Juvenile Law Commons^™

The Law Of Disposable Children: Searches In Schools, Tonja Jacobi, Riley Clafton

UC Irvine Law Review

It’s the forgotten, discarded, disposable people. That’s so often who you find in jail—the forgotten.

—Rev. David Kelly, explaining why he devotes himself to working with children coming out of the juvenile detention system.

Many schools treat children as “disposable.”

—Francisco Arenas, Juvenile Probation Officer at Cook County Juvenile Probation.

Schoolchildren are being strip-searched based on little or no reasonable suspicion, and schoolchildren are being targeted for searches based on their race, disability status, gender, or homelessness. This is possible because the Supreme Court has issued only two opinions in its history about the right of schoolchildren to be free …