School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

The “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the process by which children in kindergarten through 12th grade are pushed out of school classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Ultimately, the school-to-prison pipeline represents an educational failure of underfunded public institutions, wherein overcrowded classrooms, ineffective teachers and administrators, and a lack of resources, such as those relevant to special education, counseling services, and learning materials, result in disengaged and alienated students who either drop out altogether or are pushed out with the use of exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. Then, when students are no longer in their schools, the likelihood of involvement in the justice system increases, a consequence that is most common among Black and poor children and also those with special learning and emotional needs. There is additional evidence that schools are actually encouraging this process of ridding themselves of certain students in order to bolster test scores for their institutional benefit. The pipeline reflects the expansion of student criminalization to the detriment of educational objectives, with the most harshly disciplined students experiencing repeating grades, dropping out, committing crimes, and eventually being incarcerated.