One day I visited a barbershop near me on the West Bank of New Orleans where I lived at the time, in the Algiers section of the city. The staff and patrons told me that in the 1990s and before Katrina (as this was not too far from the old housing projects near the bridge across the Mississippi) if police saw you on the corner next to a minor who was out of school during school hours it meant a trip to jail for both of you and being slapped with an automatic charge of contributing to delinquency of a minor, no ifs and buts or questions asked. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, go straight to Orleans Parish Prison (of which I’ll let you find the video of inmates doing various drugs openly in the cellblocks on YouTube).
The owner of the barbershop was shot to death in front of his place earlier this year. Whatever solution HN tries to come up with to this on an armchair basis please don’t let it be eliding the difference between school and prison in the school-to-prison pipeline or making Kamala Harris’ record look like Harriet Tubman in comparison instead of apprenticeships or something. That’s all I ask.