Corporal Punishment in Schools and its Impact

In a HRW and ACLU report, officials in 21 states have affirmed the beating of children as a sound educational practice

The report says:

Certain minority groups—particularly African-American students—receive corporal punishment at disproportionate rates. African Americans constitute 17.1 percent of the nationwide student population, but 35.6 percent of those paddled. Even while overall corporal punishment rates have declined during the last 30 years, disparate rates of physical punishment of African-American students have persisted.

Racewire wrote a great article about this - click here for it.

Also, the Children's Defense Fund's Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign has really important information and steps toward action. They write:

Nationally, 1 in 3 Black and 1 in 6 Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime. While boys are five times as likely to be incarcerated as girls, there also is a significant number of girls in the juvenile justice system. This rate of incarceration is endangering children at younger and younger ages.

This is America's pipeline to prison — a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment and often premature death. Although the majority of fourth graders cannot read at grade level, states spend about three times as much money per prisoner as per public school pupil.

I know that in a lot of ways the incarceration of children makes sense if you look at the larger function of the prison industrial complex - because of course none of it MAKES SENSE how rational people think about what makes sense, rather it is all about maintaining the hierarchy of power that currently exists and above all, supporting the status quo - but reading this just hurts so much. The prison system is painful and harmful and I hurt when I read about anyone locked up and everyone who is locked up or loves someone who is locked up but it hurts that much more to read about children being beaten in schools and locked up. It makes the world seem hopeless.

Sorry for rambling. In light of all this I need some Shel Silverstein:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.