It is shameful the way our state over incarcerates those whom have become errant. It is a shameful the way our state failed its future errants when there was a possibility to keep them from becoming errant. It is shameful the way we are failing untold numbers of future errants that occupy our classrooms today.
Today marks 4,900 days since the initial weaponized false allegation of abuse was levied by Myrtha Mikel (http://ManassehEphraim.blogspot.com/myrtha-mikel-day-3338.HTML), which she later admitted to at trial was a blatant lie. I reflected seven years ago today, on Wednesday, March 23, 2016, in my Day #1300 posting titled Wait Without Fret that Dostoyevsky said that, "the degree of a civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." I would add that in Oklahoma, its current prison warehousing model has been directly impacted by the 1950's/MAGA factory model of education that we indoctrinate our children into in its school systems, and therefore those schools are also reflective of the degree of civilization in this state. A state that I used to dearly love. A state that shamefully treats the have nots, the oddballs, and the skewed as a pariah to be locked away as disposable and lesser than. A state that shamefully devalues and wastes its current and future talent pool. I am convinced that many, if not most, of the men that I have encountered during my incarceration are over sentenced and should be receiving treatment in an active rehabilitation scenario with a proactive intensive therapeutic program. Some of the most intelligent and talented men that I have ever met have been in prison. The solution to this states health care worker shortage and nursing crisis lay untapped inside of its prison walls with millions of dollars worth of potential work and talent going to waste every single day. Some absolutely amazing history, sociology, science, math, and English teachers, potential educators who could actually reach through the clanging and inspire students and future errants to love learning, languish in DOC chattle stalls. Some potentially great DHS interventionist, child and youth therapist, substance abuse counselors, and inspiring motivational speakers remain silenced behind concertina wire. All of these men have felonious labels which will more than likely forever rob this state of their talent and intellect. It is a pitiful shame the way we have stripped them of the opportunity to reflect the civility their now "adulting" brains so deeply desire to reflect. I have been blessed at the Jess Dunn minimum to be hired as a GED tutor. I am once again working directly with young men, men my children's ages (31 and 26), whose brains, and brain chemistry, are just now settled enough to allow them to learn in a way society wanted them to be able to learn from 11-16, but they just were not able to. I have also once again become engaged in recovery groups. I hear the same stories I've heard over the past ten years, but retold now by these Millinials and GenZers. So many of the men I am living with were sexually, physically, and emotionally abused in their youth. They were introduced to alcohol, drugs, porn, and sex at such a young age. They were exploited or pimped out to pay for their family's rent or chemical dependencies. They continue to live with, and suffer from, a lifetime of unresolved trauma.These same GenXers, Millinials, and GenZers were also overlooked, neglected, and mislabeled as troublemakers in their classrooms. They actually are incredibly smart, just not in the obvious ways that many traditional white christian female teachers want to be able to teach to. Many of these guys were/are dyslexic and dysgraphic. These were not, and still are not, set in your chair in a quiet row type of people. They have high IQ's and a broad knowledge base due to their Google, Wikipedia, and social media use, yet struggle to interact face-to-face, spell well, or express themselves on paper. Undoubtedly, they were more intellectual than their white bread prim and proper Leave-It-To-Beaver teachers and operated with a street smart mindset that their Waltonesqe school marms couldn't phathom. Many of these guys were highly intellectual but didn't have their basic hierarchy needs met. They were traumatized, abused, and neglected children. Once they knew all about the letter "Bb" or that "6+6=12" their 5th week of doing a color, cut, and glue worksheet for reinforcement was maddening. They became labeled as troublemakers because they would daydream or get fidgety after a three hour stretch of completing boring repetitive worksheet after boring repetitive worksheet after boring repetitive worksheet of busy work (semicolon)all the while their stomachs were growling because their last meal was the free school lunch they had 20 hours ago. A Montessori approach where their own curiosities could have been encouraged and supported would have radically changed their lives. However, this state's bass ackward approach to pre-K and primary school education does not allow for many deviations from the 1950's MAGA factory model of turning out automaton citizenry, free of critical thinking skills, who would blindly follow the government's leading.
[excerpt from The Body Keeps the Score (2014) by Bessel van der Kolk]
The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools where they are seen and known, where they learn to regulate themselves, and where they can develop a sense of agency. At their best, schools can function as islands of safety in a chaotic world. They can teach children how their bodies and brains work and how they can understand and deal with their emotions. Schools can play a significant role in instilling the resilience necessary to deal with the traumas of neighborhoods or families. If parents are forced to work two jobs to eke out a living, or if they are too impaired, overwhelmed, or depressed to be attuned to the needs of their kids, schools by default have to be places where children are taught self-leadership and an internal locus of control.
When [van der Kolk's] team arrives at a school [in response to a student incident], the teachers' initial response is often some version of "If I'd wanted to be a social worker, I would have gone to social work school. But I came here to be a teacher." Many of them have already learned the hard way, however, that they cannot teach if they have a classroom filled with students whose alarm bells are constantly going off. Even the most committed teachers and school systems often come to feel frustrated and ineffective because so many of their kids are too traumatized to learn. Focusing only on improving test scores won't make any difference if teachers can't effectively address the behavior problems of these students. The good news is that the basic principles of trauma-focused interventions can be translated into practical day-to-day routines and approaches that can transform the entire culture of a school.
Most teachers [van der Kolk's team] work with are intrigued to learn that abused and neglected students are likely to interpret any deviation from routine as danger and that their extreme reactions usually are expressions of traumatic stress. [This is the case with Jaylynn Hilley as I described in my January 27, 2023 posting about Abigail Zwerner. He was acting out as a classroom terrorist because of the strapping/punishment he had received the day before.] Children who defy the rules are unlikely to be brought to reason by verbal reprimands or even suspension - a practice the has become epidemic in American schools, [and its prisons]. Teachers' perspectives begin to change when they realize that these kids' disturbing behaviors started out as frustrated attempts to communicate distress and as misguided attempts to survive.
More than anything else, being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health (semicolon) safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.
It is standard practice in many schools to punish children for tantrums, spacing out, or aggressive outbursts - all of which are often symptoms of traumatic stress. When that happens, the school, instead of offering a safe haven, becomes yet another traumatic trigger. Angry confrontations and punishment can at best temporarily halt unacceptable behaviors, but since the underlying alarm system and stress hormones are not laid to rest, they are certain to erupt again at the next provocation.
[END of excerpt]
The aftermath of these undiagnosed and unresolved traumas playing themselves out in classrooms are the beginnings of the open grate that dumps these boys directly into the school to prison pipeline. Not only are our prisons full of men still unsuccessfully coping with unresolved trauma, they are also full of geniuses whom did not have their talent acknowledged and/or directed in a healthy way.
What is our legislator's response to dealing with classrooms where children with unresolved trauma, poverty, and diversity exist? To offer families, white affluent families, the ability to move their already overly entitled children out of their local public schools and to take their meager pittance of student funding with them. Not only is Oklahoma setting itself up to shelter and coddle its already most privileged children into their perception of a non threatening and non challenging quasi private school environment where they won't be academically challenged enough to flourish, but we are going to suppress the traumatized, the impoverished, and the repressed geniuses around us (semicolon) or worse, encourage them to use their genius and trauma to create ways out of their boredom and adversity that continually and perpetually land them in prison because they did not have their trauma healed or their genius funneled in productive ways while the state had its chance. The school to prison pipeline, Oklahoma's revolving prison doors, must be shutdown at the pre-k and primary school levels by focusing our attention and monies where, and when, it can be used most effectively.
I've been enjoying the writings and podcasts of Malcolm Gladwell this winter. In his book David and Goliath Gladwell writes that "there is a fascinating passage in an essay by the psychologist Dean Simonton in which he says that one of the reasons gifted children fail to live up to their early promise [fail to launch or have late onset adulting] is that they have "inherited an excessive amount of [positive] psychological health." Those who fall short, he says, are children "too conventional, too obedient, too unimaginative, [and I'll add too entitled], to make the big time with some revolutionary ideas." He goes on:(colon) "Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendencies of growing up in more adverse conditions."
I know that's why my approach to instruction and administration was viewed as radical and threatening to the Lori Hills, Jan Everitts, Bella Mendozas, and Myrtha Mikels of the world. It required out of the box thinking, flexibility, and strong discipline. It required transcending an A-F mindset and moving towards meeting student goals and outcomes across time. It required teamwork with special education teachers to provide individualized IEPs for "full inclusion" and "least restrictive environment" educational opportunities. It required addressing multiple intelligences. It required admitting that you were not always the smartest or most talented person in the room full of ten year olds. It required viewing the four walls of the school building as the heart of a child's community with a full range of social resources available to him or her, not just as a brick and mortar factory to churn out the next generation of automaton.
Under this states leadership by those who worship at the alters of FOX News and the MAGA Antichrist I would have been labeled a radical classroom teacher. Under the newest Oklahoma Senate Bill 397(2023) I am certain that my own classroom library of the 1990s and 2000s would have been confiscated and locked away just like so many other classroom libraries are CURRENTLY being boxed up and audited in Ron DeSantis' Florida. I began each school year, from week one, reading the saga of the Logan family living in post reconstruction Mississippi. Beginning the first day of school we would read The Well, then Song of the Trees, and Mississippi Bridge. We would culminate that series with Roll of Thunder. Today I'd be accused of indoctrinating my students with a sense of false woke history for reading those books. I am sure I'd come under fire for being anti-American for shedding light on the WWII Japanese internment of Asian Americans in Arizona with Baseball Saved Us or for acknowledging the plight of North America's indigenous occupants in The Light in the Forest. State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters would probably personally fire me for exposing the overt racial prejudices on display in The Cay and Timothy of the Cay saying I was promoting white/caucasian guilt. The disgraced, twice impeached, former president would blast me as a weak-on-borders anti-nationalist refugee and immigrant lover for exposing my students to the difficulties that Vietnamese refugees experienced in the '70s and '80s in Hello, My Name is Scrambled Eggs. Florida Governor and presidential wannabe Ron DeSantist would have me strung high as an LGBTQIA+ alliant for reading the true story of Emma Edmonds, a Union affiliated female spy who often disguised herself as a young male infantryman to infiltrate Confederate encampments to gather intelligence. He'd say that I was promoting a drag lifestyle. I'd be labeled a left wing environmentalist for reading Culebra Cut. The only books that we read in class that may have been approved were Hatchet and Where the Red Fern Grows. However, both stories may have caused PTSD as the children coped with the deaths of Old Dan, Lil' Ann, and the pilot. Red Fern also includes references to Cherokee mysticism which I am surprised has flown under the radar of those Christian elitist sitting in our state capitol.
The state Department of Education, under the leadership of Ryan Walters is also doing little to stem the flow of men into the prison system. The only part of a positive plan I have heard from him is to focus on reading skills and comprehension at the pre-k through fourth grade level, and that is a great place to start. However, he is a MAGA adhearant and Ron DeSantis proselytite. His plans to allow parents (specifically white bread WASPy christian nationalist) to move their already privileged children into private and charter schools AND to take their public tax dollars with them are just going to continue to fuel the school to prison pipeline that this state has perfected over the past 7 decades. He seems rather intentionally clueless about how his separatists ideologies keep the children of the impoverished, the addicted, the socially outcast, the mentally challenged, the non-white, non-heterosexuals, the academically bored, and the traumatized of this state at a sever disadvantage.
It is shameful the way our state over incarcerates those whom have become errant. The Oklahoma courts are just perpetrating the misfortune that many of these men were born into. The Department of Corrections provides no real behavioral modification therapy, just a proclivity to issue "write ups" (which hurt the chances for Commutation or Parole) issue threats to demote your level, and/or toss you in the SHU (the Segregated Housing Unit aka the Hole or Isolation). There is no meaningful state funded substance abuse treatment. Other than the volunteer led or inmate initiated therapy/counselling there is little mental therapeutic help for an incarcerate.
In my Jess Dunn Correctional Center position as a GED instructor I come into contact with many many Millennials and GenZers whom are in their late twenties and early thirties whose brains just now seemed to flip their "on switch". As they share their educational backgrounds, which I have reflected on previously, their stories all share the same theme of being late blooming readers who were then labeled as trouble makers due to their teachers being lazy, indifferent, or inept. But now, having their brains finally turn on in their late twenties, they are voracious readers consuming any materials they can find about history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, science, and religion. Math has sudden become an unwravenable mystery. But now they are faced with decades of prison and question whether the effort to learn and improve themselves is worth while if there is no opportunity to prove their newly discovered selves on the outside.
This current legislative session must see the passage of HB 1792 (2023 Oklahoma House Bill No. 1792, Oklahoma First Regular Session of the Fifty-Ninth Legislature OKLAHOMA BILL TEXT TITLE: Classification of felony offenses creating the Oklahoma Crime Reclassification Act of 2023 effective date) as a first step to giving current incarcerates a glimmer of hope of returning back to our families and to society. We also need to continue to have advocates in OKC like Sen. David Rader fighting for Senate Bill 11 ( 2023 Oklahoma Senate Bill No. 11, Oklahoma First Regular Session of the Fifty-Ninth Legislature OKLAHOMA BILL TEXT TITLE: Higher education removing certain eligibility provision for certain state tuition aid grants. Effective date. Emergency) to pass that would expand funding for educational opportunities inside these prison walls.
The question becomes how do we shut down the school to prison pipeline, the school to prison revolving door? By focusing our attention and monies where and when it can be used most effectively at the pre-k and primary school levels. We have to be bold and courageous enough to break the MAGA/1950s model of educational outcomes/factory replication. We need to individualize needs based outcomes for each pupil. We need to break the "grade level" model of classification and focus on skill mastery regardless of age or "grade level". We must move from evaluations with ABCDF and look strictly at mastery as the judgement tool to determine scaffolding. We need to quit comparing any one student's achievement to another/all others student achievement and just focus on the individuals personal goal achievement.
But that is a fanciful dream. I just can't see the U.S., or Oklahoma, breaking the "grade level" systems across the board. But there are other things we can and should do in the pre-k through primary classrooms to break the school to prison pipeline in our state. In the broadest of generalities there are concrete solutions, many of which are free, that can be implemented. There needs to be intentionality to match a pupil and their learning style with a teacher and their teaching style. Within a "grade level" there can be a very wide age gap, as much as 14 months. We need to be intentional about how we group these children. We must rethink "end of year testing" to evaluate a pupil, teachers, or a schools effectiveness. We need to take our cue from Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers as he discusses achievement gaps and the MATCAB (Maturity Corrective Adjustment Base) resolutions to augment these gaps. We should implement a true year round school program (commensurate with appropriate contract expansions and pay for educators and support staff). At the junior high and high school level our buildings should make programing available until 10pm to accommodate family lifestyles and the needs of students and their teachers (semicolon) many teens are just night owls and learn better in the early afternoon, not necessarily at 7:45 a.m.
These solutions may provide an answer to deterring future errants from surfing into incarceration on the prison pipeline. In the meantime, our state's prisons are bursting at the seams, but many men are ready to return to society in rather short order. There are certain men who have committed certain crimes (premeditated murder for example) for whom the death penalty is appropriate. There are a FEW other certain specific crimes for which a life, or very long sentence, are justified. However, most of Oklahoma's incarcerates are just waiting out the clock, and their release dates are quickly approaching. They are returning to their communities and about fifty percent have not changed for the positive. Some have grown more civil. Other have not. They still suffer from unresolved trauma and/or have had years to create ingenious ways to perpetrate future crimes. I observe this to be very true for the Millennials, GenXers, and GenZers that I live with.
[Exerpt from Malcolm Gladwell in David and Goliath chapter 8]
Longer sentences work on young men. But once someone passes that crucial midtwenties mark, all longer sentences do is protect us from dangerous criminals at the point that they become less dangerous....Prison has a direct effect on crime: (colon) it puts a bad person behind bars, where he can't victimize anyone else. But it also has an indirect effect on crime, in that it affects all the people with whom that criminal comes into contact. A very high number of men who get sent to prison, for example, are father's. (One-fourth of juveniles convicted of crimes have children.) And the effect on a child of having a father sent away to prison is devastating and an undesirable difficulty. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child's chances of juveniles delinquency between 300 and 400 percent (semicolon) it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
Once the criminal has served his time, he returns to his old neighborhood. There's a good chance he's been psychologically damaged by his time behind bars. His employment prospects have plummeted. While in prison, he's lost many of his noncriminal friends and replaced them with fellow-criminal friends. And now he's back, placing even more strain emotionally and financially on the home that he shattered by leaving in the first place. Incarceration creates collateral damage. In most cases, the harm done by the imprisonment is smaller than the benefits (semicolon) we're still better off putting people behind bars. But Todd Clear's point is that if you lock up too many people for too long, the collateral damage starts to outweigh the benefits. (Todd Clear first described his ideas some years ago in a research paper entitled "Backfire:(colon) When Incarceration Increases Crime" as published by the Oklahoma Justice Research Consortium).
I predict fifty percent of these exiting Millennials and GenZers will return in short order, mostly due to their chronic drug use, lack of formal, technical, or trade skills education, and most sadly, because for these 20-35 year olds prison is fun and easy when you have no dreams or ambitions or programing/educational opportunities presented, or required of you, while you are held as a "captive audience".
Oklahoma spends way too much money to incarcerate individuals when therapy, active monitoring with AI and biochip technology, and court mandated and financed college/trade smithing would be much more cost effective, keep families intact, and grow these men into a productive citizenry.
Just as we need an outliers mindset to reevaluate how we determine mastery in education we need an outliers mindset to reevaluate how we sentence the errant. Just "serving time" for a crime does not encourage positive future behavior. Tools need to be developed that encourage rehabilitation. So many men are being incarcerated just at the point where the male brain is final being fully formed in the prefrontal cortex (25-27). They finally have a brain that can comprehend what they read. The light bulb finally turns on and they become interested in (and capable of comprehending) history, sociology, literature, and psychology. Instead of a standard sentence of 12 years let's get creative and proactive, "sentencing" the errant to completing his GED and earning an Associates degree/trade certification and undergoing behavioral modification therapy (all in a DOC setting). This is one place where our Securustech.net tablets are severely underutilized. The company contracted at the Lawton facility offered many, many good tools and classes on their tablet that could be, should be, used to begin the journey to self improvement. The educational/therapy/rehabilitation programs played instructional videos followed by assessments. I don't understand why the state is not utilizing the technology currently in the hand of each incarcerate as something other than a babysitter. "Fun and entertainment" tablet time should be predicated and activated by completing a certain number of hours of "educational time" invested on the tablet each week.
This may be an extreme outliers point of view. Gladwell defined an outlier as "a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. People who are outliers are those whom are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest if us as cold day in August." Gladwell says in Outliers that he "sees that success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages:(colon)when and where you were born, what your parents did for a living, and the what circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world." Gladwell asks, "Can we learn something about why people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously.
For many of the men I've met in prison, being incarcerated is their cultural legacy. Their families have been caught up in the school to prison pipeline for generations. We have to change these legacies at the frontend and the backend simultaneously. On the backend, while in prison, another way we can do this is to provide the opportunities outlined previously and then let the Case Managers, Educators, and therapist/counselors who know the prisoner best determine whether or not the errant has matured/changed enough for reintroduction into society instead of the traditional, and impersonal, pardon and parole board process.
It is shameful the way our state over incarcerates those whom have become errant. It is a shameful the way our state failed its future errants when there was a possibility to keep them from becoming errant. It is shameful the way we are failing untold numbers of future errants that occupy our classrooms today. So what am I doing about the issue beyond a blog rant? I'm co-facilitating a Genesis One (G1) recovery group, I'm employed as a GED educator, I'm making myself available to Crossing's Community Church to facilitate a weekly Celebrate Recovery® group, and I've coauthored a proposal to create a Parenting/Fatherhood Class and support group to help teach these Millennials and GenZers how to be the fathers they long to be not only once they reenter society, but from inside these fences as well. I can't be everything, everywhere all at once but I do not have to let this state's shame be my shame when there is even a small difference that I can make in this version of the world that I am living in.
#wastedtalent
