Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice

4. The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Rhetoric and Reality

94 > 95 and potential strategies for attenuating the connection between schools and the justice system. As I describe below, unhealthy changes in the assumptions and processes of school discipline have accumulated over the past generation—and correcting this aspect of the school-to-prison pipeline should be a priority concern. Describing the School-to-Prison Pipeline Discipline, or behavioral modification through the use of rules and punishment , has been a central mission of public schools since the spread of compulsory education throughout the United States. Early American schools were in large part designed to “Americanize” immigrant and lower-class youth and their families by teaching lessons about expected behaviors that would help these youth obtain work and assimilate into American society (e.g., Tyack 1974). Ensuring that these children learned to be punctual, respectful to authorities, and docile was possibly as—if not more—important to nineteenth-century teachers as teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. While some scholars have viewed school systems as instilling the behaviors demanded by an industrial society (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 1977), others, like Durkheim (2011), have taken a broader view, arguing that schools establish a baseline for “moral education” by instilling respect for moral authority or democratic participation (Dewey 1916). Though discipline has always been central to American schools, there have been substantial changes to schools’ disciplinary practices and policies over the past two decades. Beginning in the 1990s, schools across the United States began to change how they conceptualize, detect, and respond to student misbehavior in significant ways; collectively, these changes are often known as elements of the school-to-prison pipeline (Kim, Losen, and Hewitt 2010). One important change was the introduction of surveillance and security technologies—such as surveillance cameras, metal detectors, drug-sniffing police dogs, and locked gates at the school’s perimeter—that are traditionally found in criminal justice systems, not schools (see Monahan and Torres 2010). Another is the increasing reliance on exclusionary punishments that remove students from school or classrooms, such as expulsion, out-of-school suspension, or in-school suspension (serving a short suspension in the school, away from instruction and in a separate “punishment” room) (Skiba et al. 96 > 97 more subtle and more common chain of events: students are repeatedly suspended, fail academically, and have their social, emotional, and educational needs unmet by the school; they withdraw from school or are expelled; and this school failure or withdrawal substantially increases the risk that they become ensnared in the criminal justice system (Fabelo et al. 2011). As schools have grown more hostile to youth misbehavior , they have set more youth on the path to educational and social exclusion, and in the process increased the chances that these youth end up in prison. The risks of being entrapped by such a pipeline to prison are unequally distributed among youth. Students of color, particularly low-income black youth, are far more likely to be punished in school, suspended, expelled, and eventually arrested than others. Studies find racially disproportionate disciplinary responses, even when statistically controlling for self-reported rates of misbehavior (e.g., Skiba et al. 2000). Black youth are singled out for punishment because they are perceived to be more threatening, more loud and disruptive, their style of dress and manners of speaking viewed as “thug-like,” and they are seen as more disrespectful than others to teachers (Bowditch 1993; Ferguson 2000; Lewis 2003; McCarthy and Hoge 1987; Skiba et al. 2000). Furthermore, a small but growing body of research finds that school policies and practices vary in ways that correlate with aggregate student body race and socioeconomic status, with schools serving larger populations of poor youth and youth of color more likely to rely on harsh discipline and less likely to use restorative discipline approaches (Payne and Welch 2010; Welch and Payne 2010, 2012), and less likely to respect students’ rights (Bracy 2010; Kupchik 2009). As a result of these practices, school discipline undermines a primary goal of public education, or at least the version of public education outlined by Dewey (1916); rather than allowing a platform from which all youth can achieve success, students who arrive at school with the fewest social and academic opportunities for success are unfairly targeted and further marginalized. After a brief discussion of the accuracy and helpfulness of the pipeline metaphor to describe the problem of school discipline and its effects on youth, I consider what factors put...