Thread by @reveal

1/ This is Isaiah, a 13-year-old boy charged as an adult in Mississippi. He’s one of nearly 5,000 to go through the adult prison system since 1994 because of Jim Crow-era laws.

This history and analysis are layered like an onion. Let’s unpeel it.

revealnews.org/article/bound-…

2/ @keaux_ wanted to know how many other kids had gone through this system. With no existing count, she sifted through dusty records at the Philadelphia, MS, courthouse where Isaiah was charged.

She found 26 kids’ cases since '05.

3/ Sidebar on Philadelphia, MS – a place where it feels like you’re always two degrees away from major historical moments. Three civil rights workers were killed there during Freedom Summer 1964: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

4/ The courthouse where @keaux_ pulled case files was also where late Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was prosecuted for the “Mississippi Burning” murders in 2005.

A Confederate soldier statue dedicated in 1912 stands on the lawn in memory of locals who served in the Civil War.

5/ Eventually, @keaux_ got a tip about 25 years’ worth of state court data. Enter @iff_or, who turned nearly 1GB of messy data into a revealing analysis of deep racial disparities among kids in the adult system in the state with the highest African-American population.

6/ @iff_or also found significant sentencing disparities among children in the adult system. Even when white kids are sentenced to more time, they get out sooner than black kids. White kids are also more than twice as likely to go into diversion programs.

7/ @keaux_ and @iff_or dug through archives at @MDAH_Official and found that Mississippi started officially charging kids as adults in the 40s.

8/ Lawmakers specifically targeted black children who’d been going to the notorious Parchman Farm and working on chain gangs since Reconstruction ended.

9/ Black children also fell victim to a violent extrajudicial system. @eji_org data shows Mississippians lynched the most people. Two teenagers named Charlie and Ernest were hanged in 1942. Langston Hughes memorialized them in a poem called “Bitter River.”
mscivilrightsproject.org/clarke/event-c…

10/ Our research also found that in 1916 Mississippi made separate jails for kids, calling them “training schools.” The governor who created them was a known Klansman named Theodore Bilbo. All MS schools were forced to integrate in the 70s.

11/ Now back to Isaiah. He ended up spending the length of a school year in and out of solitary confinement in an adult jail.

But he wasn’t free.

12/ Isaiah got his case moved down to youth court – a rare deal. But he ends up getting sentenced to eight months at a training school Oakley Youth Development Center, which was a reformatory for “delinquent negros" in the 40s.

13/ Isaiah went home this summer, and is currently out on parole. He’s 15 and hasn’t been to real school since 7th grade. These are the tangible consequences of charging kids as adults.

Every state puts kids in the adult system. 26, including Mississippi, do it automatically.

14/ Some states are making changes. In the last few years, Oregon, Florida, and California got rid of laws that automatically put kids in the adult system for certain crimes.

@justiceforyouth tracks national reform efforts. campaignforyouthjustice.org/state-work/sta…

15/ Isaiah spent a school year in an adult jail, where he etched tattoos on himself and worried a lot. “This a lot of time that’s gone and passed by, and I can’t get it back.” You can hear Isaiah and his mom Felicia's story in "Development Arrested": revealnews.org/podcast