The Troubling Trend of Elementary School Arrests

For months we have been investigating problems associated with troubled youth in the state of Wyoming. Recently we published a series of reports on How to Keep Kids Out of Jail. Within this series is a piece focusing on the presence of School Resource Officers increasingly in schools.

An inflammatory news article appeared in the press just before Christmas of this year. A link to the article is provided in the table shown later in this blog. The story featured the arrest, handcuffing and detention of a juvenile offender in the state of Virginia. The juvenile in question was four years old and the behavior leading to the arrest was described as a tantrum.

Previous blogs and articles that we have written on juvenile justice issues tend to focus on children significantly older than four. Trends in arrest and incarceration in Wyoming have revealed disturbingly young arrests and incarcerations in Wyoming.

The following chart illustrates the age of juveniles incarcerated in Wyoming compared to the national age of incarcerated juveniles for 2011, the most recent year of data available from the FBI.

Arrest data is also available through the FBI but these stories on extremely young juvenile arrests run into some interesting data dead ends. The FBI data only reports on juveniles ages ten to seventeen. Incarceration data also tends to start at age ten.

In all fairness, most of the stories in the following table did not result in formalized arrests or incarcerations but we as a society must ask ourselves if arrest is the appropriate response to a misbehaving elementary school child in the first place. When police officers are installed in schools and discipline is outsourced on a regular basis, the arrest of young children appears to be an inevitable outcome.

The following research is only a handful of the readily available accounts of too-young children being restrained, arrested and criminalized in various states around the country.

These listed cases represent only a fraction of the incidents of young children being subjected to arrest, restraint and sometimes incarceration. These incidents happen so frequently in some states that they are not considered significant enough to make the local news.

According to several of the reports linked above, the parents of these children may be inadvertently making the long-term consequences for their children worse. Although these school-based police officers are behaving according to their protocols for incident handling, most of these "cases" will be dropped entirely by the time they get to court. The dismissal of these cases has to do with these children not being old enough for "criminal responsibility" according to the laws of their states.

Traumatized parents frequently want to get these damaging incidents behind them rapidly and so they pay a fine or sign a form, not realizing that by doing so they are essentially pleading guilty on behalf of their children, creating a criminal record which may well limit their child's potential for success in life.

"Once you pay it, that's a guilty plea and that's on your record," said Simpkins. "In the US we have these astronomical college and university expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no aid."

Another issue is the ongoing thread of absolute denial of any civil rights for these tiny accused criminals, as was the case of the California boy accused of sexual battery. "Oswin said his child was kept in the principal's office for two hours until he confessed. He was suspended, and a sexual battery charge was placed on his permanent school record."

Is this horrifying trend an issue for Wyoming? It is difficult to answer that question definitively. We have definite evidence of an eleven-year-old boy serving more than six months of incarceration in 2013 for alleged "assault" but we have no details to indicate whether this was a criminally troubled young man or childish playground behavior which provoked an appalling overreaction. Before Wyoming joins the states listed on the incident table in this blog, we should explore some alternative directions for in-school discipline.

According to reports on ABC news, this trend of using arrest as response to tiny temper tantrums appears to be growing: "Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more of this," Bowers said. "We're tending to want to handle these types of problems through the juvenile justice system, as opposed to getting help for these children and their families through other means."