders I used to teach would know that it wasn’t correct,” she started off. “It’s just poor grammar. And what about that cover? It put me off.”

I happened to think Beacon Press did a terrific job with the cover—the title, in hip-hop script on a blue background and, in profile, the photograph of a young African American male, sixteen at most, looking out at the reader with a somewhat challenging look yet with the inevitable vulnerability of any teenager.

But I knew where Marge was headed.

“Besides, I don’t like the topic, sounds too depressing,” she said. And then she got blunt. “What’s it got to do with me?”

I’d heard the objections before, although not quite so frankly stated. I did some mild reassuring, but I didn’t work at it. I knew that Marge had called to invite me to speak to the group despite her opposition. Two friends who were a part of the book club had read the book, liked it, and lobbied for it.

When I arrived at the community center the night of my talk, I thought things might have changed.

“We don’t usually do refreshments, but I thought this time it might be nice,” Marge said, greeting me warmly at the door, then leading me to a table covered with plates of home-baked cookies and pastries, a coffee urn, and two pitchers of fresh-squeezed lemonade.

And indeed things had changed. At first when Marge introduced me, she was true to form. I winced as she laid out all her objections and doubts about the book in excruciating detail. “Oh boy, what kind of night is this going to be?” I thought.

But then, with equal clarity, Marge told the group of about thirty how the book had changed her thinking and answered all her doubts. How she understood now that the title reflected the fractured yet still human lives of many of the kids I wrote about, especially Ray, the young man who was damaged by years of abandonment and drugs, and from whom I took the quote for the title. She said how the cover itself mirrored these kids’ lives—on the one hand it showed the fragile world of childhood with the book jacket’s blue background and playful lettering, and on the other, the gritty world of the streets with that scowling, discontented-looking young man. How, yes, the stories that she expected to depress and alienate her did make her sad at times, as she learned about these children’s lives in and out of jail. Yet at the same time they made her smile and laugh and admire those same children for their resilience and generosity and willingness to forgive society for what it had done to them, although society didn’t forgive the children for their mistakes.

“It was pretty obvious to me by the end of the book that I had a lot more in common with those kids than I could ever have imagined,” Marge concluded.

Listening to Marge, I smiled to myself and began to wonder why I’d made the trip there (well, there were those delicious-looking brownies), since she was telling the group all the things I would have said.

And I wondered if Marge realized that what had happened to her is what I always hoped would happen whenever I handed one of my locked-up students a book: their perceptions of the world would shift; that places they’d never been to, were excluded from, would open up to them; that people they’d never gotten the chance to meet, or who they refused to meet because of all the protective barriers they put up, would suddenly became more like them than they could have ever realized.

I didn’t think Marge, now, after reading the book, would mind being in the company of Warren, who, finally, at the age of fifteen and reading on a fourth-grade level, had completed his “first-ever book,” as he put it, or Frankie, who made it through a long stint in solitary confinement devouring the novels (all good ones, I might add) I brought him; or Larry, who began to see that even a life like his wasn’t foreign to the pages of literature after he finished reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

Readers like Marge and Warren and Frankie and Larry and all the others out there are the reasons why writers like me write their books and why teachers like me stay in the classroom despite the struggles. We want to do nothing less than change the world (and a few hearts while we’re at it) book by book.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Kids in Adult Jails: A Different Kind of Commencement

Now that all the high school graduations are over and the backyard barbeques celebrated, I’m finally coming down from the contact high of all that youthful exuberance and optimism.

It’s easy to get swept up into those good feelings. But now as I move into summer’s quieter months, I can’t help thinking about the high school students I taught in a county penitentiary and what “commencement” meant for them.

Success never came easily to my students. Why should it? They came from lives wrecked by poverty and discrimination. It tried to wreck their spirit, but it never could, not completely. In that way my students weren’t any different from the kids at our local high schools—like their peers, they believed that life was there for the shaping.  That faith in success, though, didn’t always translate onto the streets. So they got caught up in crime, got arrested, did their time.

When that time was served, their “commencement” was being released from jail. The “graduation ceremony” wasn’t much: Down to booking to sign papers, their clothes stuffed into black garbage bags. Then the booking officer handed the “graduate” bus money and delivered the keynote address, “Stay out of jail.”

And that’s exactly what they intended to do. My jailhouse students talked a lot about “starting over again,” and I believed each of them. Because while they were locked up, most worked to change things for the better. They studied for their diploma or GED. They worked at staying clean and sober. They grappled with the rage of disappointment that tore at their guts through anger management programs. If there was a thread of family life left, they reconnected with it.

When they hit the streets, they were determined to shake the dust—and smell—of prison off them forever. But the only thing that had changed while they were locked up was them, not the streets. There was nothing out there for them, no services, no resources, no one. The only things waiting were the same predator-prey food chain, the same joblessness, and the same lure of the streets with easy money.

I knew the litany these young people heard from corrections and probation officers: Get a job. Go to school. Stay away from your buddies (the only people who even remembered your name.) Stay away from your girlfriend (the only one glad to see you.) Stay in the house. Start over. Stay out of trouble. And I’ve watched more than one kid’s face fall when he was told that he had to find someplace else to live. He couldn’t live with his mother because his probation didn’t allow him to associate with anyone with a record, and since his brother, or uncle, or cousin was already there he needed to find another home.

It’s not hard to guess what all those demands sound like to a 16 year old fresh out of prison: Stop being the only person you recognize. Stop living your life.

I often tell people that the changes we demand of young ex-offenders are things most of us, even with all our assets, would find daunting. The isolation. The loneliness. The helpless rage of unreasonable expectations. Yet these kids are told to make those changes with no one to help or guide them.

It happens, though, if rarely—some kid takes the plunge into all that fear and dynamites his life apart.

Alex was one of those kids. The judge made it clear. This time no probation. Instead a full county bid. Next arrest, a long stretch in state prison. Even at 17 Alex knew that going back to the same neighborhood, the same friends and enemies would seal his fate. “I might as well stay here and wait for the next bus to state prison,” he tried to laugh it off but couldn’t.

I can’t tell you what happened, but something did. Everybody had given up on him, with good reason or not, but somehow he hadn’t. Alex had a cousin in California that he never met but who said he could come live with him. So at his “graduation” he hopped a cross country bus. However, there was nothing quixotic about his move. Alex had never been out of his own town except to go to various jails and detention centers. He knew he had to do it. It was a terrible struggle at first. The dirt jobs. The loneliness. The disorientation. The fears of failure. Eventually, though, the jobs got better and he signed up for college. Last I heard Alex was close to a real commencement.

Watching that final moment of triumph when our local high school graduates flung their caps into the air I imagined all the hands—of family, teachers, coaches, clergy, counselors—that over the years had made that moment possible.  Young ex-offenders at their “commencement” haven’t had, and don’t have that same net of hands. And yet, there are plenty of hands in each of their communities to help, if they only would. That way kids like Alex wouldn’t have to go 3,000 miles for a chance at a new beginning.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

Getting the Word Out About Kids in Adult Jails: One Author’s Reasons

The only people who think it’s fun to do book promotion and events are the ones who haven’t written a book, at least in my experience. I hear it all the time from friends and family. “How exciting!” “I wish I could do something like that.”

A writer friend squirms in sympathy over our occasionally shared breakfasts when I tell her what and where my latest book gig is. “Oh, my god!” she gasps, turning as green as her eggs, a local eatery’s homage to Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” (or in this case, tempah.) “Better you than me.”

I’m never happy about it either as I set out for yet another night of mystery, suspense, anticipation—dread, actually. A night when Life’s Big Questions loom large: Will anybody buy a book? Will anybody even show up?

So why do I—or any author—put myself through that kind of anxiety? There are the “industry” reasons, of course. Platform. Name recognition. Networking. An eye on another book contract. The old bottom line: sales.

But are those the real reasons that get me out there, that get any author out there? Are they motivation enough for me to make contacts, set up venues (and I’ve done quite a variety—libraries, bookstores, panels, organizations, agencies, college classes, reading groups), walk into empty rooms, and, if I’m lucky, meet strangers?

I have no quibble with the industry’s reasons. But I know me. I didn’t write a book to promote it, and I didn’t dream of making a lot of money from it. Fact is, I love stories—real or made up—and have an abiding faith in the power of story to change people’s lives, so I’ve always written.

I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, the book that gets me out these days, came about because of the locked up kids I met during my ten years teaching at a county jail. While their lives were packed with street adventures, heartbreaking tragedies and lost opportunities, they were also filled with humor, dreams, honesty and resilience. Kids like that don’t get their stories told too often, and if they are told, they’re usually filled with recriminations. I wanted to give those kids the words they didn’t always have to tell their tales.

Writer, storyteller—nevertheless, I’m still a peddler on the road with goods to sell.

It happened to me just the other night. Driving through a pounding rain in a Boston traffic pile-up that would make most Manhattanites pale, I arrived late at the library where I was speaking. With apologies, I began my talk to the intrepid audience who themselves had weathered the rain. It was a good night, filled with good will but not much of the “other stuff,” well, book sales. On the drive back, I asked myself once again, “Why do I do this?” That night I came up with a pretty good answer.

After the reading, as often happens, people came up to me with comments to share, experiences to compare. A former teacher in a Cleveland inner city school. A man who volunteered at a local prison working with inmates on an architecture program. A law student who wanted to specialize in juvenile justice. A parent. A therapist.

At the edge of the group, I could see a young woman waiting, her head down, looking like she wanted to be invisible. Slowly, as each person finished and left, she inched her way forward. Then when everybody else was gone she looked up at me. “I just wanted to thank you. If it hadn’t been for teachers like you I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you. I wouldn’t be able to come to something like this,” she almost whispered. “I just wanted you to know that in the darkness teachers like you are a point of light in some kid’s life. Your stories really show that.” I shook her hand with my own thanks.

Thinking about that interchange later, I realized that the young woman’s hands were empty. She hadn’t bought a book, but she gave me a lot more than the price of one. Her empty hands, her shy, quiet words and my own feeling of gratitude helped me see that there was another type of currency exchanged at events like these that has little to do with the marketplace.

Then I started to remember all the other gifts I had gotten over the months and months of readings and talks. The young security guard at Barnes and Noble who, like the woman tonight, waited until everyone was gone to tell me about her struggles with the streets and how she only managed to keep out of jail for the sake of her baby. The Viet Nam vet who overcame his years of addictions through books. The woman who had two sons locked up in jail, “I’m so worried about them. I hear horrible things happen in prison.”

That kind of currency may be spare change to some, not all, in the publishing industry, but for this writer, at least it’s what keeps me writing and in turn, gets me back on the road, ready to peddle my stories and to listen to yours.

Originally posted on HuffingtonPost

Education Reform: Failing Schools, Failing Lives

No matter how tough politicians and education pundits talk the obstacles remain. Massachusetts is a good example. The Boston Globe reports that among 3^rd graders last year, minority and low income students were twice as likely as white students to score lowest in the state’s standardized tests. These are discouraging numbers for everyone, and they are pretty much replicated nationally. They raise the question: Why after all these years of No Child Left Behind are we still struggling to achieve parity between rich and poor students, between white and minority children?

Nobody is satisfied with our schools, and there’s blame all round as experts scramble for solutions: We label schools as failing. We fire whole teachings staffs. We tweak curricula. We script teachers’ every move. We increase the school day and student seat time at the expense of art, music and recreation. Still things don’t improve.

Maybe we’re not listening to the right people. Somebody like Dick Gregory, for example. Yeah, Dick Gregory. You may remember him (if you’re old enough)—African American comedian, civil rights activist, 1968 presidential candidate, author, and nutrition guru? His list of accomplishments doesn’t include education specialist, but he knew quite a lot about why schools fail and about the “achievement gap.” He went to one of those failing schools and was trapped in that gap.

Most of my students—kids serving time in an adult county jail where I taught high school—didn’t know who Dick Gregory was when I announced that we were going to read a short chapter entitled “Shame” from his autobiography. At first they weren’t interested. They assumed (like so many teenagers) that the reading, any reading would be boring. Then when I mentioned that he was black, and had marched with Dr. King there was a spark of curiosity. It was enough to get us into the chapter. After that they were hooked.

In a page and a half, Gregory tells the reader (and America if we would only listen) why poor kids of color fail in school. In heartbreaking detail he writes about being in the third grade filled with shame—the shame of poverty, of being a “welfare kid,” of being abandoned by his father, of living in the projects, of wearing dirty clothes because once again there wasn’t any hot water, of having little food, and of living with rats and bugs.

When my locked-up students read that he was a “troublemaker” in school, the little kid who spent more time in the corner facing the wall than he did at his desk, none of them was surprised. And when Gregory wonders out loud why the teacher didn’t understand that maybe he caused trouble not because he was bad or stupid but because he was poor and hungry and too tired to concentrate you could hear the whispered, “Ya got that right,” followed by, “bitch” when she berates him in front of the class, talking about “you and your kind.”

The reading may seem dated to those of us comfortable with the gifts of life; after all that was back in the late 30s. But my students had no problem with what Gregory described. Most of them lived similar lives, although I would venture to say, much harsher and more embattled ones. They grew up in neighborhoods overrun with drugs, guns and random violence, in households fractured by unemployment, disease and substance abuse. My students went to schools that never had enough books or supplies or staff to go around, in falling down buildings in neighborhoods unsafe to walk. A friend of mine works in a school where it’s not unusual that kids can’t play outside at recess because of drive-by-shootings.

If it wasn’t good in Dick Gregory’s day, it’s far from good for minority students today. The 2010 Census confirms this: Black children are three times as likely to be poor as white children. Forty percent of black children are born into poor families compared with 8% of white children. An even more alarming statistic is that an African American boy born in the past decade has a 1-in-3 chance of being incarcerated in his lifetime.

There’s a poignant moment in Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools when he goes into an East St. Louis grade school classroom that is dirty, dilapidated, and overcrowded. At one point Kozol reports that as he came into a classroom a young boy looked up at him with an expression that asked, “What did I do to deserve this?” The “achievement gap”—which is just that young boy’s unspoken question in a different form—will never be closed until our policymakers, educational and otherwise, aggressively address the underlying issues of poverty and racism that cripple every aspect of poor and minority children’s lives.  Maybe those policymakers need to stop talking and listen for a change to people who know a lot more than they do about failing schools, and about failing lives.

Originally posted on Beacon Broadside

 

Zero Tolerance Revisited in Our Kids’ Schools

Young kids in our country are not safe. But the dangers aren’t what you might think. Kids in schools–places where they should feel safe and understood and protected, places that should help when kids need help–continue to be ruled by our nation’s fears. Prison Culture has a video and quotes a Dallas newspaper demonstrating how crazy adults can get when it comes to kids. I’ve written about the absurdity of zero tolerance before in this blog. I write about the criminalization of children in my book I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Kids in Adult Lockup when in the mid 90s social policy makers warned of the “super predators” slowly making their way up through childhood to become dangerous and vicious teenage thugs. As Prison Culture says at the end of this cogent post, we have to stop this madness.

Education Reform and Juvenile Justice: The Children Still Left Behind

Statewide test day and Damian was psyched. He didn’t sleep much the night before from worrying. Still, he was there on time, ready to go. Now he sat hunched over his desk, head down, lips moving as he read, his pen carefully inching across the paper.

He was like any other kid in his grade taking the mandated English exam. The only difference was that he was locked up in an adult county jail in Westchester, NY where I taught high school for ten years, and he was reading—and barely writing—on a 4th grade level, which was up from the 2nd grade level he came in with.

Damian was a tall, thin 17 year old with a bushed-out Afro who had been in and out of juvenile placements since childhood—foster care; group homes; detention centers; jails. As a result, he had as many gaps in his education as he had in his mouth from missing teeth, most prominently his front two. The list of his educational diagnoses was almost as long as his rap sheet. Mentally Retarded. Learning disabled. Behavioral disorder. ADD/HD. Oppositional personality. Yet as badly as he’d done in school, a part of him always valued education.

Over the months I had him in class, something clicked for Damian. He never missed a day. He worked hard, asked for homework—and did it. His progress was daily. Soon, his reading rose from that humiliating 2^nd grade level to 3^rd to 4^th grade. The kid was on the move. But something else was happening. When Damian first came to class, he never looked anyone in the face and hid what he called his “baby work.” Now he was more self-confident. He was proud of his improvement and suddenly saw himself as a learner.

Then the mandated end-of-year state tests came round.

When I was told that Damian had to take the English exam I was as uncomprehending as he must have felt sometimes trying to decipher a page of print.

“It’s got to be a mistake,” I said to our on-site test administrator. “The kid’s reading on a 4^th grade level. Maybe on paper he’s an 11^th grader, but he doesn’t have the credits or the skills for the 11^th grade.”

“It’s not a mistake,” she explained. “He’s enrolled in high school. Technically, he’s 11^th grade; so he has to take the test.”

Then she tried to soften the regulation by explaining the reasoning behind it: a student was required to take the test and fail it in order to be eligible for remediation classes. I didn’t bother to interpret back to her what I heard: Damian had to fail a test we all knew he would fail in order to prove that he would fail it so he could get “remediation.” Kids, especially kids like Damian, don’t think like educational pundits. It was easy to imagine the damage this latest failure would do to his burgeoning self-confidence as a learner.

Unfortunately, he’d already been told that he was scheduled to take the exam before I talked to him. When I suggested that he might not feel ready to take the test, that it was okay if he didn’t show up, he could take it another time, he looked at me as though I was every white teacher he’d ever had who’d told him that he’d never succeed so why bother. After that I knew he’d be there on test day.

The Comprehensive English exam is two days, a total of 6 hours. Damian was there both days, for every minute of those 6 hours, doing the best he could. It was painful to watch.

I wish Damian was the only example of such mandated failure. But there are lots of Damians in classrooms across the country in places as diverse as jails, psych hospitals, rehabs, juvenile detention centers, special ed classes who find themselves in similar situations. Now that Obama’s educational reforms are continuing where Bush’s left off with their reliance on standardized test results as the prime measure of educational success, I’m afraid that there will be many more kids, and teachers, facing similar struggles.

I am not recommending social promotion. Nor am I suggesting “feel good” education. I wouldn’t insult kids like Damian. Students should be held to rigorous academic standards. However, teachers—and there are many of who are fiercely dedicated to this hard-to-reach population—should be allowed some flexibility to evaluate their students’ readiness and plan accordingly. That local flexibility can’t happen under the present reform blueprint. And given all that is at stake—money, autonomy, prestige, reputations—superintendents, principals, and supervisors will adhere, perhaps reluctantly, to these lock-step standards rather than advocate for the needs of these vulnerable kids and their teachers in their districts.

Certainly gains have been made nationwide. But all of us—teachers, parents and school administrators—should share, on a local and national level, the concern many civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition have recently expressed: that the very students these reforms were meant to keep in school—poor, disaffected, disenfranchised, minority kids—will continue to be left out and left behind.

Originally posted on Huffington Post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching the Hard to Reach: Working with Juvenile Offenders

Over any teacher’s career—in my case, 26 years of teaching high school English to at-risk teenagers, the last 10 of those years in an adult county jail—you get asked lots of questions. Some about the topic you’re teaching; others, well, it’s hard to know where they come from. But there’s one question I heard a lot, most frequently from my jail students, “Why don’t you teach in a real school?”

This usually happened when a lesson went well and a kid really got what we were talking about. “That was a good lesson, Mr. C.  You should teach in a real school instead of here.” That last part was typical of incarcerated kids. Instead of taking credit for understanding some new idea, the student was quick to give it to me.

I knew where the “real school” remark came from. My students were mostly poor youth of color; many bereft of families. The education they received in their home districts was pretty bogus, and they knew it. Minimal supplies. School buildings as dilapidated as the warehouses (called “public housing”) they lived in. The curriculum dummied down because “they can’t handle the real thing.” For these locked up kids a “real school” was one they weren’t in.

They knew my take on the “real school” remark. My classroom was a real school; they were real students doing real learning; and I expected them to act that way. I confess, I wasn’t always polite about it. It made me mad—at them; at the educational system; at society; at myself. And it made me sad because within that comment was their bone-deep belief that they were worthless.

But in their remarks I heard another question. It’s a question every teacher asks with each new school year, “Why do I teach?” For me it was, “Why teach the hard to reach—at-risk kids—in the first place?” It’s a fair question, one that deserves an answer.

Of course there’s the obvious one. Everybody knows that education affects the quality of your life. Jobs. Where you live. Where your children will be able to grow up. Your health. Perhaps even your happiness. So as an English teacher, I knew the incalculable value of being able to read and write.

Yet I wanted my students to learn more than basic survival skills. I’ve always been a passionate believer in literature’s ability to change people’s lives on a deeper level. It was never an easy sell. By the time my students got to me their minds were slammed shut; their worlds, small. Presented with a story or a book to read they’d growl, whine, practically stomp their feet in a tantrum. “Why do we have to read this? It’s stupid…boring…crazy” (you supply the adjective.) Still I insisted we read.

It didn’t always work. Some refused to leave the streets behind, to glimpse a less hopeless life, even just for the duration of a short story. But not always. Warren read way below grade level. I wasn’t sure that could improve since his teenaged mother drank heavily while she was pregnant. But one day he announced that he was 15 and had never read a book. A friend told him about Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, and he wanted to read it. I worried about the reading level, but Warren was captivated from the start by a kid just like him, steeped in the hood and all its troubles, yet with a message of hope that kind of sneaks up on you. It took him months, but Warren painstakingly, proudly read every word.

I’m not saying that reading a book will radically change a kid’s life, but it may come close. It does happen. Wilbert Rideau who served 44 years, many of them in solitary confinement, in Angola, the nation’s largest maximum security prison, is a testament to that power. In his riveting memoir of his incarceration, In the Place of Justice, he writes that the books he read then saved him emotionally,

Reading allowed me to feel empathy, to emerge from my cocoon of self-centeredness and appreciate the humanness of others…It enabled me finally to appreciate what I had done.

Those words should give any Language Arts teacher the courage to continue pushing books on his or her students.

Yet, my jailhouse teaching wasn’t just about hustling books. You need a lot more than that to survive ten years of prison’s daily grind. No. I knew there was more to it than that. Since I always believe in practicing what I preach, I often got solace and inspiration from what I read. On my toughest days a few lines from Galway Kinell’s poem, St. Francis and the Sow, reminded me why I even bothered,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness.

At times, that reteaching loveliness was the hardest lesson I had to teach. But ultimately I knew it was what every day of my teaching was all about.

Repost from Beacon Broadside

School on the Inside: Teaching the Incarcerated Student

When people hear that I taught language arts for 10 years in a New York county penitentiary, they assume it was a tough job because kids in jail are uninterested in learning. If that were the case, it would be easier to explain the tragedy of their lives. The majority of the teenage boys I taught—mostly poor and minority—didn’t lack ability. They lacked focus and old-fashioned seat time, but most had an aptitude for learning. Some were quite bright. It was just that “other things” got in the way: addictions, street violence, fractured families, homelessness, racism.

But as they confront their chaotic lives, kids in jail share the same goals as their peers in the world outside: get a high school diploma, secure a decent job, go to college, make something of themselves. These young men wanted their school, albeit a cramped space off a noisy prison corridor, to be a “real school.” Though beaten down by negative experiences as learners, they still set high expectations for themselves. My job was to prepare them for the state’s comprehensive and demanding English exam. Curriculum would be the key.

New York State allows individual districts to choose literary texts based on community demographics and students’ educational needs and interests. I designed a curriculum that would be engaging and relevant, yet honored the state’s standards. Students read Greek, Norse, and Aztec mythology and such works as August Wilson’s play, Fences; the poetry of Luis J. Rodriguez and Pablo Neruda; and Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.

Although the readings hooked students as they came to identify with characters and situations, I knew we had to go beyond cultural relevance if they were to pass the state test. So we slowly assembled the skills they would need. Working with the “critical lens,” they learned how to respond to such statements as, “All literature must teach a lesson as well as entertain,” explaining why they agreed or disagreed. Students compared and contrasted readings. Two favorites were the urban classics Manchild in the Promised Land and Down These Mean Streets. They worked to identify and explain the use of foreshadowing, allusion, and conflict (something they felt well grounded in). I encouraged them to hone their facility with these concepts by applying them to situations they encountered on the cell block, the music they listened to, and the TV shows they watched.

My students not only discussed, they wrote. They wrote every day. They wrote persuasively—taking a stand on a current issue, as one young man said, “Like a lawyer in court”; informatively—gathering, organizing, and presenting facts on topics such as drug prevention and teen violence; and critically—analyzing a story, novel, or poem. Most hated writing, but they knew writing skills were crucial for their diploma. Instruction was a blend of mechanics and content development, confidence building and critiquing, as students learned to identify “audience,” establish “voice,” structure arguments.

Understandably, not every student mastered the skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. No matter what progress they made, it was still jail. A kid might come to class with a bruised face from a fight on the block or be missing for weeks, put on disciplinary lockup. The temptation is to “dummy down.” Too many of my students had been shortchanged by that approach in the past, and they knew it.

Through all the disruption and turmoil, most of the young men managed to sustain their connection to school, even showing pride in what they were doing, be it organizing thoughts into paragraphs or discussing the role of institutionalized discrimination in Mark Mathabane’s South African autobiography, Kaffir Boy. Occasionally, some young man might even quip about his situation, to show what he had learned. One I recall in particular said, “It’s pretty ironic, Mr. C. Here I am locked up in jail, but finally going to school.”

He may have casually dropped that literary term into conversation, but the mischievous glint in his eyes spoke volumes about what he had accomplished.

Originally appeared in the journal Education Next (Fall 2010)

“Zero Tolerance” Creates More Problems Than It Solves

“Zero tolerance.” It sounds like a good idea: “Put your foot down.” “Get tough.” “We’re not taking it anymore.”

The American public, worried about the purported drug and gun wars being fought in our cities in the 1990s, grabbed onto this concept. In turn, a number of states and municipalities adopted “zero tolerance” laws.

Since then “zero tolerance” has pervaded our culture.

Draconian drug laws impose harsh sentences on nonviolent offenders, glutting prisons and draining overextended state budgets, while leaving the people with drug problems untreated. (Boston Globe)

Our hard-hitting laws about who is a sex offender create a caste of people who will be a burden for the rest of their lives on the very society these laws hoped to shield.

Certainly citizens, young and old, need to be protected from real sex offenders, but consider the case of a 17-year-old I taught at the county jail.

Earle was serving time as a sex offender. His crime? Sleeping with his 15-year-old girlfriend. Janet Marie’s mother didn’t have a problem with letting him stay over night as much as he wanted. Until one day she had a big fight with Janet Marie about keeping her room clean, and Earle became a pawn in their battle.

The mother called the cops, accused Earle of sleeping with her underage daughter, and Earle was convicted of statutory rape. Under “zero tolerance,” he wasn’t a stupid teenage boy anymore who, as Robert De Niro says to his son in the movie, Bronx Tale, let his little head get the better of his big head, but a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Recently, “zero tolerance” policies in schools, where their misuse is most obvious and egregious, have come under fire, and not soon enough.

An editorial in the New York Times points out these well intentioned regulations have become a debacle for children. Originally meant for such serious offences as drug or weapon possession in schools, overzealous school personnel and local officials have taken some bizarre stances in the name of “getting tough.”

Children have been arrested for profanity, hallway tussles, mouthing off at a teacher, things that used to get you detention and a pretty uncomfortable meeting with a parent.

To the general public these cases of misjudgment seem almost laughable. We wonder, “Whatever happened to commonsense?” Yet teachers and administrators who overreact are responding to the legislative pressure of “zero tolerance.”

Their overreactions, however, have far-reaching results on young people. It contributes to a devastating cycle that the American Civil Liberties Union calls the “school-to-prison pipeline:” Students (mostly minorities) are kicked out of school; they then end up in the only place that accepts them for what they are—the streets; and more times than not those streets lead to the dead-end world of jail.

The courts, however, are finally stepping in. In Massachusetts a Federal District judge recently ruled that LD, a Worcester eighth-grader, was wrongfully suspended for a year because he had a knife in school. (Boston Globe)

But wasn’t that a clear breach of the school’s “zero tolerance” weapons policy?

Here’s the story. One day in gym class, LD’s friend told him that another kid threatened him with a knife. LD, an honors student who never got into trouble, confiscated the knife without incident. He planned on turning it in to the front office. But before he could word got to the assistant principal. When asked if he had a knife, LD, good kid that he was, said yes and explained. He hadn’t waved the knife around tough-man style. He hadn’t threatened anybody. Still, in the eyes of the school, he violated the “zero tolerance” policy and was suspended for a year.

Luckily LD, along with two determined lawyers (one, an attorney from the Center for Law and Education in Boston,) challenged this decision and won. The court ruled that LD’s one-year suspension was so “grossly disproportionate” to his wrongdoing that his right to “due process” had been violated.

But LD wasn’t the only winner. Thousands of young people (over 10,000 in Massachusetts) who are pushed out of the school system, often as a result of just such excessive disciplinary practices, will also benefit. LD’s efforts, along with those of such advocacy groups as the American Bar Association which has called for a reduction in the removal of students from schools through the discipline process, will nudge educators towards establishing more constructive intervention policies.

With more and more schools reverting to the tried and true approach of judging each student situation case by case, perhaps other segments of our society where “zero tolerance” has rampaged through people’s lives will begin to examine the real, lasting, destructive effects this policy has had on us as a country and culture.

In the meantime, I, for one, have “zero tolerance” for “zero tolerance.”