Hello and welcome back to our continuation of our Prison and Justice System Series! In this post we’re going to be unpacking the School to Prison Pipeline (STPP) going over what it is, a brief history on zero tolerance policies, stats and study findings, and then finally discussing next steps and alternative viewpoints.
The STPP is actually exactly what it sounds like. To quote the words of Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D, it is the “process through which students are pushed out of schools and into prisons. In other words, it is a process of criminalizing youth that is carried out by disciplinary policies and practices within schools that put students into contact with law enforcement”. This pipeline specifically targets Black students and those with learning disabilities. Cole writes that this pipeline may be maintained due to the zero tolerance policies put in place in combination with the presence of police officers on school campuses. Zero tolerance policies are practices that use fixed/preset consequences for misbehavior, not taking into account the context of the situation. These practices are most commonly known as suspension and expulsion, in which students are removed from their educational settings for a set period of time. While the practice of punishing school crimes through suspension/expulsion used to be relatively uncommon, this idea really started to take off during the 1990’s in response to the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 that was passed to make schools safer by deterring serious offenses (via exclusionary policies and law enforcement). Unfortunately, what was first introduced into the public school system as a way to discourage larger crimes from occurring had disastrous effects on students, resulting in the STPP that we refer to today.
Zero tolerance policies and the presence of law enforcement on school campuses not only significantly increased the amount of suspensions and expulsions (about 92,000 students were arrested during 2011-12 school year according to the US Department of Education), but these rates of disciplinary actions were higher among Black students in comparison to any other race or ethnicity. Data from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights during the 2011-12 school year found that Black students were suspended 3x more than White students. Even at preschool-age, Black children were found to represent 48% of those being suspended from school at least once. A study done by Welch and Payne in 2010 found that schools with Black students were more likely to use “punitive discipline” and zero tolerance policies on their students. In other words, researchers found that schools with these demographics were more likely to implement harsher punishments on their students rather than attempting to resolve the disputes in a more calm, restorative manner. Another study done in 2011 on the Texas public school system showed that Black students had “a 31 percent higher likelihood of a school discretionary action, compared to otherwise identical white and Hispanic students”. Wald and Losen determined from national data that “Black students were 2.6 times as likely to be suspended as white students,” and also very alarmingly, “approximately 68 percent of state prison inmates in 1997 had not completed high school”. The list goes on and on. All of these studies are evidence as to how Black students are disproportionately represented in disciplinary measures, put into contact with law enforcement at a young age, and funneled into the criminal justice system after school.
In addition, zero tolerance practices have not yet been proven to actually help a school’s learning environment. In a study done by the American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force in 2008, researchers found that these zero tolerance policies may be more harmful than helpful. This study found that schools with higher levels of suspension and expulsion actually end up with lower levels of satisfactory school climates, indicating that removing students that do not follow school rules (those labeled as “problematic”) may not actually promote a productive learning environment. The 2011 Texas public school study found that students that were suspended or expelled were also more likely to drop out of school/repeat a grade, further emphasizing the fact that these zero tolerance measures may not actually help students in any way and are actually quite harmful towards their academic performance.
Even though the “school-to-prison pipeline” metaphor has grown in popularity over the past few decades, some scholars don’t believe it accurately represents the problem at hand. Many think the metaphor is too narrow and ineffective because the relationship between school policies, students, and prison is not as direct as “school-to-prison”. These critics claim that other issues, such as poverty, unemployment, and lacking mental health resources, in tandem with these harsh zero tolerance policies, are what result in schools criminalizing their students and resorting to suspensions and expulsions as a means for “effective” discipline.
One author of an Oxford Research Encyclopedia entry titled “Examining the School-to-Prison Pipeline Metaphor” created an infographic that shows an example of a possible path to prison where different factors, such as poverty, delinquency, school arrest, probation, etc. ultimately lead to jail time. The graph shows the intersection and crossing points of these different situations, and the “web of forces that eventuate in incarceration” (Crawley & Hirschfield, 2018). This model, among others, breaks down the idea of the “pipeline”, in that there are extenuating circumstances (along with school behavioral policies) that result in incarceration.
Figure 1: (Skiba et al., 2014)
Figure 2: (Hirschfield, 2012)
All of this to ask: what can schools do knowing this information? We now know that these zero tolerance and exclusionary policies are harmful and do not solve any behavioral problems in students, so what can we do moving forward?
The Department of Education and the Department of Justice worked together in 2014 to give educators guidelines on how to tweak their disciplinary policies and created The Guiding Principles - A Resource Guide for Improving School Climate and Discipline. In it, they break down their suggestions into three main ideas:
First, they emphasize the importance of a, “favorable school climate that helps prevent and changes inappropriate behaviors,” (MST Services, 2018). Instead of suspending students and leaving them without any suggestions or instruction on how to improve their behavior, schools should be providing resources to help develop conflict resolution skills. Give students mentors to talk to that can ultimately help them address the root to their misbehavior so they can address them in a productive way.
They also suggest making sure all behavioral expectations and consequences of students are clear and understood. Many cases of unfair uses of zero tolerance policies are due to students not understanding the repercussions of their actions, as well as these punishments being unfair to start with.
Finally, disciplinary policies should be constantly reviewed and evaluated to ensure that they are fair in their consequences, as well as equitable amongst students of all different backgrounds.
Knowing this, we hope you will go out into the world with a greater understanding of school policies and their long-term effects on youth. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more content regarding prison and the justice system!
SOURCES:
Civil Rights Data Collection (US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014)
Understanding the School to Prison Pipeline (Cole, 2019)
The School to Prison Pipeline, Explained (Nelson & Lind, 2015)
Racial Threat & Punitive School Discipline (Welch and Payne, 2010)
LINK: it’s really long
Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement (Fabelo et al., 2011)
Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools? An Evidentiary Review and Recommendations (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008) LINK: https://www.apa.org/pubs/info/reports/zero-tolerance.pdf
Defining and Redirecting a School to Prison Pipeline (Wald & Losen, 2003)
Explaining the School-to-Prison Pipeline Metaphor (Crawley & Hirschfield, 2018)
Figure 1 (Skiba et al., 2014)
Figure 2 (Hirschfield, 2012)
How Can We Stop The School-to-Prison Pipeline? (MST Services, 2018)