Cradle to Prison Pipeline

I found this in a Salida newspaper today, it is written by Marian Wright Edelman who is the president of the Children's Defense Fund.

Suppose during the next decade, a quarter of all the children born in New York, North Carolina, Texas, Colorado, Ohio and Pennsylvania were infected by a virulent new strain of polio or tuberculosis sometime during their youth.

Clearly, our response to a health crisis affecting a combined population of 80 million people would be to mobilize the nation's vast public health resources. Medical labs would operate around the clock to develop new vaccines.

Unfortunately, an infection akin to this hypothetical tragedy is actually coursing through Black and Latino communities across the nation. I'm not referring to a virus such as HIV-AIDS or a hazardous bacterium. I'm talking about the criminalization of poor and minority children who enter America's "Cradle to Prison Pipeline."

Together, African Americans and Latinos comprise a segment of the U.S. population equal to the six above states. Like the victims of a crippling or wasting disease, once drawn into the prison pipeline, tens of thousands of young people have the opportunity to live happy, productive lives stolen from them, not by festering microbes, but by years spent behind bars.

Read the Op-Ed here

Read the Report: The State of America's Children