School to Prison Pipeline

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 policy and mandatory sentencing policies exacerbate the racial justice system and are ineffective in decreasing the crime rate. Yet, the same structure is applied to the disciplinary policy at almost all school districts.

Why students of color are more likely to get harsher punishments compared to White students (Nelson et al. 2017) can be explained with the matrix of domination. Students of color are occasionally suspended for “loud”, “disrespectful”, or “defiant”, which all are very subjective terms. According to Nelson et al. (2017), teachers and administrators are as susceptible to stereotypes of people of color as the rest of the population. These stereotypes can lead educators to view students of color as more threatening or dangerous compared to White students. As the teachers become fearful, and when fear intersects with racial stereotypes, the result is often removal of the student of color from the class and then suspension. Students who are suspended—whether if it is a in-school suspension or out-of-school suspension does not make a big difference according to the lecture on October 31, 2019 by Dr. Jason Jabbari—are more likely to walk down the path of academic failure and has higher chance of not graduating high school, which immensely increases the students’ chance of incarceration either as juvenile or later as adults—high school drop-outs has 8 times higher chance of ending up in jail or prison. Educators are not the only ones who are biased against students of color. Police officers also have a reputation for their divergent attitude towards people of different races— how police treat civilians are not independent of race, gender, class, and other socioeconomic factors (Shedd, 2015). When police officers with such bias are bought into schools, they do not create as safe of an environment as the educators wished them to. Misbehaviors that used to be handled by schools are criminalized that schools with police have 5 times more arrests for disorderly conduct compared to the schools without police (Hasty, 2017; Nelson et al. 2017).

To cut the tendency of the school-to-prison pipeline, educators need to take a genuine interest in the whole student and should not be too quick to discipline. They should be mindful of the predictions that they make and need to have better understandings of different cultures and backgrounds. Overall, defying the matrix of domination by providing equal opportunities for education and creating an environment that supports all the students would prevent incarceration for many students and put an end to the school-to-prison pipeline.

13Th. (2016). Retrieved from http://www.netflix.com/watch/80091741?trackId=13752289

How Schools Are Funneling Certain Students Into The Prison System. (2017). Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=O9Wyc85x38o

Jabbari and Johnson (2019). The Collateral Damage of In-School Suspensions: A Counterfactual Analysis of High-Suspension Schools, Math Achievement and College Attendance. Unpublished Manuscript.

Nelson, J. L., Palonsky, S. B., McCarthy, M. R., & Noddings, N. (2017). Critical issues in education: dialogues and dialectics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Shedd, C. L.-M. (2015). Unequal city: race, schools, and perceptions of injustice. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.