By Sadie
On Sunday November 11th, we had an interview scheduled to talk to Ilana Brunner who works in the Washington D.C. office of Congressman Robert “Bobby” Scott. Mr. Scott is working on a legislative called the PROMISE Act. PROMISE stands for Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support and Education. Pennsylvania invested 60 million dollars in similar programs to PROMISE and in ten years, they saved 300 million dollars. PROMISE is not a law yet but its strategies work, America just needs to recognize it. Our goal in the interview was to fortify our basic knowledge and understanding of youth incarceration as well as find the answers to some questions we had. Calling Mr. Scott’s office was a rather spontaneous thing and it really payed off. We learned a lot more about our topic, and I think we did very well working together and playing off of each other’s strengths. The fact that struck me the most was that in some places, prisons look at third grade reading scores to determine how many of those kids will drop out and eventually become part of the system in 20 years. Prisons look at 3rd grade reading scores because prior to 3rd grade children are taught how to read, but after third grade reading is used for learning. If kids can’t read by third grade, they are more likely to drop out of high school. I was really surprised that instead of helping the kids who are more likely to end up in prison at some time in their life, they look at those numbers to see how many inmates there will be and if they need to expand the prison. Ms. Brunner gave us a lot of resources, (i.e. a page of bar graphs). Next I think we should watch The Interrupters and go onto youthpromiseaction.org. It would also be cool to visit Rikers Island and get an inside view of the juvenile prison system. I would also like to find out what states have the most incarcerated youth aka top ten states because it would be interesting to know if geography had an affect on the juvenile prison rates. Overall, our fieldwork went really well.
