REPORT: Black Females Are Fastest Growing Segment of Juvenile Justice Population
According to a recent report, black females represent the fastest growing segment of the juvenile justice population.
The author of the report, Monique Morris, argues that it is extremely important that we expand the ‘school-to-prison pipeline” conversation to include black girls.
From these and other incidents in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that punitive disciplinary practices and other criminalizing policies that fuel what we understand as a “school to prison pipeline” impact the girls as well as the boys. However, a deeper look reveals that perhaps the “pipeline” analogy is too linear a framework to capture the education-system pathways to incarceration for black girls.
In discussions with young women who have dropped out of school, or who are attempting to return to school following a period of incarceration, it is becoming clearer that we must think about the multiple ways in which racism and patriarchy marginalize black girls in their learning environments—places that have become hostile learning environments for girls who are too frequently marginalized for acts of “defiance” or for being too “loud” and aggressive in ways that make them nonconforming to society’s gender expectations. For too many black girls, schools are places where they are subject to unwanted sexual harassment, where they are judged and punished for who they are, not necessarily for what they have done, and where their experiences have been overshadowed by a male-dominated discourse on dignity in schools.
Read more at blackstarjournal.org
Click here to check out the report: Race, Gender and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Why has there been so little focus on the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline on black girls?
How do we ensure that schools prepare our young people for success, rather than prison?
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