The American school-to-prison pipeline system
How minorities are affected by the corruption within the American education system
"When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison"
- Angela Davis
The American school-to-prison pipeline system is the term coined for the phenomenon of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies in American schools that result in disproportionately harsher punishments for minority students, funneling them out of schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice system.
This byproduct of the American educational system was institutionalized decades ago, and despite the racial injustices it has caused, it is not a widely-discussed topic. The jaw-dropping statistics, though publicly available, go unacknowledged by many.
According to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, “out-of-school suspensions have increased about 10 percent since 2000. They have more than doubled since the 1970s. Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students.”
In addition, these students who are being suspended are three times more likely to either be held back a grade or to drop out of high school entirely.
The introduction of zero-tolerance policies can be traced back to 1994, when the Gun-Free Schools Act was first passed. This act mandated that if any student brought a weapon to school, they would face an out-of-school suspension for a full year. According to the Justice Policy Institute, “as states began adopting these zero-tolerance policies, the number of suspensions and expulsions increased.”
The main problem with these zero-tolerance-policies is that, it leaves much up to interpretation. For example, in 2014, a 10-year-old boy named Nathan Entingh was suspended for “forming his hand into the shape of a gun and pointing his finger ‘execution-style’ at a classmate.” This fueled significant backlash, but the administrative officials at Devonshire Alternative Elementary School maintained their decision.
This is not an isolated incident. Another example includes student Zachary Christie, who brought a camping utensil for Cub Scouts into the classroom. As a result of zero-tolerance policies, he was ultimately suspended and sent to reform school for 45 days.
These punishments can drastically alter the path of a child’s life, and yet it seems that many school administrators hand them out with little thought given to their consequences.
But a threat far greater to students than suspensions is real-life legal action.
While these students were not sent to court, these examples provide a clearer understanding for why these policies are often unjust, as it is one of the core issues propelling the school-to-prison pipeline system.
According to a study by the Justice Policy Institute, public schools with on-campus officers are by far the most likely to refer students to juvenile courts or law enforcement. They found that even when controlling for a school district's poverty level, “schools with officers had five times as many arrests for ‘disorderly conduct’ as schools without them.”
These arrests ultimately turn these students over to the criminal justice system, funneling them from public schools and into the hands of the law, hence why it was named the“school-to-prison” pipeline.
How minorities are impacted
According to the U.S. Department of Education, black students are suspended or expelled three times more frequently than white students.
In a study by NCES.ed.gov, only 17% of all students enrolled in public school in the U.S. are black as of the fall of 2020. And yet, black students still make up the dominant percentage of in-school arrests.
This disparity in the system begins as soon as these students enter preschool, as NCES.ed.gov found that 48% of preschool children suspended more than once are black. In California alone, for every thousand students enrolled in public school, 12.4 black students are referred to the criminal justice system. On average, the total percentage of black students in this sample size of 1000 is 6.6%. This means that 14.3% of all referrals to the justice system in California alone are made up of black students.
These statistics don’t even compare to those of other states. For example, in Wyoming, out of every 1000 students enrolled in public school, an average of 23.1 black students are arrested. The total percentage of black students in the same sample size of 1000 is 32.1%. When taking into account that 50.6% of all student referrals were black students, the statistics shine a light on the discrimination within the school-to-prison pipeline system.
Ultimately, there is no sound reasoning for this disparity: despite numerous surveys and studies, there is no sound evidence proving that black students misbehave at higher rates.
In fact, a study by Indiana University shows that “white students were more likely to be disciplined for provable, documentable offenses (smoking, vandalism, and obscene language), while black students were more likely to be disciplined for more subjective reasons, such as disrespect.”
According to the Washington Post, a study of Texas discipline policies found that “97% of school suspensions were the choice of school administrators, while only 3% of students had broken rules that made suspension a required punishment.”
In addition, the study found that “African American students had a 31 percent higher likelihood of being disciplined for a discretionary offense, compared with whites and Hispanics with similar characteristics. The analysis also concluded that African Americans had fewer mandatory-discipline offenses than whites or Hispanics.”
While the school-to-prison pipeline continues today, there are now resources to help combat the unjust system. Resources such as aclu.org include more information on ways to help.
Where it all began:
The Superpredator theory
Seattle Municipal Archives/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 2.0
Twenty-five years ago, the word “superpredator” spread in the media like wildfire, shaping criminal justice policy for decades.
The superpredator theory initially gained popularity in the United States in the 1990s. It began when John DiIulio, a professor at Princeton, predicted that violent juvenile crime rates would increase exponentially and usher in a new era of violence for America.
"A new generation of street criminals is upon us- the youngest, biggest, and baddest generation any society has ever known," Dilulio said. He additionally claimed that by 2010, there would be "an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990."
These statistics scared America, creating a nationwide panic.
Criminologist James Fox soon added to the hysteria, stating that "Unless we act today, we're going to have a bloodbath when these kids grow up."
Despite these predictions, violent crime declined drastically. But it was too late. The damage had been done.
The juvenile justice population surged.
According to data collected in 2015, 66% of juvenile lifers convicted from the superpredator scare are black. According to an article by PBS, "life without parole sentences were disproportionately imposed on black juveniles, even when compared to rates of arrest. While 3% of white juveniles arrested for murder were sentenced to life without parole, 5% of black juveniles were locked away for life."
Fueled by the superpredator theory, California passed Proposition 21 in 2000, which created irreversible effects for the school-to-prison pipeline system. This increased criminal penalties for gang-related felonies, requiring individuals 14 years or older to be tried as adults for murder or specified sex offenses. This also prohibited the use of informal probation for any juvenile offender who commits a felony.
Because the superpredator theory had funneled a disproportionate number of black students into the juvenile system, this proposition ruined the lives of many. Zero-tolerance policies, racial discrimination, the superpredator theory hysteria, and Proposition 21 paved the way for the American school-to-prison pipeline system to become a target on the backs of minorities, funneling them into prisons at inordinate rates.
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