Federal Appeals Court to Hear Birmingham School Pepper Spray Case

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A case that alleges chemical spray is overused in Birmingham, Ala., schools is headed to federal appeals court and will probably not re-emerge for at least a year. Attorneys for the school officials, resource officers and city police officers named as defendants have asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to hear two questions. First, if the case go forward as a class action; and second, if they have any official immunity. If the court decides to hear the questions, no ruling is likely for at least a year, said Ebony Howard, an attorney with the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center. She is lead attorney representing six youths who say officers on campus sprayed them with a chemical called Freeze+P for minor school-based infractions, including in one case, uncontrollable crying over being bullied.

Conditions Not Improving at Troubled Mississippi Detention Center: Juvenile Justice Expert

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According to a recent report from The Jackson Free Press, conditions at a Hinds County, Miss. youth detention center have not improved, despite a federal settlement agreement from earlier this year that sought to address and improve the facility’s problems.

In August, Leonard Dixon, a Michigan-based juvenile-justice expert, filed a federal court complaint alleging that the Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center has not complied with the provisions of a settlement that would provide juvenile detainees with mental-health evaluations, counseling sessions and improved rehabilitation options, among other services, The Jackson Free Press reported. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Disability Rights Mississippi filed the original class-action lawsuit that instigated the settlement agreement in 2011. The lawsuit further alleged that juveniles were often subject to verbal and physical abuse from staffers. Corrie Cockrell, a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi office, told The Free Press that since the settlement agreement, Hinds County officials have not addressed a number of “basic issues” at the facility, alleging that the conditions at Henley-Young remain substandard.

Sheila Bedi On a Federal Initiative to Keep Students in Schools and Off the Streets

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We all want our schools to be safe and orderly. Our teachers should be able to focus on teaching and our children should be able to focus on learning. Sadly though, the effort to instill greater discipline into our schools has backfired. Instead of creating classrooms conducive to learning, schools have enacted policies that criminalize students and force teachers to spend more time on classroom management than teaching –- an approach that better prepares students to be inmates than members of the workforce. Currently, this country imprisons 2.2 million people -– the highest incarceration rate in the world.