Profiteering and Union-Busting Repackaged as School Reform

This is one of those stories that shows how far some people will go in America to make a buck—even if it means profiting at the expense of children, or exploiting the legacy of the civil rights movement.

Stand for Children is an unassuming name for an organization.  Just taken at face value, one would conclude that the Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit aspires to accomplish what the title suggests.  Their website says SFC is “an innovative, grassroots child advocacy organization.  Our mission is to use the power of grassroots action to help all children get the excellent public education and strong support they need to thrive.  Our members believe we need to stand up for our children now - particularly for their education from pre-school through high school - to create a better future for America.”

Now, that all sounds good, until you dig deeper.  The cofounder and CEO of SFC, Jonah Edelman, is the son of Marian Wright Edelman, the well-respected civil rights activist and head of the Children’s Defense Fund.  Critics charge that Stand for Children started out on the right side of the issues, devoting itself to progressive issues such as class sizes, affordable children’s healthcare and adequate funding for schools.  But then, things changed when they started taking the money, and lots of it— from wealthy interests who arguably care nothing about poor children of color in the inner cities, and care a great deal about a vision of privatization that extracts profit from the public schools. 

In an infamous YouTube video that went viral, Edelman discussed his strategy in Illinois at a July 10 Aspen Institute event.  That strategy was essentially to mislead the teachers unions, do a number on them, and pay off the state legislators to pass SB7, an extensive school reform bill.  The original bill would have stripped teachers of their right to strike, eliminated seniority as a factor in layoffs, and denied teachers their due process rights that come with tenure.  What this has to do with the interests of children is anybody’s guess.  A weaker version of the bill that passed still undermined labor rights by restricting seniority and the right to strike. 

Typically, when Edelman goes into a state, he sets up a PAC, raises a ton of money and hires the best lobbyists money can buy.  He benefits from his mother’s rolodex and the cache her name and reputation bring to the table.  SFC spreads money around in the community, in an attempt to soften up the black clergy and community leaders and get them on board as partners.  And they bribe public officials to pass union-busting legislation.

In Illinois, SFC raised $3 million late last year and hired 11 lobbyists.  They approached Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan—who failed to garner union support that year for passing pension reform— and donated $610,000 to nine state campaigns in both major parties. 

And Edelman attended a community meeting of black Chicago clergy with what observers have called a “slick dog and pony show.”  But the pastors didn’t take the bait.  According to Rev. Robin Hood, executive director of Clergy Committed to Community, SFC wasn’t the least bit interested in the concerns of the black community.

“One of the schools I’m working in has serious problems.  Their organizer wasn’t concerned about that, they were interested in getting people to see [the film] Waiting for Superman,” Rev. Hood said of SFC.  “Waiting for Superman did not fly here in Chicago.  It wasn’t a hit like they thought it was going to be.  It was about taking away the rights of unions to organize.  In the communities we live in we need living wage jobs,” he said.  “Most of these parents have been arguing about how we don’t have books in school.  Those are not the things Stand for Children were talking about.  They were talking about taking power from teachers,” Hood added.

From the start, Rev. Hood found Edelman and his group disrespectful and arrogant, with dollar signs and union-bashing on their mind. “I found they were anti-union when we met with Stand for Children.  It was all about money, it was nothing about children.  That’s why they had to build a grassroots component.  They did a switch up while they were working here,” he said. 

Although SFC spread around a lot of money in Chicago communities, Rev. Hood emphasized that not one of the pastors in his group would take any of it.  “How much money do you people have?” he asked rhetorically of Edelman.  “First they said they are doing political advocacy, and using community organizations as their base.  Six months later they said ‘we got our own base now.’  Then they gave $3 million to state legislators,” he noted.

“Instead of advocating they became lobbyists,” Rev. Hood concluded. 

Rev. Hood also shared his thoughts on the recent fallout from Edelman’s comments at Aspen.  “As much money as they put out, I didn’t think they would self-destruct,” Hood said.  “On a personal level, it was interesting to see him self-destruct, and I knew they weren’t focused on changing things for the children.  They were union busting and making money off the backs of our kids.”  Moreover, Rev. Hood believed Edelman’s public disclosure of his machinations with Speaker Madigan was particularly damaging.  “Speaker Mike Madigan is the most powerful man in the state.  The Governor doesn’t have that power.  To say what he [Edelman] did to him [Madigan] is what the Japanese call hari-kari.”

To put Jonah Edelman and his operations in perspective, just follow the money.  Susan Barrett quit her volunteer leadership position at SFC in Portland because wealthy investors are now driving the organization.  “I want to make sure that people pay close attention to who is on the SFC board, where their money is coming from, and think critically about whether or not the agendas they are promoting will bring the results parents and community members hope for in public education,” Barrett recently wrote.

SFC’s Illinois PAC amassed the state’s largest war chest, just days before new caps on state campaign contributions went into effect.  Those new restrictions limit individual contributions to $10,000, with $20,000 from corporations.  All of the contributions to SFC were five- and six-figure amounts, including $250,000 from the billionaire Pritzker family, and $500,000 from Ken Griffin, CEO of the Citadel Group and bankroller of GOP state candidates.  Sam Zell, owner of Tribune Co., contributed $100,000.  Meanwhile, of the $610,000 that Edelman gave to legislative candidates, his PAC handed over $175,000—a record for Illinois— to Republican state House candidate Ryan Higgins, who lost his contest.

Stand for Children’s donor list is quite impressive, and equally revealing.  For example, last year SFC received a $3.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation, its largest donor.  The Walton Family Foundation—of Walmart anti-union fame—chipped in $1.4 million.  And New Profit Inc., with ties to a firm running Muammar Gaddafi’s PR campaign, has donated nearly $1.5 million in recent years.       

Meanwhile, the SFC board of directors consists of venture philanthropists and private equity investors, including the extremely wealthy and powerful.  One would think that a “grassroots child advocacy organization” would have at least a token of community representation on its board, including educators and child advocates of color.  Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, is a board member, as is Emma Bloomberg, daughter of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Mayor Bloomberg, who is pro-charter school and seems to claim personal ownership of New York’s public schools, has a history of placing ill-prepared corporate types in charge of the nation’s largest—and mostly black and brown— school system.  Bloomberg’s most immediate past schools chancellor, a magazine executive named Cathleen Black, had no experience in education whatsoever.  During her brief and painful stint as chancellor, Black offended many with her jaw-dropping remarks, which included addressing shortages in classroom space by asking “Could we just have some birth control for a while?  It could really help us all out a lot.” 

Black’s predecessor, Joel Klein, now Rupert Murdoch’s deputy at News Corp., is overseeing an investigation into the company’s infamous phone hacking scandal.  Klein is the head of Murdoch’s new education technology business, which Murdoch plans to spend $1 billion to build.      

But the larger picture here is that corporate education reform is big business.  And the rightwing, plutocratic agenda— of school privatization, government austerity measures and deunionization— clashes with the needs of poor, working class, and disproportionately black and brown public school students.  

“What I can say personally is their true colors came out.  He won’t get a base in my community.”  Rev. Hood said defiantly of Edelman.  “We need to educate our kids, not get rich folks richer.  These are the same people that don’t want you to have a living wage and adequate housing.”    

Meanwhile, the education reformers, armed with a pocketful of billionaire money, rip off communities of color.  And as they buy off legislatures, they come off looking like the saviors of the black and brown children they just pimped.     

“I wish I could be wrong, but I think they’ll be back for vouchers,” Rev. Hood offered on a cautionary note.  “They’ll be back with a sad sack of legislators to write a bill for vouchers.” 

New York's Juvenile Prisons Are A Crime

If you can judge a society by the way it treats its children, then New York fails in a big way. In fact, the Empire State should be found guilty of child abuse and neglect.

The New York Times recently reported on the deplorable state of New York's juvenile justice system. Gov. David Paterson appointed a task force to look into the matter. A draft report prepared by the task force--a stinging indictment of the state's treatment of juveniles in state custody--comes three months after a federal investigation found constitutional violations at four facilities. The abuse was so severe, including broken bones, concussions, knocked-out teeth and other injuries, that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) threatened to take over the prison system.

The task force was assembled as a result of years of complaints, and incidents such as the death of an emotionally-disturbed 15-year-old boy after he was pinned down by prison staff. The bottom line is that New York's juvenile centers are broken, expensive, unfair and a failure.

It is shocking that the state spends close to $210,000 per year to incarcerate a youth. More than 1,600 juveniles enter the system each year. In these days of budget cuts, shortfalls and economic triage, that is money that will not go to that child's education and development. What does the taxpayer, or the juvenile, for that matter, actually get for $210,000? Not much, it appears. Although the system was meant for those juveniles who are a danger to society if not themselves, there is no system to assess whether they are a risk to public safety. Over half of the children are placed in these detention centers for misdemeanor offenses such as drug possession, truancy and theft. And three-quarters of those youths who are released from custody return within three years.

Many of these children have problems that are not being addressed, including developmental disabilities, drug or alcohol addiction problems, and mental illness. But the facilities are understaffed, with only 55 psychologists and clinical social workers, and absolutely no psychiatrists that can prescribe medication. Moreover, juveniles are locked up with violent adult criminals and susceptible to physical abuse, while staff use force as a form of discipline for the most minor infractions.

Race and the criminal justice system are inseparable, and the New York system is proof of that. Blacks and Latinos are less than half of the state's juvenile population. Yet, at over 80 percent, black and Latino youth are the overwhelming majority of the occupants of its juvenile prisons. And while seventy-six percent of these children come from the New York City area, they are imprisoned upstate, far away from their families, out of reach, and accessible only through a great expense. With a median age of 16 and one-third of them reading on a third grade level, they have learned nothing in a school system that has failed them. Not surprisingly, they receive no education in these centers.

"The DOJ report makes clear what many system stakeholders have been saying for a very long time: namely, that New York's juvenile justice system is failing in its mission to nurture and care for young people in state custody," the task force said of the previous federal investigation. "The state's punitive, correctional approach has damaged the future prospects of these young people, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, and violated the fundamental principles of positive youth development." Further, the task force concluded that New York State is endangering the public by placing thousands of children in these facilities.

The report concludes that institutionalizing youth should only be used as a last resort for small percentage of them, and to protect public safety. In those cases, the goal should be to rehabilitate them, rather than harm or harden them. Some of the recommendations made in the report include reducing the use of institutional placement; addressing the racial disparities; reinvesting in communities, expanding community-based alternatives to institutional placement; funding education and mental health treatment programs that prepare juveniles for release and reentry, and creating a system of transparency and accountability.

For those who are familiar with the dysfunction and inequities of the criminal justice system, this report should not be surprising. This author has no shortage of commentaries written on this very subject. Nevertheless, this report should shock the conscience of expert and layperson alike. In poor communities and communities of color, children are funneled through a cradle-to-prison pipeline, as the Children's Defense Fund so effectively reported in recent years. With a broken education and no employment opportunities, these children are being set up for a life behind bars. Schools are a holding pattern for prisons, and with metal detectors and armed police with the power to arrest, many urban schools resemble prisons. Society's answer is to incarcerate more and more people, and to criminalize and punish at a younger age. This tragic situation plays itself out throughout the nation, with the same results. And as the nation with the world's largest prison population, what does America have to show for it?

Gov. Paterson's task force report provides a warning not only to New York concerning its miserable juvenile justice system, but to other states as well. And in the end, they should be applauded for finding constructive solutions to a problem that should concern us all. In Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, California, Texas and everywhere else, no longer can we ignore the consequences of our inaction.

On the Criminalization of Black Motherhood

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 8, 2008

On this Mother’s Day, it is fitting that we take time to think of all of the mothers, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately of color, who are behind bars in the United States. Victims of a failed war on drugs, pawns in a for-profit prison scheme that requires more and more warm bodies, locked up, to boost the bottom line, Black women are the fastest growing demographic in America’s prisons. They are twice as likely as Latina women, and three times as likely as White women to be incarcerated.

Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2000, African American children (7.0%) were almost nine times as likely to have a parent in prison as White children (0.8%), while Latino children (2.6%) were three times as likely as white children to have a parent in prison.

And in a related matter, according to the Children’s Defense Fund at least 58 percent of children in foster care are children of color. Of this, Black children are 35 percent of children in foster care, even though they are only 16 percent of the population. Latino children make up 17 percent of foster children; 2 percent of the foster care population are American Indian/Native American children, although they represent only 1 percent of the general population, and 1 percent is Asian Pacific Islander.

In a 2002 opinion in Nicholson v. Scoppetta - which involved a class action suit by battered women against New York City’s unjust child welfare policies - federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein characterized the excessive removal of children from their homes as “a form of slavery.” According to Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts in a Colorlines magazine article, the role of racism in the child welfare system is a national disgrace: “Most white children who enter the system are permitted to stay with their families, avoiding the emotional damage and physical risks of foster care placement, while most black children are taken away from theirs. And once removed from their homes, black children remain in foster care longer, are moved more often, receive fewer services, and are less likely to be either returned home or adopted than any other children.”

In a society that seeks retribution, punishment and profit rather than rehabilitation and preservation of families as a desirable goal, women of color are penalized for their race, their gender, and even their motherhood. Women of color are more likely than White women to be monitored and supervised by the state, and more likely to experience state control over their bodies and their children. Call it a holdover from slavery, when Black women had no right to privacy, were violated at will, and could not make decisions regarding themselves, their bodies or their families.

Some states have enacted laws which criminalize drug-dependent expectant mothers and violate their civil liberties. Women’s eNews reported that eighteen states have laws that are racially discriminatory and potentially interfere with a woman's reproductive rights. Penalties may include arrest and termination of their parental rights. Driven by hysteria and misinformation regarding the so-called “crack baby” epidemic, these laws first became popular during the 1980s.

South Carolina was the first state to uphold the criminal conviction of a woman who has taken drugs while pregnant. In South Carolina v. Whitner (1997), that state’s highest court affirmed that child abuse laws apply to the behavior of a mother while the fetus is in her womb, and she may be prosecuted for harm to her viable fetus. In 1992, Cornelia Whitner was sentenced to eight years for unlawful child neglect— smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy.

In 1989, a group of prosecutors in South Carolina, in cooperation with the police and public hospitals, decided to start punishing pregnant women who test positive for cocaine—most of them African American women who sought prenatal care. Proponents claimed the law was designed as a “family-friendly” measure to stop pregnant women from abusing drugs and to improve the health of the baby. Studies have shown the opposite: Such laws deter women from seeking prenatal care and the limited drug treatment that is available because they are afraid of going to jail.

Cocaine is by no means the leading cause of birth defects. Alcohol abuse is responsible for more birth defects. Tobacco is particularly damaging, as is poverty, malnutrition, stress and exposure to lead.

And the prosecution of pregnant women for drug use takes us down a slippery slope that leads to a logical conclusion of criminalizing alcohol and tobacco use.

But the issue is not a pregnant woman’s right to take drugs, but whether African Americans are accorded the same constitutional rights as everyone else. The issue is whether the state can intrude in the reproductive lives of women. Drugs already are illegal, and child abuse charges amount to piling on. Treatment for their disease, proper prenatal care and mental health services, rather than criminalization, will help make these mothers’ lives whole and productive. And as the Drug Policy Alliance has reported, “removing a child from his family may cause serious psychological damage - damage more serious than the harm intervention is supposed to prevent.”

Critics decry a police mentality that allows the state to monitor the behavior of parents, and all-too-readily separate parents from their children, rather than deal with systemic social ills. “Child welfare policy and practice in the United States can't be understood fully in isolation of other larger social phenomena in our country,” says NYU law professor Martin Guggenheim, author of What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights, in a PBS Frontline interview. “We are a country that proclaims a child-loving philosophy, which is belied by harsh statistics that suggest for an advanced, industrialized country, we do very poorly by and for our children. We have a shockingly high infant mortality rate; we have known environmental pollution conditions in many, many industrialized cities, in which children suffer from life-threatening asthma at shockingly high rates; we have inadequate housing; we have inadequate income assistance for many, many children in this country. Given our relative wealth, one could say objectively we are one of the poorest distributors of income to children in any advanced country. We have the highest rate of poverty among children in any advanced country.”

Malissa Ann Crawley, a mother of three healthy children, was one of the women prosecuted under the South Carolina law who petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. She was sentenced to five years for testing positive for cocaine during pregnancy. At Crawley’s hearing, the judge remarked: “I’m sick and tired of these girls having these bastard babies on crack cocaine and until they change the law, the law they gave me, it said I could put them in jail.”

The Drug Policy alliance also noted that the Whitner decision “gave law enforcement a green light to arrest and prosecute pregnant women for child abuse who suffered from drug and alcohol dependence. The decision also opened the doors for prosecuting women for homicide by child abuse, as in the case of South Carolina vs. Regina McKnight.”

Also commenting on the devastating effect of Whitner, National Advocates for Pregnant Women says that infant mortality in South Carolina increased for the first time in a decade. In addition, the state has experienced a 20 percent increase in abandoned babies, and there has been a dramatic decline in the number of women seeking drug treatment program services.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Whitner case on appeal. But in 2001, the nation’s highest court decided in Ferguson v. City of Charleston that a public hospital violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by performing drug tests on women, and reporting the results of the tests to the police without the woman’s consent. Nevertheless, the criminalization of women struggling with addiction continues with the promulgation of unjust laws.

Punishing pregnant women for their addiction is unconscionable public policy. Locking up the mother, purportedly to save the baby, is primarily a violation against the Black mothers who are targeted, as well as their families and communities. But ultimately, it is an attack on us all.

The Clinton Monster, Unleashed

By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator
March 13, 2008

In desperation, some people will say and do anything to get a vote.

Under the military principle of scorched earth, an advancing army will proceed to destroy anything of use to its enemy, including infrastructure, land and natural resources, food supply, transportation, what have you.

Observing Hillary Clinton and her conduct in the presidential race against Barack Obama, I cannot help but make comparisons with a scorched earth strategy. Clinton, it seems, has concluded that if she is going down, she is taking everyone down with her. Not only is she destroying her party’s chances of victory in the White House, more importantly, she is killing the best opportunity of a progressive-led governing coalition this nation has seen in generations.

In a prior commentary, “Clintons, Your Black Pass Is Hereby Revoked,” I decried the use of the race card by Hillary and Bill Clinton in South Carolina and the early primary season. But since that time - with Obama as the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination - the Clinton camp has become even more guileful and grimier in its tactics. Machiavelli would be proud. Karl Rove is somewhere blushing.

As Senator Clinton said of the attack, “Well, now the fun part starts.” Her goal, of course, is to do anything that will mess up her rival, politically disfigure him, assassinate his character, and render him unusable damaged goods.

And she will throw Obama under the bus, to be sure. But so, too, will she sacrifice the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the poor, labor, people of color, the folks she and her husband eschewed while in the White House, and as leaders of the conservative, corporatist Democratic Leadership Council. Evidence of the Clinton “kitchen sink” strategy abounds:

• There was the talk from the Clinton camp of Obama being unfit for presidency because of his youthful drug use.

• There was the photo of him dressed in traditional Kenyan clothing during his visit to Africa, allegedly leaked by a Clinton staffer. And there were the suggestions that Obama is a Muslim, an attempt by the Clinton campaign to tap into and capitalize on this nation’s anti-Muslim sentiment.

• At the time of the South Carolina primary, President Clinton, acting as his wife’s hatchet man, compared Obama to Jesse Jackson. The statement, designed to peg Obama as a Black candidate with no widespread appeal, was made at the suggestion of Clinton campaign manager Mark Penn.

• Senator Clinton has heaped praise on Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, and touted his qualifications for president, while denigrating Obama, the probable Democratic nominee. Stating that she and McCain are qualified and have the experience to be president, but Obama is not, suggests either that Clinton would endorse McCain over Obama, or she is trying out for the GOP vice presidential spot. Meanwhile, President Clinton suggested that a Clinton-Obama ticket would be “unstoppable,” with frontrunner Obama, of course, at the bottom.

A cornerstone of the Clintonian narrative is that she possesses the requisite experience, that she will be ready for the job on “day one,” ready for the emergency phone call at 3 A.M. (as if a president does not rely on an army of advisors – and who wears a business suit to bed?). On the one hand, she provides scant evidence of the vast experience she claims to possess, particularly in the area of foreign policy. On the other hand, to be sure, Clinton does have experience of a different kind, albeit not the type she would care to publicize. For example:

• Sen. Clinton endorsed the disastrous, deadly and costly Iraq war, a cynical move to bolster her national security image. A gender card carrying, faux feminist who will cry when her career is at stake, she has not shed a tear for the multitudes of widows and orphans created by this war, or the thousands upon thousands of women and children who were killed in this war.

• With a lifetime of commitment to serving corporations, she is the leading recipient of lobbyist money of any presidential candidate.

• Poor when they came to the White House in 1993, the Clintons have amassed great wealth through public service and associations with sketchy individuals. Sen. Clinton lent her campaign $5 million of her own money. They are reluctant to disclose their tax returns, or reveal the list of contributors to the Clinton Presidential Library.

• As first lady, Clinton was put in charge of healthcare reform, an abysmal failure. Arrogant, secretive and unwilling to be a team player who works well with others, she refused to allow potential political allies into the process. This allowed foes to paint healthcare reform as socialized medicine, dead on arrival.

• With their approval of the welfare reform bill in 1996, under the GOP Contract With America, the Clintons betrayed and alienated Marian Wright Edelman, their friend at the Children’s Defense Fund. Her husband Peter Edelman, who at that time was a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services, resigned from his position. “His goal was re-election at all costs,” Mr. Edelman wrote of Bill Clinton. “Whatever his rationalizations, he was at bottom interested only in himself. His political approach was not to calculate the risks but to take no risks at all.” Edelman elaborated: “He has tended generally to make things worse for the politically powerless. …His penchant for elevating shadow over substance has hurt poor children.”

There is a consensus that, barring some unlikely and unforeseeable circumstances, Clinton mathematically cannot overtake Obama in pledged delegates and win the nomination, even with a Michigan and Florida revote. Her only pathway to the nomination is through thievery, that is, destroying Obama, and strong-arming the super-delegates into throwing their support behind her second-place candidacy in the dead of night.

The party elders may try to convince themselves that when this happens, all of the Democratic constituents will come together and rally behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton. Guess again. Obama - who has drawn millions of new people into the process, including independents, Democrats, Republicans and young people - is the stronger candidate against McCain in the general election. These Obama supporters, who, if organized, could form the basis of a new grassroots multiracial movement in this nation, will not roll over for the establishment this time around. Nor will the specter of a new McBush administration scare them into voting for the evil of two lessers.

And African Americans - who have rejected the Clintons’ racialized politics, never to return to the fold - will see once again that when Black folks get into the game, they are told they are not ready, that they are unqualified, and must take a back seat. Suddenly, the rules are changed.

Deprived of its core, this would signal the death of the Democratic Party, as people finally realize that the two major parties, siding with the establishment and entrenched corporate power, represent a difference without a distinction.

Ultimately, under this scenario, Clinton will emerge as a candidate with high negatives, an inherently defective product and damaged brand name, with half of the population who simply will not vote for her. Combined with a Republican base energized to defeat her, she would lose the general election in a landslide, and rightly so.

The vetted, tested and entrenched Clinton not only mocks Obama’s positive message of change and hope, of people working together to get things done, of divesting ourselves of the old ways and doing things differently. She also stands diametrically opposed to what Obama represents in this campaign, and disregards and dismisses his supporters, and the promise they represent.

The Clintons have created a monster this election season, out of their arrogance, their sense of entitlement, their lust for power for power’s sake, and their insistence on dynastic succession. Had Obama lost 11 straight contests, he would be a footnote in political history. Clinton remains in the race because the Clintons are the establishment, they own the party, they hold onto politicians in their hip pocket. And in a cynical power play, they would patronizingly offer the Black frontrunner and likely nominee the VP slot.

Progressives were fooled once by the Clintons, but woe upon us if we let it happen again.

From cradle to jail in America

BY DAVID A. LOVE
Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service
November 26, 2007

America is failing its most vulnerable children.

The United States does not provide a level playing field for all children and does not protect all young lives equally, says a recent report by the Children's Defense Fund.

Poor children and children of color, in particular, "already are in the pipeline to prison before taking a single step or uttering a word," the report states. Many youth in juvenile detention facilities have never been on the track to college or a successful life. "They were not derailed from the right track; they never got on it," the organization says.

Much of the problem is due to poverty, and children of color are more likely to be afflicted. One-quarter of Latino children and one-third of black children are poor. Black children are more than three times as likely as white children to be born into poverty, and are more than four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, according to the report.

For millions of poor children, failed by their families, the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system, a life of prison awaits them. Prison is the only universally guaranteed program for children in America, the study notes, as America increasingly criminalizes its youth, and spends nearly three times as much per prisoner as it does per student. This, in a country with 2.3 million prisoners, the world's largest inmate population, and more prisoners than China, a nation that has four times as many people as the United States.

And those who are incarcerated are disproportionately of color, products of a society that has neglected and marginalized them. Children of color are more likely to be placed in programs for mental retardation, placed in foster care, more likely to be suspended, left back a grade, and drop out of school. And youth of color, 39 percent of the juvenile population, are 60 percent of incarcerated juveniles, according to the report.

A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. A Latino boy has a one in six chance. Today, as a result of unfair drug laws and draconian sentencing, failing schools and a lack of opportunity, 580,000 black men -- many of them fathers -- are doing time in state and federal prisons, while only 40,000 graduate from college each year, an astonishing statistic.

All of this comes down to a lack of commitment by our society, misplaced priorities and squandered resources. The Children's Defense Fund makes a number of recommendations for dismantling the cradle-to-prison pipeline, including full funding of Head Start, making sure that children can read by the fourth grade, ensuring health insurance for all pregnant women, eradicating child poverty by 2015, eliminating hunger and providing jobs with a living wage.

The money is available. These and other recommendations are estimated to cost around $75 billion, with $55 billion to eradicate child poverty, the Children's Defense Fund says. Repealing the tax cuts for the top 1 percent richest people would provide $57 billion. And to put things in perspective, the war in Iraq has cost more than $450 billion through 2007, about $100 billion a year.

The price -- $500 billion -- that America must pay in lost productivity because of its 13 million impoverished children should give all of us sticker shock. America cannot afford the cost of allowing these children to suffer.

A nation is best judged by the manner in which it treats its children. America's treatment of children is shameful. Now is the time to clean up our act and give all kids an equal chance in life.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love