Let’s fight for the rights of our children.

How long will we allow our children to be victims of society? If we take a look at the way the New York education department is designed, from pre-K all the way through high school, you will see the only difference between our schools and our prison system is this. Our children come home every day. Students are being mentally conditioned to feel comfortable in jail. This is why we have so many habitual offenders at such a young age. When you look at it, it’s really the only environment these kids have been living in. Starting  their morning with police at the door, metal detector and  multiple police vans parked outside during the day. Our children are often restrained with handcuffs just to be escorted to the principal’s office or worse, taken to a juvenile centers.

    According to Prison Policy Initiative there are 10,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons on any given day in America. There are 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities in the United States. There are 70,792 juveniles. Now with over a hundred privately owned prisons. The government has found  it highly lucrative to build more prisons, and reduces funding for after-school programs that actually insure the success of our children.

    Of course not all of the schools are structured exactly the same. The students that can afford a better education attend the better schools. These schools offer multiple programs as well as after-school programs for the students to participate in throughout the year. Giving them more opportunities to succeed in life. How do we give these same opportunities to every student in New York regardless of their family’s  financial means?

Due to lack of funding and support from the state, there are thousands of students on wait list for after-school programs. So if our children don’t have programs, they are often subject to the streets. Learning how to use drugs, sell drugs, have sex and make poor choices. Oftentimes, parents are forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. There are 4,986 juveniles in prison for drug related crimes, 6,097 are in for aggravated assault, 6,996 are in for robbery, and 7,247 are in for burglary. This is why after-school programs are so important. We have to change these statistics.    

We have to change the system, and we have to start today.  Let’s stand together and fight to build more  programs for our kid instead of building more prisons for the Correctional Corporation of America and the privatized and profitable industry it leads to pave a path for our youth to make poor choices for their lives and generate capital from those mistakes.

Let’s not be slaves to the system.