Facts Contributing to the Cradle to Prison Pipeline
CPP_FactSheet.pdf
The Cradle to Prison Pipeline(SM) can be reduced to one simple fact: the United States of America is not a level playing field for all children.
The largest driving force of the pipeline is poverty, exacerbated by race.
At critical points in their development, from birth through adulthood, poor children, and disproportionately poor children of color, face many critical risks and disadvantages.
These multiple risks and disadvantages, when accumulated, make a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely.
They include lack of access to health and mental health care; lack of quality early education and enrichment; unstable parenting; child abuse and neglect; educational disadvantages resulting from failing schools; zero tolerance discipline policies; a culture which glorifies materialism and violence; unaddressed mental health problems; racial and economic disparities in child-serving systems; the criminalization of children at earlier ages; tougher sentencing guidelines; and too few positive alternatives to the streets and positive role models and mentors.
Without significant interventions to prevent and remove these multiple, accumulated obstacles, poor and minority youths are too often trapped in a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives and premature death.
Research on these risks and disadvantages proves that the Cradle to Prison Pipeline is a tragic reality for far too many poor children and a disproportionately high number of poor children of color.
Our country's priorities and values need resetting.
Thanks to the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty for highlighting this item.
