Why are kids so messed up? Murphy thinks cops in school do it – Journal Inquirer

Police officers stationed in schools, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy told a conference at the University of Connecticut last week, are why there is a "school-to-prison pipeline" that targets Black and Hispanic students. So he has introduced legislation to forbid federal funds from paying for such police.

"All across our country," Murphy said, "kids are being arrested, sent into the school-to-prison pipeline for ordinary misbehaviors often connected to their disabilities or childhood traumas, and that one negative interaction, which ends up with an arrestable offense, often leads kids down a path from which they can never return.

In Connecticut, a pretty progressive state, if you are a Black student in a school with a school resource officer, you are three times more likely to be arrested than if you're in a school that doesn't have a school resource officer. For Latino students in our state, for some reason, the number is actually six times.

So are school administrators and teachers a bunch of racist bums as Murphy suggests, or as the social science suggests, are crime, misbehavior and failure in school, and child neglect and abuse racially and ethnically disproportionate because poverty is?

To illustrate his point, the senator told the story of a student in a Connecticut city school system who at the start of 10th grade began walking out of class, "wandering the hallways until he bumped into another teacher, administrator, or school security officer who would bring him to the principal's office. He ended up getting suspended for a few days and sent home to his grandmother, with whom he lived."

Eventually in one of his wanderings the student got into an argument with a vice principal that was loud enough to prompt the school resource officer to arrest him for disorderly conduct. As it turned out, Murphy explained, "This kid didn't know how to read. He was years behind his peers. He had a learning disability and was mortally embarrassed to sit in this class when he couldn't understand anything the teacher was talking about. Luckily he had access to a good legal aid attorney who kept him out of the court system."

But the senator's example doesn't sound at all like a case of racism, overbearing pedantry, or the "school-to-prison pipeline." Instead it sounds like a case of chronic disruption by a student, of the disorderly conduct eventually charged to him -- probably because it was necessary to lay hands on him to end the confrontation with the vice principal -- and a routine diversion from the criminal-justice system.

It also sounds like a case of child abuse or neglect at home and grotesque social promotion at school. How do you get into 10th grade without being able to read? It's easy in Connecticut.

Indeed, Murphy's anecdote makes him seem unaware of just how hard it is for anyone to work his way into prison in Connecticut these days. For the prison population is steadily declining even as the state has more incorrigible offenders remaining free after their 10th, 20th, and even 30th arrest.

Police officers in school aren't the problem. At worst they are a symptom. Nor is the solution what the senator advocates, "wraparound social services." Whatever the solution is, it begins with asking: Where are all the messed-up kids are coming from?

But with Murphy and most elected officials, that is a most politically incorrect and prohibited question.

* * *

BARRETT THE LIBERAL: Restoring the civil rights of felons after they have completed their sentences is properly part of the liberal political agenda. For permanently alienating people from society just invites more trouble.

But Connecticut's U.S. senators, Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, both liberals, are making an exception in the hope of obstructing appointment to the Supreme Court of the federal appeals court judge nominated by President Trump, Amy Coney Barrett. In a dissenting opinion last year Barrett wrote that the constitutional right to bear arms can be revoked only for someone who has shown a proclivity for violence or threat to public safety. The case before her involved a man who had committed Medicare fraud.

Barrett's opinion in that case, Connecticut's senators say, makes her a dangerous extremist. Actually that opinion puts her in the liberal mainstream, which the senators have betrayed so they can defeat her.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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Why are kids so messed up? Murphy thinks cops in school do it - Journal Inquirer