Keith Knight on young people and the prison industry.
I'll leave the racial aspects of things in his hands, except to remember that it was Richard Pryor who said of the legal system: "You go down there looking for justice; that's what you find: Just us."
I certainly agree that we bust kids for stuff we used to just get suspended from school for, and that, whether it's an issue of race or class, kids still get suspended from this school over here but today, if they go to that school over there, they get busted.
Even within the same school, they know who's who. A friend teaching alternative ed in the LAUSD found that her kids weren't allowed to use the new computer lab. It wasn't for "them."
Not racial, no, but, well, as Keefe says, "mix & match." By their fruits you shall know them, whateverthehell their intentions.
Anyway, it is a strange country indeed that would rather pay for prisons than for schools.
Granted, the median salary for a correctional officer is $39,020 while the median salary for a high school teacher is $53,230. But you don't have to provide three hots and a cot for the students, and there is strong opposition to even helping their parents pay to feed and shelter them.
The average cost of incarceration in a community (not federal) facility is $24,758. The average cost of a student is $11,824. Now, I'm no mathematician, but ...
I've gone into juvie facilities a couple of times, most often to present awards for winning the Stock Market Game, back when I did such a thing.
"Stock Market Game" was something I got stuck with because it was a tradition and because teachers liked having kids create a dummy portfolio and track its progress for six weeks to see who made the most money.
I tried to compensate for the banal evil inherent in the game by teaching that trying to make the most money over the short-haul like that was irresponsible investing, but, well, you could make graphs and do percentages and everything. Lesson lost.
However, you can't say it didn't mirror the ethics-free bubble that was supposed to end with the crash in 2008 but does not appear to have done so.
The E*Trade baby still claims you can make a boatload of money on your smartphone without knowing what the hell you're doing, and that it's more or less like the World Series of Poker: A fun way to get rich and prove your manhood at the same time!
Which certainly does play into the skills and interests of bright people who have drifted into sin by learning how to bust the system, and, in comparing notes with colleagues from around the country, I found that a lot of them were handing out Stock Market Game awards in juvie facilities.
There are some people in prison who genuinely belong in mental hospitals or are actually retarded, but there is also a large mix of the clueless and some very smart ones who just didn't happen to get away with it.
I remember two kids who, in my reporter days, I knew on the outside just before they went inside on a burglary charge.
One was a nice kid who told me that he was innocent: He hadn't stolen the bike, he just held the door open while the other guy wheeled it out of the apartment. And he was totally sincere; one of the guards later told me that, when he was being booked into the county lockup, he asked what time the bus would come each morning to take him to school.
His buddy, by contrast, did a harder stretch some place and resurfaced a few years later in a program to prepare underprivileged kids for college. His teacher told me she had a problem because he had turned in a paper that he could not possibly have written, but she didn't know where he'd gotten it and didn't want to bust him without proof.
I suggested she give an in-class writing assignment and see how he did with that. She came back wide-eyed: The kid was genuinely that good.
Of course, he didn't make it through freshman year because, despite being extremely bright and very talented, he was, at core, a screw-up.
Which is why classes in juvie facilities do so well in the Stock Market Game: It represents fast, easy money, and the defining mark of the con is that he's always looking for The Big Score. Since he is very smart, he figures he's got the inside track and can figure a way to make a lot of money without actually having to work for it like those suckers in the straight world.
You can see that the line between stock swappers and liquor store robbers is extremely thin. I like to think that my Stock Market Game may have persuaded a few kids to pursue a life of perfectly legal theft instead of the kind that sends you to the joint.
Or, if it does, at least you're Bernie Madoff and not some dumb punk out breaking rocks in the hot sun.
However, leave us not be totally naive. Like Keefe, I have to acknowledge that there are some people who need to be there and, to go back to Richard Pryor's trenchant analysis, "Thank god we've got penitentiaries!"
Two of the places I would go into were "alternatives to incarceration" where the kids had screwed up to the point where they could have gone to jail but I think the judge looked at their home life and said, "Okay, I can't jail the truly guilty parties in this case, but I can at least get this poor kid away from them for a few months."
The people there were tasked with trying to undo in three-to-six months what the parents had done to the kid over 15 years, and sometimes it worked.
But there was another place more like what Keefe is talking about and that place was kind of scary. The kids there were lower level gangbangers and such, and, while I wasn't scared of them in any immediate sense, the atmosphere was like being around cons or bikers. It wasn't a place to say anything stupid.
So I walked on eggs for a little bit and didn't say anything stupid and then we loosened up and had a really nice time. I liked them. And I'm not foolish: I know that some of them never got out of "the life," maybe most of them, but I think some of them probably did and I hope it was a lot of them.
But here's the deal: One of the things they teach you in those places is that it's easier to clean up as you go along. Make your bed when you get up, toss your clothes in the hamper when you change, wipe the counter as you're cooking, do the dishes as soon as you're done eating.
Unfortunately, it's a case of "do as I say, not as I do," because, if we were wise enough to clean up the small spills as they happen, we wouldn't end up with the big messes that make these kinds of places necessary.
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