Texas Sends Poor Teens To Adult Jail For Skipping School
▻http://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/texas-sends-poor-teens-to-adult-jail-for-skipping-school
Serena was offered “jail credit” at a rate of $300 per day. She was patted down, touched “everywhere,” and dispatched to adult lockup, where she would stay for nine days, missing a week and a half of classes. The first school day after she was released, administrators kicked her out. ▻https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1873746-serena-vela-plea-form.html#document/p1/a213743
She had gone to jail because of a law intended to keep kids on the path to graduation. Instead, her high school career was over.
Serena is one of more than 1,000 Texas teenagers who have been ordered to jail in the last three years on charges stemming from missing school, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. The students get locked up with adults, sometimes inmates charged with assault, robbery and other violent crimes.
The overwhelming majority of students charged are poor, and most are black or Hispanic. Students are not sentenced to jail for missing school outright but rather for failing to follow court orders associated with their truancy charges. Many students have found themselves in a teen version of debtors’ prison, locked up because their families did not or could not pay steep fines stemming from their original truancy charge. Moreover, there is evidence that some Texas judges are flouting a law intended to prevent young people from being jailed because their families can’t afford the fines.
The overwhelming majority of students charged are poor
▻https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2019199-texas-appleseed-class-not-court.html#document/p10/a214753
Most are black or Hispanic
▻https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2019199-texas-appleseed-class-not-court.html#document/p12/a214752