02/22/2012 – Los Angeles, California - TARDY TRUANCY TICKETS: Roosevelt student Rene Ayala, to the right, wears a prison jumpsuit in front of the City Hall building. According to a Student organizer for the Community Rights Campaign, the prison jumpsuit represents movement by Latino and African-America students that want stop and prevent a school system that sends student to prison by their inability to help students progress. Instead of helping students move forward or establishing a crime-prevention program, the student organizer explained, the school system suspends the students for bad behavior or for school code violation, without really addressing the problem therefore sending them down a ‘prison pipeline’ since their mistakes are not really dealt with.
In the same way truancy tickets used to oppress students since they are unable to pay, and by the time they are 18, their unpaid fines become a warrant to jail, he said. (PHOTO JONATHAN OLIVARES/BOYLE HEIGHTS BEAT)
