SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE
School to Prison Pipeline
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OnYou Kang School-to-prison pipeline is a tendency of disadvantaged students getting funneled out of the public school system into the juvenile justice system. Such tendency, which is largely because of increasingly harsh school disciplinary policies, victimizes primarily Black students and it starts as early as preschool—48 percent of students who have been suspended more than once in preschool are Black. Black students are three times more likely to be suspended compared to the White students, and the list goes on (Hasty, 2017). Based on the statistics, it is hard not to say that the school-to-prison pipeline is independent of the race. The 13th amendment guarantees the freedom to all American citizens, but there was one exception: criminals. This exception is a loophole of the 13th amendment and has been exploited as a tool for keeping Black people from freedom by starting to arrest Black people for small crimes right after the bill was passed. From then until now, White people constantly built the image of Black people as savages and criminals, which established stereotypes and prejudice against Black people (DuVernay, 2016). As drug-related crimes immensely increase in the lase 80s, zero-tolerance policy and ostensibly “color blind” mandatory sentencing policies were introduced in the 90s, which made it possible for people to get a life sentence or the death penalty for drug-related crimes (Nelson, Palonsky, McCarthy, & Noddings, 2017). Over time, it was proven that the zero-tolerance
