Perps or Pupils? Safety Policy Creates Prisonlike New York City Schools

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This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity

When Minerva Dickson first saw her high school she thought it looked like a prison. After her first week she realized how right her initial impressions were. Every day when she arrived at the Thomas Jefferson Campus in Brownsville, Brooklyn, she waited in a line that snaked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She would shuffle up two steps passing beneath words from Abraham Lincoln inscribed on the neo-classical pediment: “Let Reverence for the Laws Become the Political Religion of the Nation.”

Next, she reached into her pocket for her identification card and slid it through a machine. When it recognized her, it blurted an approving beep and a green light would flash.

Exhibit Examines the Lives of Former Foster Children

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Richard Wilkerson needs two hands to count the number of families he had as a boy. On a recent, unusually temperate summer morning, Wilkerson, 28, sat at a picnic table in the courtyard of the Long Island Children’s Museum and counted them off. All around him children scampered and squealed, shepherded around by attentive parents and summer camp counselors. There were his grandparents and the long trips from Hollis, Queens to upstate New York when he would stare out the bus window, a city kid dazzled by all that space, on his way to visit his mother in prison. Years later, there was a stint with his mother after she was released that involved a trip to a crack house that ended abruptly when he tripped on an uneven plank in the floor and was sent home bleeding.