Fearful adults, frightening children: Generation Armed and Dangerous

Our schools have more security than yesterday's prisons. Today our schools are full of metal detectors, drug dogs and private security guards who roam the halls in search of wild-eyed, armed, potentially bomb making, mass murdering, drug using/selling children who mean harm to themselves, their fellow students and their often paranoid teachers.

School bus drivers, fed up with hauling foul mouthed, out of control, disrespectful prison-inmates-in-training are losing their cool, and their freedom, as they are jailed for backhanding brats and cuffing cretins. Ah, such is life in these here United States, a place where we are afraid to look at our children wrong, for fear the little darlings will haul out their cell phones and place a 911, my daddee's beatin' my butt call.

How can the nation's parents raise healthy children, if their every move is monitored by the welfare gestapo? How can poor parents or parents of minority children get a fair shake when recent studies say social workers are more apt to generate incomplete reports on minority families, and are so afraid of the children's home situations, that they opt to yank the child out of the home and place him or her into foster care rather than conduct a home visit?

We have untold numbers of social workers and case workers who are gaming the system, tweaking procedures behind the scene to favor predestined outcomes, which they create for their own convenience. This is not to say there are no dangerous situations out there. A Kentucky case where a social worker was beaten to death when she took a child for a final pre-termination of parental rights visit is a case in point.

However, when we have children being yanked out of homes because social workers will not step outside their mostly white, middle class comfort zones, that is an different kettle of fish. A rotten kettle, to be exact, because it is the nation's children who end up getting the short end of the stick--not to mention the burden on the nation's tax payers who are paying for this monstrous, megalithic prison assembly line.

The multi-billion dollar foster care system has done much good in providing a safety net for children whose parents are abusive or incapable of taking care of them. It has also become a massive cultural genocide conveyor belt, which caters to the self-interest of social workers and places institutional and employee comfort over the need of the children.

Children who age out of foster care are less likely to
graduate from high school or college; experience more
serious mental health problems, including post-traumatic
stress disorder, than children generally; are less likely to
receive adequate health and mental health care; are
more likely to experience homelessness; and to be
involved in the criminal justice system. (America’s Cradle to Prison PipelineSM Summary Report))


There is no doubt that the child welfare system needs more resources, training and oversight. As it stands, much of today's foster care system has become an assembly line which manufactures prisoners for the American Military-Prison-Industrial Complex.

According to the Children's Defense fund every single day in the United States:
4 children are killed by abuse or neglect.
5 children or teens commit suicide.
8 children or teens are killed by firearms.
33 children or teens die from accidents.
77 babies die before their first birthdays.
192 children are arrested for violent crimes.
383 children are arrested for drug abuse.
906 babies are born at low birthweight.
1,153 babies are born to teen mothers.
1,672 public school students are corporally punished.
1,879 babies are born without health insurance.
2,261 high school students drop out.
2,383 children are confirmed as abused or neglected.
2,411 babies are born into poverty.
2,494 babies are born to mothers who are not high school graduates.
4,017 babies are born to unmarried mothers.
4,302 children are arrested.
17,132 public school students are suspended.
(Ibid)

Many of those children are minority kids. Many of them end up in foster care. Many of those who end up in foster care also end up in prison. Who these children were born to, where their parents live, the education level of their parents, whether they were born to single mothers, all of these factors determine how much a child is at risk for being placed in the foster care system and then winding up in the nation's incarceration pipeline.

The Cradle to Prison Pipeline crisis can be reduced to one simple fact: The
United States of America is not a level playing field for all children, and our nation
does not value and protect all children’s lives equally. So many poor babies in rich
America enter the world with multiple strikes already against them: without prenatal
care and at low birthweight; born to a teen, poor and poorly educated single mother
and absent father. At crucial points in their development, from birth through adulthood,
more risks and disadvantages accumulate and converge that make a successful
transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the
criminal justice system significantly more likely. (Ibid)

This country is not a level playing field for all children, and this is most apparent in the way many of our children and families are treated by the grave-to-prison complex. Of those nearly 2400 children who are considered abused on a daily basis, many live in family situations which do not meet middle class standards of minimum care. That is, poor working parents who often can not afford child care, will leave their children in the care of older siblings, while they work.

For middle class social workers, those whom one demographic considers babysitters, are in need of babysitters. A 12 or 14 year old who is considered in need of adult supervision by middle class families, is considered prime babysitting material in working class and working poor families.

We do not have to go across the ocean to find a conflict of culture. We have our own social civil war right here in the old US of A, with our children's future serving as a very bloody batleground. Education costs less than ignorance, according to experts, but we have already shown ourselves to be more apt to pay for prison than for education. As noted below, America's love affair with incarceration is a multi-billion dollar industry, and has generated the most active part of our economy--much to our children's cost. It costs $22,000 a year to pay for imprisoning a child--that's 22 times the cost of a mentoring program, 9 times the cost of a youth jobs training program, 3.5 times the cost of housing a low-income family for a year.

• The average annual per child cost of a mentoring program is $1,000.
• The cost of providing a year of employment training for unemployed youths is $2,492.
• The annual per child cost of a high quality after-school program is $2,700.
• The average cost of ensuring that a low-income family has affordable housing is $6,830.
• The average annual per child cost of Head Start is $7,028.
• The annual per child cost for a high quality comprehensive full-day, full-year
early childhood education program is $13,000.
• The average annual per prisoner cost is $22,650. States spend on average
almost three times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil. (Ibid)

Our children are growing up in a nation which has higher low birth rates and greater incarceration rates than many of the so-called "Third World countries" that we stick our noses up at. Our children are killing themselves and each other at greater rates than their counterparts who live in many of the world's war zones.

Many families are afraid of their own juvenile members. Some of our teachers carry guns for their own safety. Our nation's streets are full of armed and dangerous, scared children who gravitate to gangs because they have little or any security at home.

Our children are afraid. Our parents are afraid. Our teachers are afraid. Our school bus drivers are afraid. Our police officers are afraid. Our neighbors are afraid.

Writing in American Renaissance magazine, author Bob Lonsberry, speaks to the fear of black children in foster care, after noting that "In the United States, of all the children in foster care, 60 percent are black. African-Americans are 60 percent of the foster children and 12 percent of the general population. That’s a 500-percent over representation..."

Lonsberry says, "because I am haunted by the thought of those African-American kids in foster care, and the lonely isolation and deprivation of natural affection they must feel. The babies who need holding and the young tears that need to be dried. The kids who never really get a chance, who never really get the most basic of birthrights – a mom and a dad and a loving home. And I am saddened by what those children must almost unavoidably become – alienated from society and deprived of its opportunities, wards first of the state and then of the welfare and prison systems. It is a cancer wherever it exists, but it exists with butchering disproportion in the black community." (Ibid)

Much of the problem with foul mouthed, out of control, angry, often violent, children in the United States can be traced right back to unstable family or foster care home life. If our children remain alienated, fearful, angry, much of it begins in the homes in which they are reared. From dysfunctional family to dysfunctional foster care system to dysfunctional prison, life in the great American prison pipeline is the road to despair for many of the nation's children.

The author is a public speaker, columnist and author of several books. Her author website is: http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000