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A science teacher in Mississippi asked her students to take a picture with their completed DNA Lego model. John Doe took his picture with a smile and a hand gesture in which his thumb, index, and middle finger was raised. This was enough to earn him an indefinite suspension with a recommendation for expulsion because his school administrators believed he flashed a gang sign although he was simply putting up three fingers to represent his football jersey number. (NPR Isensee, 2014). This kind of criminalization of young people contributes to suspension, dropout, and incarceration, and too often pushes students into what is referred to by many education scholars and activists as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term that refers to “the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems” (ACLU 2013). The School-to-Prison Pipeline is one of the most urgent challenges in education today. This paper will focus on the following circumstances and policies contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline: 1) resource deprived schools, 2) high-stake testing and 3) zero-tolerance discipline policies. However, it is important to note that the school-to-prison pipeline is a broad problem not limited to these three components and has been influenced by historical inequities (segregated education), concentrated poverty, and racial disparities in law enforcement (NAACP, 2005). They have each served to isolate and remove a massive number of people, a disproportionately large percentage of whom are youth of color, from their communities and from participation in civil society (NAACP, 2005). I argue for attention to the school-to-pr...
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...w Center, and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (2011). Federal Policy, ESEA Reauthorization, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: New Press
American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force (2008). Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools?
Ewing, C. P. (2000, January/February). Sensible zero tolerance protectsstudents. Harvard Education Letter. Retrieved March 24, 2014, from http://www.edlettr.org/past/issues/2000-jf/zero.shtml
Fordham University (2003). National Center for Schools and Communities, Equity or Exclusion: the Dynamics of Resources, Demographics, and Behavior in the New York City Public Schools.
National Council of La Raza (2011). School-to-Prison Pipeline: Zero Tolerance for Latino Youth.
From the study, Michelle Alexander’s argument is true and correct that the mass incarcerations are just a representation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow has just been redesigned as the blacks have continued to be mistreated and denied some of the rights and privileges that their counterparts enjoy. There is discernment against the African Americans towards different privileges which are essential to their lives. This discrimination is political as leaders steer operations that are aimed at racially discriminating people from particular groups of race.
Despite the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action, racism evolved from the blatant discrimination of the 1960s like segregation, to the slightly more passive racism of the 1990s such as unfair arrests/jail time (Taylor). Curtis’ writes three decades after the aforementioned progress and yet, looking back on the 90s, there is an alarming amount of similarities between the two.
For my second article review I decided to do mine over the article Harry Wilson titled Turning off the School-to-Prison Pipeline. The main theme that this particular article deals with is how our school systems have become a direct pipeline for kids to end up in prison and the way to break this pipeline is through our schools changing certain policies they operate by. The main topic of this article that the author talks about frequently that contributes to the “pipeline” is the zero tolerance rule that school systems follow. The author speaks frequently about how the zero tolerance policy is a key factor to the school-to-prison pipeline being eliminated. Throughout the entire duration of the article the reader can expect to be confronted with
The Author transitions the past and present signatures of Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow with the suggestion that the New Jim Crow, by mass incarceration and racism as a whole, marginalizes and relegates Blacks to residential, educational and constitutionally endowed service to the Country. The final chapter of The New Jim Crow reviews the manner in which the Black community might respond to the racism that exists today. Some research implies that we in America have reached a point of attrition as to incarceration, and the positive effects outweigh the negative effects of marginalization and collateral damage to the community. By some research, the "War on Drugs" procreates poverty, joblessness, family breakdown, and crime.
The work by Victor M. Rios entitled Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness depict ways in which policing and incarceration affect inequalities that exist in society. In this body of work I will draw on specific examples from the works of Victor M. Rios and Michelle Alexander to fulfill the tasks of this project. Over the course of the semester and by means of supplemental readings, a few key points are highlighted: how race and gender inequalities correlate to policing and incarceration, how laws marginalize specific groups, and lastly how policing and incarceration perpetuate the very inequalities that exist within American society.
Today, more African American adults are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began (Alexander 180). Throughout history, there have been multiple racial caste systems in the United States. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander defines a “racial caste” as “a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” (12). Alexander argues that both Jim Crow and slavery functioned as racial caste systems, and that our current system of mass incarceration functions as a similar caste system, which she labels “The New Jim Crow”. There is now a silent Jim Crow in our nation.
Print. The. Alexander, Michelle. A. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
There are various reasons why many juveniles are ending up in the juvenile justice system unjustly. The pipeline commences with inadequate resources in public schools. Many children are locked into second rate educational environments in which they are placed in overcrowded classrooms, insufficient funding, lack of special education services and even textbooks. This failure to meet the educational needs of children leads to more dropout rates which could also increase the risk of later court involvement. Surprisingly enough, some school may even encourage children to drop out in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes which create incentives to push out low-performing students to increase overall test scores.
However, zero tolerance policies are not the only cause of this school-to-prison pipeline. The addition of school resource officers also feeds the pipeline. As school resource officers are added to the environment, the number of criminal citations in schools increased dramatically (Shah 14). Students often find themselves being harassed by police officers in the halls for minor offenses (Middleton 1). This also increases the arrest rate in schools and paves a path to the juvenile justice system (“What is the School-To-Prison Pipeline?”). “The very policies that schools adopted to manage behavior and increase achievement are fostering failure and feeding the school-to-prison pipeline” (Wilson 50). The school-to-prison pipeline pushes students, especially African Americans and special needs children, out of schools through suspensions and expulsions leading them down a path to the juvenile justice system, which then fosters a culture of incarceration in the United States. As the pipeline becomes more of a national trend, legislatures and school administrators need to come together to eliminate the effects of the
In the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunities of education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right that must be made available on equal terms.” There is a widespread issue that is currently affecting children across the nation. It’s too often that schools push racial minorities and children with disabilities from the classrooms to the criminal justice system at increased rates for minor offenses, suspensions, and expulsions. According to the article, “The School to
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that works together –almost invisible– to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined by race, African American (p. 178 -190).
Tulman, J. B. (2008). Time to Reverse the School-to-Prison Pipeline. (Cover story). Policy & Practice (19426828), 66(1), 22-27.
Khadaroo, Teicher. A. “School suspensions: Does racial bias feed the school-to-prison pipeline?” The Christian Science Monitor. March 31, 2013. Web.
Ogawa, Brian K. Color of Justice: Culturally Sensitive Treatment of Minority Crime Victims. Allen and Bacon: Needham Heights, MA, 1999.
Imagine your own child growing up in the same environment prison inmates waste away in. With Zero-tolerance schools, this is a very real prospect. Zero-tolerance schools are just now coming to light with the sudden realisation of their affect on children, but these schools need to end all together. Zero-tolerance schools are not an effective way to stop the school-to-prison pipeline because they criminalise otherwise innocent students, unfairly targets people of colour, and put students in a negative environment by surrounding them with police officers, dogs, guns, and metal detectors.