Education or Incarceration: Zero Tolerance Policies and the School to Prison Pipeline.

In the past decade, there has been a growing convergence between schools and legal systems. The school to prison pipeline refers to this growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily via ―zero tolerance‖ policies, and , directly and/or indirectly, into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. The school to prison pipeline has emerged in the larger context of media hysteria over youth violence and the mass incarceration that characterize both the juvenile and adult legal systems. While the school to prison pipeline is facilitated by a number of trends in education, it is most directly attributable to the expansion of zero tolerance policies. These policies have no measureable impact on school safety, but are associated with a number of negative effects‖ racially disproportionality, increased suspensions and expulsions, elevated drop-out rates, and multiple legal issues related to due process. A growing critique of these policies has lead to calls for reform and alternatives. The School to Prison Pipeline Defined “In the last decade, the punitive and overzealous tools and approaches of the modern criminal justice system have seeped into our schools, serving to remove children from mainstream educational environments and funnel them onto a one-way path toward prison. The School-to-Prison Pipeline is one of the most urgent challenges in education today. ” (NAACP 2005) The promise of free and compulsory public education in the United States is a promise of equal opportunity and access to the ―American Dream‖. This ideal is billed as the great democratic leveler of the proverbial playing field, and proclaims educational attainment as a source of upward social mobility, expanded occupational horizons, and an engaged, highly literate citizenry. This promise has proven to be an illusionary one, marred by a history of segregationde jure and de facto, by class and race disparities, and by gulfs in both funding and quality. Despite some fleeting hope in the early years of the post-Civil Rights eras, the promise remains elusive for many. Indeed, shifts in educational policy in the past 15 years have exacerbated the inherent inequities in public education. Rather than creating an atmosphere of learning, engagement and opportunity, current educational practices have increasingly blurred the distinction between school and jail. The school to prison pipeline refers to this growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily via ―zero tolerance‖ policies, and tracking them directly and/or indirectly into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. While schools have long been characterized by both formal and informal tracks that route students into various areas of the curriculum, tracking students out of school and into jail is a new phenomenon. Current policies have increased the risk of students being suspended, expelled, and/or arrested at school. Risk of entry into the school to prison pipeline is not random. The School to Prison Pipeline disproportionately impacts the poor, students with disabilities, and Forum on Public Policy 2 youth of color, especially African Americans, who are suspended and expelled at the highest rates, despite comparable rates of infraction (Witt 2007). Youth of color in particular are at increased risk for being ―pushed out‖ of schools—pushed out into the streets, into the juvenile justice system, and/or into adult prisons and jails. This pattern has become so pronounced that scholars, child advocates, and community activists now refer to it as ―the school to prison pipeline‖, the ―schoolhouse to jailhouse track‖ or as younger and younger students are targeted, ―the cradle to prison track‖ ( Wald and Losen 2003; NAACP 2005; Advancement Project 2006; Children‘s Defense Fund 2007 ) In part, the school to prison pipeline is a consequence of schools which criminalize minor disciplinary infractions via zero tolerance policies, have a police presence at the school, and rely on suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions. What were once disciplinary issues for school administrators are now called crimes, and students are either arrested directly at school or their infractions are reported to the police. Students are criminalized via the juvenile and/or adult criminal justice systems. The risk of later incarceration for students who are suspended or expelled and unarrested is also great. For many, going to school has become literally and figuratively synonymous with going to jail. The school to prison pipeline is most immediately related to zero tolerance policies and to failing schools that are over-crowded, inadequately resourced and highly segregated, but it is also the result of larger social and political trends. The school to prison pipeline is consistent with media driven fears of crime and ―super-predators‖, an increasingly harsh legal system for both juveniles and adults, and the rise of the prison industrial complex. What follows is a discussion of the factors that contribute to the school to prison pipeline, an in-depth analysis of the flaws of zero tolerance policies, and recommendations for the interruption of this growing pattern of punishing rather than educating our nation‘s youth. The School to Prison Pipeline: The Context The school to prison pipeline does not exist in a vacuum. It is deeply connected to a sociopolitical climate that is increasingly fearful and punitive. The tendency towards criminalization and incarceration has seeped into the schools, and with each year, this legal net ensnares younger and younger children. School funding declines precipitously, while funding for enhanced security measures rises. Behavior that once resulted in a trip to the principal‘s office now is grounds for a trip to jail. The willingness of some officials to have handcuffed 5 year olds escorted from school by uniformed police officers cannot be accounted for by educational policy alone. How have some young children come to be viewed as so dangerous? What factors account for the policy shifts that shape the school to prison pipeline? How has the line between school and legal systems become so blurred? Who benefits when a growing number of children pushed out of education and into risk for incarceration? The answers in part can be found by a closer examination of the role of both media constructions and the on-going push towards prisonization. Media Construction of Crime and Criminals Forum on Public Policy 3 A substantial body of research documents the role of media—especially television – in constructing perceptions of crime, public images of the criminal, and subsequently shaping attitudes, everyday interactions and public policy. Television reaches almost every household, and the average American consumes over 4 hours TV viewing each day (Croteau and Hoynes 2001, 5). Television shapes what issues we think about and how we think about them. This is particularly true with regard to TV news coverage of crime; ―the public depends on the media for its pictures of crime‖ (Dorfman and Schiraldi 2001, 3). The TV world of crime and criminals, however, is an illusion. TV news does not accurately reflect reality, especially when it comes to reporting on crime. As Walker, Spohn, and Delone (2007, 25) observe, ―Our perceptions of crimes are shaped to a large extent by the highly publicized crimes featured on the nightly news and sensationalized in news papers. We read about young African American and Hispanic males who sexually assault, rob and murder whites, and we assume that these crimes are typical. We assume that the typical crime is a violent crime, that the typical victim is white, and that the typical offender is African American or Hispanic. ‖ These assumptions are false. TV news constructs a portrait of crime, criminals and victims that is not supported by any data. In general, the research indicates that violent crime and youth crime is dramatically over-represented, crime coverage has increased in spite of falling crime rates, African Americans and Latinos are over-represented as offenders and underrepresented as victims, and inter-racial crime, especially crimes involving white victims, is overreported (Dorfman and Schiraldi 2001, 5) Beyond over-representation as ―criminals‖, African American offenders are depicted in a more negative way than their white counterparts. Blacks are mostly likely to be seen on TV news as criminals; they are four times more likely than whites to be seen in a mug shot; twice as likely to be shown in physical restraints; and 2 times less likely to be identified by name. Black suspects are also depicted as more poorly dressed and were much less likely to speak than white suspects, reinforcing the notion that they were indistinct from non-criminal blacks (Entman and Rojecki 2000). The media‘s general misrepresentation of crime and criminals certainly extends to youth; some estimates indicate that as much as two-thirds of violent crime coverage focused on youth under age 25 ( Hancock 2001). The context for the current climate of repressive youth policies was set in the in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Media generated hysteria inextricably linked ―teen super-predators‖, gang-violence and the crack cocaine ―epidemic‖, and all were unmistakably characterized as issues of race. The coverage of the youth gangs, which focused almost exclusively on African American and Latino gangs, exaggerated the extent of gang membership and gang violence, contributing the creation of ―moral panic‖ ( McCorkle and Miethe 2000). Headlines screamed dire warnings about the legions of teen super-predators that would come of age by 2010; of course, they were urban, they were black and brown, and they were relentlessly violent (Templeton 1998). Given apparent legitimacy by conservative Forum on Public Policy 4 academics such as Wilson (1995) and DiIuio (1995) this super-predator script took off among both m