A Pipeline to Prison—and Suicide—for Native Kids
This article appeared on Indian Country Media Network in 2013. For more on topics like this, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... A new legal paper on racial disparities in juvenile justice is laced with searing narratives of wrongs suffered by Native schoolchildren on Montana’s remote and windswept reservations. Law graduate Melina Healey’s study, “The School-to-Prison Pipeline Tragedy on Montana’s American Indian Reservations,” has just appeared in the New York University Review of Law & Social Change . According to Healey (shown here), who got her NYU law degree this past May, the school-to-prison phenomenon has been well documented in poor, minority communities nationwide. Ho wever, it’s been generally ignored with respect to Montana’s reservations, where the problem is extreme . “I’m baffled by this,” she said in an interview. “It’s a staggering tragedy.” Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial