The Southern Poverty Law Center today sued a Mississippi school district for violating the constitutional rights and derailing the promising academic and athletic career of a high school student over a tossed penny on a school bus.
Hinds County School District officials violated the constitutional rights of a 10th–grader who was expelled for throwing a penny that landed on his school bus driver. The expulsion and subsequent assignment to an alternative school threatens to derail the academic and athletic career of the 16-year-old boy, a good student who dreamed of a collegiate basketball scholarship.
Schools struggling with student dropouts and discipline problems have an opportunity to tackle those issues with innovative programs funded by federal grant money, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Dignity in Schools Campaign said today.
Reform project seeks to keep children in school, out of the juvenile justice system
Children and teens held at the Lauderdale County Juvenile Detention Center in Mississippi were subjected to shockingly inhumane treatment. The youths endured physical and mental abuse as they were crammed into small, filthy cells and tormented with pepper spray for minor infractions. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued Lauderdale County and reached a settlement agreement to end the abuses.
The Southern Poverty Law Center today sued Lauderdale County, Miss., to comply with federal law and open the county's juvenile detention center to inspection following reports of children being locked down in unsanitary, overcrowded and abusive conditions.
The children and teens detained at a Mississippi detention center will be protected from abuse and neglect under an agreement reached with county officials who oversee the facility.
Children and teens at a Mississippi juvenile detention center will no longer be locked in cells all day without reason or forced to sleep on the floor in a squalid, overcrowded facility following an agreement the Southern Poverty Law Center has reached in a federal lawsuit.
Five black youths accused of beating a white high school student in Jena, La., amid racial tension sparked by nooses hung on the high school campus, have pleaded no contest to misdemeanor simple battery charges as part of an agreement to resolve a case that sparked a massive civil rights protest on their behalf.
The United States may be faltering as an economic powerhouse, but we're still No. 1 in one important category: locking people up. With one out of every 100 adults behind bars, we're ahead of China, Rwanda, Cuba and every other country. Our prisoner population has nearly tripled over the past two decades.
