The United States has an unconscionable history of racism that is firmly embedded in its education policies. Addressing racism in every aspect of our school system is the central task in making public education more equitable. This includes education provided within the walls of the U.S. juvenile justice system, which has a known history of disproportionately confining racially minoritized students and students with disabilities, due to patterns of discriminatory policies and practices related to school discipline, policing, arrests, and sentencing. This system functions as a critical point in the âschool-to-prison pipeline,â through which students, disproportionately racially minoritized students, and students with disabilities are funneled out of public education and toward the adult criminal justice system (Erevelles, 2014; Redfield & Nance, 2016; Wald & Losen, 2003; Wallace et al., 2008).
Existing policy research on the school-to-prison pipeline has drawn attention to the role of school-level discipline policies as tools for pushing Black and Brown youth out of regular school through suspension and expulsion through metal detectors, how these practices are disproportionately inflicted on students of color (Kupchik & Ward, 2014), and how these practices contribute to increased contact with the justice system (c.f. Noguera, 2003; Skiba et al., 2002, 2014). There has been less work on the role of education policies and practices originating âoutside of schoolsâ â for example, in and through the actions of school board members, police and community actors at the district level, federal agencies, teacher education programs, curriculum vendors, and in the courts. This book brings together new evidence of the consequences of these hidden âoutside of schoolâ policy dynamics on the educational trajectories of youth, specifically youth of color. The papers individually and collectively speak both to the explicit aims of policy and to policy silences â what happens when things are left âunsaidâ or unnamed. Taken together, the chapters offer practical pathways for reimagining policy.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to these ideas. I begin with an overview of research to date in understanding the policy problem in the school-to-prison pipeline. I chart key developments in federal policy, including policy efforts specifically aimed at improving the quality of education in prison schools. Prison schools are a central âlinkâ in the school-to-prison pipeline as students arrive there because of harsh disciplinary practices and racist pedagogies. While prison schools should be abolished, as long as they remain, they must be placed where incarcerated students have a right to a quality public education. Much policy aimed at improving learning conditions within prison schools is a failure. It has aspects, following Schneider and Ingraham (1997) of degenerative policies, which send signals that the intended beneficiaries (incarcerated youth) remain the real policy problem. I end with a discussion of the specific contributions of the chapters in illuminating these dynamics and by identifying ways to address system failure as part of a broader effort to abolish the school-to-prison pipeline.
Existing Perspectives
There has been much good work on the school-to-prison pipeline. This work has drawn attention to the role of school discipline policies as tools for pushing Black and Brown youth out of regular school with suspension and expulsion through metal detectors, how these practices are disproportionately inflicted on students of color (Kupchik & Ward, 2014), and how these practices contribute to increased contact with the juvenile system (c.f. Noguera, 2003; Skiba et al., 2002, 2014). From this perspective (rooted in part in implicit bias theory), a largely white and female teaching force view Black and Brown students as violent and risky and enact these biases inside of classrooms in the form of low expectations, repeated in-school suspensions, and expulsions. Implicit bias theory refers to practices whereby individuals act on existing stereotypes rather than facts or reality. These exclusionary practices (rooted in part in labeling theory in which individuals enact the stereotypes placed on them) lead youth toward chronic absenteeism, truancy in and outside of school, and dropping out of school. Students who are perceived as criminals start to behave differently, more generally as âbad kidsâ and are labeled as making other students uncomfortable; so, they start to do things that will keep them out of the settings where they are treated as unequal, such as schools (Hirschfield, 2008; Noguera, 2003).
Work informed by a critical race theory perspective has argued that the behavior of teachers and others is rooted in school policies that racialized codes of conduct (Crawley & Hirschfield, 2018). For example, Skiba, Michael, Nardo, and Peterson (2002) found that Black and Latinx students were more likely to be disciplined for disrespect, talking loudly or minor threats. This work shows how categories of discipline, codified in school codes, such as insubordination and willful defiance created the conditions for Black and Latinx students to be disciplined and pushed toward incarceration.
Through the lens of these theories, scholars have argued that the incarceration of youth of color correlates with racist policies and practices inside of schools. The empirical evidence suggests that the rise of harsh disciplinary policies enacted by racist educators and administrators within schools correlate with increased incarceration rates among these youth. The other side of the school-to-prison pipeline argument is that when harsh disciplinary policies and practices are addressed and replaced, for example, by less punitive approaches to discipline, incarceration rates among the populations decline (c.f., CPSV, 2008; APA, 2006).
From this perspective, the school-to-prison pipeline is created by and through the micro level actions of school staff who draw on broader and often institutionalized understandings in society about who deserves to be in school, what it means to be a good student, how schools should regulate and manage youth while in school, understandings that take the form of broad cultural repertoires that educators enact, sometimes without reflection. The criminal justice system sees youth as schools tragically have and inflicts harsh and long sentencing practices, typically for minor violations. The youth are placed in short- or long-term juvenile detention centers where they are further othered, deprived of social ties and social capital (Rios, 2011), go on to become repeat offenders, and move on a track toward lifetime incarceration.
The second conceptual wave, which builds on the first in its integration of political economy perspectives and Critical Race Theory, argues the importance of a wider lens on the sources of these behaviors (c.f., Hirschfield, 2012; Meiners, 2010; Turner, et al., 2021). This work locates harsh disciplinary practices at a societal relational level. For example, Hirschfield (2008) has examined the relationship between carceral policies in society and school policy. One instance of this dynamic is the political benefits that legislators accrue with the expansion of the prison system in the form of population-based political benefits (e.g., representation) and economic benefits in the form of revenue and jobs to their jurisdiction. This creates a dynamic whereby schools get less funds and prisons get more (Hirschfield, 2008).
From this perspective, the logics of harsh discipline and zero tolerance is just one of the many manifestations of a broader set of societal logics. These broader discourses include dominant ideologies of white privilege and racial capitalism whereby systems are structured to make it easier for whites to get and stay ahead, without explicit forms of racism, but instead with rules and practices that seem race neutral on the face but that have disproportionate consequences for Black and Latinx youth.
School discipline policies that invoke generalized ideas of school safety draw on historically rooted racism and property rights (Harris, 1993), and assume the form of new jobs or expanded surveillance in schools in the form of school safety officers (Turner and Beneke, this volume). These ideas circulate through behavior inside of schools and the criminal justice system, but also in and through many other segments of society, including social and popular media (Meiners, 2010). âMass media sutures the transition between schools and jails with hyperbolic representation of youth of color in need of managementâ (ibid., p. 26). The ideas are constantly in motion â manifest through practices and behavior, through written texts but also through other âliteraciesâ such as television shows where African Americans or Latinx are portrayed as criminals and where youth violence of any sort is sensationalized.
Through the discourse and discursive lens, scholars have examined whether and how policies of harsh school discipline intersect with racial capitalism; how the disciplining of youth serves a larger narrative that keeps students of color out of schools and pushes them into low wage, low-skilled jobs that whites feel are beneath whites. It has looked at how television executives distribute and naturalize ideas of mass incarceration of youth of color through the roles they assign Black actors, their portrayal of Black individuals in films and in advertisements about behavior in schools. This work views the school-to-prison pipeline as historically situated and as reproduced and reinforced in political systems of the 1970s and 1980s (when good governance became associated with being tough on crime and became a popular political platform). It understands the school-to-prison pipeline less as pipeline and more as a nexus. Work that attends to the intersection between racial capitalism and the school-to-prison pipeline acknowledges historically situated intersections between school funding and the school-to-prison pipeline (Kim, McCarter, & Logan-Greene, 2020; Turner et al., 2021). Redlining (especially during the Roosevelt era via the Federal Housing Authority) did not allow people of color to obtain loans for housing, and as a result, those practices did not allow people of color to own houses in certain areas These housing policies and practices excluded people of color from getting homes in certain areas and pushed them toward neighborhoods with lower property taxes and low-quality schools. Most students of color attend these low-resourced schools where funds tend to be spent on security and surveillance over school counselors.
In contrast to the idea of a unidirectional pipeline, a nexus implies a multi-directional complex landscape (school policy, housing policy) with overlapping motives from various actors â a set of discourses (including both formal and informal policy) that legitimate the relationship between schools and incarceration. Policy research and designs that attend to the nexus also examine policies and practices in the interstices of the pipeline in the probation phase (CrumĂ© et al., 2021).
Both perspectives are useful; the first draws attention to how the daily actions of staff within and across schools and the criminal justice system exclude youth from school, send them to prison for life, and deny them basic educational and human rights. The second draws attention to how micro practices gain legitimacy from broader discourse as produced and disseminated in policy, in media, and in scholarship. Why, then, another book on the school-to-prison pipeline given decades of powerful research on how the prevalence of school practices, particularly punitive discipline, correlates with incarceration rates? Why, another book, given persuasive arguments that the behaviors we see in schools and the criminal justice system are the result of broader discourse, specifically racism, anti-Blackness, and the role of schools in the socialization and sorting of students?
The answer is this. First, despite over a decade of intense policy and public attention to the school-to-prison pipeline, it persists, and its existence disproportionately harms youth of color. Over the past three decades, out-of-school suspensions have increased, despite dropping slightly (10%) since 2004. Black stu...
