How we're priming some kids for college — and others for prison

On the path that American children
travel to adulthood,

two institutions oversee the journey.

The first is the one we hear
a lot about: college.

Some of you may remember
the excitement that you felt

when you first set off for college.

Some of you may be in college right now.

You're feeling this excitement
at this very moment.

College has some shortcomings.

It's expensive and leaves
young people in debt.

But all in all, it's a pretty good path.

Young people emerge from college
with pride and with great friends

and with a lot of knowledge
about the world.

And perhaps most importantly,

a better chance in the labor market
than they had before they got there.

Today I want to talk about
the second institution

overseeing the journey from childhood
to adulthood in the United States.

And that institution is prison.

Young people on this journey
are meeting with probation officers

instead of with teachers.

They're going to court dates
instead of to class.

Their junior year abroad is instead
a trip to a state correctional facility.

And they're emerging from their 20s

not with degrees in business and English,

but with criminal records.

This institution is also costing us a lot,

about 40,000 dollars a year
to send a young person

to prison in New Jersey.

But here, tax payers are footing the bill

and what kids are getting
is a cold prison cell

and a permanent mark against them
when they come home

and apply for work.

There are more and more kids
on this journey to adulthood

than ever before in the United States

and that's because in the past 40 years,

our incarceration rate
has grown by 700 percent.

I have one slide for this talk,

here it is.

Here's our incarceration rate,

about 716 people per 100,000
in the population.

Here's the OACD countries.

What's more, it's poor kids
that we're sending to prison,

too many drawn from African-American
and Latino communities

so that prison now stands firmly between
the young people trying to make it

and the fulfillment of the American dream.

The problem's actually
a bit worse than this

cause we're not just sending
poor kids to prison,

we're saddling poor kids with court fees,

with probation and parole restrictions,

with low-level warrants,

we're asking them to live
in halfway houses

and on house arrest,

and we're asking them to negotiate
a police force

that is entering poor communities
of color,

not for the purposes
of promoting public safety,

but to make arrest counts,

to line city coffers.

This is the hidden underside
to our historic experiement

in punishment:

Young people worried that at any moment,

they will be stopped, searched and seized.

Not just in the streets,
but in their homes,

at school and at work.

I got interested in this other path
to adultoood

when I was myself a college student

attending the University of Pennsylvania

in the early 2000s.

Penn sits within a historic
African-American neighborhood.

So you have these two parallel
journeys going on simultaneously:

the kids attending
this elite, private university,

and the kids from
the adjacent neighborhood,

some of whom are making it to college,

and many of whom
are being shipped to prison.

In my sophomore year, I started tutoring
a young woman

who was in high school who lived
about 10 minutes away

from the university.

Soon, her cousin came home
from a juvenile detention center.

He was 15, a freshman in high school.

I began to get to know him
and his friends and family,

and I asked him what he thought
about me writing about his life

for my senior thesis in college.

This senior thesis became a disertation
at Princeton

and now a book.

By the end of my sophomore year,

I moved into the neighborhood

and I spent the next six years

trying to understand
what young people

were facing as they came of age.

The first week I spent
in this neighborhood