Destined to Fail: How Florida's Jails Deprive Children of Schooling

It’s hard for Miguel Rodriguez to forget the time he was held in the Pasco County Jail in Land O’ Lakes, Florida.

Miguel was sent into the adult system in 2009 at age 15. At the jail, there were no books, no library and no educational services offered to minors. Miguel believes the lack of school and other productive activities fostered violence, creating a fight club atmosphere.

“It was like a little dungeon,” he said.

Miguel Rodriguez

But Miguel also believes it didn’t have to be that way. Classes – or any form of education – could have gone a long way toward changing the environment.

“[I]t would have made everything a lot less violent and a lot less scary,” he said.

Unfortunately, many children held in adult jails across Florida receive little – if any – education during their confinement, this Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) review, launched in 2016, found. In most of the counties surveyed, the educational services for children, as reported, fail to meet even the basic requirements of federal and state law.

As part of this review, the SPLC submitted public records requests to school districts to determine how they are educating children in adult jails, spoke with public defenders and advocates, examined data from the U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection, and interviewed children who are or have been held in county jails.

Small Jails

In many of Florida’s smaller counties, where jails housed fewer than 20 children in 2015-16, there is no dedicated unit for children, much less a dedicated space for classes. For children held in some of these smaller counties, legal prohibitions on “sight and sound” contact with adult detainees have spurred the jails to frequently house children in solitary confinement, significantly impeding their ability to receive an education – and potentially violating federal law.

In Indian River County, for example, where in 2016 there were no more than two or three children in the county jail at any given time, they were almost always held in solitary confinement and denied educational services. The county school district had not budgeted for, among other things, a classroom, full-time teachers, or special education teachers at the jail.

Similarly, a public defender in Gadsden County reported that children transferred into the adult criminal justice system there were left in isolation for the entirety of their pre-trial detention – over six months in one case – while receiving no educational services. School districts in Gadsden and Levy counties also reported that they lacked a written agreement with the sheriff’s office to educate children at the jail.

In some instances across the state in 2016, children received worksheets but did not have access to a teacher, and the worksheets did not count toward class credit. Some counties provided worksheets to children in solitary confinement but did not even allow them to have pens or pencils to complete them.

Many smaller county jails offered only GED preparation to children. Such practices shortchange students, who often do not receive credit for their work, including GED work, when they return to their neighborhood schools. And the practices also may violate federal requirements.

In addition, with few exceptions, the smaller county jails surveyed did not provide 300 minutes of daily instruction and 180 days of instruction per year to children, which are required under Florida law. Many provided just a few hours of instruction per week.

Large Jails

Larger counties may have jails with separate units for children, but they don’t fare much better in terms of educating the children in their care. Children in Palm Beach County, for example, are regularly placed in solitary confinement to keep multiple co-defendants separate. The solitary confinement cells look into the common room where class is held, but the students in these cells cannot see anything the teacher writes on the board and have a difficult time hearing lessons through their cell doors. Interviews at the Broward County Jail uncovered similar problems.

Although most of the larger county jails provided instruction for the required length of time to children housed in the general population, several of them failed to do so for children held in solitary confinement.

Female students

The SPLC found that female students in jails – including jails with separate units for children – encounter barriers that hinder their education. Units for children are frequently limited to boys, meaning that girls under 18 are held separately in solitary confinement or in medical and mental health segregation wings.

The segregation units holding girls are not equipped for education. Failure to provide an education specifically to girls may violate Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which provides girls with the right to the kinds of opportunities that are comparable to what boys receive.

When 15-year-old D.A. was held in the Sarasota County Jail in 2015 after being charged as an adult for burglary, she experienced how girls were treated differently than boys. A community advocate told the SPLC that D.A. was held on the jail’s medical floor. She slept on a rubber mattress in a room that lacked a desk. She didn’t receive educational services, books or any materials for learning. The community advocate said this is how all girls are treated at the jail.

Children with Disabilities

Children with disabilities represent a disproportionate number of the youth in jail and have an extensive and well-defined set of legal protections. Even so, the SPLC’s review found that many do not receive the educational services to which they’re entitled.

Of the 55 out of 67 counties that responded to a records request, the SPLC found that small jails that hold fewer than 20 children per year fail to properly identify students with disabilities when they enter custody. As a result, these children receive few, if any, services. Such failures likely violate multiple federal laws.

The records produced by many of the smaller counties do not show that these children are being evaluated by the local school districts’ Exceptional Student Education (ESE) coordinator, the official responsible for ensuring that the needs of students with disabilities are being met. In addition, some existing IEPs for students in facilities were not implemented as written. In several smaller counties, IEPs already in place were altered during the course of the children’s stay at the county jail.

Larger facilities, this review found, typically have a standard practice for identifying children with IEPs when they enter custody. For the most part, the school district assigns personnel to conduct the necessary assessments and develop IEPs. The plans, much like the IEPs in smaller counties, are sometimes rewritten, however. The SPLC encountered a few instances in which the plans were effectively terminated without an IEP meeting or re-evaluation, leaving students without services.

The high cost of Florida’s failure

Children in Florida’s adult jails face a number of dangers that can have disastrous consequences for their future.

They’re in greater danger of abuse and assault, and are less likely to receive any rehabilitative services than children in juvenile facilities. They also risk falling further behind in their education. Unsurprisingly, they are more likely to re-offend upon release.

Despite these dangers, Florida’s outdated law grants prosecutors unfettered discretion to charge children as adults. Florida is not only out of step with the rest of the United States as a result, but it also charges more children as adults than any other state in the country.

Under current Florida law, these children must be housed in adult jail while awaiting disposition of their cases. It’s a process that can take months and, in some cases, years.

And the price is high for everyone involved. Incarceration of young people increases their chances of dropping out of high school. Research shows that shortchanging the education of children has negative consequences. Failure to obtain a diploma reduces their prospects of future employment and economic independence.

Children and the Florida Criminal Justice System

When examining the issue of children in the corrections system, it’s important to acknowledge that the legal system recognizes that children are different from adults in a number of fundamental ways.

The U.S. and Florida Supreme Courts have each recognized that children lack the same maturity as adults; have less education and less life experiences to draw upon when assessing the consequences, risks, and propriety of their behavior; are more susceptible to negative societal and peer influence; and have not reached full psychological and physical brain development. Such limitations diminish a child’s level of culpability and also increase the likelihood of rehabilitation with the right interventions and supports.

Florida, like all other states, maintains a separate justice system for children who break the law. The state constitution provides that “a child ... may be charged with a violation of law as an act of delinquency instead of crime.”

Florida statutes make clear that the purpose of this specialized juvenile justice system is “to increase public safety by reducing juvenile delinquency through effective prevention, intervention, and treatment services that strengthen and reform the lives of children; ... to provide an environment that fosters healthy social, emotional, intellectual, educational, and physical development; to ensure secure and safe custody; and to promote the health and well-being of all children under the state’s care.”

This statement of purpose is nothing new. When Florida lawmakers wrote those words, they were keeping with an old tradition – the rehabilitative tradition that goes back to the founding of the juvenile justice system more than a century ago.

Yet Florida law currently allows some children to be removed from the delinquency system and tried as adults. Specifically, prosecutors may choose to transfer children ages 14 and 15 charged with certain felonies and children ages 16 and 17 charged with any felony to adult court.

This means that an eighth-grader can be charged as an adult with robbery for taking another child’s bike, phone or lunch, or with burglary for entering a garden shed or abandoned house and taking anything of value; if the child has a pocket knife, he or she can be charged with armed burglary. A 10th-grader can be charged as an adult for those same acts, as well as for any other felony, such as stealing a cell phone or video game system or taking a car without permission.

As noted earlier, Florida prosecutors try more children in adult court than any other state – more than 1,100 in fiscal year 2016-17. The vast majority are “direct files,” meaning that the state attorney exercised his or her sole discretion to prosecute the child as an adult, without any input from a judge or the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ). In a significant number of child transfer cases, about one-third in fiscal year 2015-16, transfer to adult court is mandated by law.

Adult Jail vs. the Juvenile Justice System

When a child is transferred to adult court and prosecuted as an adult, he or she goes into the adult carceral system. As outlined in this report, adult prisons and jails are ill-equipped to handle children and provide for their education and rehabilitation. In short, jail is no place for a child.

By contrast, the Florida juvenile justice system is at least designed by law to focus on children’s capacity for rehabilitation, with the guiding principles that “prevention and education are paramount.” Further, the Legislature has mandated that children in the juvenile justice system be guaranteed “equal opportunity and access to quality and effective education, which will meet the individual needs of each child.” 

Federal law provides similar guarantees. Any facilities receiving Title I, Part D funds must, to the extent feasible, ensure that youth in juvenile justice residential facilities have the same opportunities to meet academic content standards and achievement standards as they would have if they were enrolled in a regular public school.

Because of its mandated focus on education and rehabilitation, the DJJ operates an Office of Education, which is meant to coordinate with the Florida Department of Education and with district school boards to ensure that children in DJJ custody receive an education.

The Legislature instructed the DJJ to “implement procedures to ensure that educational support activities are provided throughout the juvenile justice continuum,” including “mentoring, tutoring, group discussions, homework assistance, library support, designated reading times, independent living, personal finance, and other appropriate educational activities.” Further, a child’s school records and IEP or 504 Plan  are included in planning treatment objectives while in DJJ custody.

Children in Adult Jails Have Education Rights

Children charged with a crime who are being held in jail are legally entitled to access education under federal and state law. Florida law requires school districts to offer educational services to minors in custody who have not graduated from high school and to students with disabilities under 22 who are in custody and lack a high school diploma.

The law requires the county sheriff to notify the local school district when a child under 21 is admitted to the jail; the sheriff and school district must develop a cooperative agreement reflecting the notification requirement and the provision of educational services reflecting each entity’s legal obligations. All children, no matter where they are educated, are entitled to 300 minutes of instruction per day and 180 days of instruction per year.

In addition, federal law makes clear that incarcerated children have a right to access education. Recipients of Title I, Part D funds, as described above, must ensure that all children in facilities have access to comparable opportunities as those educated outside of facilities. States and localities also have comparability of services obligations when it comes to providing services equitably for boys and girls in custody; under Title IX, girls in facilities have comparability rights and cannot be assigned to opportunities that are based on gender stereotypes.

States and localities also have obligations to English Learner (EL) students. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and under the Equal Education Opportunities Act of 1974, education agencies cannot, among other things, discriminate on the basis of a student’s national origin and language status, and must take “appropriate action” to overcome EL students’ language barriers so that they can meaningfully participate in their schools’ educational programs. To that end, facilities must provide these students with an educationally sound and effective educational program, and afford meaningful access to all of the facility’s educational programs.

Separately, children with disabilities have a number of education rights that they retain no matter where they are held. As the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services clarified in 2014, “the fact that a student has been charged with or convicted of a crime does not diminish his or her substantive rights or the procedural safeguards and remedies provided under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to students with disabilities and their parents.”

Under IDEA, and similarly under other federal disability rights laws (i.e., Section of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, also known as the ADA), each child with a disability is entitled to various forms of evaluation and assistance. This includes assessment to determine which services are necessary to allow the child to fully access education and the receipt of those support services in a timely and consistent manner.

Facilities also must reasonably modify their policies, practices and procedures to account for children’s disabilities, and must educate children in the most integrated, least restrictive setting appropriate to their needs.

Under disability rights laws, the state has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that an education is made available to all eligible students with disabilities. The state educational agency must monitor and enforce implementation of the act to ensure compliance with the law. Similarly, Section 504 binds all recipients of federal financial assistance, which includes many justice facilities. The ADA also requires public entities, including states and local governments, to administer their programs without the purpose or effect of discriminating on the basis of disability.