Friend,

Five years ago in Orlando, Florida, a 6-year-old Black girl named Kaia Rolle was arrested after throwing a tantrum in class. The viral video of her being escorted out of her school and into a police car, despite her tearful pleas for a second chance, illustrates Florida’s well-developed school-to-prison pipeline — policies and practices that disproportionately funnel Black children into the state’s legal system. Even with the eventual passage of the Kaia Rolle Act in 2020, setting a minimum age for arrests, children as young as 7 can still be arrested and prosecuted in Florida.

In our report, Only Young Once: The Systemic Harm of Florida’s School-to-Prison Pipeline and Youth Legal System, the Southern Poverty Law Center explores the scope and impact of youth incarceration and ways Florida can reform and disrupt these systems.

Florida’s investment in youth discipline has produced a system that disproportionately pushes Black children out of schools and into carceral facilities shown to be incredibly dangerous for children, and does so at a great expense to taxpayers.

“All children deserve their childhood. However, Kaia Rolle was robbed of hers when she was arrested as a 6-year-old first grader. The same traumatic experience can still happen to any 7-year-old in Florida today,” said Delvin Davis, SPLC senior policy analyst and report’s author. “Florida should put greater investment in child development, rehabilitation, and education rather than child incarceration.”

Kaia Rolle is far from the only victim of the state's aggressive and discriminatory discipline policies. Florida routinely pushes Black children out of schools and into a legal system with well-documented harms. In recent years, the state has made significant investments in school law enforcement and self-proclaimed “tough love” youth legal system policies, purportedly in the name of public safety. However, these investments have yielded a system that disparately disciplines, arrests, prosecutes and incarcerates Black youth more harshly than their counterparts.

In solidarity,

The Southern Poverty Law Center