Development arrested
When Isaiah was 13, he used a BB gun to rob another child outside a bowling alley in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Instead of being sent to a youth detention center, Isaiah immediately was pulled into the state’s adult correctional system. There, a stint in solitary confinement magnified his anxiety and ADHD.
Isaiah entered the adult system thanks to Mississippi’s “original jurisdiction” laws, part of a long legacy of the state permitting kids as young as 13 to face criminal prosecution as adults. Twenty-five other states use these laws to put kids into the adult system at the moment of arrest for certain crimes.
What sets Mississippi apart, as reporters Ko Bragg and Melissa Lewis explain in this week’s new episode, is the racist history underpinning its current laws and the racial discrimination to which they have given rise. In the state’s notorious penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, children as young as 11 were forced to pick cotton. Criminal justice policies that still affect the lives of Isaiah and other youth in Mississippi were developed in significant part by politicians with unabashed ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
After months spent poring over historical documents and court data, Bragg and Lewis discovered the stunning contemporary impact of these laws: Nearly 5,000 Mississippi children have been charged as adults in the last 25 years. Three out of every four are black, like Isaiah.
But there’s more:
The racial disparity among children in the adult system, it turns out, is even worse than it is for actual grown-ups. Census data shows that black and white kids in Mississippi match up nearly 1:1 in the free world, as Isaiah describes life outside jails. But of the kids charged as adults who have gone before a Mississippi judge in the last quarter-century, nearly 75% are black. While boys make up most of the system, the racial disparity among Mississippi girls in the system also is stunning: 60% are black.
Less than 4% of the cases involve murder and rape. Most stem from a handful of charges: drug use, burglary, larceny and armed robbery. Some of these cases involve serious incidents, but are not always inherently violent.
Isaiah spent an entire school year in and out of solitary confinement in an adult jail, at a time when isolation can have a devastating impact on a child’s health and well-being.
“I’m still like 15, and I feel like I’m about 28,” he said.
HEAR THE EPISODE
READ THE STORY
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