Toney Jennings was illiterate when he was arrested at age 16. In the six months he spent at the Lowndes County Jail in eastern Mississippi, he says he played basketball, watched TV and “basically just stayed to myself.”
A special education student, Jennings qualified for extra help in school. Those services should have carried over to the justice system, but Jennings said he never even attended class while in jail. Now 20, he is still unable to read or write.
Each year, thousands of Mississippi teens cycle through the justice system, where experts say the quality of education is often low. Incarcerated juveniles have the same educational rights as those outside — five hours of instruction a day that meet their learning needs, including special education. The state does not currently track how many of those juvenile offenders are entitled to extra education services, but according to a 2010 federal survey, 30 percent of youth in custody of the juvenile justice system have a diagnosed learning disability — six times the amount in the general population. Following several lawsuits, Mississippi has worked to improve the quality of education for all students in the system, with some successes.
[For more of this story, written by Jackie Mader and Sarah Butrymowicz, go to http://jjie.org/pipeline-to-pr...ion-students/107827/]
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