America's War On Children exposes how the "super predator" myth and zero-tolerance policies drove juvenile incarceration from 107,000 in 1997 to 200,000 annually, with 40% held in for-profit facilities like those owned by James F. Slattery, whose prisons suffered abuse and deaths despite political donations. The episode details the school-to-prison pipeline, where Black students face arrest rates 27 times higher than whites, while militarized SROs utilize 1033 program weapons and chemical agents without preventing shootings or ensuring safety. Ultimately, this systemic failure transforms schools into prisons, proving that punitive measures exacerbate trauma rather than securing communities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Control and Meditation00:02:47
This is an iHeart podcast.
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On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
Yeah.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
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Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How much you wait, Wanda?
Right now, I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
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You know, a pod.
Was that an intro?
Is that how you started a show?
Yep, Sophie.
Yep, you did great.
Did I do it?
Literally, I'll take anything at this point.
Okay.
Well, just a grunt.
Just a little grunt with it.
This is behind the bastards.
The War on Children's Rights00:16:05
I'll do your job.
This is behind the bastards.
Continue.
Thank you.
You know what I hate, Sophie?
What, Robert Evans, the host of this podcast, who you haven't introduced yourself?
He is Robert Evans.
Words.
Words.
And my guest today, Courtney Kosak, and I are going to sit quietly for an hour and a half.
And that's going to be the podcast.
No words.
I'm doing a bold new thing in podcasting where we don't do anything here.
To be honest, it's not told there's plenty of meditation podcasts that do that.
Oh, no, people aren't allowed to meditate.
People are not allowed to meditate.
Yeah.
I will kick your ass if you meditate during our quiet podcast.
Be really stressed out the whole time.
Courtney, how are you doing today?
You know, I'm pretty good, considering.
Considering?
Is something happening?
No, just the world.
Just the dumpster fire.
Oh, I saw a lovely dumpster fire the other night.
I bet.
A bunch of kids lit it so that they could burn a police union down.
Yeah, it was a good buck dumpster fire.
Courtney, speaking of children, do you like kids?
Eh.
Eh?
Not really.
Okay, well, I was going to ask how you feel about incarcerating children in penitentiaries for what most people would consider modest misbehavior, but I guess you're fine with that.
So again, back to the 90 minutes of silence that we had planned.
I'm into civil rights.
I mean, I feel like kids can, I just don't want one.
So kids get civil rights in your head?
You're a fan of that.
Okay, okay.
That's a bold stance.
Children getting civil rights.
That's the episode we're going to talk about.
This is about the war on children that our country's been fighting for a while now.
Did you know we were fighting a war on children?
It's been brought to my attention.
Yeah, we fucking hate kids in this country.
We absolutely hate kids.
It fully rules how much this country hates kids.
As of right now, this moment, 2020, about 200,000 children enter the adult criminal justice system every year, mostly for nonviolent crimes.
About 10,000 children are housed in adult prisons and jails every single day.
And about 40% of incarcerated kids are locked away in private for-profit facilities.
While the number of incarcerated children has fallen somewhat in recent years, it is still massively escalated over where it was in the past.
In 1997, only 107,000 children were incarcerated every year.
So that's roughly doubled since 1997.
From 1983, though, to 1997, the number of juveniles incarcerated in adult facilities jumped by around 366%.
So it used to be way lower than it was.
Back in the 80s, like a fraction of the number of kids were incarcerated as are now.
So that's cool.
That is not cool.
How did we get here, Robert?
How did we get here?
Well, I wish we were going to explain that.
But again, this podcast is mostly going to be 90 minutes of silence.
Okay, I'll shut the fuck up.
It's okay.
No, you shouldn't shut the fuck up.
I need to.
I am very strung out.
I was getting shot at repeatedly by federal agents again last night.
So I'm a little bit punchy.
I apologize.
Thank you for being cool.
That's me saying I'll take anything at this point.
That grunt earlier, fantastic.
Let's do this.
So good.
All right.
All right.
So, Courtney, the U.S. incarcerates children at a rate five times higher than the next highest nation, South Africa.
So, like, that's where we are.
Like, if you're looking, if you're playing a global game, if you're looking at like what are the things the United States does better, one of the things, best, one of the things on that short list, one of the things that no country can take away from us is like, we're the best at locking children away.
We're so good at it.
So proud.
Yeah.
You think fucking Paraguay can lock up children?
Like, they don't know shit about locking up kids in Paraguay.
They just let them roam.
Yeah, they let them roam.
They just let them go on the fucking streets like they're goddamn like jujubes.
What's a jujube?
I don't know.
They let them out.
They let them wander.
It's a problem.
So in 1960, yeah, let's talk about where this all started, how America got to the point that it is now with all these kids not walking around and instead locked up in criminal facilities.
It started, well, kind of the legal jurisprudence around whether or not it's cool to throw kids in a small dark hole owned by the government.
That all really started to kick off in the 1960s.
And for a while, judges and stuff like pretty consistently cited with kids having rights.
It started in 1964 with 15-year-old Gerald Galt.
He was convicted of juvenile delinquency by an Arizona juvenile judge and sentenced to be incarcerated until age 21.
So that was like a seven-year sentence.
And his crime was making a lewd phone call.
Oh, my God.
Well, yeah, you got to lock a kid away for a quarter of his life for that shit.
Just during the formative years.
No big deal.
He'll be fine when he gets out.
Throw him in a hole.
Yeah, he made a dirty phone call.
Six years, seven years.
Jesus.
So the young Mr. Galt enjoyed no defense counsel, which you might recognize as a violation of what this nation considers to be his basic human rights.
He was also sentenced to a vastly higher penalty than an adult would have received for the same crime.
Because again, 15 years old, that's like a six-year sentence.
An adult at the time charged with the same crime, making a lewd phone call, would have faced at most two months of jail.
So there was a lawsuit as a result of Jared Galt's case, and his parents filed for a writ of habeas corpus.
Now, at the time, juveniles were not allowed to appeal in California.
So the Superior Court and the Supreme Court of the state backed up this nonsense.
Galt's family appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they agreed to hear the case for the specific purpose of determining the procedural rights of a juvenile defendant.
The court's 1967 decision determined that kids have the same due process rights as adults, including the right to counsel.
So that's good.
That's a win.
Yeah, I like that.
But wait, was this, was he poor, or how did this even happen?
I mean, it was Arizona.
We'll talk a little bit about how it happened, but the gist of it is that while consistently in this period, like the Supreme Court kind of has tended to decide on the side of child's rights, a lot of judges really fucking hated kids.
And a lot of cops really hated kids because those are both groups of people.
I think a lot of what it comes down to, based on at least my reading, is that judges and cops are both people who are used to receiving a certain kind of respect, often a fear-based respect, and kids don't give a shit.
And when you are disrespected by a child as one of those types of people, because you're that type of person, your instinct is to lock them in a hole for a large chunk of their life.
Punishable character flaw?
Hey, that's not good.
You could call yelling at the cops a character flaw.
I don't.
Yeah.
So the Galt case was the start of a series of major wins in the field of children's legal rights.
In Tinker v. Des Moines, Independent Community School District, a 1969 case, the court ruled that public school students cannot be punished for expressing their personal opinions on campus so long as doing so does not interfere with the work of the school or with other students.
In 1970, the court ruled that juveniles are constitutionally entitled to proof beyond a reasonable doubt before they can be declared delinquent.
The 60s were, in general, a pretty good time to be an advocate for the legal rights of children.
This period of wins occurred right up until 1977, which is the year the court ruled on Ingraham v. Wright.
This is the case that determined schools were not violating the Constitution by, quote, paddling the recalcitant children on the buttocks with the flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long, three to four inches wide, and about one and a half inch thick.
So that's 1977.
The court rules schools can still paddle kids.
It's not limiting their rights to paddle them.
Children were, however, limited to five licks from a paddle, which is written into jurisprudence.
And that's pretty neat.
Did you ever get hit in school by your teachers?
I did not.
I was forced to crawl around on the floor.
That was probably the most terrible thing.
But it was a pretty bad punishment.
Not hit, though.
Oh, my God.
I can't imagine.
My mom always tells me fun stories about getting hit by nuns when she was in LA.
Yeah, my school paddled.
Yeah, they definitely paddled.
Your school paddled?
Yeah.
Was that legal?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's Oklahoma.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Forgot about Oklahoma.
Yeah, they were like, of course you can paddle kids.
Like, can you not paddle kids?
Is that okay?
That's the question we have in Oklahoma.
Yeah.
Because we're so busy paddling kids.
So, yeah, the Supreme Court rules in 77 that you can paddle kids at school.
You just can't lick them more than five times.
In 1979, another court case rules that minors can be placed in state-run mental health facilities for basically no reason, without any kind of like due process, really.
And so, in the late 70s, this kind of trail of anti-child court cases continued.
And sort of the, you know, this thing that had started in the 60s with children getting, you know, awarded more and more or not, but having more and more rights kind of recognized in court cases, that turns around and courts start chipping away at the rights of children to not be locked in dark holes by the government for long periods of time.
And this continues until 1984, when the Supreme Court rules on Shaw v. Martin and affirms that children do, in fact, have a lesser inherent interest in liberty than adults.
The justification for this is that they are always in some form of custody.
So while Galt affirmed, you know, that the first case we talked about affirmed that children had the right to the same due process as adults, Shaw flipped the table and declared that juvenile detention facilities are basically the same as kids living at home or in a foster facility.
So it really doesn't matter if kids get sentenced to something without having a lawyer because kids have no real liberty anyway.
And the state putting them in a hole is no different from their parents putting them in a bedroom.
Oh, my.
That's not great.
What?
Who hurt that guy?
That's what we need to really investigate.
Jesus.
I mean, the messed up thing is it's like, who hurt that large room full of judges and all of their aides who decided that was a good way to work?
It's kind of bad, right?
To say that, to be like, kids aren't interested in freedom.
Like, so it's okay.
Whatever we do to them is okay.
It's the most backwards thing, literally.
Now, according to a paper I found in the Temple Law Review, the reason for this tragic reversal and the general decades-long trend towards less rights for children under trial is that trial judges in the latter half of the 20th century really fucking hated kids.
And I'm going to quote from that paper now right after I sneeze.
Oh, fucking tear gas.
Okay.
The real actors who influenced juvenile justice were state juvenile court judges and administrators whose hostility to the principles of GALT led many of them to ignore the decision.
From the very beginning, many trial-level juvenile courts simply ignored Galt's thrust when it came to the actual provision of counsel to juveniles.
According to Professor Wally Mliniak, quote, studies in the 1970s and 1980s found that few children were represented by counsel.
The predominant reason is that these juveniles waived their right to counsel, often without being properly informed of the right.
State courts also employed insidious methods to ensure that juveniles from poor families who were supposed to benefit from the constitutional right to free court-assigned counsel never were assigned a lawyer.
In Florida, for example, indigency rules were so strict that having $5 in the bank made a family ineligible for appointment of counsel.
Moreover, as Professor Melinik has explained, Florida parents had to pay a $40 fee just to apply for an indigency determination.
So you see what they do in places: like, you have the right to a lawyer unless we determine you have too much money to get a free lawyer.
And we're saying $5 is too much money.
That is so crazy.
If your family net worth is $5, you're doing way too well for a free lawyer.
Where are the social workers in all this?
That's like a whole nother episode, probably.
Yeah, I mean, underpaid, often traumatized.
And let's face it, in some cases, like being very much a part of fucking these kids over because some of them suck too.
Like, it's a whole mess, right?
And it's this underfunded thing.
And yeah, it's just bad.
There's not a lot.
There's not a lot looking out for poor kids in the states that have the most protections for poor children, right?
And Florida is not the most protection state.
The Arizona of the other side of the East Coast.
Of the East Coast.
Yeah.
So accurate.
Yeah.
Good stuff, everybody.
Good stuff.
So, yeah, we're going to be hearing a lot from Florida in this episode.
We're also going to hear a lot from trial judges who hate children with a passion that boggles the mind, which is cool and good.
And this was a fun episode to write that didn't make me want to commit federal crimes.
Anyway, the whole situation with children's rights degenerated right up to the mid-1990s, which is when a study conducted by the American Bar Association found that huge numbers of kids waived their right to counsel without really knowing what they were doing.
As a result, the association's report wrote: many children charged with crimes were literally left defenseless.
In Maryland, 40% of kids charged with crimes waived their right to a lawyer.
90 to 95% of Louisiana children did, as did 50 to 75% of children in Florida and more than half of the children in Georgia, Ohio, and Kentucky who went before judges.
So that's a lot of kids not having lawyers.
And I don't know if you know much about kids, but one thing they're not good at is representing themselves in court.
Oh my God.
Shocking.
They really should be with our education system.
I don't know what the fuck.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Everything's good stuff.
Everything's great stuff.
I'm happy.
Another major change that happened in the 1970s, or from the 1970s to the 1990s, was the ease with which courts were allowed to treat juveniles as adults.
Now, as in most things, New York State led the way in this.
New York was like, we're not treating kids like adults enough when we decide how long to throw them into dark holes owned by the government.
Let's change that.
This is the state of New York, and this is the fight we're picking.
So in 1978, they changed their laws in order to make it possible for courts to prosecute children aged 13 and up in adult criminal court.
You know, all those hardened adult 13-year-olds that you know.
Is it like just for murder or JY?
I mean, that was kind of the justification, but it wound up being for a lot of things, right?
The idea was initially like there's so many dangerous teenage predators, we have to start treating them like adults.
But like the people who, the kids who actually get tried as adults, most of them are not murderers.
So every state in the union followed New York's example to one extent or another, making it easier to try children as adults.
This whole process really accelerated in the late 1980s and 1990s as the crack epidemic fueled waves, fears of a new wave of child super predators.
Age of offense thresholds were reduced all around the nation, and politicians who had fought for the rights of children to be treated as children were attacked for being soft on crime.
Now, the two folks most responsible for this were right-wing criminologist John DeLulio and our old buddy James Q. Wilson.
If you remember listening through the Behind the Police miniseries we did, James Q. Wilson is the co-author of the Broken Windows Theory of Crime.
And coincidentally, best friends with the guys who wrote the racist book about IQ, The Bell Curve, which is far a cool group of dudes.
Politicians Exploiting Kids00:04:37
Yeah.
Call me for the barbecue, guys.
Yeah, I'm going to insinuate a series of racial attitudes towards policing and push them so deeply into the zeitgeist that people think that they're actually just protecting their neighborhoods when they're in reality contributed to something that could be viewed as almost an act of genocide.
Sorry, I lost track of the surfer bro voice I was doing after a while.
Anyway, okay, let's catch our breath for a second.
Just catch our breath for a second.
Back to that 90 minutes of silence.
Ready, everyone?
Back to the 90 minutes of silence.
So, John DeLulio and James Q. Wilson, they write a paper in 1995 arguing that the U.S. is about to experience a wave of unprecedented youth crime driven by single-parent families, crack cocaine, and a bunch of other stuff that was all basically coded language for the existence of black people.
Wilson predicted that by 2010, there would be 270,000 additional predators on the streets committing violent crimes at an unprecedented level.
These children, he wrote, would be radically impulsive, brutally remorseless, elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches and have absolutely no respect for human life.
So let's put them in a hole, see if it gets better.
I also love the idea that they're packing guns instead of lunches because they do two separate things, James.
You still need to eat, even if you're going to be shooting people.
You want to have a lunch.
Totally.
Yeah.
You don't lose hunger pains just because you're packing a nine.
You know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
You might get hungrier.
So basically, everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, in the American political establishment, bought into the idea of these child super predators to one extent or another.
And they also bought into the argument DeLulio and Wilson made about what to do with this upcoming crop of super predators.
I'm going to quote now from the book, The End of Policing.
DeLulio and his colleagues argued that there was nothing to be done but to exclude such children from settings where they could harm others and ultimately to incarcerate them for as long as possible.
DeLulio's ideas were based on spurious evidence and ideologically motivated assumptions that turned out to be totally inaccurate.
Every year since, juvenile crime in and out of schools in the U.S. has declined.
However, the super predator myth was extremely influential.
It generated a huge amount of press coverage, editorials, and legislative action.
One of the immediate consequences was a rash of new laws lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier to incarcerate young people in adult jails, in keeping with the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration.
So that's good shit right there.
We're all part of the problem if we're clicking on that clickbait super predator bullshit.
Yeah, don't I mean, it was the 90s, so that was people, people knew less to be worried about the clicks.
But yeah, always be worried about the clicks.
Don't click Atlantic articles.
Yeah.
Don't click Atlantic articles.
Just say no to the Atlantic.
So by the 1990s, politicians realized that specifically fucking over children was a really good vote getter.
Some elected leaders, like the Republican Speaker of the House, also fuck children literally because Dennis Hastert is a pedophile while also advocating for children to be treated as adults under criminal law.
And there's a really dark joke in that whole situation, but I'm not going to make it.
But there is one in there about Dennis Hastert wanting kids to be treated as adults while he molests a bunch of kids while being the longest serving Republican speaker of the House.
Read about Dennis Hastert.
It's a real bad story.
This is one of the guys who stood up there and talked about how bad Bill Clinton was.
Turns out he was a child molester the whole time.
A lot of people don't talk about Dennis Hastert enough anymore.
Oh, first time I'm hearing about him.
Oh, yeah, you didn't know about the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House who was just a complete child molester the entire time he was in office.
No, but that's a terrible first impression.
Oh, it's so bad.
Yeah, he was just molesting the hell out of some kids.
It was really a problem.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
You want to take an ad break, buddy?
Yeah, let's take an ad break.
Courtney, you know, who won't be the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House and use their power to assault children?
Whoever this ad is for?
That's exactly the case.
Unless this is yet another one of our ads for Dennis Hastert, in which case, I do apologize.
We do not know how they keep getting in there.
Eating While Broke Conversations00:03:18
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Search the Ceno Show.
And listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here, the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Zero Tolerance in Schools00:15:01
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the president?
You think he goes to president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Los Law Cruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and we're talking about children being incarcerated.
So in the 1990s, yeah, kids decide, or politicians decide that like really specifically going after kids as criminals is like the thing to do.
So this is the political situation in the U.S. in 1999 when two Colorado high school kids with an interest in Adolf Hitler walked into Columbine High School and murdered 13 people with firearms.
Now, there were armed police in Columbine that day, and they failed to stop the rampage.
But the kind of folks who vote based solely on scary things that just happened did the thing that those kind of people do, and they started voting to increase the presence of armed police in schools.
Politicians were happy to do this because given the shocking number of civilian arms in the U.S. and our growing supply of angry young men, it seemed likely that more Columbines would soon follow.
The real fix to this problem would probably involve doing something to fill the yawning chasm at the center of our national soul.
And that wasn't about to happen.
So everybody just agreed to throw more men with guns and badges at the problem.
School resource officers became increasingly common in school districts around the nation at this point.
So that's good.
And another thing that happens in, you know, 1994, the president passes like the Gun Free Schools Act or something.
I forget the exact name, but that is like the legal justification that starts pushing a lot of zero tolerance policies in schools and really starts ramping up the number of SROs.
But it's Columbine that kind of adds fuel to that fire.
And Courtney, were you in school when Columbine happened?
I was.
I was like, maybe a senior or early college.
I was, yeah, it was when I was still growing up.
But I mean, I went to a small rural school.
So like that, I mean, it could still happen, but like that armed police presence was not at my school.
And I think still isn't.
We started to have cops in my schools after Columbine.
And what I remember most, though, is just kind of like the attitude change was like feeling that teachers were kind of suspecting kids of planning something now.
Like it was this very weird feeling that like, oh, now we're all kind of like now they're searching us as we enter the school.
We're all kind of suspects of wanting to kill each other.
That feels like it's not going to lead anywhere well.
Oh, yeah.
99.
I was, yeah, early high school.
Yeah.
Maybe a little more suspect from the teachers for sure.
Yeah, it was weird.
It was not a cool time to be in school.
So yeah, Columbine.
Now, in the immediate wake of Columbine, there were like, people did get more worried about bullying too, briefly.
There was like, I think just because there was this assumption that the kids who shot up the school had been like bullied, which wasn't really true, but like everybody got on that too for a while.
But for a practical, on the practical level, most of the focus in preventing another Columbine involved zero tolerance discipline.
And the idea of zero tolerance policies in schools was basically the broken windows theory as applied to living children, right?
The broken windows theory says that like as soon as you have a broken window, it's permission for people to engage in more antisocial behavior.
So soon they'll start tagging up windows and breaking other windows and lighting shit on fire.
And then you have, you know, the collapse of civilization.
It's that as applied to students.
If a kid acts up in one way, you know, if he talks back to a teacher, you have to punish him more than he deserves to be punished for that.
Because if you don't, it could lead to other bad behavior like shooting up your school.
Like that was the justification for zero tolerance policies.
Great.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
They weren't effective, right?
Because there's been like a million more shootings.
Have there been other shootings since Columbine?
Yeah, I've heard of it.
I don't read the news, Courtney.
I didn't realize America still had a problem with this.
I assumed that it had been settled.
Yeah, mostly solved, but still a few.
Still a few.
Seems like we got a handle on it now that all of the schools are closed from the plague.
Yeah, totally.
We did it, everybody.
We did.
We're going to try to solve it.
Making things a lot harder for school shooters.
Thank you, COVID-19.
Thank you.
So, yeah.
Now, another thing that happened right around the same time was a major reorganization in the way that schools measured success and failure for students.
Standardized testing began to have an increased influence on teacher pay and on school funding.
This created a situation where it was in the interest of adult administrators and teachers to find ways to remove low-performing students from their classroom.
Florida schools adopted a high-stakes testing model in 1998.
And within five years, their rate of out-of-school suspensions had increased by 20%.
In 2004, 28,000 Florida children were arrested at school, two-thirds of them for minor offenses that would have been dealt with non-carcerally in the past.
By 2006, eight years after adopting a high-stakes testing policy, teacher morale had cratered.
More than half of all Florida teachers reported thinking about quitting their field.
Florida's graduation rate fell to 57%, the fourth lowest in the nation.
Now, Texas also adopted a high-stakes testing program in the 1990s.
Governor George W. Bush's education advisor, Sandy Kress, convinced him that the soft bigotry of low expectations is what held back minority students.
And he felt that Texas could fix this by making all schools administer the same tests statewide.
That would make it easier to determine where resources were needed.
The implementation of standardized tests was accompanied by new zero tolerance policies, too.
And since school funding and teacher pay was now tied to test results, teachers, you know, used those punishments.
Like whenever kids would do something bad, it was threatening that teacher's payment, like the money that they would get and the money the school would get.
So they would report those kids.
Suspension rates began to soar, and 95% of suspensions were for minor infractions.
By 2009, there were 2 million suspensions statewide.
And the sheer number of suspended kids in Texas led to the creation of so-called supermax schools, which are basically prisons designed for children to go to class at.
And this was the kind of thing I grew up in Texas in this period of time.
And everyone would talk about these schools because you all knew somebody who had been sent there, right?
Who had been like, and it was always something like, yeah, they would talk up in class or maybe they got caught with weed or something.
But like usually it was just like they annoyed a teacher for a couple of days in a row.
And then suddenly this person's like going to a school where you have to like fucking go through a metal detector.
And if you talk in the hallways, you could get arrested.
Like it's this fucking, it was pretty, pretty bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you like none of the kids who go to these schools like learn anything there.
Like the schoolwork, I remember, because again, we knew some kids who would go there.
The schoolwork they would get was like, you know, shit that kids five or six years younger would have found easy.
Like it was, it was clearly that like the kids who went to that building, the state was giving up on and was locking them in a separate building and saying like, this is technically schoolwork.
Do this until you're old enough that we can put you in a real prison.
Yeah.
And like, don't infect our test scores in the meantime.
Just go.
Yeah, exactly.
Because they're not fucking up the test scores of the other schools, which makes it look like things are going better for the other schools.
So, yeah, it's not great.
A lot of the kids in these supermax schools drop out.
But overall, it looked like Texas's test scores were improving massively.
And that fact was trumpeted loudly during the 2000 election.
George W. Bush called it the Texas miracle.
And huge numbers of people, including my parents, still believe that this was a thing that happened, that like Texas figured it out and massively improved education via standardized testing and all of these policies, these zero tolerance policies and shit.
When Governor Bush became President Bush, he worked with famed lady drowner Ted Kennedy to make no child left behind law nationwide.
And this is what?
Lady Drowneder is so good.
Well, he drowned that lady.
He absolutely did.
Yeah.
Yeah, good old Ted Kennedy, the lady drowner.
So he worked with President Bush.
They came down the middle, you know, this man who would go on to commit a series of war crimes and this other man who had drunkenly drowned a lady in his car.
They made no child left behind nationwide.
And the law promised that by 2014, all students in the United States would meet or exceed their state's proficient level of academic achievement.
They didn't hit that goal.
I'm sorry to say, Courtney, we didn't fix teaching.
That might surprise you at the moment.
We got a whole batch of new criminals.
We do have so many new criminals.
So No Child Left Behind brought with it zero tolerance policies.
Of course, the tight teacher pay to test scores in a lot of cases.
Nationwide, short-term suspensions increased by 41% and long-term suspensions by 135%.
Black students were three and a half times likelier to be suspended.
By 2008, the number of school resource officers nationwide had doubled, and more than 16,000 students had been arrested.
After 10 years of No Child Left Behind, graduation rates were about the same, dropout rates were about the same, and in general, absolutely nothing had been achieved except that a fuck ton of kids had gotten suspended and arrested.
Now, people were baffled by this, and they started looking into why the Texas miracle hadn't worked out nationwide.
It turned out that this was because the Texas Miracle had never actually been a thing.
From MSNBC, quote: Texas started to lose 70,000 kids a year, mostly dropping out before they had to take the 10th grade test that would count against the school.
Almost a third of kids in Texas who started high school never finished.
Scores on the Texas test rose, but SAT scores for prospective college students dropped.
Researchers discovered that the Texas test designed by Pearson primarily measured test-taking ability.
Apologists cherry-picked national assessment of educational progress scores to show progress.
But overall, Texas lost ground to the rest of the country, found Dr. Julian V. Helig, an education researcher at the University of Texas.
But by then, it was too late.
The Texas Miracle, Mirage or Not, was law of the land.
So that's fun that it actually made everything worse and they made it the law nationwide.
Is fun the word for that?
No.
Oh.
Like, was anyone surprised?
A lot of people were.
Most people still don't know that the Texas Miracle isn't a thing that happened.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Listeners can't see, but my jaw has just been on the floor the entire episode, just trying to pick it up.
Oh, God.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
I love cool and good.
Yeah, you know what else is cool and good is I sometimes life gives you lemons.
And when you get lemons, you got to lock a shitload of kids away in what are essentially prisons until they learn how to make their own weapons and stab prison guards that they can go to adult prisons and learn how to cook methamphetamines and join the Aryan nations.
That's just a thing you got to do sometimes because clearly there are no other options.
And that's fine.
They can make lemonade and you can pay them like one cent for doing it.
Absolutely.
And they can make, I don't know, license plates or MacBooks.
Why don't we have children making MacBooks in prisons?
That's what I want to know.
Why are we letting the Chinese have all the fun of making MacBooks when we could have 11-year-olds who talked up in class doing it?
That's what I want to know.
Good question.
Thank you for liking my question.
So, all of this stuff that we've been talking about today kind of gelled together to create something commonly known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Schools with school resource officers have nearly five times the arrest rate as schools without school resource officers.
And again, because these schools were getting by before they had the cops, it kind of suggests that those arrests are things that could have been handled without cops and arrests.
Most of those arrests are students of color and students with disabilities, both of whom are vastly disproportionately arrested by school cops.
And I'm going to quote again from the book, The End of Policing.
The U.S. Department of Education found in a 2011-2012 survey of 72,000 schools that black, Latino, and special needs students were all disproportionately subjected to criminal justice actions.
While black students represent 16% of student enrollment, they represent 27% of students referred to law enforcement and 31% of students subjected to a school-related arrest.
In comparison, white students represent 51% of enrollment, 41% of students referred to law enforcement, and 39% of those arrested.
Some individual districts have even starker numbers.
In Chicago, in 2013 to 2014, black students were 27 times more likely to be arrested than white students, leading to 8,000 arrests in a two-year period.
Over 50% of those arrested were under 15.
That's good stuff.
Yeah.
That's depressing.
It's hard to make a joke about that.
It's just sad.
It's just really sad.
I mean, you know, yes.
Yes, it is.
A big part of the problem is that putting cops in schools made calling in the school cop an option for teachers and administrators who would have had to do the actual hard work of like disciplining a child earlier.
It's easier to just have the kid arrested if he's pissing you off, and it might help increase your pay.
So like, why the fuck not?
Now, the argument that much of what's going on was the result of teachers not wanting to bother or not knowing how to handle students with more complex problems was bolstered by the fact that special needs children make up more than 25% of students referred to police.
They make up just 14% of the student population.
One good example of how this looks is the 2015 case of a Lynchburg, Virginia sixth grader.
11-year-old Caleb Moon Robinson has autism and behavioral issues.
In one incident, he kicked a trash can after being scolded by a teacher.
The school SRO filed disorderly conduct charges against the boy for this.
In another incident, the SRO body slammed the kid and handcuffed him after he resisted being dragged out of the classroom for another behavioral issue.
The student was charged again with a misdemeanor disorderly conduct, and this time with felony assault on a police officer.
Oh my God.
They love doing that.
If you struggle in your handcuffs, you're assaulting the cop.
If they beat you, it's okay.
Yeah, he's 15.
Militarized Police in Classrooms00:06:52
No, 11.
He's 11.
This 11-year-old was charged with felony assault on a police officer after he was body slammed.
It's good.
Oh, my God.
I love it when 11-year-olds feloniously assault police officers.
Happens all the time.
Well, it actually happens quite a lot in Corporate Games.
Self-defense.
Yeah.
Not even in that, just in like the, if a person grabs you and starts like choking and body slamming you, sometimes your body will resist them without you thinking about it.
I think that's self-defense.
Yeah, it is self-defense.
He is choking you and body slamming you.
If that person's a cop and you do anything but go limp, you have assaulted the cop because literally anything you do to a cop is assaulting the cop because cops have very, very thin skin.
They're tiny, tiny little people.
Defund the police.
They're very soft.
Yeah.
I mean, that's one option.
That's a start.
You know, defund the police.
I don't know.
I'm not going to.
I've urged enough federal crimes on other podcasts.
Anyway, so Caleb was, yeah, found guilty on all charges, although this was thankfully reversed and new statewide protections for children under 13 were put in place due to the outrage generated by Caleb's case.
But it took this cop, like, assaulting and then fucking charging as an adult, an 11-year-old, for there to be changes in Virginia as a result of this.
Which ain't great.
So, part of the problem is that school resource officers don't get meaningful training for how to deal with kids, let alone special needs kids.
And so, they tend to treat every problem the way cops treat problems, with indiscriminate, blind, furious violence.
In August of 2015, a Kentucky sheriff's deputy handcuffed an eight-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl, both disabled, for disorderly behavior tied to their disabilities.
Since they were too small to handcuff properly, the officer had to handcuff their biceps.
The whole thing was caught on tape, and you can hear the cops tell the boy, you can do what we ask you to, or you can suffer the consequences.
It was, so I taught special ed, and my kid was like, my kid had some serious behavioral problems, right?
To the point where he had 70-something workman's comp claims processed against him because of all the injuries he caused people.
He permanently crippled a gym teacher, you know, not long before I started the job.
My predecessor, he'd like broken his skull.
So he was like, he was a kid that required a lot of specialized care.
And most days, my job was to just get hit in the face by this kid because the other teachers were like older ladies who couldn't safely be hit in the face by a 17-year-old.
And we had incidents where like this kid would like smash his face and like a bus window to get attention, but also he would be covered in blood and cops would wind up being called in because it was like happening on a bus on like a street and shit.
And the police, like, I guess, thankfully, at the time, I was frustrated because like I was having to deal with this like violent bleeding kid and the police were just like stand back looking terrified and have no fucking idea what to do.
But reading all of this, it's like, oh, thank God they didn't get involved.
They would have shot that boy.
Oh, totally.
They would have put a fucking bullet in him.
Yeah.
Both my parents are special ed teachers.
And my dad had like your first job where like his first gig was like at this middle school and kids would just like throw their heads into walls and like it was nuts.
But you do have to have a special, I mean, my dad was like an angel at dealing with them.
I can't imagine with cops.
Yeah, I certainly wasn't an angel at dealing with him because I was too young to be doing that job.
But like I'm glad I wasn't, I'm glad it wasn't a cop dealing with it.
Yeah.
So for most of the aughts, schools steadily increased the number of cops on campus.
They also pumped more and more weapons into the police departments dedicated to protecting those schools.
The Washington Post reports at least 120 school-affiliated police forces in 30 states have made use of the 1033 weapons transfer program.
This has gotten rather famous lately.
It's the thing that lets cops get things like tanks and grenade launchers.
So this is why like the LA school police department has a tank.
Yeah, the 1033 program.
So that like throughout the aughts, they're just getting pumped full of military grade weaponry as they are chokeholding 11-year-olds and charging them with assault.
So militarized police have meant that militarized police tactics keep getting used on children.
The most infamously vile example of this may have been the 2003 SWAT raid on Goose Creek High School in South Carolina.
The goal had been to find drugs and guns.
The result was that dozens of heavily armed cops forced hundreds of mostly black students onto the ground for no reason.
Students, of course, were not warned, and many panicked and ran when officers indistinguishable from soldiers leapt out of closets and out from under stairwells, screaming and waving guns.
Yeah.
They were just like, what if we just really fuck with these kids?
Like, what if we just have an army come in and fuck these kids up?
And no, no drugs were found.
Like, no contraband was found.
But huge numbers of students were traumatized.
And the school administrator who coordinated the whole thing, because there was a local outroar, apologized.
But he stated that, quote, once police are on campus, they are in control.
So honestly, the students of Goose Creek ought to be grateful because none of them were beaten or assaulted by crowd control weapons in a serious way that day.
But this too has actually become very common in other schools.
And in the end of policing, Alex Vitali writes, In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action lawsuit against the Birmingham, Alabama schools, claiming they were systematically using excessive force.
They alleged that from 2006 to 2014, 199 students have been sprayed with a combination pepper spray and tear gas agent called Freeze Plus P, which causes extreme pain and skin irritation and can impede breathing and vision.
All of the students sprayed were African American.
One student was pregnant.
Many were innocent bystanders, and some were completely nonviolent when sprayed.
In most cases, officers made no effort to treat those sprayed, and some were held in police custody to await arraignment wearing chemically coated clothing.
In 2015, a federal court found the school district guilty of civil rights violations and banned the use of the spray.
A 17-year-old high school student in Texas was tasered by an SRO while trying to break up a school fight.
The student was critically injured by the resulting fall and blow to the head and spent 52 days in a medically induced coma.
Surveillance videos showed that the young man was actually stepping away from the officers when he was tasered.
You can find a million stories like this because it's bad to have these people in schools.
Trauma from School Arrests00:04:36
Oh my God, can we just go back to hitting the kids?
Like, Jesus Christ.
Yeah, man, that paddle doesn't sound so bad now, does it?
No.
Yeah.
Delightful.
Yeah, bring back the fucking paddle.
Or not, maybe just not do violence to children.
I don't know.
I don't want to be an extremist in my political beliefs.
It's like it's time for an ad break.
All right.
Well, enjoy our ads from Safari Land, the company making all of the tear gas that's getting dumped into American streets.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
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They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
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Lazla proves that.
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I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
A better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
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Oh, we're back.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline00:03:42
Oh my God, what a nice night.
It's not nighttime.
It's the middle of the day.
I am real cracked out.
So, violence by SROs against children is terribly common.
Between 2010 and 2015, at least 28 U.S. students were severely injured by school cops, and one was killed, 14-year-old Derek Lopez.
His crime was punching a fellow student and then running away when the school cop told him to freeze.
The SRO chased Lopez and shot him to death in a nearby backyard shed, claiming the boy had bullrushed him.
Yeah.
Pretty cool that a fist fight at school led to a man with a gun chasing a child.
That was a situation that needed to happen.
Oh my God.
And the kid just had fists?
No.
Yeah, of course he was a 14-year-old boy.
He was a 14-year-old boy at school.
I mean, it's one of those things.
I think about all the fist fights I got into at school, and it's a shame there wasn't a man with a gun there to chase any of us.
Otherwise, it might have ended.
You know, thankfully, I don't know.
It's just bad.
It's bad.
This is bad.
I don't have a joke.
Yeah.
So, for all of this, Courtney, like, again, the reason all these cops are in all these schools is because of shit like Columbine and everybody getting worried that someone's going to murder kids at schools.
For all of this, there's not a single solitary case of a school resource officer preventing a school shooting.
The closest thing they have is a guy who was arrested by his SROs after shooting two people, but he had finished the shooting when the school resource officers got him.
Like, he went after his girlfriend and somebody else, and he shot them, and then he was done.
And I guess they stopped that.
Like, they didn't stop that.
They never stop it.
They're bad at that job.
So, as it turns out, students in schools that have police in them report feeling less safe than students in similar schools without police.
No evidence exists to even suggest that the presence of school resource officers reduces violent crime or any other kind of crime for that matter.
What they do, though, is arrest a whole fuckload of kids.
More than a million children have been arrested by school resource officers in the last 20 years.
That's good?
Whoa.
Yeah, that's a lot of kids with criminal records getting pumped into the system.
Sweet.
Yep.
Yeah, and of course, like, a huge amount of research shows that punishing kids in this way reduces their odds of graduating massively.
A lot of these kids never get back to school.
It increases their odds of developing a criminal record.
And that's for kids who don't get a criminal record because of the charges filed against them by NSRO.
Like the Virginia middle schooler who was charged with assault and battery for throwing a baby carrot at her teacher.
A baby carrot.
Well, it was an assault baby carrot.
Yeah, the most assault weapon ever.
That carrot was trimmed down to an illegal.
Yeah, it wasn't even a full carrot.
Didn't even have the skin on it.
Yeah.
It's pretty, pretty fun that that happened.
So all of these factors combine together to create, again, what's called the school-to-prison pipeline, which has gotten bad enough that it's sometimes called the cradle-to-prison pipeline, because a lot of kids are kind of dumped into places where this will happen to them from the very beginning of their school career.
Suspensions, which almost never occurred in the 1970s, have become routine.
In the 2009 to 2010 academic year, over 500 schools in the country suspended more than half of their students.
By 2006, nearly 15% of black male middle school students were suspended in a given year.
Now, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, all of these suspensions and arrests of students lead to a hell of a lot of incarcerated kids.
Profit from Incarcerating Youth00:15:16
Too many of them end up at adult facilities.
And if you paid any attention to the nation lately, you know why that's not a good thing.
But the unfortunate reality is that the children's facilities specifically made for juvenile offenders aren't much better.
And sometimes, they're worse.
Nearly 40% of juvenile delinquents in this country are sent to private for-profit facilities.
For many kids, that means some form of boot camp, juvenile prison, or detention center.
Ironically, many of these kids wind up in the care of people who are criminals themselves.
And this brings me to the story of one James F. Slattery, founder of the Correctional Services Corporation, among other businesses geared at making money by incarcerating kids.
In 20 years, more than 40,000 girls and boys in 16 states went to facilities run by James Slattery.
An expansive Huffington Post investigation, Prisoners of Profit, makes it agonizingly clear what a bad idea this was.
Slattery got his start owning a chain of shitty hotels in the 1980s, and he was not good at this.
His buildings were stuck with hundreds of code violations and notorious for being vermin-infested hellholes.
In 1986, two men got into a fight at the hallway of one of his properties and fell down a broken elevator shaft, dying on impact.
Several weeks later, a fire broke out and killed four children in the same building.
So Slattery and his business partner decided that the hospitality business might not be for them, largely because people care when your customers die horribly due to your ill-maintained facilities.
They decided to move to a business where no one cared about the clientele and started selling their space to the government to act as re-entry housing for newly released federal inmates.
A new company, Esmore Incorporated, was formed to oversee the business.
And I'm going to quote from the Huffington Post now.
As federal prison officials awarded Esmore an emergency contract to operate a halfway house in Brooklyn, local community leaders challenged the decision, questioning why the same people who had managed problem-plagued welfare hotels should be given fresh responsibility.
Less than three years after Esmore opened Le Marquis to former inmates, federal inspectors from the Bureau of Prisons found that parts of the building were turning to ruin.
Inspectors documented low-paid, untrained employees, poor building conditions from vermin, leaky plumbing, to exposed electrical wires and other fire hazards, and inadequate, barely edible food.
Federal prison officials were close to canceling the contract in 1992, according to media accounts at the time, but they said conditions at the facility started to improve after frequent inspections.
In a federal lawsuit, one the marquee employee, Richard Moore, alleged that he had been severely beaten by another employee at the direction of management after he reported poor conditions to federal inspectors.
In another federal lawsuit, four female inmates asserted they had been raped and assaulted by Esmore's private resident advocate, the employee who was supposed to protect inmates by handling their grievances.
So you might say that he wasn't good at this job, that like the company he made was fundamentally terrible at this job.
But Esmore made a lot of money, and soon the company had expanded its operations to Fort Worth, where it opened a boot camp for young boys, as well as New Jersey and Washington, where it opened immigrant detention centers.
The company went public, netting Slattery $5.2 million.
The next year, a riot broke out in his New Jersey immigrant detention center when an organized group of inmates assaulted guards and took over the facility.
Subsequent investigations found that, among other things, Slattery's guards constantly sexually harassed female inmates and stole regularly from other inmates.
Training was virtually non-existent.
Now, INS did not fine Esmore for this or cancel its contract.
Instead, they allowed the company to sell their INS contract to the Corrections Corporation of America for $6 million because fuck it.
The whole disaster was enough to make Slattery opt for a change of venue, though, and he moved the company's headquarters south to Florida in 1996 and changed the company name to Correctional Services Corporation.
He decided his new focus would be incarcerating children, since that had seemed relatively easy so far compared to locking up adults.
Florida was a great place to do this.
In the 1980s, the state had started outsourcing juvenile detention to private companies to cut costs.
And in the 1990s, a bunch of teenagers had killed people, leading to a crackdown on juvenile crime and a soaring juvenile prison population.
So, that's the situation.
This guy starts by running cheap hotels for like houseless people, and he gets a bunch of them killed.
And then he starts running cheap halfway houses for people who are getting out of prison, and a bunch of them, you know, get raped and assaulted.
And finally, he's like, you know what the job for me is?
Watching after children.
Oh my God, what a resume.
This guy.
Yeah.
And the state of Florida's like, yes.
In 1995, Slattery won bids to make two facilities in Florida.
Both prisons were meant for boys aged 14 to 19 who had been convicted as adults.
But whoopsie doodles, the state realized too late that it had enough beds for those kids.
So instead, the Florida Department of Justice filled these prisons with random delinquents who hadn't been tried as adults and weren't meant to be put in such restrictive settings.
In a press release announcing the construction of these new facilities, Slattery called them the future of American corrections.
Now, appropriately enough, the future of American corrections was an instant nightmare.
The first correctional services corporation prison to open was the Pahoki Youth Development Center northwest of Miami.
It started taking inmates in early 1997.
The Huffington Post reports, quote, Within months, local judges were hearing complaints about abusive staff, prison-like conditions, and food full of maggots, including, according to recent interviews and state audits and court transcripts from the time.
Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Tom Peterson drove an hour and a half to Pahokie in 1997 and started snapping pictures.
As a juvenile judge, he thought he was sending boys to a moderate risk program with outdoor wilderness activities.
What he found was a hardcore prison.
I came back with all those pictures and I raised hell about it, Peterson recalled in an interview.
He saw small 12-year-olds confined along much stronger 17-year-olds.
Boys were served food he called inedible.
That same year, local public defenders asked another judge to move children from Pahokie into a less punitive program.
Follow-up reviews by state-contracted auditors confirmed the operation was dysfunctional.
Now, evidence of this dysfunction included a child with unpaid prison gambling debts who was beaten so badly by three other kids that he had to have his spleen removed.
In another incident, four staff members allowed two boys to fight for 10 minutes while they watched.
No one reported this incident.
Thanks to this prison's rural location, rats and spiders were common.
No efforts were taken to control pests within the prison, leading to an epidemic of bites among the incarcerated children.
Slattery's kid prison was found to be holding children past their scheduled release dates, too, in order to get more money out of the government.
This was literally a crime, but no one was punished.
Judges did, however, start to demand that Bahoki be closed.
The state stopped sending new kids in August of 1999, but did not cancel Slattery's contract.
They allowed the company to withdraw from its contract eight months early, thus letting it continue to bid for contracts within the state of Florida.
Now, none of these abuse allegations or revelations of literal crimes harmed business at all.
By 1999, Correctional Services Corporation was making $223 million a year, more than double what it had raked in three years earlier.
Slattery used his newfound cash to buy a rival corporation, Youth Services International.
This put him in charge of five new facilities in Florida.
And that all worked as well as you might guess.
Problems grew so bad at one facility, named Hickey, that the Justice Department commenced an investigation.
It revealed that staff repeatedly concealed evidence of physical assaults, only disclosing two-thirds of such cases to the government.
Lack of staff, a cost-cutting measure by Slattery, made it easier for boys to enter each other's rooms and commit assault.
The Justice Department concluded that these conditions violated the constitutional and federal statutory rights of the youth residents.
Again, no one was penalized.
The school turned the facility over to the state, escaping any financial burden to fix it, and sailed on to profits elsewhere.
In 2001, 18-year-old Brian Alexander died of pneumonia while confined at a Correctional Services Corporation boot camp near Fort Worth.
The Texas Rangers conducted an investigation into the matter, and the Huffington Post's reporting summarizes it.
Quote, Other inmates at the facility had told investigators that they knew something was wrong with Alexander in early January.
He had stopped eating, his lips turned purple, and he shivered even while taking hot showers.
He begged a nurse and drill instructors to take him to the hospital, but they told him he was faking it, according to the Texas Rangers report.
As Alexander pleaded for help, one drill instructor told him to go ahead and die already, according to the investigative report.
The nurse, Knive at Reyes, told him to stop lying about his illness.
Other inmates at the facility saw Alexander coughing up blood into trash cans and frequently struggling to breathe, according to the report.
A week after he began complaining, staff finally took Alexander to the hospital.
He died there two days later.
A doctor told Texas Rangers that Alexander could have survived if the staff had taken him to get a chest x-ray when he first reported feeling sick.
So that's great.
They're like, if you would have done literally anything, just anything.
Yeah, you had weeks.
You could have taken literally any action to save this child's life, but refused to.
And that's fine.
You will face no corporate penalties for this.
I mean, actually, they did a bit.
In 2002, a judge found Reyes guilty of negligent homicide, the nurse, and Correctional Services Corporation was found liable to $38 million in the wrongful death suit.
That same year, auditors at a Maryland facility found that employees there had forced inmates to fight on Saturdays as a way to settle arguments.
Fines, negative Justice Department reports, and even furious judges plagued Slattery's companies constantly, but they never stopped getting contracts all over the United States.
For most of the last five years, YSI, the company Slattery bought, oversaw about 9% of Florida's juvenile jailbeds.
YSI was also responsible for 15% of all reported cases of excessive force and injured youths in state jailbeds.
40,000 kids have been sent to Slattery's prisons in the last 20 years, and state funding has made him a very rich man.
He's poured a lot of that money back into the pockets of state officials.
Slattery donated more than $400,000 to various politicians in a 15-year period, 276,000 of which went to the Florida Republican Party.
He's one of its largest donors.
Now, interesting.
Yeah, that's cool.
Good.
More than 40% of youth offenders sent to one of Florida's juvenile prisons wind up arrested or convicted of another crime within a year of their release.
In New York State, by comparison, where youth offenders are never put in private institutions, just 25% of juvenile offenders are convicted again within a year of release.
It is hard to overstate what a disaster Slattery's facilities are on a societal level and on a human level.
Children at his facilities, interviewed by the Huffington Post, recall being served bloody raw chicken and finding flies inside pre-cooked meals.
Inmates were allowed to gamble on sporting events and earn the right to take other students' food during the next meal.
One inmate, Angela Phillips, recalled, We were kept like rats in a trap in a maze.
There was no outlet and no stimulation.
So they would just turn on each other and turn on staff.
That's how it was, day in, day out.
So that's good.
That's the episode.
That's just the situation.
It's a real problem.
Just super depressed.
Okay, great.
This is why a number of cities, including the one I'm in, Portland, but also, you know, places like Minneapolis and stuff, are increasingly pulling cops out of schools, which is how, like, the start of this.
But clearly, it goes beyond, like, for one thing, why isn't this Slattery guy going to get like investigated and, I don't know, thrown in a hole somewhere?
Yeah, he shouldn't be allowed to own anything.
No, he shouldn't be allowed to own anything.
It's not great.
Very frustrating.
When you feel introduced the episode, I thought we were going to be talking about kids in cages, like at the border.
And it's just, we have such an obsession with putting kids in cages in our entire country.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, yes, we have a long history of that that goes on well beyond any of this.
Based on the title of the doc for the scripts, I thought you were going to be talking about that commercial, the cars for kids.
No, no, this actually was initially about a completely other horrible thing done to children.
I just haven't had time to finish writing that one.
But yeah, there's a whole scandal where judges locked children in prisons in exchange for direct payments to themselves, which we're just not even going to get into yet.
So good stuff.
Everybody feeling good today.
I'm just going to carry the memory of the bloody chicken throughout the day.
I feel like that is my fuel for the rest of the day.
The disgusting image.
Whoa.
Yeah, it's great.
Well, Courtney, you want to tell the listeners where they can find you on theinterwebs.com slash backslash net?
You can find me everywhere on the internet at Courtney Cosack.
Check out my podcast.
Sophia Alexander and I, my co-host, we got happy ending massages in Tokyo right before the quarrel.
So yeah, that's a good escape.
I got a sad ending massage in Tokyo once.
He got a phone call and found out his mom had died.
It was really a bummer.
Oh my God.
Really sad massage.
Really sad.
I mean, I made him finish, but yeah, very sad massage.
Christ.
Well, on that note, wow.
You can follow Robert for more loving stuff like that at iWriteOK on Twitter.
You can follow us at Bastards Pod.
You can buy our merch, including our new, what's what, the FDA one?
I can't get it right ever.
Oh, FDA approved to prevent all diseases because those masks are, in fact, FDA approved to prevent all diseases.
And if the FDA has a problem with it, you know, you fucking cowards spend, what, $600,000 a year on weaponry?
FDA?
Like, you can't take me down.
You don't have the guns, FDA.
That's right.
I'm calling your asses out.
And on that note, this is the end of the episode.
This is the end of the episode.
Thank you, Courtney.
Thank you.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budget Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart podcast presents Soccer Moms.
Financial Literacy for All00:01:01
So I'm Leanne.
Yeah.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
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How much away, Wanda?
Right now, I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Matchup with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and What It Really Means to Be Ladylike.
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