National Youth Justice Action Month: A call for change in the South and beyond

The South has always been different. Whether it’s the flavor of New Orleans Cajun cuisine, the way Spanish moss sways in the breeze across Florida palms, or the feeling of an HBCU homecoming in Atlanta, the South will always have a special way of doing things. It’s been said, “As the South goes, so goes the nation.” This statement not only recognizes the great potential of spaces that produced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer but is also an acknowledgment of the unique challenges the South has had to bear.

October is National Youth Justice Action Month, which demands we put a focus on youth incarceration, its root causes and its lingering impacts on the South’s next generation. On this front, the Deep South has also been unique in how it’s treated children – especially Black children – caught in the criminal legal system. There are several aspects of youth incarceration that are probably universal for any state, including stark racial disparities fueled by racist myths of Black youth criminality, a pervasive school-to-prison pipeline, and fiscal costs that dwarf the costs of enrolling a student in college.

However, only in Louisiana did we have children locked up in the former death row wing of Angola, a supermax adult prison built on former slave plantation land and known as the “bloodiest prison in the South.”

Only in Florida’s state law do we have a minimum age of arrest that doesn’t keep kids as young as 7 out of handcuffs or the back of a police car.

Only Mississippi can claim to be a national leader in both school suspensions and expulsions, suspending a Black student from public schools once every 15 minutes.

And until a recent legislative win by the Southern Poverty Law Center, only Alabama could push Black children out of school without due process and arrest them in 2024 much like Black children who faced the same fate over 60 years ago after protesting segregation during the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham.

The SPLC has dedicated a series of reports to delve into youth incarceration in the South, including research on Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. (Research on Georgia will be released in December.) The reports are designed to inform and change the dialogue around youth incarceration and recommend what the South can do about it – such as investing in alternatives to incarceration that emphasize rehabilitation and decriminalizing nonviolent offenses for youth.

Changing policies and culture that emphasize punishment over the rehabilitation of young people is not only an opportunity for the Deep South, but a responsibility to its own future. If as the South goes, so goes the nation, a change in how the South incarcerates its youth could be the beacon the rest of the country needs to see. We must push for such a change.

Delvin Davis is a senior policy analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Picture at top: A series of SPLC reports delves into the inequities of the youth legal system in the South. (Credit: SPLC)