[SDCPJ] LGBTQ Community Rallies Against School to Prison Pipeline

LGBTQ Community Rallies Against School to Prison Pipeline

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1486152404977656/?ref=br_tf

WHAT: Rally and visibility awareness event as a part of the Dignity in Schools Campaign National Week of Action Against School Pushout

WHEN: Friday October 10^th, 4:30pm – 6:00pm

WHERE: SDUSD Board of Education, 4100 Normal St San Diego, CA 92103

WHO: Parents, youth, educators and advocates. Featured guests/speakers will be Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, members of Canvass for a Cause, and various students

Canvass for a Cause's Event is Part of Coordinated Efforts around the Country to Take Action Against School "Pushout"

 

[San Diego, CA] – On Friday October 10, 2014, members of Canvass for a Cause, a grassroots queer and trans rights non-profit, are bringing their voices to the Fifth Annual National Week of Action on School Pushout by rallying at the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education. The event will be held at 4100 Normal St, 92103 at 4:30p.m. This action is part of Canvass for a Cause's larger Safe Kids Campaign, which works to provide safer spaces for all queer and trans youth, and will discuss Proposition 47, a California proposition that would permanently decrease the amount of people going to state prisons by reclassifying lower level non-violent offenses and using money saved to support after-school programs for at-risk youth.

 

Canvass for a Cause will join over 50 organizations in more than 20 states to demand that our school systems adopt positive approaches to addressing behavior problems instead of relying on zero tolerance discipline policies, school police or armed guards, and other punitive practices that push young people out of school. According to SDUSD data from 2010-2011, black students are at least 4 times more likely to be suspended than white students. Data about LGBT students isn't as clearly available, but personal experiences from community members reveal an alarming trend of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students students dropping out due to nonsupportive faculty, staff and students.

 

The Week of Action, which will take place from October 4 to October 11, is being coordinated by the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC), a national coalition of more than 80 organizations led by youth, parents, educators, civil rights leaders and social justice advocates that promotes alternatives to zero-tolerance discipline policies. Such policies have been found to result in much higher suspension and expulsion rates, often for minor misbehavior, fueling a "school-to-prison" pipeline.

 

During the week of action, DSC member organizations will hold rallies, marches, forums and trainings calling on states and school districts to hire counselors and school psychologists, and train teachers and school personnel in using positive discipline practices that build healthy relationships between teachers and students and treat discipline as a teaching moment. Canvass for a Cause, along with other DSC members, will also be calling on school districts to address disparities in punishment and referrals of students to the criminal justice system, which disproportionately affects low-income youth, youth of color, LGBTQ students, and those with disabilities.

###

Canvass for a Cause is a 501(c)4 grassroots non-profit who fights for LGBT rights that works through a lens of intersectionality. CFAC identifies as strictly radical, always queer, and has been mobilizing and educating the public on queer and trans rights since 2009.

General Colin Powell: The Republican Party is Headed for a Brick Wall | Ring of Fire

General Colin Powell: The Republican Party is Headed for a Brick Wall | Ring of Fire

[SDCPJ] Fwd: Peace and Justice News - October 2014

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies <peacestudies@sandiego.edu>
Date: October 6, 2014, 3:29:26 PM PDT
To:   <caroljahnkow@gmail.com>
Subject: Peace and Justice News - October 2014
Reply-To: Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies <peacestudies@sandiego.edu>

University of San Diego | Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies Click to view in browser for printing News WorldLink Premieres Video Featuring Voices of Youth TBI Director Ev Meade Crunches the Numbers on Asylum NIJ Grant Extended for Research on Gangs and Human Trafficking Peace and Justice Homecoming Brunch- Register Today!   Welcome Class of 2015 Meet our new cohort of students including changemakers from Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Guinea, Azerbaijan and the United States. Upcoming Events What Does Immigration Reform Mean? Tuesday, October 7, 2014 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, Theatre 6 - 8 p.m. The format for the public forum will be a panel discussion, followed by Q & A with the audience. Panelists: Everard Meade, PhD, Director Trans-Border Institute, University of San Diego Paola Ávila, Director, Mexico Business Center, San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce David Shirk, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Justice IN Mexico Project, University of San Diego Gabe Pacheco, Spokesman, National Border Patrol Union, Local 1613 Enrique Morones, Executive Director & founder, Border Angels This event is free and open to the public, and does not require registration. Annual Women PeaceMakers Panel Tuesday, October 14, 2014 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, Theatre 7 - 8:30 p.m. Learn about the extraordinary work that the 2014 Women PeaceMakers are doing to bring peace to their communities. Conversations with a Woman PeaceMaker Oct. 16, 21, 28 and November 4 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, Theatre 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. Join us for conversations with the 2014 Woman PeaceMakers, who will discuss their life and work in peacebuilding and human rights, and have the opportunity to answer questions from the audience.   These events are free and open to the public, and do not require registration. "Courageous Presence: Shifting Stories and Practices of Peace" Peace and Justice Student Association Conference October 16 - 18, 2014 Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice The 2014 PJSA conference has invited presentations that tell new stories, shift perspectives on old ones, include participants who are not commonly at the table, and develop transformation and emerging possibilities.   Co-hosted by the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies and the School of Leadership and Education Sciences Invest in Peace Facebook Twitter Website PJGA LinkedIn University of San Diego | Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies 5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110 (619) 260-7919, www.sandiego.edu/peacestudies unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences

Papantonio: Citizens United Has Ruined Democracy

'Politicians put us at war but people just want a normal life' – Queen's...

ISIS beheads British citizen, Daniel Henning (GRAPHIC!)

ISIS beheads British citizen, Daniel Henning (GRAPHIC!)

Cop's raid a man's home for marijuana plants, find out it's Okra

Cop's raid a man's home for marijuana plants, find out it's Okra

Cream cannon f*cks these two people up on this Japanese Prank show

Cream cannon f*cks these two people up on this Japanese Prank show

Idiots

Post by ‎المغرب اليوم - Morocco Today‎.

Income inequality: America's worst states | Spaces - Yahoo Homes

Income inequality: America's worst states | Spaces - Yahoo Homes

[SDCPJ] At Berkeley, Free (Though Subdued) Speech, 50 Years Later - NYTimes.com

An article in the New York Times about the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/us/free-though-subdued-speech-50-years-later.html

Allen

The Earth is what we all have in common.
~ Wendell Berry
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Getting Teen-agers out of Solitary at Rikers - The New Yorker

Getting Teen-agers out of Solitary at Rikers - The New Yorker

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Getting Teen-agers out of Solitary at Rikers

BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN

 
 
 
• 
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CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

In this week’s New Yorker, I wrote about a sixteen-year-old boy from the Bronx named Kalief Browder, who was accused of robbery and confined on Rikers Island. He stayed there for three years, waiting for a trial that never happened. For the majority of that time, he was in solitary confinement, locked in a cell all day every day, with little to do besides read, sleep, mark the time until his next court date, and listen through a vent to his mentally ill neighbor talking to himself. On Sunday, the Times reported that the New York City Department of Correction is planning to eliminate solitary confinement for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds by the end of 2014. This decision marks the most significant step yet taken by the New York City jails commissioner Joseph Ponte to “end the culture of excessive solitary confinement,” which was the promise he made six months ago, when Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed him.

In recent years, jail and prison systems elsewhere in the country have reduced their use of solitary confinement, but New York City moved in the opposite direction. The total number of solitary-confinement beds grew by sixty per cent between 2007 and 2013. And in early August, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York released a devastating report in which it criticized jail officials for using solitary “to manage and control disruptive adolescents” by locking them in cells for twenty-three hours a day, “at an alarming rate and for excessive periods of time.”

Browder was one of these adolescents; between 2010 and 2013, he spent about two years in solitary. Most often, he was imprisoned in Rikers’s main solitary-confinement unit, which is officially called the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, but which everyone on Rikers refers to as the Bing. The Bing has four hundred cells, laid out along two-story tiers, each cell about twelve feet by seven. Bing inmates rarely step out of their cells except to go to court, to the shower, or to the visit room. Bing inmates are supposed to be allowed to go outside for an hour of recreation every day. But, as Browder explained to me, this wasn’t really the way it worked, at least not in the time that he was there.

For Bing inmates, “rec” took place outdoors, in an empty twenty-two-by-eleven-foot metal cage, each inmate locked in by himself, with nothing to do except shout to other prisoners and count the weeds. Many Bing inmates skipped it, since they had to be standing at their cell door at around 5:30 A.M.in order to flag down an officer when he walked by. “You take a step away from your cell door to use the bathroom, and you just see a shadow speed walk by. Then you go to the door, and you try to tell him you want to go to the yard, and he’ll say, ‘I passed your cell already,’ ” Browder told me. “I used to say to myself, What’s the point of putting up with that? I’m just going to go to sleep.”

In the past six months, I spent hours listening to Browder describe his days in the Bing. He was arrested for robbery in the spring of 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, when a stranger pointed him and his friend out to the police, accusing the pair of robbing him a week or two earlier. Browder insisted that he was not guilty, refused multiple plea offers, and finally had his case dismissed—but only after he had endured more than a thousand days on Rikers. Even though I had written about the Bing in the past, and visited it some fifteen years ago, I found many of the stories Browder told me about his time in solitary not only deeply disturbing but also surprising.

Browder’s experience was not so unusual, though. A July report by the Board of Correction, which monitors conditions in New York City’s jails, found that less than ten per cent of the Bing’s prisoners went outside on any given day. “While some prisoners are passing up the opportunity to participate in recreation—principally because there is virtually nothing to do outside other than stand around—many more prisoners never even have the opportunity to decide whether or not to go outside,” the report stated.

Then there was the matter of phone calls. Browder said that Bing inmates got one six-minute call a day. If you called your mother or your girlfriend or your lawyer, and the call went straight to voicemail, too bad; there was no second call. You had to wait until the next day, when the officer brought you the phone once again. During one of his stays in the Bing, Browder told me, there was an officer who he’d clashed with who would taunt him through the cell window. “He never used to let me use the phone,” Browder said. But then, one day, he came to the door and said, “Do you want to use the phone today? Enjoy your phone call.”

At first, Browder didn’t think anything was amiss. Then he tried to call his mom, and discovered that he could not get through. It seemed that somebody had reprogrammed her number. Instead of his mother’s voice, he heard someone “asking me about what DVDs I wanted to order.” He recalls, “It got me mad, because we get one phone call a day, and I wasted the phone call calling—I think it was Netflix.” Afterward, he says, the officer came to his cell window once again: “He was like a little kid, coming to my cell. ‘Did you like your phone call?’ ”

Again, Browder wasn’t the only inmate who had this experience. A new report by the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit organization that represents poor defendants, recounts similar tales. “Lacquan, a 20-year-old client with a history of mental illness, discovered on multiple occasions that correction officers had reprogrammed his mother’s phone number to fast-food restaurants,” the report states. “When Lacquan protested, they would taunt him and then tell him that his phone call was over.”

Jail officials say that there are now fifty-one inmates in solitary confinement between sixteen and seventeen years old. By January 1st, that number should be down to zero, if jail officials follow through on their promise. Meanwhile, the months that Browder spent locked in the Bing left him with his own theories about the power dynamics of solitary. In his view, its very setup insured that guards who wanted to dole out extra punishment to inmates—deprive them of the phone or rec or even food—could get away with it. Among the general jail population, Browder said, “they’ll do their job, because they know the inmates will jump on them. But in solitary confinement, they know everybody is locked in, so they curse at us, they talk disrespectful to us, because they know we can’t do nothing.”

Three Years on Rikers Without Trial

Three Years on Rikers Without Trial

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Papantonio: Big Pharma Owns The FDA - YouTube

Papantonio: Big Pharma Owns The FDA - YouTube