Incarceration Culture

It’s unlike me to openly share thoughts about something as profoundly sad as the loss of a family member. However, the outpouring of concern expressed for our family as a result of Scott Godfrey’s homicide compels it. And when real explanations are so apparent, there is little need to wonder, why? So, while we wait for justice to ensue, I cannot help but to observe the looming despondency amid the youth of Pleasantville. Anytime you have significant numbers of young people more confident about their ability to navigate their way through family court than they are the graduation requirements of secondary school, you have despondency.

If we make the mistake of over sympathizing with the family of one shooting victim we was loose the moral force to make a difference in the events leading up to the next rash of violence. One day it looks like a shooting. The day prior it looks like a group assault on a student in the broad light of mid-day traffic. What will it look like tomorrow? So, I don’t want people to see Scott’s shooting as disconnected to the larger story. It is not.

This shooting is the result of an increasingly intractable disquiet over Pleasantville; one that has been long developing. Its factors are numerous and various: The struggle to improve academic achievement among students is well known. And the effect of lagging academic success leads to further economic disadvantages locally. Like a cycle, creeping poverty and unemployment rates among residents in the municipality contribute to waves of youth burglaries, assaults and robberies that blight the quality of life and summon more of the same. No, these incidents are certainly not peculiar to Pleasantville, but it seems like the city is accumulating its share more rapidly every year. And, I suspect, at a rate disproportional to the county census.

Still, examining statistics alone runs the risk of detaching people from the heart of the matter. My concern is that Pleasantville is fast becoming irrevocably victimized by a more insidious factor – an incarceration culture that competes as fiercely for the minds and loyalties of the cities’ young as do any of its learning centers, athletic clubs, or houses of worship. It is a culture that results from over exposure to the of criminal justice system. Where young people are not intimidated or ashamed by juvenile court appearances, and where release dates for young adults are regarded as ‘homecomings.’ When the stigma of being incarcerated wanes, and the coping habits of ex-offenders become common place habits among the young and not-so-young in a community, school officials find it nearly impossible to reverse its effects on education.

Needles to say, there is a role for school in the reclamation of the city’s youth. As long as children from families who worship on Sunday continue to fail academically and socially, and the children from families who worship on Friday exhibit a cavalier disregard for instruction, and when children from any background continue to exercise a reflexive defiance of those in authority, there remains a prominent place for clergy too – and anyone else who can turn around this ominous frame of mind.

The next time I am asked, how is your family doing? I may well give into my own impulse to respond honestly by saying… “Fine, Thanks. But how do you think Pleasantville is doing?”