good morning. thanks for having me. explain how putting these folks into the court system is wrong and what kind of system would you want to replace this thing? well, you know, the states that are doing this well, the states that have really focused on reforming how they handle status offenses like truancy use court as a last resort. that s not what we re seeing in texas and certainly not what we re seeing in dallas county. dallas county is prosecuting more than 36,000 of these cases every year. so the sheer volume is overwhelming. there are kids getting swept up into the system that in no way resemble what most of us would commonly see as a truant student. what do you think as your best hope to take something asma jort support or hasn t been stopped through the political system, what s the best hook to get the courts to stop it? we re really interested in working with the department of justice, with the county, with
safe harbor laws. in 2000 we became the first state, and nine states followed suit, but as mira said, 40 states to go. we are beginning to get there and in five years we will say, really, we sent 12-year-olds to jail for being bought and sold by adult men to adult men? this is not completely new and part of the reason i was so engaged with this story and wanted to talk about it is that i m the child of a woman who was a juvenile parole counselor back in the 60s and the 70s who saw young women put into the juvenile for status offenses, so they would run away from home, because they were often being sexually abused at home and run away, and then they were the ones who were criminalized, so this is not an entirely new reality. talk to me a little bit how now we may be at a moment though that we can take what we know, and this is not new, and it has
around particularly how the drug war ends up scooping folks into american prison ls. and i kept thinking in this case, that notion that the crimes for which people are being detained in this case are so often status offenses, i wonder if it raises or ought to raise our ethical concerns to an even more heightened level, not that we shouldn t also be concerned with the human rights of those who commit other sorts of crimes. it s sort of a cut to the chase question. one thing i researched in the giant war on drugs is it began in the 1800s with laws against chinese immigrants. we didn t want to put them in jail because they were chinese and racist and threat to the american jobs. so we said let s find a trn to put them in jail to thinly veil the fact that we re putting them on jail in racially social control. so we came up with opium laws they didn t say we re going to put you in jail because you re