KXAN: TX Senate approves bill to limit ticketing youth

[Winehole23]

Senate approves bill to limit ticketing youthMeasure would decriminalize youth misbehaviorUpdated: Thursday, 04 Apr 2013, 9:11 PM CDT
Published : Thursday, 04 Apr 2013, 9:11 PM CDT




Michael Brick, Associated Press


AUSTIN (AP) — Faced with a documented pattern of teenagers pushed into the criminal justice system for acting out in class, Texas lawmakers on Thursday advanced a measure to start decriminalizing youthful misbehavior.
The Senate unanimously approved a bill that would limit the practice of issuing tickets for minor classroom offenses. The measure, which still must clear the House, would replace misdemeanor citations with counseling referrals and punishments such as community service performed on the school grounds.

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/texas_lege/senate-approves-bill-to-limit-ticketing-youth

[boutons_deux]

275000 tickets to TX school kids/year. America is its own worst enemy, esp red-state, bubba, Confederate America.

[boutons_deux]

275000 tickets to TX school kids/year. America is its own worst enemy, esp red-state, bubba, Confederate America.

Apparently in MS, LA, GA, the school-to-jail pipeline is roaring along great.

[Winehole23]

red state, bubba confederate Texas might be starting to shut it down. if it does, you'll have Republicans to thank for it.

[ploto]

So just make sure you assault the guy in class and not after school!

[Winehole23]

school administrators can always call the police if they're needed.

what we don't need is beat cops writing tickets in schools, then criminalizing non compliance and recurrence.

[boutons_deux]

red state, bubba confederate Texas might be starting to shut it down. if it does, you'll have Republicans to thank for it.

blacks and browns are probably the main criminalized students, so bubba racist Repug legislators won't pass this.

[Latarian Milton]

kids bad behavior is also part of the brunt caused by the loss of traditional moral standards imho. parents should take the responsibility to cultivate their youths into decent persons, but too many parents have shirked their duties.

[Winehole23]

blacks and browns are probably the main criminalized students, so bubba racist Repug legislators won't pass this.bill was unanimously approved in the Senate.

[boutons_deux]

bill was unanimously approved in the Senate.

TX reps are more "down (in the bubba) market" than TX Senators, is my guess. We'll see.

[TDMVPDPOY]

fck off fags, just another revenue raising scheme :D

[jag]

blacks and browns are probably the main criminalized students, so bubba racist Repug legislators won't pass this.

Racist repugs are to blame for all the blacks and browns assaulting their teachers during the middle of class. Got it

[Winehole23]

there's no need to cripple the potential of young people by over-criminalizing what is largely age-appropriate, garden variety contumacy and misbehavior.






(I'd give a club to the teacher, first.)

[Winehole23]

blaming the prevalence of violence in the classroom on "all the blacks and browns" is an interesting thesis; is it statistically supported, _JaG?

[Winehole23]

obviously, we need more guns in schools, harsher laws and even more police to protect schoolchildren from well, you know, the wrong sort of children . . . and us from all of them, obviously.

[Winehole23]

if schools ever cease to function as schools, they will likely remain as the social expedience of segregating unruly teens from the general population in minimum security warehouses, during daytime retail hours.

[jag]

blaming the prevalence of violence in the classroom on "all the blacks and browns" is an interesting thesis; is it statistically supported, _JaG?

I'm sure I can find some interesting stats on the racial makeup of the majority of offenders.

[TeyshaBlue]

I'm sure I can find some interesting stats on the racial makeup of the majority of offenders.

Here's a decent white paper on the topic. The caveats are many however, with data acquisition and reporting issues as major players. Shocking revelation to me was that special education students are very over represented in school ticketing.

FWIW

http://cbsdallas.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/ticketing_booklet_web.pdf

[TeyshaBlue]

See pg. 23 for breakdowns of offense types.

[boutons_deux]

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

In Meridian, Miss., police routinely arrest and transport youths to a juvenile detention center for minor classroom misbehaviors. In Jefferson Parish, La., according to a U.S. Department of Justice complaint, school officials have given armed police “unfettered authority to stop, frisk, detain, question, search and arrest schoolchildren on and off school grounds.” In Birmingham, Ala., police officers are permanently stationed in nearly every high school.


In fact, hundreds of school districts across the country employ discipline policies that push students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system at alarming rates—a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-43-spring-2013/school-to-prison

[boutons_deux]

The Worst “School-to-Prison” Pipeline: Was it in Mississippi?

What do these school kids have in common? The teenage girl with a bladder disorder who left class without permission, ignoring a teacher and racing for a bathroom rather than wet herself; the boy who was rude to a school administrator; another who was tardy. They are children of color who, as a result of breaking minor school rules, were allegedly arrested and thrown into a juvenile detention facility in Meridian, Mississippi. It appears to be the most blatant case in a nationwide phenomenon that the U.S. Department of Justice, in a 37-page lawsuit, calls a “school-to-prison pipeline.”


Following an eight-month investigation and a two-month warning period, the Justice Department in October filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Meridian, Lauderdale County, the Mississippi Department of Youth Services (DYS) and local Youth Court judges Frank Coleman and Veldore Young for violating the Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendment rights of Meridian public school children.

For six years or so, at least 77 children, some as young as 10 – all of them “children of color,” says Jody Owens, with the Southern Poverty Law Center–were routinely arrested at Meridian schools allegedly on the say-so of teachers or administrators, handcuffed and taken to jail where they were held for days on end without benefit of a hearing, a lawyer, or understanding their Miranda rights. Their parents or guardians weren’t notified of the arrests until the children were in lockdown in a facility the SPLC says was a hellhole of abuse and neglect.

http://nation.time.com/2012/12/11/the-worst-school-to-prison-pipeline-was-it-in-mississippi/



and it's the still rampantly racist Confederate Bible-thumping "Christian" already-ridiculously-gerrymanded states, including TX, that are agitating for SCOTUS to kill the Voting Rights Act, saying "things have changed" :lol

[Drachen]

Here's a decent white paper on the topic. The caveats are many however, with data acquisition and reporting issues as major players. Shocking revelation to me was that special education students are very over represented in school ticketing.

FWIW

http://cbsdallas.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/ticketing_booklet_web.pdf

My step-daughter being one of them.

[TeyshaBlue]

My step-daughter being one of them.

My son being another.

[Drachen]

My son being another.

I guess technically she is a brownie (at least a half-brownie) so I guess that means that half of the reason she bent that teacher's finger back in 8th grade was because red state bubba representatives (but seemingly not senators) were willing her hand to do so.

[TeyshaBlue]

Absolutely. The Red State Jedi Mind Trick ™ is exclusive to Representatives. Senators are allowed the full use of the dark side.

[boutons_deux]

In Texas, Police in Schools Criminalize 300,000 Students Each YearIn Texas, hundreds of thousands of students are winding up in court for committing very serious offenses such as cursing or farting in class. Some of these so-called dangerous criminals (also known as teenagers) will face arrest and even incarceration, like the honors student who spent a night in jail (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/28/texas-honor-student-jailed-for-missing-too-much-school/) for skipping class, or the 12-year-old who was arrested for spraying perfume on her neck (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools). These cases have at least one thing in common in that they were carried out by special police officers walking a controversial beat: the hallways and classrooms of public schools.

evidence suggests adding armed guards will only thrust more disadvantaged youth into the criminal justice system. Civil rights groups say policing our schools will further the institutionalization of what's known as the "school-to-prison pipeline."

According to the youth advocacy group Texas Appleseed, school officers issued 300,000 criminal citations to students in 2010, some handed to children as young as six years old.

Most of the criminal citations levied against students were for “Class C” misdemeanors, compelling them to miss classes in order to attend court, and often face addition disciplinary action from the district. As the complaint notes, “These students can then face sentences including fines, court costs, community service, probation and mandatory participation in ‘First Offender’ programs.”

If students fail to appear in court, or if their parents can’t afford to pay fines, then the state issues an arrest warrant for them when they turn 17. Thus, these tickets “can follow students past high school into their adult lives with many of the same consequences as a criminal conviction for a more serious offense, including having to report their convictions on applications for college, the military or employment.”

some “Class C” misdemeanors under the state’s penal code include using profanity, making offensive gestures, creating “by chemical means” an “unreasonable odor” and “making unreasonable noise in a public place” In other words, yelling, farting, wearing Axe body spray and generally being a teenager is officially illegal in Texas.


http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/texas-police-schools-criminalize-300000-students-each-year

[TeyshaBlue]

lol. welcome to 4 days ago.

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=211942&p=6465284&viewfull=1#post6465284

[boutons_deux]

TB :lol

[TeyshaBlue]

:cry I couldn't read your link because it wasn't from alternet.borg! :cry

[boutons_deux]

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/04/12/education/Juvenile/Juvenile-articleLarge.jpg


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/education/with-police-in-schools-more-children-in-court.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

[boutons_deux]

Confederate FL criminalizing black students
16-Year-Old Girl Arrested and Charged With a Felony For Science Project Mistake
A Florida teen with an exemplary record is facing federal charges after conducting what a classmate calls “a science project gone bad.”

16-year-old Kiera Wilmot is accused of mixing housing chemicals in a small water bottle at Bartow High School, causing the cap to fly off and produce a bit of smoke. The experiment was conducted outdoors (http://www.theledger.com/article/20130423/NEWS/304235005), no property was damaged, and no one was injured.


Not long after Wilmot’s experiment, authorities arrested her and charged her with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” according to WTSP-TV. The school district proceeded to expel Wilmot for handling the “dangerous weapon,” also known as a water bottle. She will have to complete her high school education through an expulsion program.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/16-year-old-girl-arrested-and-charged-felony-science-project-mistake

[TeyshaBlue]

lol alternet.

http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/region_polk/bartow/teen-charged-with-making-discharging-weapon-at-bartow-high-school

The reaction is not surprising considering that this is apparently not an isolated "experiment".

http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/two-florida-teens-arrested-after-setting-off-acid-bomb-at-middle-school-it-scared-us-all-says-student-93597/

http://tampa.cbslocal.com/2012/02/21/police-student-arrested-for-exploding-acid-bomb-at-school/

[coyotes_geek]

I just want to know if DHS was properly notified........

[Homeland Security]

lol alternet.
Sadly, boutons passed away four years ago. His family keeps his memory alive by maintaining this "deux" account with a context-sensitive post-generating bot tied to an RSS feed.

[TeyshaBlue]

...running on an old Pentium I with 256mb of ram, apparently.

[Winehole23]

Last week, I noted (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/15/throwing-children-in-prison-turns-out-to-be-a-really-bad-idea/) that the United States puts more youths and teenagers in jail than any other developed country, with about 70,000 detained on any given day in 2010. And there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that this policy does far more harm than good.


But there’s another, important twist to this story: The U.S. incarceration rate for youths has actually dropped 32 percent over the past decade, according to a new report (http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Comeback-States-Report_FINAL.pdf) (pdf) from the National Juvenile Justice Network and Texas Public Policy Foundation. And there’s good reason to think the numbers can keep falling.


Some of the drop has been driven by the general decline in crime and arrests across the country. But not all. Importantly, another chunk of the drop is due to the fact that nine states — including California, New York and Texas — have been experimenting with new policies to keep kids who commit minor offenses out of jail. These nine states have all seen an even bigger drop in their youth confinement rates since 2000.


“Over the past decade, some states have stopped to take a second look at their youth prisons,” says Sarah Bryer of the National Juvenile Justice Network. “Their budgets were hemorrhaging, so they stopped and asked if they were really getting the best bang for their buck. And the research showed that these facilities were enormously expensive — and often weren’t actually improving public safety.”http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/19/the-u-s-is-jailing-fewer-youths-these-days-heres-why/

the report: http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Comeback-States-Report_FINAL.pdf

[boutons_deux]

"Their budgets were hemorrhaging"

so it wasn't a humanitarian decision, but a financial decision. no cigar

[Winehole23]

deincarceration is real; Republicans lead the way in Texas. all credit is due to those who made it happen, included Texas Dems who tagged along.

[Winehole23]

the result is good for young people, good for the bottom line.

win-win.

[TeyshaBlue]

the result is good for young people, good for the bottom line.

win-win.

gfy redneck bubba

[Winehole23]

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2013/06/perfumed-perpetrator-wouldnt-get-ticket.html?spref=fb

[Winehole23]

Tea Party vs. Prosecutors: The changing dynamic of Texas criminal-justice debates


Grits readers will find little new in this Texas Tribune story (http://www.texastribune.org/2013/07/10/tea-party-influence-felt-criminal-justice/) analyzing criminal-justice reform legislation from the 83rd Texas Legislature, but I thought the prosecutor association lobbyist's comments were interesting:
“The dynamic at the Capitol is definitely changing in criminal justice,” said Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations at the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

Edmonds said that with more libertarian-leaning members of the Republican Party, the approach has become less focused on Texas’ traditional tough-on-crime ways. For instance, he said, more Republican legislators are inclined to vote with Democrats for reduced penalties for small amounts of drugs.

“Along the political spectrum, as people go to the left end and the right end, it’s not actually a line, it’s really a circle,” Edmonds said. “And the left end and right end actually loop around and meet each other.”
He's right. The typical left-right spectrum simplistically portrayed by the media doesn't really apply to criminal justice politics. As gerrymandering has led to safe districts for ideologues further and further from the center, right and left, other policy areas have frequently petrified with inaction. But on criminal justice, that dynamic opened up opportunities for the sort of left-right coalitions responsible for passing every piece of Texas criminal-justice reform legislation since the turn of the century.

That said, I find the article's headline saying the Tea Party is "soft" on crime laughable and off-base. What's really happening here is that the Tea Partiers are more willing than establishment Republicans to be guided by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights instead of fear mongering by the victimocracy. And they're more committed to fiscal conservatism and less interested in pandering to the array of special interests, from police unions to private prisons, with vested financial stakes in ballooning justice costs. Shannon understandably would like to pivot back to the sort of culture-war debates over the death penalty that drove justice politics 20-30 years ago. Like an '80s metal band, however, that fad has faded and is unlikely to return soon. Time for the prosecutors to re-consider their message. I doubt they can bully the current crop of Tea Party legislators with threats of calling them "soft on crime" in the same way that's worked for them in the past. In fact, if they keep it up, the tactic could begin to backfire (http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2013/06/legislators-blast-prosecutor.html).http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2013/07/tea-party-vs-prosecutors-changing.html?spref=fb

[boutons_deux]

"the Tea Partiers are more willing than establishment Republicans to be guided by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights" :lol

"less interested in pandering to the array of special interests" :lol

[Winehole23]

Radley Balko highlights the work of Texas conservatives at TPPF leading the way on criminal justice reform:


The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) has an interesting report out (http://www.texaspolicy.com/sites/default/files/documents/2014-03-PP12-JuvenileJusticeStatusOffenders-CEJ-DerekCohenMarcLevin.pdf) on the detainment and incarceration of juveniles for “status offenses,” or offenses that wouldn’t be crimes if the juveniles were adults. (TPPF is a right-leaning think tank that has been pushingbeen pushing conservatives to embrace criminal justice reform (http://www.rightoncrime.com/).)


Status offenses could include things like truancy, curfew violations, or vaguer offenses such as “incorrigibility.” These offenses don’t directly harm anyone. Instead, they’re generally discouraged because they’re believed to lead to criminal behavior. But treating them as criminal conduct has costs, both economic costs, and the risk that introducing a kid to the “system” can inflict irreversible harm.



The study first looks at the origin of the idea that these offenses should be handled by the criminal justice system, and not, say, parents, schools, or other civil society institutions.

Status offenses, as a legal category, came about close to the turn of the past century. The founding of the nation’s earliest juvenile courts brought with it the matter of establishing their jurisdiction and differentiating the boundaries from that of the traditional criminal court. Having arisen out of the progressive movement, early juvenile courts sought to implement formal social control in order to “marry the means of educational objectives and juvenile detention.”


Under the tenets of parens patriae, these courts were empowered to place children under the care of the state if their parents were unwilling or unable to do so. This outgrowth of interventionism led to the establishment of laws seeking to expand the court’s jurisdiction over noncriminal behavior in order to better the youth.



However well-intentioned, the policy has been destructive. The good news is that after a couple decades of feeding kids into the criminal justice system for “crimes” that aren’t really crimes, over the last decade or so, we’re turning to more sensible, less destructive approaches. Here are a couple graphs from the study showing the number of kids detained and committed for status offenses:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/TPI1.jpgSource: Texas Public Policy Institute




http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/TPI2.jpgSource: Texas Public Policy Institute


But there’s still a long way to go. The study concludes:

The findings in this report suggest that, as a nation, while we have made significant progress in reducing confinement of status offenders, there remains a great deal of work to be done to shift away from confinement as the means of responding to these behaviors. Although the numbers of status offenders detained or committed to confinement have declined substantially since the year 2001, we estimated that nearly ten thousand youth each year are still being confined in the U.S. for offenses that would not be considered crimes if committed by an adult. Given the non-serious nature of those offenses and the fact that community based alternatives are much less-expensive, more-effective, and avoid the damage incarceration and other types of residential placement does to status offenders, the continued confinement of thousands of youth for status offending represents one of the major shortcomings of the nation’s juvenile justice systems.



More generally, we need resist the impulse to address every societal problem with the criminal justice system. It’s a blunt instrument, and especially with kids, applying it inappropriately causes a lot more harm than good (http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/25/ruining-kids-in-order-to-save).


http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/10/study-looks-at-kids-who-do-time-for-offenses-that-arent-crimes/

[TeyshaBlue]

Wonder what thinkprogress(lol) thinks about this? :lol

[Winehole23]

The DOJ eventually reached asettlement agreement (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-settlement-agreements-address-unconstitutional-youth-arrest-and) with Meridian in 2015. The city agreed to no longer commit any violations and not to initiate arrests for offenses that should be handled only by the school.https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/throwing-children-away-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/

[Winehole23]

parents do time for truancy:


It’s easy to see how destructive this school-to-prison pipeline can be to an individual’s development. What’s less known is that it can also lead to parents being sent to prison. The Associated Press reported (http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-woman-jailed-over-truancy-fines-found-dead-in-cell-2014jun11-story.html) in 2014 about a 55-year-old mother of seven in Reading, Pennsylvania, who had died in jail. She was serving a two-day sentence to eliminate $2,000 in fines stemming from her sons’ truancy from school.


Her situation wasn’t all that uncommon. Of the 1,600 people who had been jail since 2000 in her county (Berks), two thirds of them were women serving time related to their children’s truancy fines. Truancy isn’t as aggressively enforced nationwide, but there are some cities that stand out. Parents in Jacksonville, Florida, with a child who has more than five unexcused absences in a month can face up to 60 days in jail (https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130460&page=1).

[boutons_deux]

It’s easy to see how destructive this school-to-prison pipeline can be to an individual’s development. What’s less known is that it can also lead to parents being sent to prison.

fascist, authoritarian, brutal, dehumanizing police state America.

Where does shit hole America get this punitive brutality?

From the vengeful, crazy-assed pissed-off so-called God of the Old Testament?

[Winehole23]

nah, it makes more sense to blame zero tolerance policies passed in the wake of high-visibility/low incidence crimes.

the problem is politics, not religion.

[boutons_deux]

nah, it makes more sense to blame zero tolerance policies passed in the wake of high-visibility/low incidence crimes.

the problem is politics, not religion.

while you weren't watching, (politicized) so-called religion has polluted politics.

Americans can't see women's nipples (the originally lascivious, titillating Starbucks logo) because of Puritans 400 years ago.

supposedly religious politicians implement their religion into law, America's Christian Sharia

[Winehole23]

have you read Jeff Sharlot's "The Family"?

[Spurtacular]

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/texas_lege/senate-approves-bill-to-limit-ticketing-youth

So, nikkas can beat each other up without real consequences now, just so long as it's in the classroom. :lmao

[boutons_deux]

have you read Jeff Sharlot's "The Family"?

no, but I just checked a few reviews for The Big Picture, being a Picture Artiste Extraordinaire

[Winehole23]

assault rises to the level of a crime, spitballing and backtalk don't