Opinion: Orange County should reinvest from jail to schools

This month, a Charlotte-based architecture firm began designing a new jail for Orange County, which would increase its capacity by 87 compared to the current structure.

Propaganda describing the humanity in a new jail is based upon the premise that containing human beings like chattel can be humane. What good is a more “humane” penal institution, when additional counseling and wellness, solar panels and wider hallways will not lower the number of black and Latino/a folks subject to detainment or harassment by police?

Implementing “green” technologies obscures the racialized underpinnings of jails and prison, rather than offering a solution accountable to high incarceration rates for black and brown people compared to their white counterparts for very similar crimes.

Improving conditions within a prison is not improving how our ideas of race and gender shape who is and who is not considered inherently criminal. Orange County is not interested in creating means for restorative and transformative justice — community centered alternatives to jails. We should invest our time-seeking ways that undermine the possession of black and brown people and encourage our town councils to seek other means of creating justice that are anti-racist and noncapitalist.

Instead it seems with this investment of $20 million, the county would rather see this money going toward containing people of color, rather than educating and creating equity for students by investing in public schools or affordable housing.

In Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, black students are five times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. This trend is not unique to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system, as studies have shown that disparate practices of excessive discipline and policing lead to higher numbers of people of color incarcerated or involved in the criminal justice system.

Statistics have shown, as recently as 2010, that black men were six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated. Black women were almost three times as likely to be incarcerated compared to white women and are a growing demographic involved in the prison industrial complex.

These numbers should not be surprising as isolation and over-policing of predominately black and Latino/a communities increase, so does the incarceration or detainment of these residents. Fueling this pathology that blacks and Latino/a students are predestined for jail is standardized testing. Low test scores are used as an excuse to divest from public education, lessening the number of after-school programs keeping kids from interacting with police.

Concern over the school to prison pipeline has been massive. Activists and educators have formed numerous coalitions calling for an end to “zero-tolerance” policies and high numbers of suspensions and expulsions. When Orange County authorized plans for a $20 million jail, they were in opposition to ending the school-to-prison pipeline and should consider a moratorium on carceral institutions. This is of utmost urgency because public coffers should not be used to expand the containment of black and Latino/a people.

Instead, our efforts need to be focused on putting an end to disciplining and policing black students and ongoing gentrification of Chapel Hill.