The School to Prison Pipeline

Zero tolerance? School to prison pipeline? The threat, and fear, of youth violence? 

The White House finally stepped in. In Rethinking School Discipline, Dept. of Education puts forward:

"Racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem today, and not just an issue from 40 to 50 years ago....Our Guiding Principles document highlights the need for locally-developed approaches to promote positive school climates and equitable discipline practices. Yet at the same time, we think those locally-tailored approaches should be grounded in research and promising practices--instead of being based on indiscriminate zero tolerance policies, or, at the other extreme, ad-hoc approaches to discipline...

Schools should remove students from the classroom as a last resort, and only for appropriately serious infractions, like endangering the safety of other students, teachers, or themselves.

Unfortunately today, suspensions and expulsions are not primarily used as a last resort for serious infractions.

In recent years, secondary schools have suspended or expelled an estimated two million students a year. That is a staggering amount of lost learning time--and lost opportunity to provide support.

Making matters worse, exclusionary discipline is applied disproportionately to children of color and students with disabilities."

Let's explore the situation a little further. Chris McGreal of the UK Guardian recently described the situation as follows:

  "Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school." The US Schools with their own Police

Is punishment, or law enforcement, the answer? Let's play a thought game. Let us say that if stricter punishment is the answer, than more punishment should have better results. Here's a list of what schools could consider:

• Shackling all misbehaving students
• Hard labor (breaking rocks) in the school yard
• Flogging
• Waterboarding

If incarceration and corporal punishment isn't the answer, than perhaps society could turn to psychiatry and try designer behavior modification therapies, such as:

• "Prescription" drugs such as Ritlin
• Electroshock therapy
• Brain surgery of the  hypothalamus.

If these approaches don't seem promising, than perhaps we need to think rethink school discipline.  Henry Giroux points out:

The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults, incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as super predators, pepper sprays them for engaging in peaceful protests and in an echo of the discourse of the war on terror describes them as "teenage time bombs."(21) Young people have become the enemy of choice, elevated to the status as an all-pervasive threat to dominant authority. Instead of nurturing such children, we now taser them, sequester them to dangerous prisons and demonize them in order to divert our attention from real social problems, while at the same time engaging a public purification through the ritual of imposing harsh disciplinary practices on them.The Suicidal State and the War on Youth

And in his paper entitled War on Youth, Henry Giroux argues:

As is evident in the recent killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, poor minority youth are not just excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that no longer considers them of any value. Such youth, already facing forms of racial and class-based exclusion, now experience a kind of social death as they are pushed out of schools, denied job-training opportunities, subjected to rigorous modes of surveillance and criminal sanctions and viewed less as chronically disadvantaged than as flawed consumers and civic felons. Some such as Trayvon Martin and Rekia Boyd experience something more ominous - death by homicide.No longer tracked into either high- or low-achievement classes, many of these youth are now pushed right out of school into the juvenile criminal justice system.(18)Under such circumstances, matters of survival and disposability become central to how we think about and imagine not just politics, but the everyday existence of poor white, immigrant and minority youth. Too many young people are not completing high school, but are, instead, bearing the brunt of a system that leaves them uneducated and jobless and, ultimately, offers them one of the few options available for people who no longer have available roles to play as producers or consumers - either poverty or prison. When the material foundations of agency and security disappear, hope becomes hopeless and young people are reduced to the status of waste products to be tossed out or hidden away in the global human waste industry.  The Suicidal State and the War on Youth

So, where do we stand? How do we address the school to prison pipeline? I would argue that the White House's position is rather naive. The school to prison pipeline can't just be turned off by recommending that kids go to the principal's office. Instead, we need to deconstruct the entire structure. We need to think about both the aesthetics of the school to prison pipeline (the prison like conditions in schools, e.g., windowless classrooms, no time for play, regimentation, and the actual treatment of some students as prison track and others as college bound) as well as the new private prison industry that has grown into a lobbying machine, pushing society into ever harsher punishments in order to profit from incarceration. 

For more on this topic:

Robin Young of Here and Now
Obama Administration Discourages "Zero-Tolerance" School Policy