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An artist comments on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

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An artist comments on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

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In Washington, D.C.'s public schools, African-American students are almost six times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their white classmates. Students with disabilities are also disciplined at higher rates than their peers.

But a group of local students is hoping to use their artwork to change that.

Students participating in a program with the nonprofit group Critical Exposure contend that disciplinary practices in the District's public schools contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, which pushes minority and vulnerable students out of school and into the penal system.

For the past two years, Critical Exposure has brought students together to document the problems in their school district through more than just data and numbers. The students use photography and multimedia projects to depict the difficulty their peers face in finishing school as a result of tough disciplinary policies. Some of the student photographers have been suspended at some point during their educations, and many have seen friends and peers suspended for minor infractions.

"They see what happens when students get 10 days out of school with suspensions, how students get in trouble with the criminal justice system and juvenile justice system and how it snowballs from there," said Adam Levner, the executive director and co-founder of Critical Exposure, in a phone interview with The Huffington Post.
Scroll down to see the students' photos.
Levner said that members of his organization's 2012-2013 after-school fellowship class identified the school-to-prison pipeline as a problem they wanted to document. The 2013-2014 fellows then chose to continue the project, while other program leaders brought the idea to individual schools as well. (The current class of fellows has not yet decided what it will be documenting.)

Since then, Critical Exposure students have testified at public hearings about the issue and had a series of meetings with D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. They also successfully worked this year to establish a pilot restorative justice program, which emphasizes discussion and conflict resolution over suspensions and expulsions, at a local high school.

Malik Thompson, 19, was involved with Critical Exposure throughout his high school career. He has experienced firsthand the impact of "school pushout." Following his older brother's death several years ago, when Thompson was in the ninth grade, he says he stopped going to his citywide, application-only high school. After several months of truancy, and what he describes as "minimal efforts" from school administrators to draw him back in, Thompson says he received a letter from the school informing him that he was no longer enrolled.

"Basically, I was kicked out," Thompson told HuffPost.

The next year, Thompson became involved in Critical Exposure after seeing a flyer at his new school. He is now an intern at the Gandhi Institute in Rochester, New York, a nonprofit that helps promote racial justice and nonviolence education. There, he facilitates workshops for young people in schools while leading photography and videography efforts.

Thompson, who ended up finishing his high school career in a home-school program, also advocates for the expansion of restorative justice programs in schools.

Restorative justice, he said, "creates [a culture] where the entire student -- like what happened outside the school and during school -- is acknowledged and taken into account."

Thompson continued, "I think more programs like Critical Exposure should exist where young people have avenues to begin to experience their own power, to work collaboratively together with adult supporters in order to make change in their world."

"Critical Exposure was essential to me becoming the person I am today," he added.
Below are photos from Critical Exposure's students, representing how they see the school-to-prison pipeline in their everyday lives, provided to HuffPost by Critical Exposure. All photo captions were written by individual photographers, but have been edited and condensed for clarity.

BEFORE YOU GO

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Meet The Student Photographers Documenting The School-To-Prison Pipeline

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In Washington, D.C.'s public schools, African-American students are almost six times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their white classmates. Students with disabilities are also disciplined at higher rates than their peers. But a group of local students is hoping to use their artwork to change that.

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Jennifer Garner is not immune to sexism in the entertainment industry -- and she made a point to shed light on the issue with a speech at Elle's annual "Women in Hollywood" event Monday.

The 42-year-old star was one of multiple actresses honored by Elle for "the creative contributions they have made to the world of film-both in front of and behind the camera." When Garner took the stage at the Four Season Hotel in Beverly Hills, she questioned why it's necessary to schedule an event like "Women in Hollywood" to acknowledge actresses, according to E! News.

"I mean, the 'Men in Hollywood' event is every day. It's called Hollywood," she said, according to Yahoo Celebrity UK. "Fifty-one percent of the population should not have to schedule a special event to celebrate the fact that in an art that tells the story of what it means to be human and alive, we get to play a part!"

Garner added that Hollywood's gender divide was particularly apparent when she and husband Ben Affleck attended a recent press junket together. Afterward, the two compared notes about the questions they were asked.

"[E]very single person who interviewed me, I mean every single one -- and this is true of the red carpet here tonight, Elle -- asked me, 'How do you balance work and family?' and he said the only thing that people asked him repeatedly was about the tits on the 'Blurred Lines' girl [Affleck's 'Gone Girl' co-star, Emily Ratajkowski], which, for the record if we're talking about them, they are real and they are fabulous. Take a look and enjoy."

"As for work-life balance, he said no one asked him about it that day," she continued. "As a matter of fact, no one had ever asked him about it. And we do share the same family. Isn't it time to kinda change that conversation?"

While sexism may be prevalent in Hollywood, at home Garner says she and Affleck have an equal, supportive partnership. In an interview with Elle for the magazine's November 2014 issue, she described how motherhood changed her professional perspective and how Affleck has supported her along the way.

My ambition shifted when I had kids in a way that I didn't anticipate. I became more ambitious for my life as a whole, and for that kind of health and happiness of the overall family unit. And that very much includes my husband and very much includes me. My husband is always the one saying to me, 'You have to work, you have to work. This is part of who you are. We'll figure it out.' That's powerful, when your partner has that serious mantra.

BEFORE YOU GO

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Jennifer Garner Slams Hollywood Sexism In Speech

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Jennifer Garner is not immune to sexism in the entertainment industry -- and she made a point to shed light on the issue with a speech at Elle's annual "Women in Hollywood" event Monday. The 42-year-old star was one of multiple actresses honored by Elle for "the creative contributions they have made to the world of film-both in front of and behind the camera."

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What's wrong with how the West talks about Ebola?

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What's wrong with how the West talks about Ebola?

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The Ebola epidemic has killed 3,431 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; it has killed in the United States. Liberia's Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told the U.N. Security Council in September that the disease poses a " serious threat" to the country's existence; the Obama administration recently reminded everybody that "[America's] structure would preclude an outbreak." Health care workers are threatening to strike over dissatisfaction with wages; the U.S. sent 3,000 military personnel directly into the area to help combat the epidemic.

The Ebola headlines in Western media outlets, however, don't tell that story. The Western media circus has lapped up the Ebola epidemic and paraded it around as its newest act. It's everywhere you look - stories about "necessary" precautions, tales of children and even police cars under quarantine, fear that the disease to other parts of the country. And it all has one singular focus: America and the West.

André Carrilho, an illustrator and cartoonist based in Lisbon whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and New York magazine, chose to play up this disparity in an August illustration, drawn shortly after two white missionaries stricken with Ebola were admitted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

"People tend to respond more to illustrations that have a point of view on issues that relate to their lives and their opinions," he told Mic in an email.

The Ebola epidemic hit a particular nerve with the artist. "People in the African continent are more regarded as an abstract statistic than a patient in the U.S. or Europe," he said. "How many individual stories do we know about any African patients? None. They are treated as an indistinguishable crowd."

His point is well taken, given the recent arrival of Thomas E. Duncan, the Dallas patient who became America's only travel-related case of Ebola. He came from Liberia, but the media paid scant attention to the country's experience with Ebola until his arrival in the United States. Carrilho says the color of Duncan's skin doesn't contradict the meaning of the illustration. "The fact that [Duncan] is black doesn't change the fact that because he's on U.S. soil, he deserves more attention in the eyes of the Western media," he told Mic. It's not black vs. white in the eyes of the media, but 'the West vs. the rest.'

"A death in Africa, or Asia for that matter, should be as tragic as a death in Europe or the U.S.A., and it doesn't seem to be," he said.

Here's when the world cares about Ebola: According to data from Google Trends, which tracks the popularity of specific topics in the news, the world only really started paying attention to the Ebola epidemic when it involved patients in the U.S.:

The two peaks in this chart occurred during the first week of August and the very beginning of October. They correspond to two key events: the of Ebola-stricken missionaries Ken Brantley and Nancy Writebol to Atlanta and Thomas E. Duncan's in Dallas. Besides those two events, the ebb and flow (or lack thereof) of Ebola headlines didn't change: Coverage of the epidemic in West Africa garnered relatively low levels of interest.

The same pattern played on out on Twitter, too. According to social media analytics service Topsy, attention to Ebola only peaked when news broke that the virus had come to the U.S.:

The Western-centric tenor of the news is even clearer in the following GIF, which tracks the explosion of tweets about "Ebola" or #Ebola from Sept. 7 to Oct. 7. The orange blobs puff up tremendously in the beginning of October, right around the time Duncan showed up in the United States.

There's a natural tendency in the news to focus only on things that can or do directly affect your audience. Sure, it's self-absorbed and reeks of navel-gazing, but that reflects reality. People care largely about themselves, and anyone else is just background noise.

Even still, the sheer increase in the media's - and by extension, the country's - attention span when Ebola made its way across the Atlantic is staggering. According to a Pew Research Center poll, it outranked protests in Hong Kong, the Secret Service's troubles and airstrikes against ISIS by the U.S. as the story Americans focused on the most. Thirty-six percent reported that they paid "very close" attention to the story, up from 25% in mid-August. By comparison, it also eclipsed other outbreak-related stories, including mad cow disease in Europe, MERS in the Middle East and swine flu in Mexico and the U.S.

"Us" versus "them." For Carrilho, the nature of the Western media hysteria over Ebola underscores a more pernicious trend in how the West views the rest of the world. More than any other event in recent memory, the Ebola epidemic has brought to light America's lingering and simmering fear of "the other." The media circus is doing more than perpetuating the idea that America may become victim to a deadly epidemic - they're implying the country's very purity is at risk.

"In the Western media," said Carrilho, "there are First World diseases and Third World diseases, and the attention devoted to the latter depends on the threat they pose to us, not on a universal measure of human suffering." We see that logic at play when people tie Ebola to immigration, or insist that the country's borders get heavily policed for undesirable elements. Ebola is a "Third World disease," a concept the news industry has capitalized upon and exploited.

But what about the difference between the Atlanta and Dallas cases? The arrival of two white, Christian missionaries with Ebola in Atlanta in early August also triggered a fair amount of hysteria, but it wasn't nearly as intense as that which surrounded Duncan's. It's impossible to know exactly why this is, but there are some unsettling patterns that run through the Duncan coverage which only reinforce the divide between "the West and the rest."

The Dallas patient was a foreigner, which made him far more suspect than missionaries Nancy Writebol and Kent Brantly, who were lily-white, born and bred Americans. There were suggestions that we should fear him and accusations that he knowingly got on the plane in order to seek treatment in America. For the Western media, Duncan is an outsider, a plague-bearer to be vilified rather than a victim of a deadly and horrifying disease. He's filthy and unclean, and he's brought contamination to the United States.

We can see this clearly on Fox News, where Andrea Tantaros parroted the idea that African countries "do not believe in traditional medical care" and that residents might "seek treatment from a witch doctor that practices santería." Congressman Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) suggested that we should fear because they might carry "deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis," while CNN suggested Ebola is the "ISIS of biological agents." (It's no coincidence that both are "foreign" entities.)

In this context, then, there were two things at play when the "Dallas patient" arrived in Texas, and two things that precipitated the media circus: Duncan's "otherness" - his distinction from normal Americans as an African- and the introduction of this otherness into our immaculate country. Had he remained in Liberia, he would have become yet another faceless victim. Had he looked like Writebol and Brantly, he would never have been subjected to the same kind of fear-mongering. Duncan, however, did neither of these things, and that's precisely why the media honed in to the degree it has.

It doesn't matter that West Africa has now lost more than 3,400 people to the disease. It is, and always will be, all about us.

This article has been updated to reflect the death of Thomas E. Duncan, the Dallas Ebola patient.

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One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What's Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebola

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The Ebola epidemic has killed 3,431 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia; it has killed in the United States. Liberia's Defense Minister Brownie Samukai told the U.N. Security Council in September that the disease poses a " serious threat" to the country's existence; the Obama administration recently reminded everybody that "[America's] structure would preclude an outbreak."

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A student interviews strangers and asks them what it means to be human.

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A student interviews strangers and asks them what it means to be human.

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I love the hesitation, confusion and the pauses that mark everyone's initial responses.

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For a class project, I went into the street and asked 100 people what it means to be human. About 40 of them responded and were willing to be interviewed. Here are their answers. Music: "Cycling Trivialities" by Jose Gonzalez

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Maybe one day we won't have to make a choice between who we are and who society wants us to be.

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Sam: A Short Film About Gender Identity and LGBTQ Bullying

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How many of us can identify with the protagonist of this short film?

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Reproductive Justice and Bodily Autonomy

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Reproductive Justice and Bodily Autonomy

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This issue on Dehumanization brought to mind the horrifying Californian prison sterilization scandal.

Read more here:  http://mic.com/articles/92739/the-horrifying-women-s-rights-injustice-that-modern-feminism-forgot

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California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

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CA Prison Hunger Strike & Solitary Confinement

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California Prison Health Care Receivership Corp.

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Female Inmates Sterilized in California Prisons Without Approval

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Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals, The Center for Investigative Reporting has found. At least 148 women received tubal ligations in violation of prison rules during those five years -- and there are perhaps 100 more dating back to the late 1990s, according to state documents and interviews.

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Christopher's interview and the video footage really touched me greatly. Here's another inspirational story about Laverne Cox's journey toward self-acceptance.

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Dan Bucatinsky Lisa Kudrow Brian Pines Dan Savage

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It Got Better Featuring Laverne Cox | L/Studio created by Lexus

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She believed she was a girl, but everyone said she was a boy. Laverne Cox from Orange Is The New Black talks about being bullied, accepting her true self and proudly fulfilling her third-grade teacher's prediction.

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Nabilah Husna "5 H Detention at Heathrow Airport"

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Nabilah Husna "5 H Detention at Heathrow Airport"

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Singaporean poet Nabilah Husna's stunning poem gives us a glimpse into what it means when racial stereotypes meet airport security paranoia. How many of us have had similar experiences on account of how we look?

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"5H Detention at Heathrow Airport" by Nabilah Husna (Live at The Arts House)

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Nabilah performs "5H Detention at Heathrow Airport" in RUDE (Siol!) -- a spoken word show, part of The Arts House's 10th Anniversary celebrations. Check out Nabilah at: http://www.deapologize.wordpress.com Check out Sekaliwags at: http;//sekaliwags.wordpress.com OR http://facebook.com/sekaliwags

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Entitled's Dementia piece reminded me of this tumblr, which brings together many courageous and poignant stories related to experiences with Alzheimer's.

http://dontforgetalzheimers.tumblr.com/

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What It’s Like Being A Black Woman In A Dom/Sub Relationship With A White Man

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What It’s Like Being A Black Woman In A Dom/Sub Relationship With A White Man

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http://www.buzzfeed.com/tnwhiskeywoman/learning-to-love-my-dominant-side

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'A world of self-interest, self-image, self-promotion/Where we all share our best bits but leave out the emotion.'

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The article "Ice Queens and Manic Pixie Dream Girls" sparked so much thoughts in me about female representation in the media. I just had to post this parody/satire of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines here!!!!

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Robin Thicke - Blurred Lines [Feminist Parody] "Defined Lines"

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So much vulnerability, emotion and tenderness in this issue. Thought it would be apt to share a poem by an amazing Singaporean poet about another quintessential human experience... It's a personal favourite and everyone needs to read her work :)

http://www.theadroitjournal.org/issue-eight-cheryl-julia-lee/