Our Police State - Criminalizing Being A Kid

Police in Florida sometimes go beyond their legal authority when interrogating suspects while they are in school

Florida police frequently skirt state and federal laws, or violate them outright, when questioning children at school, a St. Petersburg Times investigation has found.

Often police question juvenile suspects first, and leave the Miranda warning for later. In some cases they question kids at school and take them to jail without notifying the principal. Or they interrogate them as suspects before trying to notify their parents, in violation of state law.

Even when police don't cut legal corners, experts say the push to station officers in most middle and high schools has brought a raft of unintended consequences: blurred roles, unclear legal authority and a sharp increase in school arrests for minor infractions that could be handled out of court.

Principals, the last line of defense for kids jeopardized by police misconduct, rarely challenge resource officers or other police who enter school to interrogate students.

And children are saddled with criminal records that can follow them for a lifetime.

"They won't be able to get a job, they won't be able to go to college," said Judge Robert Evans of the 9th Judicial Circuit. "They're screwed for life."

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Public defenders say schoolhouse confessions are common, and judges often encourage kids to waive their right to a lawyer and plead guilty.

"We run into that quite frequently," said Bob Dillinger, chief public defender in Pinellas and Pasco counties. "It's a systemic problem."

Half of all juveniles went without a lawyer in Pasco and Pinellas counties in 2005, as did three-quarters of those in Sarasota, Manatee and De Soto counties, according to the Florida Supreme Court.

In both Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, an unusually high number of kids were arrested at school and referred to court, according to the Department of Juvenile Justice. Hillsborough sent students at a rate of 21 per 1,000, while Pinellas sent 24, compared to a state average of 17.

Those counties were singled out in a report that year by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other groups, which charged that students of color were arrested out of proportion to their numbers in schools. Black students accounted for 22 percent of the student population, but they made up 47 percent of all school referrals to court, according to state figures.

In a recent study, the National Juvenile Defender Center described Florida's juvenile system as dangerously dysfunctional, with courts overloaded by low-bore school referrals.

"We saw, in courtroom after courtroom, hundreds of school-based cases that had no business being there," said Patricia Puritz, the center's executive director. "There was no place where these kids were not being dumped into the juvenile court setting."

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I would have never gotten to college, gotten a great job and been the very productive individual I am today if the basic behavior of teenage kids was treated in the 70’s like it is today(and that’s just the stuff I got caught doing).

All we are accomplishing with the insane amount of criminalization smallest juvenile infractions is creating a generation of minimum wage workers, but wait, that’s what the neo-cons are after fodder for the everlasting war on terror.