AN OPEN LETTER TO PRISON AND JAIL INMATES
and other interested stakeholders: families, friends, school officials—locale and state, law enforcement personnel, politicians, ACLU leadership, prison and jail officials, judges, NAACP officials, parent and taxpayer groups, the media, faith professionals, probation officers, and various
organizations wanting to end the pipeline.Obviously a lot of people and organizations are involved, and they all need to understand how law enforcement neglect & educational malpractice enable your shameful, human tragedy to continue affecting thousands of you boys, mostly of color, who became victims of preventable crime!
I hope you don’t mind that I make this a public letter because I think that you, your parents, and the public deserve to know why you are incarcerated even though to start with the only “crime” you committed was to live in the wrong school district over which you had no control, and located in an impoverished neighborhood where failing schools are located. Then you were forced by law to attend a failing school where you were held in bondage for at least 9 years. The only real way out was to get pushed out because that is what I believe happened to you; and, of course, when you feel like you are being pushed out, you have no real choice but to drop out.
How you ended up occupying a prison cell is what this letter is all about and it has to do with what is known as The School to Prison Pipeline (SPP) that only exists in failing public schools located in the inner cities which you were forced to attend failing schools. What it means is that if you don’t read at grade level by grade 3, and don’t receive effective remediation, whether you like it or not, you become unwilling candidates for the SPP and eventually drop out of school without any skills.
To put it into numbers will highlight the problem. Up to 80% of you are school dropouts or inmates with serious reading deficiencies. To say it another way, 80% of crimes are committed by school dropouts or reading failures; worse, within 5 years, 78% of you return to your prison cells because you committed more crimes. These are earth shocking statistics that should cause an earthquake of concern among school officials and law enforcement officials. However, the evidence suggests that it’s not even causing a ripple; therefore, nothing registers on their radar screens; but as will be seen next week as this article continues, it has caused concerns with many organizations.
You were probably told at some point that your incarceration had to do with discrimination and racism because of your skin color, being poor, hungry, from likely a single family home, and you were probably difficult to teach. All true except for a couple of very, very, very, wrong assumptions, beliefs, and myths.
Myth #1: Your socio-economic conditions (poverty, poor housing, discrimination etc.) and lack of intelligence were the causes for your incarceration. NOT TRUE! They were contributing factors, but not causes.
Part 4: Inside Education, Reading Series, Part 4 Lawsuit Deliverance.