As teachers and people working in schools who care deeply about our students, we call on all members of the New York City Council to vote no on the “Borough-Based Jail System” land use application and to take action for the immediate closure of the jails on Rikers Island. To build the healthy and safe communities our students need to thrive, we must divest from policing and incarceration and invest in community resources. We cannot end mass incarceration by creating new jails. Approval of this land use action cannot guarantee the closure of the Rikers Island jails nor address the human rights abuses that occur within jails, regardless of design or location. The City can and must close the jails on Rikers Island without building new jails by embarking on a community-based abolitionist planning process, like No New Jails’ robust abolition plan, and investing in decarceral and abolitionist strategies, including existing city programs and policies.
The mayor, his office of criminal justice, and a handful of councilmembers are currently pushing through a plan to invest $11 billion dollars in jail expansion. If the plan goes through, 4 new massive jails will be built in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. Additionally, 1 or 2 nursery jails would be constructed for women and their babies, and 3-6 jail facilities would be built into hospitals across the city. Though its proponents insist that the plan’s purpose is to close Rikers, it provides no path to that goal, no legal guarantee, and not a single dollar budgeted towards the actual process of closing Rikers, which would be a massive and costly undertaking.
We do not need new jails to close Rikers. We can close Rikers now without building a single new cage by investing that $11 billion in our communities--especially on housing, healthcare, and education--and divesting from policing and incarceration.
These new jails would be built over the next decade, and we know that they are being built for our students. The same children we are obligated to protect and care for, the same children we are responsible to ensure a meaningful future for - the city government is so terrified of them it feels it needs to build skyscrapers full of cages to contain and torture them. This jail expansion plan is the product of a failed social vision, and it is the laziest and most vicious means by which our society could seek to redress its failures. When we fail to provide adequate mental health care for the children of this city, we lock them in cages. When we fail to provide them adequate substance abuse treatment, we lock them in cages. When we fail to provide them adequate homes, we lock them in cages.
This nation’s schools have become places of increased surveillance with heightened police presence as a result of “zero tolerance” policies stemming from the war on drugs in the 1980’s and the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994. The adoption of such punishment paradigms in schools has created the school-to-prison pipeline, as students are taken out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Today most students involved in minor, non-serious infractions are handled by law enforcement officials, generally armed, that work full-time as school resource officers (SROs). The National Center for Education reported that as of 2015, there are “more than 43,000 school resource officers and other sworn police officers, and an additional 39,000 security guards, working in the nation’s 84,000 public schools”. Here in New York City, there are more cops in schools than school counselors. In 2016 the NYC Department of Education reported 4,043 in-school counselors and social workers, both full and part time, compared to a reported 5,200 in-school security personnel, including resource officers and uniformed police. With 22% more school security staff than counseling staff, many of our children are threatened with forceful punishment more often than they are offered support and care. Increased police presence in schools has led to the criminalization of students of color and those struggling with poverty, resulting in more arrests on school campuses.
We must do better! We can support our students through the many challenges they face in and outside of schools by funding the resources that have been proven to work, such as school counselors. From connecting those in need of mental-health support to finding wrap around services to alleviate the stresses of poverty, school counselors are important advocates for the social and emotional well being of our most vulnerable students. As is too often the case, students in most need of these supports often attend schools with the fewest resources. The national average student-to-school-counselor ratio is 482-to-1—nearly double the 250-to-1 ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association.
Jails serve as an extension of a punitive school system that already harms many of our students, especially Black and Brown students: suspensions and detentions that force them out of school, schools with few or no guidance counselors and many cops that create militarized learning environments. As teachers we have seen firsthand how these policies disrupt our students’ learning, dehumanize them, and put them at risk daily. In June, NYC schools chancellor Richard Carranza announced that the city would add 85 new licensed social workers, limit suspensions to 20 days, and overhaul its agreement with the NYPD’s involvement in schools. While we celebrate this baby step towards demilitarizing our schools, we know it is not nearly enough. Our students are still terrorized daily by cops, still regularly forced out of school for too long, still fear public shaming, violence, or arrest every day they walk into what should be a space of learning, creativity, and growth. How well can we possibly serve our students when we cannot protect them from police violence and discrimination inside the hallways and classrooms of our schools?
The NYPD and the Department of Correction have long been the source of violence against our communities, and especially those of us who are Black, Brown, immigrants, poor, disabled, women, youth, and/or transgender. Our responsibility to our students, therefore, is to minimize the impact of the criminal justice system on their lives and communities while supporting them in visioning and building transformative justice systems that will actually keep them safe. We must oppose the caging of human beings in jails, a practice widely evidenced to enact violence against our students of these identities regardless of location or design.
We reject the morally abhorrent vision for the future of our students put forward in the jail expansion plan and we reject the hatred, the cynicism, and the white supremacy at the heart of it. We reject the absurd claim that to build more cages for humans is to somehow create a more just city or a safer community. We reject the assumption that jails and prisons are necessary. We reject the lie that the forces and apparatuses of state violence keep our communities safe.
We reject the plan and its inevitable repercussions because we know that we can and we must build alternatives to the carceral state which fails to keep our communities safe. According to the U.S. Department of Education, state and local governments in the last three decades have increased spending on jails and prisons at triple the rate that they have on elementary and secondary education. Spending on higher education has remained virtually stagnant from 1989-2013 while spending on corrections has risen 89%. New York City currently has the opportunity to set a new precedent for where investment should be made. We call on the city to take the billions of dollars it is seeking to spend on these cages and invest them back into our communities. We call on the city to provide the adequate mental health care, substance abuse care, housing and education our students need. We call on the people of New York to speak out against this jail expansion plan and to let their politicians know that we can and must shut down Rikers Island now with no new jails.
To end the school to prison pipeline, we must demilitarize our schools. Our demands to realize this goal include a reimagination of school space, away from one that assumes danger from our students and teaches discipline through police violence, and towards one that holistically prevents harm, restores trust, and builds a liberatory vision of safety. In action, we must eliminate the presence of school “safety” officers that exist solely to inflict violence on our students and prepare them to inhabit occupied communities. We must end the extended security apparatuses and means of surveillance and intrusion that distrust our students and serve to capture them in the prison industrial complex. We must end school suspensions and other punitive models of discipline that are enforced along racial lines and punish entire communities. We must, instead, build restorative justice programs into regular administrative protocols to address harm in schools; we must train staff to employ such methods, create spaces for students to engage in safe processes of accountability, and gather resources that will allow our students the agency to build truly transformative approaches to community safety. We must provide access to positive methods of mental health care with comprehensive wellness programs and a well equipped staff of counselors and social workers. We demand that New York City divest from the building of cages that would incarcerate our children for generations to come and, instead, invest in resources that will create the possibilities for a liberated future.