In the United States, the school-to-prison pipeline (SPP), also known as the school-to-prison link, school–prison nexus, or schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track, is the disproportionate tendency of minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. Additionally, this is due to educational inequality in the United States. In other contexts, this situation has been reversed when Successful Educational Actions have been implemented from schools, involving the whole community.Díez-Palomar, J., Santos-Pitanga, T., and Álvarez- Cifuentes, P. (2013). Escuela La Paz: from a ghetto to a magnet school. International Journal of Qualitative Research , 6 (2), 198–209. doi: 10.1525 / irqr.2013.6.2.198
Furthermore, many experts have credited factors such as school disturbance laws, zero-tolerance policies and practices, and an increase in police in schools in creating the "pipeline". This has become a hot topic of debate in discussions surrounding educational disciplinary policies as media coverage of youth violence and mass incarceration has grown during the early 21st century.
The term school–prison nexus in place of school-to-prison pipeline is sometimes used to challenge the idea of a unidirectional pipeline that begins in schools in order to show that schools work within a web of institutions, policies, and practices that funnel youth into prisons. Moreover, it may no longer operate as a "pathway" to prison but instead as a de facto prison.
The current climate of mass incarceration in the US increases the contact the incarceration system has with the US education system. More specifically, these patterns of criminalization translate into the school context. Specific practices implemented in US schools over the past 10 years to reduce violence in schools, including zero-tolerance policies and an increase in school resource officers (SROs), have created the environment for criminalization of youth in schools. This results from patterns of discipline in schools mirroring law-enforcement models.
The disciplinary policies and practices that create an environment for the US SPP to occur disproportionately affect disabled, Latino, and Black students, which is later reflected in the rates of incarceration. Between 1999 and 2007, the percentage of Black students being suspended has increased by 12 percent, while the percentage of white students being suspended has declined since the implementation of zero-tolerance policies. Of the total incarcerated population in the US, 56 percent are Black or Latino.
History
For the half-century prior to 1975, the incarceration rate in the US was fairly constant at roughly 0.1 percent of the population, as indicated in the accompanying figure. The overall incarceration rate in the US has grown rapidly and steadily since 1972, rising by six to eight percent per year until 2000. Growth rates declined in the first decade of the 2000s and peaked at 506 per 100,000 in 2007 and 2008. From its peak in 2009 and 2010, the population of state and federal prisoners decreased slightly in 2011 and 2012. However, the incarceration rate, including those in jail, in 2012 was 707 per 100,000 people, which was more than four times the rate in 1972.
Causes
Exclusionary disciplinary policies, specifically zero-tolerance policies, that remove students from the school environment increase the probability of a youth coming into contact with the incarceration system. Zero-tolerance policies have led to the mistreatment of students' situations and strict disciplinary action which greatly impact the students' future, causing them to go to juvenile detention centers or prison.
Approximately 3.3 million suspensions and over 100,000 expulsions occur each year. This number has nearly doubled since 1974, with rates escalating in the mid-1990s as zero-tolerance policies began to be widely adopted. Rising rates of the use of expulsion and suspension are not connected to higher rates of misbehaviors. Risky behaviors is something suspended students will most likely engage in. Zero-tolerance disciplinary policies have been adopted across the country.
Research is increasingly examining the connections between school failure and later contact with the criminal justice system for minorities. Once a child drops out, they are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than youth who graduate from high school. Studies have found that 68 percent of all males in state and federal prison do not have a high school diploma. Suspensions and expulsions have been shown to correlate with a young person's probability of dropping out and becoming involved with the criminal justice system. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, "Students suspended or expelled for a discretionary violation are nearly 3 times more likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year." However, it is unclear if the factors determining the risk of dropping out are not wholly or partially the same as the factors determining the risk of incarceration as an individual likely to enter the criminal justice system is also likely to encounter difficulties within the education system.
From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in the US quadrupled from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. The graphic to the right shows the uniqueness of this practice in comparison to other countries across the globe, with the US incarcerating a larger portion of its population than any other country in 2008. The US holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners but only has five percent of the world's population.
Disparities
School disciplinary policies disproportionately affect Black and Latino youth in the education system. Ultimately, this means that they are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or arrested; a practice known as the discipline gap. This discipline gap is also connected to the achievement gap. The US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights issued a brief in 2014 outlining the current disparities. Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students. The Advancement Project found that "In the 2006-2007 school year, there was no state in which African-American students were not suspended more often than white students." On average, five percent of white students are suspended, compared to 16 percent of Black students. Black students represent 16 percent of student enrollment, 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement, and 31 percent of students subjected to a school-related arrest. Combined, 70 percent of students involved in "In-School arrests or referred to law enforcement are Black or Latino." The majority of these arrests are under zero-tolerance policies.
Disparities were found in the implementation of zero-tolerance policies in relation to minor offenses. In 2010 in North Carolina, Black students were punished for the same minor offenses, specifically cell phone, dress code, disruptive behavior, and display of affection by more than 15 percent for each category of offense than white students. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Zero-tolerance' policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in school lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline." Additionally, "The Council of State Governments Report found that black students were more likely to be disciplined for less serious 'discretionary' offenses, and that when other factors were controlled for, higher percentages of White students were disciplined on more serious non-discretionary grounds, such as possessing drugs or carrying a weapon."
A 2009 study reported that the racial disparity in rates of school suspensions could not be explained solely by racial differences in rates of delinquent behavior and that this disparity in turn was "strongly associated with similar levels of disproportion in juvenile court referrals". Similarly, a 2010 study found that Black students were more likely to be referred to the office than students of other races and that this disparity could be partly, but not completely, explained by student behavior and school-level factors. According to Fordham Law Review Online, "In the juvenile justice system, black girls are the fastest growing demographic when it comes to arrest and incarceration." A 2014 study found that, although Black students were more likely to be suspended, this disparity "was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student" and concluded that "the use of suspensions by teachers and administrators may not have been as racially biased as some scholars have argued". Another 2015 study using a national high school dataset concluded that "misconduct and deviant attitudes were important factors in predicting the receipt of out-of-school suspensions though results indicated that Black students did not generally misbehave or endorse deviant attitudes more than White students did".
These interdisciplinary policies and practices disproportionately impact students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds such as, Latino and Black. It also been noted that students of minority groups were vulnerable to expulsions and that Black girls are also highly criminalized for being absent from a schooling context. Dorothy E. Hines and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews have argued that increasing rates criminalization of Black girls, disciplinary enforcements such as harsh policies, and bans against "various student offenses" can be illuminated through (a) zero-tolerance policies including various forms of surveillance measures, (b) policing of their bodies as criminals, and (c) penalizing "bad" girl attitudes."
Schools with a higher percentage of Black students are more likely to implement zero-tolerance policies and to use extremely punitive discipline, supporting the racial threat hypothesis.
In addition to racial inequities, there are extant disparities and overlap of students with disabilities in the juvenile system. This disparity is exacerbated by students of color being disproportionately represented among students with diagnosed disabilities.
Current policies maintaining the link Zero-tolerance policies Zero-tolerance policies are school disciplinary policies that set predetermined consequences or punishments for specific offenses. By nature, zero-tolerance policies, as any policy that is "unreasonable rule or policy that is the same for everyone but has an unfair effect on people who share a particular attribute", often become discriminatory. The zero-tolerance approach was first introduced in the 1980s to reduce drug use in schools. The use of zero-tolerance policies spread more widely in the 1990s. To reduce gun violence, the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 (GFSA) required that schools receiving federal funding "must 1) have policies to expel for a calendar year any student who brings a firearm to school or to school zone, and 2) report that student to local law enforcement, thereby blurring any distinction between disciplinary infractions at school and the law". During the 1996–1997 schoolyear, 94 percent of schools had zero-tolerance policies for firearms, 87 percent for alcohol, and 79 percent for violence.