Fact: children can be more resilient than adults. Some kids, like NFL star Demaryius Thomas, display remarkable tenacity and transition into adulthood triumphantly despite growing up the child of an incarcerated parent. Some kids are less fortunate, and end up continuing the cycle, by way of cradle to prison pipeline.
When the government decided to intervene in "the 80's crack epidemic" to punish and rid America of its addicts, mythical crack babies, and "Nino Brown" pushermans (all disproportionately black males, see Rico & Rockefeller Laws) by installing youth drug prevention programming and outreach in schools nationwide; mass incarceration was not a buzzword yet. But exploitative television shows, such as "Cops", were then a primetime hit with audiences, so mass media plied Americans with enough reasons to contribute to why it would become a phrase in the near future, when the problem hit too close to home. The flipside of the coin was that it was entertaining to watch other people go to jail or prison on television, but not to watch your own family members and friends go in reality; or worse, make that trip to the bricks and walls yourself. So begat the war on drugs, as we know it. The government contracted services to deliver to youth to educate and protect them from the scourge of drugs. Enter Nancy Reagan, Just Say No, and the D.A.R.E. program.
This was the ideology of the D.A.R.E. program: "It was OK when America watched hippies trip on drugs in the sixties, but not cool now so let's use that fear to push police into schools to scare kids about drugs.
Ya know. The parents guilt will allow it, the teachers won't mind a break, and the government will dig it."
Maybe it took a while for society to collectively dissimilate and process that good people are sometimes incarcerated for the wrong reasons, and that its justice system is so heavily flawed. It had to sink in that drugs were a health matter, as well as a public safety matter, not just a narrow minded area of criminal justice. That children aren't stupid; that grade school children generally don't sell or use drugs, now and then.
D.A.R.E. wasted 700 million dollars on police "schooling" youth about drug culture while robbing them of precious classroom instructional time. The implication of this sort of outreach strategy using law enforcement officers on black youth holds much significance when one considers that schools in lower income areas were the initial target of the program. (at that time, police officers in schools were not altogether commonplace.) Now police are prevalent in schools, having its own set of benefits and issues.
The program was a failure, and it actually ended up making things worse in that it encouraged kids to relate to or be familiar with drugs and drug culture in a harmful way, in the perspective of sometimes negative and inappropriate direct law enforcement involvement. Sometimes, there was information shared that was too complex for the age level. Or worse, the in-class discussions that encouraged that shamed and stigmatized children before their peers that were facilitated by insensitive or bumbling officers who didn't have the training to deal with trauma and childhood psychological/psychiatric matters. Obviously, certain topics would make continuing professional development outside of the 80 hour D.A.R.E. officer curriculum a serious need.
I can personally recall my own personal negative experiences with the D.A.R.E. program and how it shaped my childhood view of "police school time" which is exactly what we called the officers who showed up before lunch in my fourth grade class time. A few bad recollections that come to mind:
- When the officer brought the briefcase full of labeled drug vials and baggies, handcuffed to himself, giving a talk about the dangers of its contents and not to touch, before showing us what was inside. He opened it in such a mysterious and dramatic fashion that could give a child the impression that drugs were fantastic things (i.e. "presto" "a magician's case", glamorising the unveiling of them. The hanging assortment of drugs on display in the attache case looked like candies to us children, and I said so, to my teachers' horror. The point was supposed to be so that we could identify the drugs, know the names and not get tricked into using them. Since substances change form, and names, this was a fail.
- That time the other kids called one kid a crackhead because he looked and dressed poorly, after the officer explained how crack was for poor people and you can get robbed by crackheads, they smoke it out of t.v. antennas after they steal your t.v. set., and the crime rate's high due to crack...yada yada.
- The day I went home feeling sad because I realized that people in my family were on drugs, and I was mad the police could take them from me because of it. Thank goodness my mama knew what to say.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not totally against school drug outreach programs and awareness, it's just common sense to have them in place. There is however, a responsible approach. It wasn't D.A.R.E., and the money spent kinda seems like a backwards investment. Like investing in the cradle to prison pipeline backwards. Some gather that the schematics of the whole drug war war were intentional. Either way, we got served.
The War on Drugs hasn't ended by a long shot for people of color in the racist social undercaste of The New Jim Crow. Children of incarcerated parents face social stigmas, "doing time" right along with their parents, paying a price they didn't deserve. Police run drug programs can normalize criminal justice interactions for children. Mass incarceration will continue to disproportionately impact black men and women as long as we allow our children to be mis-educated or undereducated about the systems, such as criminal justice, that they are subject to, as citizens of the United States of America .We as parents, not the schools, are responsible for effectively teaching children drug awareness and decision making skills. Who is to blame, really?
Whitney Houston told no lies when she said the children are our future. Clearly, the change is up to us.
