School Prison Pipeline Essay

Keigen S. Daniels

Juvenile Delinquency

October 6, 2017

The School Prison Pipeline

The term “School prison pipeline” is a metaphor used to describe the increasing patterns of the contact students have with the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems as a result of the recent practices implemented by educational institutions, zero tolerance policies, and the use of police in schools.[1] The metaphor is currently a hot topic of debate in discussions surrounding educational disciplinary policies as media coverage of youth violence and mass incarceration has grown during the early 21st century.

The Zero-tolerance policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while officers in school’s lead to students being criminalized

for behavior that should be handled inside of the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline. The ACLU believes that children should be educated, not put into jail. They are working to challenge a number of policies and practices that are within public school systems and the juvenile justice system that contributes to the term “school-to-prison pipeline.”
For most students, the term “pipeline” begins with lack of or inadequate resources in public schools.

Overcrowded classrooms, the lack of qualified teachers, and the lack funding for "extras" such as counselors, special education services, and textbooks. This leads to locking students into second-rate educational environments. The failure to meet the educational needs of the students leads to an increase of disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court involvement. Even worse, schools may encourage dropouts in response to pressures from test-based accountability organizations such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which creates incentives to push out low performing students to make overall test scores

increase.
Lacking the resources, the incentive to push out low performing students, and responding to a handful of highly publicized school shootings, most all schools have embraced the zero tolerance policies that automatically apply severe punishment regardless of the circumstances. Under these policies, a lot of students have been expelled for bringing nail clippers, scissors, and etc. to school. The rate of suspension has increased dramatically in recent years. From 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000. This has been most dramatic for children of color.
The overly harsh disciplinary policies have pushed students down the line and into the juvenile justice system. Children that are suspended and expelled are often left unsupervised and without constructive activities. Also, they can easily fall behind in their coursework, which in turn, leads to a greater likelihood of disengagement and the drop out of the students. These ingredients increase the likelihood of court involvement. As the harsh penalties for minor misbehavior becomes more inviting, schools are increasingly ignoring and bypassing the due process protections for suspensions and expulsions. This lack of due process is particularly severe for students with special needs, who are misrepresented in the pipeline despite the better protections afforded to them under the law.
Many schools that are lacking resources, become pipeline gateways for students by placing increased reliance on police officers rather than teachers and administrators to be able to maintain discipline. The Growing numbers of districts employing school resource officers to patrol school hallways, often have little to no training in working with youth. Because of this, many children are far more likely to be subject to school arrest and the majority of which are for nonviolent offenses like, disruptive behavior. Unlike they were a few years ago. The rise of school arrests, which is the quickest route from the classroom to the jailhouse, most directly shows the criminalization of school children.
In some school jurisdictions, students who have been suspended or expelled have no right to any education at all. For others, they are sent to disciplinary alternative schools. Increasing in numbers across the country, these systems are sometimes ran privately for profit companies that are immune from the educational accountability standards and may fail to provide a meaningful educational service to the students who need them the most. As a result, the struggling students return to their regular schools unprepared and are permanently locked into harder educational settings, or are funneled through other schools into the juvenile justice system.
Youth who early become involved in the juvenile justice system are often denied protections in the courts.

In one state, up to eighty percent of children involved in court do not have lawyers. Students who have committed minor offenses may also end up in secured detention if they violate probation conditions prohibiting them from going to normal activities like school and them disobeying their teachers. Students pushed along find themselves in juvenile detention facilities that lack educational services. Students of color are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same miss behavior at a school and those with disabilities are likely to travel down this same road. Though many students are pushed down the pipeline from school to jail, it is very difficult for them to make the journey in reverse. Students who enter the juvenile justice system face many obstacles in their re-entry into traditional schools. Most of these students never graduate from high

school.
Privatization of prisons, private prisons or for-profit prisons is a place in which individuals are physically confined or incarcerated by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. In this case crime does pay because these are for-profit prisons. Which means they are benefiting in way. The federal government decided to end its use of private prisons because officials have concluded that the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.