Many of you have come to us expressing concern after a media flurry about upcoming changes to Missouri’s criminal laws.
Recently, these changes have been reported out of context as requiring students as young as five to be charged with felonies for ordinary discipline issues that should be handled by the schools.
These upcoming changes will likely not affect the result of the existing laws.
It has been the law that children can be charged as adults, but these cases are extremely rare (less than a quarter of a percent). Those children must go through the juvenile justice system and be certified as adults before they can be tried for a felony.
Missouri schools increasingly attempt to address student behavior problems by outsourcing discipline management strategies to law enforcement. This is where we have the deepest concerns.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a very real problem in Missouri -- the state has the highest rate of school discipline disparity in the nation. Black students are three times as likely to be suspended or expelled for comparable disturbances as white students. This unequal treatment makes it harder for these young people to succeed as adults.