School-to-prison pipeline

Based on Wikipedia: School-to-prison pipeline

Here's a number that should stop you cold: the United States holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners while containing just five percent of the world's population. And increasingly, the path to those prison cells begins not on street corners or in back alleys, but in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms.

They call it the school-to-prison pipeline.

When Schools Started Acting Like Police Stations

For about fifty years before 1975, America's incarceration rate held remarkably steady at roughly 0.1 percent of the population. Then something changed. The rate began climbing six to eight percent every single year, eventually quadrupling from about 500,000 incarcerated people in 1980 to 2.3 million by 2008. By 2012, the incarceration rate had reached 707 per 100,000 people—more than four times what it was in 1972.

What happened?

Part of the answer lies in how America's schools transformed during the same period. Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, schools began adopting what came to be known as "zero-tolerance policies"—predetermined punishments for specific rule violations, applied uniformly regardless of context or circumstances.

The zero-tolerance approach first appeared as a tool to combat drug use in schools. Then came the school shootings of the 1990s, and fear took the wheel. The Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 required any school receiving federal money to expel students who brought firearms to school for a full calendar year and to report them to local law enforcement. The distinction between a school disciplinary matter and a criminal matter began to blur.

By the 1996-1997 school year, 94 percent of American schools had zero-tolerance policies for firearms, 87 percent for alcohol, and 79 percent for violence. The policies seemed reasonable enough on paper. Nobody wants guns in schools.

But zero-tolerance didn't stay limited to guns and drugs.

When Cell Phones Became Criminal Offenses

Over time, zero-tolerance expanded to cover an increasingly broad range of behaviors. The policies, by design, don't distinguish between serious and minor offenses. A student caught with a cell phone receives the same type of punishment framework as one caught with drugs. Tardiness gets treated with the same institutional severity as violence.

The numbers tell the story. In 2006, a full 95 percent of out-of-school suspensions were for nonviolent, minor disruptions like showing up late to class. In Maryland during the 2006-2007 school year, suspensions for non-serious, non-violent offenses accounted for 37.2 percent of all suspensions. Only 6.7 percent were for actually dangerous behaviors.

When Chicago adopted widespread zero-tolerance policies in 1994, student suspensions jumped 51 percent over the following four years. Expulsions increased by 3,000 percent. Not three hundred percent. Three thousand percent.

Today, approximately 3.3 million suspensions and over 100,000 expulsions occur in American schools each year. This number has nearly doubled since 1974, with the sharpest increases coming in the mid-1990s as zero-tolerance spread across the country. Crucially, these rising suspension rates aren't connected to higher rates of actual misbehavior. Students aren't acting worse. Schools are just punishing them more.

The Pipeline Mechanics

Why does kicking a kid out of school lead to prison? The connection operates through several interlocking mechanisms.

First, there's the simple matter of supervision. When you suspend a student, you remove them from the structure and oversight that school provides. An unsupervised teenager with nothing to do has more opportunities to get into trouble. Studies show students are more than twice as likely to be arrested during months when they've been forcibly removed from school.

Second, suspension creates alienation. A student who gets kicked out often feels rejected by the institution. That rejection pushes them toward relationships with peers who may be engaged in antisocial behavior. The influence of peer groups on teenage behavior is well-documented through what criminologists call differential association theory—essentially, people tend to adopt the values and behaviors of those they spend time with.

Third, and most consequentially, suspension dramatically increases dropout rates. Students who have been suspended are three times more likely to drop out by tenth grade than students who have never been suspended. And dropping out itself creates a multiplier effect: once a young person leaves school, they are eight times more likely to end up incarcerated than those who graduate.

The American Civil Liberties Union, often abbreviated ACLU, puts it starkly: students suspended or expelled for a discretionary violation—meaning something subject to interpretation rather than a clear rule—are nearly three times more likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year.

Today, 68 percent of all males in state and federal prison do not have a high school diploma.

Cops in the Corridors

Zero-tolerance policies didn't just change how schools punished students. They changed who was doing the punishing.

Between 1997 and 2007, the number of School Resource Officers—law enforcement officials stationed in schools, commonly called SROs—increased by 38 percent. In 1999, 54 percent of students reported seeing a security guard or police officer in their school. By 2005, that number had risen to 68 percent.

Here's the bitter irony: the 1990s school shootings that prompted much of this police presence were committed by white students. Not a single perpetrator in those high-profile incidents was Black or Latino. Yet the increased police presence in schools has disproportionately resulted in Black and Latino students being criminalized.

When police are present in schools, behaviors that might once have been handled by a teacher or principal sending a student to detention instead become matters for law enforcement. The school discipline system begins to mirror the criminal justice system. Teachers and administrators refer students to police. Police use profiling techniques—trying to identify students who might engage in misbehavior based on observable characteristics.

The problem with profiling in schools is the same as its problem everywhere: it over-identifies students from minority populations. It catches the wrong people while missing actual threats.

The Discipline Gap

If the school-to-prison pipeline affected all students equally, it would still be a profound policy failure. But it doesn't affect all students equally. Not even close.

Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students. On average, five percent of white students are suspended in a given year, compared to 16 percent of Black students. The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, examined data from the 2006-2007 school year and found there was no state in the entire country where African-American students were not suspended more often than white students. Not one.

Black students represent 16 percent of total student enrollment in America. But they represent 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of students subjected to school-related arrest. When you combine Black and Latino students, they account for 70 percent of all in-school arrests and law enforcement referrals.

Between 1999 and 2007, the percentage of Black students being suspended increased by 12 percent. During the same period, the percentage of white students being suspended actually declined. Zero-tolerance policies, in practice, have meant more tolerance for white students and less for Black ones.

This disparity shows up even for minor offenses. A 2010 study in North Carolina found that Black students were punished more harshly than white students for the same infractions—cell phone use, dress code violations, disruptive behavior, even displays of affection. For each category, Black students received punishment at rates more than 15 percent higher than their white peers for identical behavior.

The Council of State Governments examined this pattern and found that Black students were more likely to be disciplined for less serious "discretionary" offenses—the kind where someone has to make a judgment call. Meanwhile, when the researchers controlled for other factors, higher percentages of white students were disciplined for more serious non-discretionary grounds, like actually possessing drugs or carrying a weapon.

In other words, white students tend to get in trouble when they clearly break explicit rules. Black students get in trouble when someone decides they've done something wrong.

Can Behavior Explain the Gap?

One question that naturally arises: could the disparity simply reflect actual differences in behavior? Are Black students being suspended more because they're misbehaving more?

Researchers have examined this question carefully, and the answer is complicated but important.

A 2009 study found that the racial disparity in suspension rates could not be explained solely by racial differences in rates of delinquent behavior. The disparity was, in the researchers' words, "strongly associated with similar levels of disproportion in juvenile court referrals"—suggesting the same biases operating in schools were operating in the broader justice system.

A 2010 study found that Black students were more likely to be referred to the principal's office than students of other races, and that this disparity could be partly but not completely explained by student behavior and school-level factors. Something else was going on.

A 2015 study using national high school data found that while misconduct and deviant attitudes were important factors in predicting out-of-school suspensions, Black students did not generally misbehave or endorse deviant attitudes more than white students did. The behavior was similar. The punishment was not.

There was one 2014 study that reached a different conclusion, finding that the disparity in suspensions was "completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student." But even that study acknowledged the complexity—prior problem behavior itself can be shaped by earlier discriminatory treatment, creating a cycle where bias feeds into records that then justify future bias.

The Fastest Growing Demographic

There's another dimension to this story that often gets overlooked. According to analysis published in the Fordham Law Review, Black girls are the fastest growing demographic in the juvenile justice system when it comes to arrest and incarceration.

Researchers Dorothy E. Hines and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews have examined why this is happening. They argue that Black girls face criminalization through several specific mechanisms: zero-tolerance policies and various forms of surveillance, the policing of their bodies and physical presentation as inherently suspicious, and the penalizing of what gets labeled as "bad girl attitudes."

Black girls are highly criminalized even for being absent from school—the very thing expulsion and suspension force upon students.

Disability Compounds Everything

Students with disabilities face their own disproportionate representation in school discipline and the juvenile justice system. And because students of color are themselves disproportionately diagnosed with disabilities—sometimes appropriately, sometimes as a way of labeling and removing troublesome students—the effect compounds.

Data shows that people of color with disabilities are the most affected by the school-to-prison pipeline. They sit at the intersection of multiple systems that each carry their own biases, and those biases multiply rather than cancel out.

The Racial Threat Hypothesis

Here's a pattern that researchers have documented: schools with higher percentages of Black students are more likely to implement zero-tolerance policies in the first place, and more likely to use extremely punitive discipline.

This supports what social scientists call the racial threat hypothesis—the idea that as minority populations grow, majority institutions respond with increased control and punishment. The more Black students in a school, the more likely that school is to adopt the very policies that funnel students into the criminal justice system.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle. Schools in Black neighborhoods get more punitive policies. Those policies create more suspensions and expulsions. Those removals lead to more dropouts. Those dropouts lead to more incarceration. And the incarceration rates get cited as evidence that these communities need more policing—including in their schools.

Pipeline or Prison?

Some researchers have begun questioning whether "pipeline" is even the right metaphor anymore. A pipeline suggests a pathway—something you travel through on your way somewhere else. But increasingly, the disciplinary structures in American schools function not as a path to prison but as a kind of prison themselves.

Students in heavily policed schools experience constant surveillance, restrictions on movement, and the ever-present possibility of criminalization for ordinary behavior. The term "school-prison nexus" has emerged to describe this reality—schools operating within a web of institutions, policies, and practices that don't just lead to incarceration but replicate its conditions.

When a teenager's school day includes walking through metal detectors, being watched by armed officers, facing punishment for minor infractions, and experiencing discipline that mirrors law enforcement models, the distinction between school and jail becomes harder to draw.

What Suspension Really Teaches

Zero-tolerance policies were supposed to make schools safer. They were supposed to send a clear message about consequences. They were supposed to deter bad behavior.

By any measure, they have failed at these goals.

Rising suspension rates aren't connected to declining misbehavior. Students who get suspended are more likely, not less likely, to engage in risky behavior afterward. The policies don't distinguish between actual threats and minor disruptions, so they waste resources on students who pose no danger while teaching them that the system is arbitrary and punitive.

What suspension actually teaches is alienation. It teaches that you don't belong. It teaches that minor mistakes can derail your entire future. For students who are already struggling, it teaches that the institution meant to help them has given up on them.

And disproportionately, it teaches these lessons to Black and Latino students, to students with disabilities, to students from disadvantaged backgrounds—the very students who most need school to be a pathway to opportunity rather than a gateway to incarceration.

The Numbers We Live With

The United States incarcerates a larger portion of its population than any other country on Earth. We incarcerate more people than China, which has four times our population. We incarcerate more people than Russia, more than Brazil, more than India.

Sixty-one percent of the total incarcerated population in America is Black or Latino.

Sixty-eight percent of incarcerated men never finished high school.

Every year, over 100,000 students are expelled from American schools.

These numbers are connected. They are not coincidences. They are the measurable output of systems we have built—systems that take children who need more support and respond by giving them less, that take students struggling in school and push them out entirely, that take minor infractions and treat them as crimes.

The school-to-prison pipeline is not a metaphor. It is a documented, measurable, statistically verifiable reality. And it is a choice. Not an inevitable consequence of youth behavior or crime rates or social conditions, but a specific set of policy decisions that produce specific outcomes.

Which means it could be different. There are places where these policies have been reversed, where schools have implemented what researchers call "Successful Educational Actions" that involve the whole community, where discipline focuses on keeping students in school rather than pushing them out.

But reversing course requires first acknowledging what we've built. A system where a cell phone violation can start a chain of events ending in prison. A system where the color of your skin predicts how harshly you'll be punished for the same behavior. A system where the institutions meant to prepare young people for productive lives instead prepare them for incarceration.

The pipeline is real. The question is whether we'll keep sending children through it.