Using boot camps, prisons to control black children

Using boot camps, prisons to control black children

By Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Tribune Media Services
Published May 16, 2006

So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.

We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a doctor so inept he wasn't technically a doctor (he had allowed his license to lapse) when he issued the report. A doctor so inept he once described a person he autopsied as having "unremarkable" testes. The person was a woman.

Siebert claimed that after being hit, manhandled and choked by guards Jan. 5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City, Fla., the 14-year-old Anderson died of sickle cell trait, a genetic blood disorder carried by 1 in 12 Americans of African heritage. That finding has been roundly hooted by real doctors, who say it is unlikely in the extreme the condition could lead to death. Recently, a new autopsy told a different story. Dr. Vernard Adams, Tampa's chief medical examiner, found that the teen died because guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia.

Just so you know, Martin Lee Anderson was an A and B student, good at math. He wound up in the boot camp after he took his grandmother's car for a joy ride.

In other words, hardly the second coming of Al Capone.

As it happens, news of how he died came almost simultaneously with news of another appalling mistreatment of children in detention. According to a report from an advocacy group, the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, more than 100 teenagers were left locked in a flooded prison in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They had to scramble to the top bunks to avoid drowning. They went up to five days with nothing to eat or drink. Some drank floodwater. Many had not been convicted of any crime.

And, the vast majority was, like Anderson, black. While New Orleans was about 67 percent black, the report says the prison was well over 95 percent black. No surprise. Human Rights Watch reports that black people are more than eight times as likely to wind up behind bars as whites.

It is telling how mutely we absorb that fact, which gives tacit approval to this means of controlling a population whose mere existence we have historically found threatening and inconvenient.

In the Jim Crow years, the institutions of government and society could hardly have been more brazen in pursuit of that goal. White teachers told black students they should aspire to no goal higher than to work as janitors and cooks. White cops turned black suspects over to lynch mobs.

It could never happen that way in this enlightened era, of course. And yet, it happens in other ways. A 2002 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says black kids are labeled as emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded and shipped off to special-education classes at rates of up to four times those of white kids. A 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice Department tells us that, of people who've never done time in juvenile facilities, a black drug defendant is 48 times more likely to be jailed than a white one with the same record.

The means have changed, but the end--repression, control--remains the same.

Granted, there may have been some white kids in that fetid, flooded prison. There were certainly some in that brutal boot camp. Yet, it's no accident African-American children are always so well represented in those lousy places.

So our concern for them now feels--well, let's call it belated. And self-deluding.

Those children were right where we wanted them to be.

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E-mail: lpitts@miamiherald.com