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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, and author of The School-to- Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline and Racialized Double Standards, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice and Considering Hate, is co-founder of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline Persists
by nancy a heitzeg

Despite  two decades of research and recommendations for federal, state, and local remedies, the school-to-prison pipeline persists. Students,  especially Black students and students with disability labels, are at oarticular risk for suspension, expulsion, restraint/seclusion and arrest at school. In fact, racial gaps have continued to increase even as efforts are underway to address the school-to-prison pipeline. Dignity in Schools Campaign indicates the  continued cope of this problem in the following press release (the bold is mine). The full U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Report  is located below.

 New Federal Discipline Data Shows Racial Disparities Continue

New York- Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released new data on school discipline revealing that students of color continue to be suspended, expelled and arrested in schools at higher rates than white students, pushing them out of the classroom and into a pipeline to prison and low-wage jobs.

The new data shows that Black students are 3.8 times as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 2.3 times as likely to receive a referral to law enforcement or be subject to a school-related arrest as white students.

The data also documents that 51 percent of high schools with Black and Latino students have sworn law enforcement officers, demonstrating the increasing surveillance and criminalization of youth of color. Every week, we learn of the result of these practices as students of color are arrested and assaulted by School Resource Officers or suspended and expelled from school for minor disciplinary infractions….

Last week, the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a report showing the high cost of harsh discipline and its disparate impact specifically. The study estimated a loss of $35 billion worth of tax revenue over the course of a lifetime from disproportionately pushing out students of color.

The DSC calls on states and districts across the country to direct funds towards effective alternatives to harsh school discipline that would reduce suspensions, expulsions and arrests and address racial disparities.

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Ending the school-to-prison pipeline will require extraordinary measures, and to that end,  here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my recently published book The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards. I hope you will read it, and better yet take action to end the destruction of young lives.

Beyond Reform, Beyond the Schools

 The school to prison pipeline has finally been recognized as a civil rights issue. Students of color, the poor and students with disabilities – and especially those at the intersections of these statuses- are being denied the right to an education via differential labeling, suspension, expulsion and arrest at school. In addition to the denial of education, they are being denied the right to a childhood and a meaningful adulthood too, as minor youthful misbehavior is criminalized and their futures now entangled with a pervasive and punitive legal system.

Various initiatives at the federal, state and local school districts have emerged to address this pipeline and the policies that most immediately create it. Most involve various reforms of zero tolerance disciplinary policies, and efforts to reduce suspensions and expulsions. There is some success here, and some mixed results. Data collection and assessment across states and districts is spotty; moratoriums on suspension often are limited to elementary and middle school students only; alternatives to zero tolerance may not be fully funded, while federal monies continue to pour in for SROs.[i] The role of police in the schools is largely unattended too; there is limited data collected, wide variation cross states and districts in SRO training, use of force expectations or attention the legal rights of students, and little political will to remove them, especially in light of persistent clamoring for “safety”.[ii]  Since it is zero tolerance policies, coupled with a police presence, that jointly fuel the pipeline, it is difficult to imagine ending the school to prison pipeline without the removal of police from the schools.

It is difficult to imagine too that the school to prison pipeline can be ended without comprehensive, nationally mandated and funded initiatives that address the larger plight of public education. Schools are underfunded, teachers are under trained and heavily constrained in ways that are the anti-thesis of the ideal of public education…

The school to pipeline flourishes in schools that are already under-resourced and additionally pressured via the high stakes testing pressures that resulted from NCLB. Unless real investment is made in teacher education and training, school resources are increased, and ESEA reauthorization offers a substantial move away from standardized testing, these schools will be left to juggle new pressures as calls for reduced suspensions continued. Already overworked, underpaid and inexperienced teachers will be asked to add initiatives such as PBIS to their repertoire now too, as another “unfunded mandate” in addition to NCLB. The result may well a shift from criminalizing some students to medicalizing them in new ways. This possibility has already emerged as Compton United School Districts in Los Angeles recently filed a lawsuit, arguing that “complex trauma” should qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.[iii] While the students named in the lawsuit certainly may need services, it is unclear what the larger impact may be for all students who may be de facto medicalized due a combination of race, place and socioeconomic status. And given the connections between IDEA placement and suspension, this may just be slower side-road to the school to pipeline, one now burdened with additional stigmatizing labels. The solution is not to simply replace criminal labels with medicalized ones, slowdown the school to prison pipeline or advocate for reforms that serve for-profit interests, but to address the issue at the root.

The school to prison pipeline flows most heavily from schools that are doubly segregated by race and class, and targets youth of color, especially African Americans, where ever it operates. It is a racialized phenomenon, a product of Post-Civil Rights era “race neutral” policies that provide a color-blind cloak for double-standards of social control. White and more affluent students have their minor misbehaviors mitigated by diversion into the medical model, where they receive less stigmatizing labels and treatment. Black and other students of color are criminalized at school, and when medicalized, given stigmatizing deficit labels that lead to IDEA designations and special education. These medical labels are not a diversion from the pipeline, but to the contrary, escalate the likelihood of suspension, expulsion and arrest at school. This easy criminalization is made possible by mediated stereotypes that persist in equating crime with color, to the extent that Black children in particular are denied childhood innocence, feared and punished.[iv] The school to prison pipeline is meant for youth of color, and however many color-blind cover stories are spun, the data reveals the race neutral lie.

The school to prison pipeline is a feeder for the prison industrial complex and any efforts to disrupt it must consider this. The pipeline is the product of our reliance on racialized mass incarceration, now the centerpiece of our political economy, where disposable labor in a late capitalist service sector economy is criminalized and caged in order to create jobs and profit opportunities for others. Educational institutions, in their function as workforce preparation, serve to track select students along career pathways, and for children of color in poor urban schools that pathway is prison. They are prepared for this future by penal atmospheres, replete with a police presence and punitive disciplinary policies. They are prepared for this future because the prison industrial complex will always demand new “clients”, and piecemeal reforms will not refuse this gaping need.

Dismantling the school to prison pipeline necessitates a rethinking of the punishing state and privatizing ethos that has permeated all aspects of life. It requires a shift towards reinvestment in institutions that serve, rather than deplete, the public good. It requires an interrogation of the carceral state in all in all its; manifestation, including, perhaps especially, the school to prison pipeline..

In the end, dismantling the school to prison pipeline will require us to attend to both the school and the prison, to confront the cloud of color-blind racism that shrouds them each. Ending the school to prison pipeline requires us to meet this challenge: “The most difficult and urgent challenge of today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.”[vi]

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[i] Jane Meredith Adams “State law encourages alternatives to school-based police while federal grants increase their presence” EdSource October 4 2013 retrieved October 1 2015 from http://edsource.org/2013/school-police-under-greater-focus/39952

[ii] L.A. Addington, “Cops and cameras: Public school security as a policy response to Columbine.” (American Behavioral Scientist. 2009) 52:10 143; Thomas A. Birkland and Regina Lawrence.  “Media Framing After Columbine” (American Behavioral Scientist 20090 52; 1387; Frymer, B. (2009).

[iii] Stephen Ceasar “Compton United fights a lawsuit over “children’s demons’” Los Angeles Times, August 15 2015 Retrieved October 1 2015 from http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-compton-schools-trauma-lawsuit-20150820-story.html

[iv] Phillip Atiba Goff and Matthew Christian Jackson, The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 106(4):526-45. (April 2014); Kathleen Welch, Black criminal stereotypes and racial profiling. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice (2007); 23; 276

[v] Kay J. Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg “Smoke and Mirrors: Essential Questions about Prison Reform”. Truthout October 30 2014 retrieved October 1 2015 from http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27006-smoke-and-mirrors-essential-questions-about-prison-reform

[vi] Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York Seven Stories Press 2003.) p. 10

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