By now you’ve probably heard about Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year-old Florida girl who botched a science experiment with a plastic bottle and toilet cleaner. The bottle ended up exploding, and though no one was hurt and no property damaged, Kiera was expelled from high school and is now being prosecuted as an adult for discharging a weapon on school grounds. She had an exemplary behavioral record up until that point.

Kiera is, as one might expect, black. The notion of a white girl getting hauled off to jail for a harmless expression of intellectual curiosity is dubious, to say the least. And though the rise of “zero tolerance” policies in American schools should theoretically be race-neutral, that’s not the reality. According to the Dignity in Schools campaign, “students of color… are more likely to be suspended and expelled than their peers for the same behavior” and “African American students [are] 3.5 times as likely to be expelled” as whites. What happened to Kiera Wilmot is part of a broader story about racial disparities in our criminal justice system.

Yet we don’t have to go macro to get the whiff of racial bias in this case. The prosecutor who decided to throw the book at Kiera is one Tammy Glotfelty, an assistant state attorney in Florida. The officer who arrested Kiera named Glotfelty in his police report:

I THEN CONTACTED ASSISTANT STATE ATTORNEY TAMMY GLOTFELTY VIA TELEPHONE. I ADVISED [HER] OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE CASE AND SHE ADVISED THIS OFFICER TO FILE THE CHARGES OF, POSSESSING OR DISCHARGING WEAPONS OR FIREARMS AT A SCHOOL SPONSORED EVENT OR ON SCHOOL PROPERTY F.S.S. 790.115 (1) AND MAKING, POSSESSING, THROWING, PROJECTING, PLACING, OR DISCHARGING ANY DESTRUCTIVE DEVICE F.S.S. 790.161 (A).

Sounds absurdly harsh, right? And there has been no reversal of this decision since then. But Glotfelty isn’t always so heartless. Just last week, she decided not to prosecute a teenager named Taylor Richardson who accidentally shot and killed his younger brother with a BB gun. Glotfelty declared the case “a tragic accident.” I don’t doubt that it was. The Richardson kid will probably have nightmares about this incident for the rest of his life. But I do wonder how to make sense of a prosecutor who one week shows understandable compassion for a kid who made a terrible mistake and the next week insists on giving a teenager the harshest possible sanction for something that didn’t harm anyone.

The first Tammy Glotfelty has a normal-sized heart in her chest. The second one has a hole there.

There is one fact, however, that may help us figure out the discrepancy between Glotfelty #1 and Glotfelty #2: The Richardson family is white.

Am I accusing Glotfelty of conscious racial bias? Nope. Self-awareness isn’t the issue here. And maybe she has good reasons for treating these two cases differently. Hey, Taylor was 13 instead of 16; perhaps that makes all the difference in her eyes. But I can’t shake the feeling that these two stories would have unfolded quite differently if the races of the children had been reversed. Somehow the white Kiera Wilmot would have had her story end with an adult touching her shoulder saying “I’m just glad you’re alright.” And the black Taylor Richardson would have heard platitudes about “taking responsibility” while being led away in handcuffs.

The school-to-prison pipeline has become a very real phenomenon in this country, at least in communities of color. Suspending and expelling students for minor misbehavior has become routine despite there being no evidence that these steps improve school safety and strong evidence that they are linked to increased odds of behavior problems later. Moreover, prosecuting children as adults can destroy their chances of becoming productive members of society later in life. If prosecutors like Tammy Glotfelty really want to get serious about public safety, they’ll work to transform our racially disparate justice system and refuse to put harmless black students behind bars.

The debate over Florida Atlantic University’s decision to name a football stadium after a notorious private prison company has descended into deception.

Today, student activists confronted FAU President Mary Jane Saunders at a public forum to denounce the fact that the school is taking $6 million from the GEO Group in exchange for stadium naming rights. This company has a shameful record of human rights violations, abuse, and neglect at its facilities. Unfortunately, Saunders was less than forthright in dealing with her critics.

The first problem was dishonesty over the forum rules. On Monday, students had engaged in a sit-in at Saunders’s office and agreed to leave only after Saunders promised there would be an open public dialogue on the issue, with an open Q&A and a mutually-approved moderator. There was also the strong implication that community members (i.e. non-students) would be able to ask questions. It’s all on videotape. Yet the administration quickly reneged on these terms. It named the moderator itself, declared that community members couldn’t ask questions, and made a list of the students who could ask questions. Indeed, according to student organizer Anole Halper, with whom I spoke today after the event, students tried to present Saunders with a petition that had amassed nearly 10,000 signatures, yet she refused to take it (though the moderator eventually relented and took it himself). Does this sound like an administration comfortable with an open dialogue?

FAU has also been deceitful about the nature of its arrangement with the GEO Group, insisting that the $6 million it received was just a charitable gift, not a corporate sponsorship. This claim is absurd on its face: a corporation doesn’t hand over $6 million to get nothing in return. And in this case we know the assertion is false because there’s a signed agreement in which naming rights are given in return for the “donation.” If this were a mere gift, GEO wouldn’t need its name on the stadium in the first place.

FAU’s dissembling adds to the falsehoods that the GEO Group has already been peddling. Immediately after news of the naming deal broke, the company apparently tried to scrub its Wikipedia page of all information that portrayed it in a negative light.

Then, in an attempt to bat away the bad press it was receiving, the GEO Group claimed that a number of the accusations being leveled against it were unfair because the abuse at one of its youth facilities in Mississippi had occurred under another company’s watch. Actually, that’s not true. As the ACLU has pointed out, the Department of Justice report in question was not issued until March 2012, and its investigation occurred in 2011 while GEO was in charge. The report accused GEO of “systematic, egregious, and dangerous practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls,” contending that the sexual misconduct there (which included staff-on-youth abuse) was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.” So there’s that.

Together, the GEO Group and Saunders have displayed a pattern of deception. These aren’t isolated incidents. GEO and FAU seem to think that genuine transparency would be bad publicity, and the best strategy to save their naming deal is to lie about it and shut out the community. Not that this is entirely surprising: these are the folks who thought it was totally cool to pair a public university with a human-rights-violating private prison. Yet there does come a point when being aboveboard is really the best way to stop getting raked over the coals.

Halper says there was a two-minute applause break today after a student told Saunders that the GEO Group deal is making Florida Atlantic University an embarrassment for alumni. Let’s hope Saunders and FAU’s board of trustees heed that warning and listen to their students and the broader community instead of trying to deceive them.
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Word came out this week that Florida Atlantic University had sold the naming rights to its new football stadium to the GEO Group, which is the second largest private prison company in America. Beyond Bars has a petition to stop this move, which has generated an outpouring of criticism. Video here:

It appears that in an effort to minimize the damage from this developing story, the GEO Group may have decided to give its Wikipedia page a facelift.

If you visited the page before the story became a New York Times headline, then you would have seen this section highlighting the company’s sordid past:

Soon, however, that entire section was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a very corporate-friendly timeline touting the company’s history, successes, and high-points. So who made the change? All the edits appear to have been performed by someone named Abraham Cohen, and there just happens to be an Abraham Cohen employed by the GEO Group as a spokesman.

As a result of Mr. Cohen’s edits, Wikipedia added the following disclaimer to the top of the page:

Keepers of the Wiki faith seem to have undone those edits over the last day. But clearly, if GEO Group did indeed edit its own Wikipedia page, this is not a company that cares about the truth or an open dialogue. Otherwise, why go to all the trouble to hide the section labeled controversies that appeared on the page yesterday? This is a corporation that wants to control the information and discourage people from getting the entire story. Now aren’t those values completely antithetical to everything a university is supposed to stand for?

We think so. If you agree, then head over to Beyond Bars’ online petition asking Florida Atlantic University to drop the GEO Group.