The panel was a call for lawyers, educators, everyone to take whatever actions they could to interrupt the school to prison pipeline. In particular, emphasis was placed on the role of the new Federal Guidelines on School Climate and Discipline and the opportunity offered now to move away from decades of zero tolerance. The piece below, written for Praeger/ABC-CLIO Publishing’s on-line series Enduring Questions, highlights the role of zero tolerance policies and police in the schools, both key policy cornerstones in the school to prison pipeline.

Over the years, Criminal InJustice has written much on this topic, in part, with the  hope that this may be the a pathway into a larger social critique of the prison industrial complex which impels it. It has been my experience that however deep the commitment some have to “law and order”, to the harsh policing and punishment of adults, the school to prison pipeline gives many pause. There is something so shocking, so fundamentally unfair about the notion of children, increasingly young,  being policed in the pursuit of an education, being criminalized for mere childish misbehavior. It is so unfair it can sometimes shine a light back on the entire system that it is designed to feed.

So let it now.

 Decriminalizing School Discipline

The school to prison to prison pipeline is the direct result of educational policies and practices that have transformed our schools from sites of opportunity and inclusion into centers of criminalization and exclusion. Over the past two decades, the proliferation of “zero tolerance” policies and an increased police presence at schools have combined to shape the school to prison pipeline via the “criminalization of school discipline.”[1] The school to prison pipeline is a consequence of schools which criminalize minor disciplinary infractions via zero tolerance policies, have a police and/or security officers (School Resource Officer or SRO) presence for enforcement, and rely on suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor infractions. While these policies were motivated, in part, by the perceived need to increase “safety” and “security”, zero tolerance policies and police in schools have instead increased the risks of criminalization for segments of the student body, particularly students of color. Dismantling the school to prison pipeline then, requires immediate attention to the very policies that push students out of school, criminalize minor misconduct, and blur the distinction between the educational function of schools and the punishing power of legal systems.

The School to Prison Pipeline: Definition and Context

The term, the school to prison pipeline began to emerge in the late 1990s as scholars, child advocates, and community activists began to see the results of school policy changes that emerged during that decade. “The school to prison pipeline” describes the growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions and sending them on a pathway towards the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.[2]

Sometimes this push towards prison and jail is indirect; students who are suspended and/or expelled are less likely to return to school, are sent to under-resourced alternative schools, and are, in effective, “pushed out” of the educational system. Increasingly, the school to prison pipeline operates in a more direct fashion, as misconduct has become criminalized and as a growing police presence in the schools allows for direct arrests and ticketing, often for minor misconduct that once would have been handled by teachers and school administrators.[3]

The school to prison pipeline, and the policies that make it possible, do not exist in isolation. The school to prison pipeline is part and parcel of a larger socio-political climate of media driven fears of crime and “gangs” it is consistent with a range of policies associated with mass incarceration, harsh sentences for non-violent offenses, and an increasingly punitive legal system for both juveniles and adults. Further, the impact of the school to prison pipeline is complicated by and correlated with failing schools that are over-crowded, inadequately resourced, heavily pressured by the high-stakes testing originally associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and highly segregated by both race and class.[4] Still, any efforts to dismantle the school to prison pipeline must focus immediately on the two sets of inter-related policies that are at the very heart of the matter: zero tolerance and police in schools.

Zero Tolerance and Police in the Hallways

While there is no official definition of the term zero tolerance, generally the term means that a harsh predefined mandatory consequence is applied to a violation of school rules without regard to the seriousness of the behavior, mitigating circumstances, or the situational context. Violators are suspended, expelled, and increasingly arrested and charged in juvenile court as a result.[5] Zero tolerance rhetoric, which was borrowed from the War on Drugs, became widespread by the mid- 1990s, despite school crime/violence rates that were stable or declining. Implementation was achieved by appeals to fears and calls for safety, and further enforced by the connection of related policies to both federal and state school funding.

The Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 (GFSA) provided the initial impetus for zero tolerance policies. The GFSA mandates that all schools that receive 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 breaking the law. Subsequent amendments to The GFSA and changes in many state laws and local school district regulations broadened the GFSA focus on firearms to apply to many other kinds of weapons[6].

While the original intent of The GFSA was to require these punishments for serious violations involving weapons, conduct, most schools nationally have adopted zero-tolerance policies for a variety of behavioral issues- weapons, alcohol/drugs, threatening behavior, fighting on school premises, and increasingly, minor “misconduct” such as tardiness, “defiance” and disorderly conduct.[7]  Zero tolerance policies often do not distinguish between serious and non-serious offenses, nor do they adequately separate intentional troublemakers from those with behavioral disorders. And as the name implies, these policies indicate zero-tolerance for any infractions, casting a very wide net.

Zero tolerance policies are additionally associated with an increased police presence at school, metal detectors, security cameras, locker and person searches and all the accoutrements of legal control. The Safe Schools Act of 1994 and a 1998 amendment to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 promoted partnerships between schools and law enforcement, including the provision of funding for in-school police forces or School Resource Officers[8]. In 1999, the US Department of Justice “COPS in Schools” grant program dramatically increased the use of SROs, in part as a response to the highly publicized Columbine shootings.[9]

The presence of uniformed police officers in schools is now routine. An estimated one-third of all sheriffs’ offices and almost half of all municipal police departments assign nearly 17,000 sworn officers to serve in schools, and nearly half of all public schools have assigned police officers.[10] Although enhanced security measures security measures were largely inspired by the school-shootings in predominately white suburban schools, they have been most readily adopted and enforced in urban schools, where nearly 70% report a police presence.[11] It is less common, but also possible now for some schools to employ canine units, Tasers, and SWAT team raids for drug and weapons searches[12].

Zero Tolerance and Police in the Hallways Put Students at Risk

 Zero tolerance and school policing were promoted as policies that would increase the safety and security of students and enhance the orderly delivery of education. In reality, the opposite has occurred. There is little research that documents any correlation between these policies and reduced school violence. A growing body of work however, documents the myriad risks created for students including increased rates of suspension/expulsion and drop-puts/push-outs, hostile climate, and racial disparities in the application of discipline[13]. It is these very policies that have facilitated the flow of students out of schools and into legal systems, in fact, creating the school to prison pipeline.

Under zero tolerance policies, over 3.3 million students are suspended each year and over 100,000 expelled.[14] This number has nearly doubled since 1974, with rates escalating in the mid-1990s as zero tolerance policies began to be widely adopted[15]. Suspension and expulsion rates increased most dramatically immediately following the adoption of  No Child Left Behind legislation .Critics have noted that zero tolerance policies have been used to “push –out” low performing students. Since school funding is directly tied to test scores, NCLB gives schools an incentive to get rid of rather than remediate students with low test scores; it is more “efficient” to simply remove the child from class through punitive disciplinary measures and focus on the remaining students.[16]

While zero tolerance was initially intended to address serious offenses such as deadly weapons, assaults, and possession/sale of illegal drugs, the bulk of the suspensions are for minor infractions: Consider the following quite typical cases:

• A 17 year old junior shot a paper clip with a rubber band at a classmate, missed, and broke the skin of a cafeteria worker. The student was expelled from school.
• A 9 year old on the way to school found a manicure kit with a 1-inch knife. The student was suspended for one day.
• Two 10 year old boys from Arlington, Virginia were suspended for three days for putting soapy water in a teacher’s drink. The boys were charged with a felony that carried a maximum sentence of 20 years, and were formally processed through the juvenile justice system before the case was dismissed months later.
• A Pennsylvania kindergartener tells her friends she’s going to shoot them with a Hello Kitty toy that makes soap bubbles. The kindergartener was initially suspended for two days, and the incident was reclassified as a “threat to harm others.”
• In Massachusetts, a 5 year old boy attending an after-school program makes a gun out of Legos, points it at other students, and mimics the sound of gunfire. He was expelled. [17]

Students who are suspended and/or expelled are deprived of educational services or are, at best referred, to sub-standard alternatives schools. Many states fail to offer any access to alternative schools. Students are left to fend for themselves, and if they are re-instated are now further behind their peers and more likely to be suspended again. In fact, rather than deterring disruptive behavior, the most likely consequence of suspension is additional suspension.[18]

Increased drop-out rates are directly related to the repeated use of suspension and expulsion. Students who have been suspended or expelled are more likely to experience poor academic performance, and eventually drop-out.[19] Additional suspensions increase this likelihood; The National Center for Education Statistics documents this: 31 percent of high school sophomores that dropped out of school had been suspended three or more times, a rate much higher than for those who had not been suspended at all.[20]

Both suspension/expulsion and drop-out/push-out rates are highly correlated with future involvement in the juvenile and adult legal systems, creating an indirect pathway out of school and into jail.[21] It is, however, the growing police presence at schools that contributes to the direct flow of youth into the juvenile justice system. Police in schools means more arrests, and not necessarily for serious criminal violations. A variety of studies have shown that a police presence significantly increases both arrests as well as the criminalization of minor misconduct; one three-year study of numerous schools in the same district, for example, found that the schools with police had nearly five times the number of arrests for disorderly conduct as schools without a police presence.[22]

Each year, hundreds of thousands are ticketed and/or arrested at school for minor infraction; research indicates that as many as two-thirds many be for “offenses” such as talking back to teachers, truancy or disorderly conduct.[23] Consider these typical cases as well:

• A 5 year old boy in Queens NY was arrested,handcuffed and taken to a psychiatric hospital for having a tantrum and knocking papers off the principal’s desk.
• In St Petersburg Florida, a 5 year old girl was handcuffed arrested and taken into custody for having a tantrum and disrupting a classroom.
• An 11 year old girl in Orlando Florida was tasered by a police officer, arrested, and faces charges of battery on a security resource officer, disrupting a school function and resisting with violence. She had pushed another student.
• An honors student in Houston, Texas was forced to spend a night in jail when she missed class to go to work to support her family.
• A 13 year old from New York was handcuffed and removed from school for writing the word “okay” on her school desk.[24]

This is not a climate conducive to education. The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have found that extreme discipline, including arrests, predict grade retention, school dropout, and future involvement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.[25] Research shows that a first-time arrest doubles the odds that a student will drop out of high school, and a first-time court appearance quadruples the odds. Zero tolerance policies and over-policing are associated with negative outcomes for all youth, academically, socially, emotionally, and behaviorally. This includes a decreased commitment to education in light of perceptions of unfair treatment.[26]

While turning schools into “secure zero tolerance environments” lowers morale and makes learning more difficult for all students, schools that have a high percentage of minority and low-income students bear the brunt (Kim, Losen and Hewitt 2010).  Criminalized education disproportionately impacts the poor, students with disabilities, LGBT students and youth of color, especially African Americans, who are suspended, expelled and arrested at the highest rates, despite comparable rates of infraction.[27] The U.S. Department of Education, Civil Rights Division documents the disparity. The most recent data indicates the racial gap is widening as nationally, black students were three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension.[28]

Black students made up only 18 percent of students, but they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions. In districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.[29] In addition, black and Latino students represent over 70 percent of the students arrested or referred to law enforcement at school.[30] This racial over-representation then manifests itself in both higher drop-out rates for students of color (students from historically disadvantaged minority groups have little more than a fifty-fifty chance of finishing high school with a diploma) as well as the racialized dynamic of the legal system.[31]

Zero tolerance and over-policing in the school then create the school to prison pipeline by pushing students out of school and into legal systems. These policies and practices also shape the racial dynamic of the pipeline by dis–proportionately criminalizing students of color.

Remedies: Decriminalizing Our Schools

The school to prison pipeline is most immediately the result of the criminalization of school discipline via zero tolerance policies and a police presence in schools. Sold as a means to “safety and security” and heavily funded at the expense of other educational programming, these policies have been abysmal failures. They have “succeeded” only in creating the pipeline by which students, particularly students of color, are pushed out of educational institutions and into legal systems.

A growing chorus of scholars, educators, youth advocates, and youth themselves are challenging the illogic of zero tolerance and policing in schools. There is widespread agreement that the criminalization of school discipline via zero tolerance and school-based policing is the most immediate contributor to the pipeline. There are increasing efforts – on the local, state and national levels – to curtail the impact of debilitating school discipline policies via reform and alternative approaches.

A number of school districts and states have revised their disciplinary policies, distinguishing between minor infractions and more serious violations, offering graduated responses to discipline, reducing the amount of suspension time, and encouraging a non-punitive common sense approach to discipline. Even districts that have not entirely abandoned a police presence or zero tolerance have taken steps to mitigate the scope of their impact, and decriminalize minor infractions. These schools have implemented better data collection methods to facilitate the documentation of disparities in school discipline with an eye towards remedies. Still others have offered additional training and evaluation for police officers who patrol the hallways, with a particular emphasis on dealing with students who have disabilities or mental health challenges.[32] Most recently and significantly, several school districts have turned away from a punishment –centered approach entirely with an emphasis instead on restorative/ transformative justice models and peace circles as means to create a positive school climate and culture.[33]

Nationally, the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice have committed to addressing disparities in the school suspensions and expulsions as a civil rights matter, including filing suit against the State of Mississippi for operating a school to prison pipeline in Meridian.[34] In December of 2012 the first ever Congressional hearings on the school to prison pipeline were held and featured expert testimony that detailed both the scope of the problem and solutions including calls for decreased funding incentives for police, increased funding for counseling, support staff  and educational resources, mandatory nation-wide data collection on suspension, expulsion and arrests at school, and support for evidenced-based solutions to end the persistent racial disparities that shape the contours of the pipeline.[35]

Of course, in the aftermath of the tragic Newtown school shooting, there were calls for more police and punishment, again in the name of school safety.    [36] But this time, taking the lessons learned in the decade since Columbine, communities are saying no. The era of criminalized educational settings, of zero tolerance and heavily policed schools, has created no solutions, but instead, pathways to prison. And that era must end.