Arrested Development
On my first day as a substitute teacher at Prospect Heights High School in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in the early 90s, I was filling in for a Physics teacher who had been stabbed in the hand with a pencil for trying to confiscate a student’s Walkman. As a Humanities major, I was probably less concerned about the threat of violence than the class subject matter. This was during a particularly violent and crime-ridden era in NYC. There was a crack epidemic, 2000 plus murders a year, and the Crown Heights riots were about to erupt in the blocks surrounding our campus. And Prospect Heights was considered a bottom-five school — we had metal detectors at the front doors and security guards roaming the halls. One thing we didn’t have, even during a notorious era at a notorious school in a neighborhood that, back then, most New Yorkers would have tried to avoid, were arrests. So I’ve got to wonder: What the hell is going on in Texas? (In the spirit of transparency, I should mention that this is not the first time that question has entered my mind). Somehow, offenses that used to get kids sent to the principal’s office are instead getting them sucked into a school-to-jail pipeline. “Children ages 10 to 13 were referred for prosecution after incidents in schools more than 47,000 times since 2014, an analysis by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News found. About 4,800 students in that age group were referred during the 2024-25 academic year alone.” Nearly five thousand students getting hauled toward juvie? How is that not totally crazy? NYC (Gift Article): For Texas Schoolchildren, Minor Misbehavior Can Mean Criminal Charges. “William Shaw, a juvenile judge in San Antonio, said that many of the cases that came before him could have been handled by a school principal. ‘Kids are sometimes not going to get along … They may end up pushing each other, maybe even fighting. That can be considered adolescent behavior. It isn’t necessary to arrest.” I taught at that high school in Brooklyn for two years, and I don’t remember a single student being taken away in handcuffs. (Full disclosure: I never tried to take away anyone’s Walkman, and after that first day, I refused to ever teach Physics again. In Texas, that could probably get me arrested.)
