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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Saved up. You know. The pads. Was that an intern? Is that how you start a show? Yeah. Sophie. Yep. You did great. I do it literally. I'll take. I'll take anything at this point. OK. Well. It's just a grunt. Just, yeah. You know, with it. This is sometimes ********. I'll do your job. This is behind the ********. Continue. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know what? I hate Sophie. What? Robert Evans, the host of this podcast. Do you haven't introduced yourself? He is Robert Evans. Words. Words and my guest today, Courtney Cosack and I are going to sit quietly for an hour and a half, and that's gonna be the podcast no words. I'm doing a bold new thing in podcasting where we don't do anything that you can hear. To be honest, it's not total silence. There's plenty of meditation podcasts that do that. And no, people aren't allowed to meditate. Yeah, people are not allowed to meditate. Yeah, I will kick your *** if you meditate during our quiet podcast. Be really stressed out the whole time. Courtney, how are you doing today? I you know, I'm pretty good considering, considering. Is something happening? No, no, just the world. Just the dumpster fire. Ohh, I saw a lovely dumpster fire the other night. I bet a bunch of kids lit it so that they could burn a police union down. Yeah, it was a good bug. Dumpster fire. Courtney, Speaking of children, do you like kids? Yeah, not really. OK, well, I was going to ask how you feel about incarcerating children in penitentiaries for what most people would consider modest misbehavior. But I guess you're fine with that. So again, back to the 90 minutes of silence that we had planned. I'm into civil rights. I mean, I feel like kids can. I just don't want one. So, kid, kids get civil rights in your head. You're a fan of that? OK? That's a bold stance, children getting civil rights. That's the episode we're going to talk about. This is about the war on children that that our country's been fighting for for a while now. Did you, did you know we were fighting a war on children? I it's been brought to my attention. Yeah, we ******* hate kids in this country. We absolutely hate kids. It's it fully rules how much this country hates kids. As of right now, this moment 2020, about 200,000 children into the adult criminal justice system every year, mostly for nonviolent crimes. About 10,000 children are housed in adult prisons and jails every single day. And about 40% of incarcerated kids are locked away in private for profit facilities. While the number of incarcerated children has fallen somewhat in recent years, it is still massively escalated over where it was in the past. In 1997, only 100,000 or 107,000 children were incarcerated every year, so that's roughly doubled since 1997. From 1983 though, to 1997, the number of juveniles incarcerated in adult facilities jumped by around 366%. So. It used to be way lower than it was back in the 80s. Like, like a fraction of the number of kids were incarcerated as are now. So that's cool. That is. That is not cool. How did we get here, Robert? How did we get here? Well, I wish we were going to explain that, but again, this podcast is mostly going to be 90 minutes of silence. OK. I'll shut the **** **. It's OK. No you shouldn't shut the **** I I need to I'm. I am very struck out. I was getting shot at repeatedly by federal agents again last night so I'm a little bit a little bit punchy. I apologize. Thank you for being cool. Courtney saying I'll take anything at this point that grunt earlier. Fantastic. Let's do this. So alright. Alright. So Courtney the US incarcerates children at a rate five times higher than the next highest nation South Africa. So like that that's where we are. Like, if you're looking, if you're playing a global game, if you're looking at, like, what are the things the United States does better? One of the things best, one of the things on that short list, one of the things that no country can take away from us is like, we're the best at locking children away. We're so good at it, so proud. Yeah, we like you. We. You think ******* Paraguay can lock up children? Like they don't know **** about locking up kids in Paraguay? They just let him roam. They let him roam. They just let him go on the ******* streets like their *** **** like jujubees. What's a jujubee? I don't know. They let him out. They let him. They let him wander. It's a problem. So in 1960, yeah, let's let's talk about where this all started, how America got to the point that it is now with all these kids not walking around and instead locked up in criminal facilities. It started, well, kind of the the legal jurisprudence around whether or not it's cool to throw kids in a small dark hole owned by the government that all really started to kick off in the 1960s. And for a while they judges and stuff like pretty consistently cited with kids. Having rights it started in 1964 with 15 year old Gerald Gault. He was convicted of juvenile delinquency by an Arizona juvenile judge and sentenced to be incarcerated until age 21. So that was like a seven-year sentence and his crime was making a lewd phone call. God, well, yeah. You gotta lock a kid away for 1/4 of his life or that **** just during the formative years. No big deal. He'll be fine. When he gets out, throw him in a hole. Yeah, he made a dirty phone call. 6 years. Seven years. Jesus. So the young Mr Galt enjoyed no defense counsel, which you might recognize as a violation of what this nation considers to be his basic human rights. He was also sentenced to a vastly higher penalty than an adult would have received for the same crime. Because again. 15 years old. That's like a six year sentence. An adult at the time charged with the same crime, making a lude phone call, would have faced it most. Two months of jail. So there were there was a lawsuit as a result of Jared Galts case, and his parents filed for a writ of habeas corpus. Now at the time, juveniles were not allowed to appeal in California. So these Superior Court and the Supreme Court of the state backed up this nonsense. Galt's family appealed to the US Supreme Court and they agreed to hear the case for the specific purpose of determining the procedural rights of a juvenile defendant. The court's 1967 decision determined that kids have the same due process rights as adults, including the right to counsel. So that's good. It's a win. Yeah, I like that. But wait, was this, was he poor or how did this even happen? I mean, it it was Arizona. They they, you know, we'll talk a little bit about how it happened, but the gist of it is that. While consistently in this. Like the Supreme Court kind of tent has tended to decide on the on the side of child's rights, a lot of judges really ******* hated kids and a lot of cops really hated kids because those are both groups of people. I think a lot of what it comes down to, based on at least my reading, is that. Judges and cops are both people who are used to receiving a certain kind of respect, often a fear based respect and kids don't give a ****. And when you are disrespected by a child as one of those types of people because you're that type of person, your instinct is to lock them in a hole for a large chunk of their life. Punishable character flaw. A that's not good. You could call yelling at the cops a character flaw. I don't yeah. So the Gault case was the start of a series of major wins in the field of children's legal rights. In Tinker V Des Moines Independent Community School District in 1969 case, the court ruled that public school students cannot be punished for expressing their personal opinions on campus so long as doing so does not interfere with the work of the school or with other students. In 1970, the court ruled that juveniles are constitutionally entitled to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Before they can be declared delinquent, the 60s were, in general, a pretty good time to be an advocate for the legal rights of children. This period of wins occurred right up until 1977, which is the year the court ruled on Ingraham V Wright. This is the case that determined schools were not violating the Constitution, by quote, paddling the recalcitrant children on the buttocks with the fat, flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long, 3 to 4 inches wide, and about 1 1/2 inch thick. So that's 1977. The Court rules schools can still paddle kids. It's not limiting their rights to paddle. Children were, however, limited to five licks from a paddle, which is written into jurisprudence. And that's that's pretty neat. Did you ever get hit in the school by your teachers? I did not. I was forced to crawl around on the floor. That was probably the the most terrible thing, but it was a pretty bad punishment. Not hit, though. Oh my God, I can't imagine. My mom always tells me fun stories about getting hit by nuns. When she was in the yeah, my school paddled. Yeah, I definitely paddled. Your school paddled? Yeah. Was that legal? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Oklahoma. Ohh, yeah. Yeah. Forgot about Oklahoma. Yeah, they were like, of course you can paddle kids. Like, can you not paddle kids? Is that OK? That's the question we have in Oklahoma. Yeah, because we're so busy paddling kids. So yeah, the Supreme Court rules in 77 that you can paddle kids at school. You just can't lick them more than five times. In 1979, another court case rules that minors can be placed in state-run mental health facilities for basically no reason without any kind of, like, due process. Really. And so in the late 70s this kind of trail of anti child court cases continued and sort of the, you know this thing that had started in the 60s with children getting, you know, awarded more and more or not, but having more and more rights kind of recognized in court cases. That turns around and court start chipping away at the rights of children to not be locked in dark holes by the government for long periods of time. And this continues until 1984 when the Supreme Court rules on Shaw V Martin and affirms that. Children do in fact, have a lesser inherent interest in liberty than adults. The justification for this is that they are always in some form of custody. So while Gault affirmed, you know that the first case we talked about, a firm that children had the right to the same due process as adults, shall flip the table and declared that juvenile detention facilities are basically the same as kids living at home or in a foster facility. So it really doesn't matter if kids get sentenced to something without having a lawyer, because kids have no real liberty anyway. And the state. Putting them in a hole is no different from their parents putting them in a bedroom. Oh, that my, that's not great. One who hurt that guy. That's what we need to really investigate. Jesus. I mean, the messed up thing is it's like, who hurt that large room full of judges and all of their aides who decided that was a good way to. It's kind of bad, right, to say that, to be like, kids aren't interested in freedom, like, so it's OK, whatever we do what's OK? It's the most backwards thing. Literally. Now. According to a paper I found in the Temple Law Review, the reason for this tragic reversal and the general decades long trend towards less rights for children under trial is that trial judges in the latter half of the 20th century really ******* hated kids. And I'm going to quote from that paper now right after I sneeze. ******* tear gas, OK? The real actors who influenced juvenile justice were state juvenile court judges and administrators whose hostility to the principles of Galt led many of them to ignore the decision. From the very beginning. Many trial level juvenile courts simply ignored galts thrust when it came to the actual. Provision of counsel to juveniles. According to Professor Wally Liniak quote, studies in the 1970s and 1980s found that few children were represented by counsel. The predominant reason is that these juveniles waived their right to counsel, often without being properly informed of the right. State courts also import employed insidious methods to ensure that juveniles from poor families, who are supposed to benefit from the constitutional right to free court assigned counsel, never were assigned a lawyer. In Florida, for example, indigency rules were so strict that having $5. In the bank made a family ineligible for appointment of counsel. Moreover, as Professor Millenia has explained, Florida parents had to pay a $40 fee just to apply for an indigency determination. So you see what they do in places like you have the right to a lawyer unless we determine you have too much money to get a free lawyer and we're saying $5 is too much money. Bucks. That is so crazy. If your family net worth is $5, you're doing way too well for a free lawyer. Where are the social workers in all this? That's like a whole nother episode, probably, yeah. I mean, it's Christ. Underpaid, often traumatized. And let's face it, in some cases, like being very much a part of. ******* these kids over because some of them suck too. Like it's it's a whole mess, right? And it's this underfunded thing. And yeah, it's just bad. There's not a lot. There's not a lot looking out for poor kids in the states that have the most protections for poor children, right? And Florida is not a the most protection state, the Arizona of the other side. Of the East Coast, of the East Coast, yeah. So accurate. Yeah. Good stuff, everybody. Good stuff. So yeah, we're going to be hearing a lot from Florida in this episode, or also going to hear a lot from trial judges who hate children with a passion that boggles the mind, which is cool and good. And this was a fun episode to write. That didn't make me want to commit federal crimes anyway. The whole situation with children's rights degenerated right up to the mid 1990s, which is when a study conducted by the American Bar Association found that huge numbers of kids kids waived their right to counsel. Without really knowing what they were doing. As a result, the association's report wrote, many children charged with crimes were literally left defenseless. And Maryland, 40% of kids charged with crimes waived their right to a lawyer, 90 to 95% of Louisiana children did, as did 50 to 75% of children in Florida, and more than half of the children in Georgia, Ohio and Kentucky who went before judges. So that's a lot of kids not having lawyers, and I don't know if you know much about kids, but one thing they're not good at is representing themselves in court. My God. Shocking they were. They really should be with our education system. I don't know. What the ****? Yeah, it's good stuff. Everything's good stuff. Everything's great stuff. I'm happy. Another major change that happened in the 19 or from the 1970s to the 1990s, was the ease with which courts were allowed to treat juveniles as adults. Now, as in most things, New York State led the way in this. New York was like, we're not treating kids like adults enough. When we decide how long to throw them into dark holes owned by the government, let's change that. This is the state of New York, and this is the fight we're picking. So in 1978, they changed their laws in order to make it possible for courts to prosecute. Children aged 13 and up in adult Criminal Court. You know all those hardened adult 13 year olds that you know? Is it like just for murder or? Jay I mean, that was kind of the justification, but it wound up being for a lot of things, right? The idea when the idea was initially like, there's so many dangerous teenage predators, we have to start treating them like adults. But like the people who the kids who actually get tried as adults, most of them are not murderers. So every state in the Union followed New York's example to 1 extent or another, making it easier to try children as adults. This whole process really accelerated in the late 1980s and 1990s as the crack epidemic fueled waves. Fears of a new wave of child super predators age of offense thresholds were reduced all around the nation, and politicians who had fought for the rights of children to be treated as children were attacked for being soft on crime. Now the two folks most responsible for this were right wing criminologist John Dulio and our old buddy James Q Wilson. If you remember listening through the behind the police miniseries we did, James Q Wilson is the co-author of the Broken windows theory of crime. And coincidentally, best friends with the guys who wrote the racist book about IQ, The Bell Curve, which is fun. Yeah, cool group of dudes. Yeah, call me for the BBQ guys. Yeah, I'm gonna insinuate a series of racial attitudes towards policing and push them so deeply into the zeitgeist that people think that they're actually just protecting their neighborhoods when they're in reality. Contributed to something that could be viewed as almost. An active genocide. Sorry, I don't. I lost. I lost track of that surfer pro voice I was doing after a while there. Anyway. OK, let's catch your breath for a second. Just catch your breath for a second to that 90 minutes of silence. Ready? Everyone back to the 90 minutes of silence. So John Dulio and James Q Wilson, they write a paper in 1995 arguing that the US is about to experience a wave of unprecedented youth crime driven by single parent families, crack cocaine, and a bunch of other stuff that was all basically coded language for the existence of black people. Wilson predicted that by 2010 there would be 270,000. Additional predators on the streets committing violent crimes at an unprecedented level. These children, he wrote, would be radically impulsive, brutally remorseless elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches and have absolutely no respect for human life. So let's put them in a hole, see if it gets better. I also love the idea that they're packing guns instead of lunches because they do 2 separate things. James, you still you still you still need to eat, even if you're going to be shooting people. You want to have a lunch? Yeah, like you don't. You don't lose the hunger pains just because you're packing A9. You know, I don't know, you might get hungrier, honestly. So basically everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, and the American political establishment bought into the idea of these child super predators to 1 extent or another. And they also bought into the argument Julio and Wilson made about what to do with this upcoming crop of super predators. And I'm going to quote now from the book the end of policing. Dulio and his colleagues argued that there was nothing to be done but to exclude such children from. And children from settings where they could harm others and ultimately to incarcerate them for as long as possible. Dulio's ideas were based on spurious evidence and ideologically motivated assumptions that turned out to be totally inaccurate. Every year since, juvenile crime in and out of schools in the US has declined. However, the Super predator myth was extremely influential. It generated a huge amount of press coverage, editorials, and legislative action. One of the immediate consequences was a rash of new laws lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier to incarcerate young people. Adult jails, in keeping with the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration. So that's good **** right there. We're all part of the problem if we're clicking on that clickbait super predator ********. Yeah, don't. I mean, it was the 90s, so that was people. People knew less to be Dane, to be worried about the clicks. But yeah, always be worried about the clicks. Don't, don't, don't click Atlantic articles. Totally, yeah. Don't click Atlantic articles. Just just say no to the Atlantic. So by the 1990s, politicians realized that specifically ******* over children was a really good vote getter. Some elected leaders, like the Republican Speaker of the House, also **** children. Literally, because Dennis Hastert is a pedophile. Well, also advocating for children to be treated as adults under criminal law. And there's a really dark joke and that whole situation, but I I'm not going to, I'm not going to make it. But there is one in there about Dennis Hastert wanting kids to be treated as adults while he molests a bunch of kids while being the longest serving Republican speaker of the house. Read about Dennis Hastert. It's a real, real bad story. This is one of the guys who like stood up there and talked about how bad Bill Clinton was. Turns out he was a child molester the whole time. A lot of people don't talk about Dennis Hastert enough anymore. Oh, first time I'm hearing about him. Ohh yeah, you didn't know about the longest serving Republican speaker of the house who was just the just a complete child molester the entire time he was in office? No, but that's a terrible first impression. So bad. Yeah, he was just molesting the hell out of some kids. It was really a problem. Yeah. Good stuff. You wanna take a break, buddy? Yeah, let's take an ad break. Courtney, you know who won't be the longest serving Republican speaker of the house and use their power to assault children? Whoever this ad is for, that's exactly the case. Unless this is yet another one of our ads for Dennis Hastert, in which case I I do apologize. We do not know how they keep getting in there. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back, and we're talking about children being incarcerated. So in the 1990s, yeah, kids decide or politicians decide that, like, really specifically going after kids as criminals is like the thing to do. So this is the political situation in the US in 1999 when two Colorado high school kids with an interest in Adolf Hitler walked into Columbine High School and murdered 13 people with firearms. Now there were armed police in Columbine that day, and they failed to stop the rampage. But the kind of folks who vote based solely on scary things that just happened did the thing that those kind of people do, and they started voting to increase the presence of armed police and schools. Politicians were happy to do this because given the shocking number of civilian arms in the US and are growing supply of angry young men, it seemed likely that more columbines would soon follow. The real fix to this problem would probably have involved doing something to fill the yawning chasm at the center of our national soul. And that wasn't about to happen, so everybody just agreed to throw more men with guns and badges at the problem. School resource officers became increasingly. Common in school districts around the nation at this point. So that's good. And another thing that happens and you know, 1994, the president passes like the gun Free Schools Act or something. I forget the exact name, but that's what is like the legal justification that starts pushing a lot of 0 tolerance policies in schools and really starts ramping up the number of SRO's. But it's Columbine that kind of adds fuel to that fire. And Courtney, were you in, were you in school when Columbine happened? I was. I was like maybe a senior or early college. I was, yeah. It was when I was still growing up. But I mean, I went to a small rural school, so like that. I mean, it could still happen. But like, that armed police presence was not at my school and I think still isn't. We started to have cops in my schools after Columbine. And I what I remember most, though, was just kind of like the attitude change was like feeling that teachers were kind of suspecting kids of planning something now. Like it was this very weird feeling that, like, oh, now we're all. Kind of like now they're searching us as we enter the school. We're all kind of suspects of, of wanting to kill each other that feels like it's not going to lead anywhere. Well, Oh yeah, 99 I was, yeah. Really high school. Yeah. Maybe a little more suspect from the teachers, for sure. Yeah. It was weird. It was not a cool time to be in school. So, yeah, Columbine now, in the immediate wake of Columbine, there were like, people did get more worried about bullying. Two briefly, there was like, I think just because there was this assumption that the kids who shot up the school had been, like, bullied, which wasn't really true, but like, everybody got on that too, for a while, but for practice on the practical level, most of the focus in preventing another Columbine involved 0 tolerance discipline. And the idea of 0 tolerance policies in schools was basically the broken Windows theory as applied to living children, right? The broken windows theory says that, like, as soon as you have a broken window, it's permission for people to engage in more antisocial behavior. So soon they'll start tagging. Windows and breaking other windows and lighting **** on fire, and then you have, you know, the collapse of civilization. It's that as applied to students. If a kid acts up in one way, you know, if he talks back to a teacher, you have to punish him more than he deserves to be punished for that. Because if you don't, it could lead to other bad behavior like shooting up your school like that. That was the justification for 0 tolerance policies. Great. Yeah, it's good stuff. They weren't effective, right, because there's been like a million more shootings. Have there been other shootings since Columbine? Yeah, I've heard of. I don't. I don't read the news, Courtney. I didn't realize America still had a problem with this. I assumed that the this had been settled. Yeah, mostly solved, but still a few. Still seems like we got a handle on it now that all of the schools are closed from the play. Yeah, we did it. Everybody. We did it. Solve it, making things. A lot harder for school shooters. Thank you, COVID-19. Thank you. So, yeah. Now, another thing that happened right around the same time. It was a major reorganization in the way that schools measured success and failure for students. Standardized testing began to have an increased influence on teacher pay and on school funding. This created a situation where it was in the interest of adult administrators and teachers to find ways to remove low performing students from their classroom. Florida schools adopted a high stakes testing model in 1998 and within five years their rate of out of school suspensions had increased by 20% in 2428 thousand Florida children. Were arrested at school, 2/3 of them from minor offenses that would have been dealt with non carceral in the past. By 2006, eight years after adopting a high stakes testing policy, teacher morale had cratered. More than half of all Florida teachers reported thinking about quitting their field. Florida's graduation rate fell to 57%, the fourth lowest in the nation. Now, Texas also adopted a high stakes testing program in the 1990s. Governor George W Bush's education adviser, Sandy Kress, convinced him that the soft bigotry of low expectations is what held back minority students. And he felt that Texas could fix this by making all schools administer the same tests statewide. That would make it easier to determine where resources were needed. The implementation of standardized tests was accompanied by new 0 tolerance policies too. And since school funding and teacher pay was now tied to test results, teachers, you know, used those punishments like whenever kids would do something bad, it was threatening that kid that teachers payment like that the the money that they would get, the money the school would get so they would report those kids. Suspension rates began to soar and 95% of suspensions were from minor infractions. By 2009, there were 2,000,000 suspensions statewide. And the sheer number of suspended kids in Texas led to the creation of so-called supermax schools, which are basically prisons designed for children to go to class at. And this was the kind of thing I grew up in Texas in this period of time. And we, everyone would talk about these schools because you all knew somebody who had been sent there, right, who had been like, and it was always something like, yeah, they would talk up in class or maybe they got caught with weed or something. But, like, usually it was just like they annoyed a teacher for a couple of days in a row and then suddenly this person's, like, going to a school where you have to like. ******* go through a metal detector and if you talk in the hallways you could get arrested like it's this *******. It was pretty, pretty bad, yeah? Yeah. And you're like, none of the kids who go to these schools, like, learn anything there, like, like the the school work. I remember because, again, we we knew some kids who would go there. The school work they would get was like, you know, **** that kids five or six years younger would have found easy. Like it was. It was clearly that, like, the kids who went to that building the state was giving up on and was locking them in a separate building and saying, like, this is technically school work. Do this until you're old enough that we can put you in a real prison. Yeah. And, like, don't. Affect our test scores in the meantime? Just go. Yeah, exactly. Because they're not ******* up the test scores of the the other schools, which makes it look like things are going better for the other schools, so. Yeah, it's not great. A lot of the kids in these in these supermax schools drop out, but overall it looked like Texas's test scores were improving massively, and that fact was trumpeted loudly during the 2000 election. George W Bush called it the Texas miracle, and huge numbers of people, including my parents, still believe that this was a thing that happened that, like Texas figured it out, and massively improved education via standardized testing. And, you know, all of these these policies, these zero tolerance policies and ****. When Governor Bush became President Bush, he worked with famed Lady Drowner Ted Kennedy to make no child left behind law nationwide. And this is what Lady Drunder is so? Well. He drowned that Lady. He'd absolutely did. Yeah. Yeah, good old Ted Kennedy, the Lady Drowner so. He worked with President Bush. They they they came down the middle, you know, uh, this this this man who would go on to commit a series of war crimes and this other man who had drunkenly drowned a lady in his car. They made no child left behind nationwide, and the law promised that by 2014, all students in the United States would meet or exceed their states. Proficient level of academic achievement. They didn't hit that goal. I'm. I'm sorry to say, Courtney. We didn't fix teaching. Uh, that might might surprise you at the moment, but we got a whole batch of new criminals. We do have so many new criminals, so no child Left behind brought with it 0 tolerance policies and of course the tight teacher pay to test scores in a lot of cases. Nationwide, short term suspensions increased by 41% and long term suspensions by 135%. Black students were 3 1/2 times likelier to be suspended. By 2008, the number of school resource officers nationwide had doubled and more. And 16,000 students had been arrested after 10 years of no child Left behind. Graduation rates were about the same, dropout rates were about the same, and in general, absolutely nothing had been achieved except that a **** ton of kids had gotten suspended and arrested. Now people were baffled by this and they started looking into why the Texas miracle hadn't worked out nationwide. It turned out that this was because the Texas miracle had never actually been a thing. From MSNBC quote, Texas started to lose 70,000. Kids a year mostly dropping out before they had to take the 10th grade test that would count against the school. Almost 1/3 of kids in Texas who started high school never finished. Scores on the Texas test rose, but SAT scores for prospective college students dropped. Researchers discovered that the Texas test, designed by Pearson, primarily measured test taking. Ability apologists cherry picked national assessment of educational progress scores to show progress, but overall, Texas lost ground to the rest of the country, found doctor Julian V Hellig, an education researcher at the University of Texas. But by then it was too late. The Texas Miracle, Mirage or not, was law of the land. So that's fun that it actually made everything worse and they made it the law nationwide is fun the word for that. No. Like, was anyone surprised? A lot of people were. Most people still don't know that the Texas miracle isn't a thing that happened. Oh my God. Yeah, listeners can't see, but my jaw has just been on the floor the entire episode. Just trying to pick it up. Oh, God. Yeah, it's good stuff. I love cool and good. Yeah, you know what else is cool and good is I sometimes life gives you lemons and when you get lemons you got to lock a **** load of kids away in what are essentially prisons until they learn how to make their own weapons and stab prison guards that they can go to adult prisons and learn how to cook methamphetamines and join the area nations. That's just the thing you got to do sometimes because clearly there are no other options. And that's fine. They can make lemonade and you can pay them like 1 cent for doing it. Absolutely. And they can make, I don't know, license plates or Macbooks. Why don't we have why don't we have children making Macbooks in prisons? That's what I wanna know. Why are we letting the Chinese have all the fun of making Macbooks when we could have 11 year olds who talked up in class doing it? That's what I want to know. Good question. Thank you for liking my question. So all of this stuff that we've been talking about today kind of jelled together to create something commonly known as the school to prison pipeline. Schools with school resource officers have nearly five times the arrest rate as schools without school resource officers. And again, because these schools were getting by before they had the cops, it kind of suggests that those arrests are things that could have been handled without cops and arrests. Most of those arrests are students of color and students with disabilities, both of whom are vastly disproportionately. Tested by school cops and I'm going to quote again from the book the end of Policing, the US Department of Education found in a 2011, 2012 survey of 72,000 schools that Black, Latino and special needs students were all disproportionately subjected to criminal justice actions. While black students represent 16% of student enrollment, they represent 27% of students referred to law enforcement and 31% of students subjected to a school related arrest. In comparison, white students represent 51% of enrollment, 41% of students referred to law enforcement. And 39% of those arrested. Some individual districts have even starker numbers. In Chicago, in 2013 to 2014, Black students were 27 times more likely to be arrested than white students, leading to 8000 arrests. In a 2 year. Over 50% of those arrested were under 15. That's good stuff, yeah. That's depressing. It's hard to make a joke about that. It's just sad. It's just really sad. I mean, you know, yes, yes, it is. A big part of the problem is that putting cops in schools made calling in the school cop an option for teachers and administrators who would have had to do the actual hard work of, like, disciplining a child earlier. It's easier to just have the kid arrested if he's ******* you off, and it might help increase your pay. So, like, why the **** not now? The argument that much of what's going on was the result of teachers not wanting to bother or not knowing how to handle students with more complex problems was bolstered by the fact that special needs children. Make up more than 25% of students referred to police. They make up just 14% of the student population. One good example of how this looks is the 2015 case of a Lynchburg, VA 6th grader. 11 year old Caleb Moon Robinson has autism and behavioral issues and one incident he kicked a trash can after being scolded by a teacher. The school SRO filed disorderly conduct charges against the boy for this. In another incident, the SRO body slammed the kid and handcuffed him after he resisted being dragged out of the classroom for another. Behavioral issue. The student was charged again with a misdemeanor disorderly conduct and this time with felony assault on a police officer. God, they love doing that. If you struggle in your handcuffs, you're assaulting the cop. What if they beat you? It's OK. Yeah, he's 15. No, 11. He's 11. This 11 year old was charged with felony assault on a police officer. After he was body slammed. It's good. Ohh my, I love it when 11 year olds Feloniously assault police officers. Happens all the time. Well, it actually happens quite a lot. Important in self-defense. Yeah, not even in there. Just in like the if a person grabs you and starts like choking and body slamming you, sometimes your body will resist them without you thinking about it. I think that self-defense yeah it is. self-defense is choking you, but body slamming you? Yeah, if that person's a cop and you do anything. Would go limp. You have assaulted the cop because literally anything you do to a cop is assaulting the cop. Because cops have very, very thin skin. They're tiny, tiny little people. Defund the police. They're very soft. Yeah, I mean, that's one option that that that. That's a start. You know, defund the police. I don't know. I'm not gonna. I've urged enough federal crimes on other podcasts anyway. So Caleb was, yeah, found guilty on all charges, although this was thankfully reversed and new statewide protections for children under 13 were put in place due to the outrage generated by Caleb's case. But it took this cop like assaulting and then ******* charging as an adult an 11 year old for there to be changes in Virginia as a result of this. Which ain't great. So part of the problem is that school resource officers don't get meaningful training for how to deal with kids, let alone special needs kids. And so they tend to treat every problem the way cops treat problems with indiscriminate, blind, furious violence. In August of 2015, a Kentucky sheriff's deputy handcuffed an 8 year old boy and a 9 year old girl, both disabled for disorderly behavior tied to their disabilities. Since they were too small to handcuff properly, the officer had to handcuff their biceps. The whole thing was caught on tape. And you can hear the cops tell the boy. You can do what we ask you to, or you can suffer the consequences. It was so I thought special Ed. And my kid was like. My kid had some serious behavioral problems right to the point where he had 70 something workman's comp claim claims processed against him because of all the injuries he caused people, he permanently crippled a gym teacher. You know, not long before I started the job. My predecessor, he'd like broken his skull. So he was like, he was a kid that required a lot of specialized care. And most days my job was to just get hit in the face by this kid because the other teachers were like older ladies who couldn't, who couldn't safely be hit in the face by a 17 year old. And we had incidents where, like, this kid would like smash his face and like a bus window to get attention, but also he would be covered in blood and cops would wind up being called in case it was like happening on a bus on like a street and ****. And the police, like, I I guess. Thankfully at the time I was frustrated because, like, I was having to deal with this, like, violent, bleeding kid and the police were just like, stand back looking terrified and have no ******* idea what to do. But reading all of this, it's like, oh thank God they didn't get involved. They would have shot that boy. Like, oh, totally, they would have put a *******. Pull it in him. Yeah, both my parents are special Ed teachers and my dad had like your first job where like his his first gig was like at this middle school and kids would just like throw their heads into walls and like, it was nuts. But you do have to have a special. I mean my dad was like an Angel of dealing with them. I can't imagine with cops who. Yeah, I certainly wasn't an Angel at dealing with him because I was too young to be doing that job. But like. I'm glad I wasn't. I'm. I'm glad it wasn't a cop dealing with it. Yeah, yeah. So for most of the aughts, schools steadily increased the number of cops on campus. They also pumped more and more weapons into the police departments dedicated to protecting those schools. The Washington Post reports at least 120 school affiliated police forces in 30 states have made use of the 10:33 weapons transfer program. This has gotten rather famous lately. It's the thing that lets cops get things like tanks and grenade launchers. So This is why, like, the LA School Police Department has a take. Yeah, the 1033 program. So that like throughout the aughts, they're just getting pumped full of of military grade weaponry as they are choke holding 11 year olds and charging them with assault. So militarized police have meant that militarized police tactics keep getting used on children. The most infamously vile example of this may have been the 2003 SWAT raid on Goose Creek High School in South Carolina. The goal had been to find drugs and guns. The result was that dozens of heavily armed cops forced hundreds of mostly black students onto the ground for no reason. Students, of course, were not warned, and many panicked and ran when officers indistinguishable from soldiers leapt out of closets and out from under stairwells, screaming and waving guns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were just like, what have we just really **** with these kids? Like, what, do we just have an army come in and **** these kids up? And no, no drugs were found. Like, no contraband. Was found, but huge numbers of students were traumatized and the school administrator who coordinated the whole thing because there was a local out Roar apologized, but he stated that quote, once police are on campus, they are in control. So honestly, the students of Goose Creek ought to be grateful because none of them were beaten or assaulted by crowd control weapons in a serious way that day. But this too has actually become very common in other schools and in the end of policing, Alex Vitale writes, quote in 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Filed a class action lawsuit against the Birmingham AL Schools claiming they were systematically using excessive force. They allege that from 2006 to 2014, a 199 students have been sprayed with a combination pepper spray and tear gas agent called Freeze Plus P, which causes extreme pain and skin irritation and can impede breathing and vision. All of the students sprayed were African American, one student was pregnant, many were innocent bystanders, and some were completely nonviolent when sprayed in most cases. Officers made no effort to treat those sprayed and some were held in police custody to await arraignment wearing chemically coated clothing. In 2015, a federal court found the school district guilty of civil rights violations and banned the use of the spray. A 17 year old high school student in Texas was tasered by an SRO while trying to break up a school fight. The student was critically injured by the resulting fall and blow to the head and spent 52 days in a medically induced coma. Surveillance video showed that the young man was actually stepping away from the officers when he was tasered. You can find a million. Stories like this because it's bad to have these people in schools. Oh my God. Can we just go back to hitting the kids like Jesus Christ? Yeah, man, that paddle doesn't sound so bad now, does it? No. Yeah. Delightful. Yeah. Bring back the ******* paddle. Or not. Maybe just not do violence to children. I don't know. I don't want to be an extremist in my political beliefs. It's like it's time for an ad break. All right, well, enjoy our ads from Safari Land, the company making all of the tear gas. It's getting dumped into American streets. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the build to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. 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I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Oh, we're back. Oh my God, what a nice night. It's not night time, it's the middle of the day. I am real cracked out. So violence by SRO's against children is terribly common. Between 2010 and 2015, at least 28 US students were severely injured by school cops and one was killed. 14 year old Derek Lopez. His crime was punching a fellow student and then running away when the school cop told him to freeze the SRO. Chase Lopez and shot him to death in a nearby backyard shed, claiming the boy had Bull rushed him. Yeah. Pretty cool that a fist fight at school led to a man with a gun chasing a child. That was a situation that needed to happen. Oh my God. And the kid just had fists? No? Yeah, he was forced. He was a 14 year old boy. He was a 14 year old boy at school, right? I mean, it's one of those things I think about all the fist fights I got into at school, and it's a shame there wasn't a man with a gun there to chase any of us. Otherwise it might have ended, you know? Thankfully. I don't know. It's just bad. It's bad. This is bad. I don't have a joke. Yeah. So for all of this, Courtney, like again the reason all these cops are in all these schools is because of **** like Columbine and everybody can would getting worried that someone's gonna murder kids at schools. For all of this, there's not a single solitary case of a school resource officer preventing a school shooting. The closest thing they have is a guy who was arrested by his SRO's after shooting two people, but he had finished the shooting when the the the school resource officers like got him. Like he went after his girlfriend and somebody else and he he he shot them. And then he was done. And I guess they stopped that. Like, they didn't stop that. They never stop it. They're bad at that job. So as it turns out, students in schools that have police in them report feeling less safe than students in similar schools without police. No evidence exists to even suggest that the presence of school resource officers reduces violent crime, or any other kind of crime for that matter. What they do, though, is arrest a whole ******** of kids more than a million. Children have been arrested by school resource officers in the last 20 years. That's good. Whoa. Yeah, that's a lot of kids with criminal records getting pumped into the system. Sweet. Yeah. And of course, like a huge amount of research shows that punishing kids in this way reduces their odds of graduating massively. A lot of these kids never get back to school. It increases their odds of developing a criminal record. And that's for kids who don't get a criminal record because of the charges filed against them by an SRO like the Virginia middle Schooler who was charged with assault and battery for throwing a baby carrot. That her teacher. Baby carrots? Well, it's it was an assault, baby carrot. Yeah, the most, uh, assault weapon ever. That carrot was trimmed down to an illegal. Yeah, wasn't even a full carrot. Didn't even have the skin on it, yeah. It's pretty, pretty fun that that happened. So all of these factors combined together to create again what's called the school to prison pipeline, which has gotten bad enough that it's sometimes called the cradle to prison pipeline because a lot of kids are kind of dumped into places where this will happen to them from the very beginning of their school career. Suspensions, which almost never occurred in the 1970s, have become routine. In the 2009 to 2010 academic year, over 500 schools in the country suspended more than half of their students by 2006, nearly 15% of black male. Middle school students were suspended in a given year. Now, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, all of these suspensions and arrests of students lead to a hell of a lot of incarcerated kids. Too many of them end up at adult facilities, and if you pay it any attention to the the nation lately, you know why? That's not a good thing. But the unfortunate reality is that the children's facility specifically made for juvenile offenders aren't much better. And sometimes they're worse. Nearly 40% of juvenile delinquents in this country are sent to private for profit facilities. For many kids, that means some form of boot camp. Juvenile prison or detention center. Ironically, many of these kids wind up in the care of people who are criminals themselves. And this brings me to the story of 1 James F Slattery, founder of the Correctional Services Corporation, among other businesses geared at making money by incarcerating kids. In 20 years, more than 40,000 girls and boys in 16 states went to facilities run by James Slattery. An expansive Huffington Post investigation, prisoners of profit, makes it agonizingly clear what his a bad idea this was. Slattery got his start owning a chain of ******. Hotels in the 1980s and he was not good at this. His buildings were stuck with hundreds of code violations and notorious for being vermin infested hellholes. In 1986, two men got into a fight at the hallway of one of his properties and fell down a broken elevator shaft dying on impact. Several weeks later a fire broke out and killed four children in the same building. So Slattery and his business partner decided that the hospitality business might not be for them, largely because people care. When your customers die horribly due to your ill maintained facilities, they decided to move to a business. Where no one cared about the clientele and started selling their space to the government to act as re-entry housing for newly released federal inmates, a new company, S MORE Incorporated, was formed to oversee the business. And I'm going to quote from the Huffington Post now as federal prison officials awarded S more an emergency contract to operate a halfway house in Brooklyn. Local community leaders challenged the decision, questioning why the same people who had managed problem plagued welfare hotels should be given fresh responsibility less than three years after as more Lope opened Lamarquis. Former inmates federal inspectors from the Bureau of Prisons found that parts of the building were turning to ruin. Inspectors documented low paid, untrained employees, poor building conditions from vermin, leaky plumbing to exposed electrical wires and other fire hazards, and inadequate, barely edible food. Federal prison officials were close to canceling the contract in 1992, according to media accounts at the time, but they said conditions at the facility started to improve after frequent inspections in a federal lawsuit won. The marquee employee, Richard Moore, alleged that he had been severely beaten by another employee at the direction of management. After he reported poor conditions to federal inspectors in another federal lawsuit, four female inmates asserted they had been raped and assaulted by S mores private resident advocate, the employee who was supposed to protect inmates by handling their grievances. So you might say that he wasn't good at this job, that, like the the company he made, was fundamentally terrible at this job. But as Moore made a lot of money, and soon the company had expanded its operations to Fort Worth, where it opened a boot camp for young boys, as well as New Jersey and Washington, where it opened immigrant. Detention centers. The company went public, netting Slattery $5.2 million. The next year, a riot broke out in his New Jersey immigrant detention Center when an organized group of inmates assaulted guards and took over the facility. Subsequent investigations found that, among other things, Slattery's guards constantly sexually harassed female inmates and stole regularly from other inmates. Training was virtually nonexistent. Now, INS did not find as more for this or cancel its contract. Instead, they allowed the company to sell their INS contract to the corrections. Corporation of America for $6 million, because **** it. The whole disaster was enough to make Slattery opt for a change of venue, though, and he moved the company's headquarters S to Florida in 1996 and changed the company name to Correctional Services Corporation. He decided his new focus would be incarcerating children, since that had seemed relatively easy so far compared to locking up adults. Florida was a great place to do this. In the 1980s, the state had started outsourcing juvenile detention to private companies to cut costs, and in the 1990s. A bunch of teenagers have killed people, leading to a crackdown on juvenile crime and a soaring juvenile prison population. So that's the situation. This guy starts by running cheap hotels for, like, houseless people, and he gets a bunch of them killed, and then he starts running cheap halfway houses for people who are getting out of prison. And a bunch of them, you know, get raped and assaulted. And finally he's like, you know what? The job for me is watching after children. Oh my God, what a resume, this guy and the state of Florida's like, yes, in 1995, Slattery won bids to make 2 facilities in Florida. Both prisons were meant for boys aged 14 to 19 who had been convicted as adults. But whoopsie doodles, the state realized too late that it had enough beds for those kids. So instead, the Florida Department of Justice filed these prisons with random delinquents who hadn't been tried as adults and weren't meant to be put in such restrictive settings. In a press release announcing the construction of these new facilities, Slattery. Called them the future of American corrections. Now, appropriately enough, the future of American corrections was an instant nightmare. The first Correctional Services Corporation prison to open was the Pahokee Youth Development Center northwest of Miami. It started taking inmates in early 1997, the Huffington Post reports quote. Within months, local judges were hearing complaints about abuse of staff prison like conditions and food full of maggots, including, according to recent interviews and state audits and court transcripts from the time Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Tom Peterson drove an hour and a half. Pahokee in 1997 and started snapping pictures as a juvenile judge. He thought he was sending boys to a moderate risk program with outdoor wilderness activities. What he found was a ******** prison. I came back with all those pictures and I raised hell about it, Peterson recalled in an interview. He saw small 12 year olds confined along much stronger 17 year olds. Boys were served food he called an edible. That same year, local public defenders asked another judge to move children from Pahokee into a less punitive program. Follow up reviews by state contracted auditors confirmed the operation was dysfunctional. Now, evidence of this dysfunction included a child with unpaid prison gambling debts who was beaten so badly by three other kids that he had to have his spleen removed. In another incident, four staff members allowed two boys to fight for 10 minutes while they watched. No one reported this incident. Thanks to this prison's rural location, rats and spiders were common. No efforts were taken to control pests within the prison, leading to an epidemic of bites among the incarcerated children. Slattery's Kid prison was found to be holding children past their scheduled release dates, too, in order to get more money out of the government. This was literally a crime, but no one was punished. Judges did, however, start to demand that Pahokee be closed. The state stopped sending new kids in August of 1999, but did not cancel Slattery's contract. They allowed the company to withdraw from its contract eight months early, thus letting it continue to bid for contracts within the state of Florida. Now. None of these abuse allegations or revelations of literal crimes harmed business at all. By 1999, Correctional Services Corporation was making $223 million a year, more than double wided raked in three years. Earlier, Slattery used his newfound cash to buy a rival corporation, Youth Services International. This put him in charge of five new facilities in Florida, and that all worked as well. As you might guess, problems grew so bad at one facility named Hickey that the Justice Department commenced an investigation. It revealed that staff repeatedly concealed evidence of physical assaults, only disclosing 2/3 of such cases to the government's lack of staff. A cost cutting measure by Slattery made it easier for boys to enter each other's rooms and commit assault. The Justice Department concluded that these conditions. Violated the constitutional and federal statutory rights of the youth residents. Again, no one was penalized. The school turned the facility over to the state, escaping any financial burden to fix it, and sailed on to profits elsewhere. In 2118, year old Brian Alexander died of pneumonia while confined at a Correctional Services Corporation boot camp near Fort Worth. The Texas Rangers conducted an investigation into the matter, and the Huffington Post's reporting summarizes it quote. Other inmates at the facility had told investigators that they knew something was wrong with Alexander. In early January, he had stopped eating, his lips turned purple, and he shivered even while taking hot showers. He begged a nurse and drill instructors to take him to the hospital, but they told him he was faking it, according to the Texas Rangers report as Alexander pleaded for help. One help 1 drill instructor told him to go ahead and die already, according to the investigative report. The nurse, Knyvett Reyes, told him to stop lying about his illness. Other inmates at the facility saw Alexander coughing up blood into trash cans and frequently struggling to breathe, according to to the report. A week after he began complaining, staff finally took Alexander to the hospital. He died there two days later. A doctor told Texas Rangers that Alexander could have survived if the staff had taken him to get a chest X-ray when he first reported feeling sick. So that's great. That happened. They're like if you would have done literally anything. Just anything. Yeah, you had weeks. You could have taken literally any action to save this child's life, but refused to. And that's fine. You will face no corporate penalties for this. I mean, actually, they did a bit. In 2002, a judge found raised guilty of negligent homicide. The nurse and Correctional Services Corporation was found liable to $38 million in the wrongful death suit. That same year, auditors at a Maryland facility found that employees there had forced inmates to fight on Saturdays as a way to settle arguments, fines, negative Justice Department reports, and even furious judges plagued Slattery's companies. Constantly. But they never stopped getting contracts all over the United States. For most of the last five years, Y SI, the company Slattery bought, oversaw about 9% of Florida's juvenile jail beds. YS I was also responsible for 15% of all reported cases of excessive force and injured youths in state jail beds. 40,000 kids have been sent to Slattery's prisons in the last 20 years, and state funding has made him a very rich man. He's poured a lot of that money back into the pockets of state officials. Slattery donated more than $400,000 to various. Politicians in a 15 year. 276,000 of which went to the Florida Republican Party, he's one of its largest donors now. Interesting? Yeah, that's cool. Good more than 40% of youth offenders sent to one of Florida's juvenile prisons wind up arrested or convicted of another crime within a year of their release. In New York State, by comparison, where youth offenders are never put in private institutions, just 25% of juvenile offenders are convicted again within a year of release. It is hard to overstate what a disaster Slattery's facilities are on a societal level and on a human level. Children at his facilities interviewed by The Huffington Post recalled being served bloody raw chicken and finding flies inside pre cooked meals inmates. We're allowed to gamble on sporting events and earn the right to take other students food during the next meal, one inmate, Angela Phillips, recalled. We were kept like rats in a trap and a maze. There was no outlet and no stimulation, so they would just turn on each other and turn on staff. That's how it was day in, day out. So that's good. That's the episode. That's just the situation. It's a real problem. Just super depressed. OK, great. Yeah, this is This is why a number of cities, including the one I'm in Portland, but also, you know, places like Minneapolis and stuff are increasingly like pulling cops out of schools, which is how like the start of this. But clearly it goes beyond, like, for one thing, why isn't this Slattery guy going to get, like investigated and, I don't know, thrown in a hole somewhere he shouldn't be allowed to own anything? So he shouldn't be allowed to own anything. It's not great. Very frustrating when you first frustrating stuff introduced the episode. I thought we were going to be talking about kids in cages like. At the border and it's just we have such an obsession with putting kids in cages in our entire country. Ohh yeah. I mean, yes, we have a long history of that that goes on well beyond any of this. Based on the title of the doc for the scripts, I thought you were going to be talking about that commercial, the cars for kids, that no, no. This actually was initially about a completely other horrible thing done to children. I just haven't had time to finish writing that one. But yeah, there's a whole scandal. Their judges locked children in prisons in exchange for direct payments to themselves, which we're just not even going to get into yet. So good stuff. Everybody's feeling good today. I'm just going to carry the memory of the bloody chicken throughout the day. I feel like that is my fuel for the rest of the day, but disgusting image. Whoa. Yeah, it's great. Well, Courtney, you want to tell the listeners where they can find you on the interwebs? Dot com, slash back slash net you can find me everywhere on the Internet at Courtney Kosack. Check out my podcast, Sophia Alexander and I, my co-host. We got happy ending massages in Tokyo right before the choir so. Yeah, that's a good escape. I got a sad ending massage in Tokyo once. He got a he got a phone call and found out his mom had died. It was really. It was a bummer. My God, really sad massage. Really. I mean, I made him finish, but yeah, very sad massage. Well, on that note, wow. You can follow Robert for more loving stuff like that that I write OK on Twitter, you can follow us at ******** pod. By our merch, including our new what's what? The FDA one. I can't get it right ever. Ohh FDA approved to prevent all diseases cause those masks are in fact FDA approved to prevent all diseases. And if the FDA has a problem with it, you know what? You ******* coward. Spend what, $600,000 a year on weaponry FDA like you can't you can't take me down. You don't have the guns FDA. That's right. I'm calling your ***** out. And on that note, this is the episode. The episode. Thank you, Courtney. Thank you. 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