Support Bill H477 An Act Interrupting the School to Prision Pipeline

An Act Interrupting the school to prison pipeline H482 is a critical bill that has been introduced to the House of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Act interrupting the School to Prison pipeline will put an end to the criminalizing of our youth before they reach leadership age. It has been proven that the school to prison pipeline affects the black community more than any other community in Massachusetts. The following is an excerpt from bill H482 that states it's importance to the community's support at large;

Whereas, school extreme policies and practices that affect students of color with the oppressive zero tolerance movement involving disciplining them for disruptive non-violent conduct offenses, disturbing the peace and instituting school-based arrests under vague offense categories, such as misbehavior and being disrespectful and then relying on law enforcement and the courts to impose punishments that needlessly remove students from school. 76% of all referrals have been for misdemeanor offenses; and,

Whereas, adult faculty members are using their imbalance of power advantage to apply arbitrary and inconsistent discipline against students and this discipline is in violation of the student’s Code of Conduct rules; and,

Whereas, police find calls by teachers for miscellaneous, trivial discipline matters as typically unnecessary for their involvement, and view these and other catchall categories as teachers wanting punishment for misbehavior to help manage their classrooms. This has contributed to suspensions and expulsions of blacks students that involve them in the justice system at a highly disproportionate rate of 3.5 times the rate of white youth; and,

Whereas, restraints by law enforcement, in some cases, have expanded into physical assaults situations and is contributing to the well-documented disproportionate racial disparities of detentions where underserved families have limited resources to launch the defensive process needed to protect their families once they are involve with the criminal justice system;