The "school-to-prison pipeline" is a phrase used by United States (US) education reform activists to designate a widespread pattern in the US education and public safety system which, according to critics including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),[1] the Justice Policy Center,[2] and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU),[3] pushes students, especially youth of color and youth with disabilities, out of school and into the criminal justice system. Educational researcher Christine Christle and her colleagues[4] have determined that school level practices correlate to delinquency and incarceration. The NYCLU states that "inequities in areas such as school discipline, policing practices, high-stakes testing and the prison industry contribute to the pipeline."[3]
The school-to-prison pipeline is understood to operate at all levels of US government (federal, state, county, city and school district), and both directly and indirectly.[3]
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"The school-to-prison pipeline refers to the national trend of criminalizing, rather than educating, our nation’s children. The pipeline encompasses the growing use of zero-tolerance discipline, school-based arrests, disciplinary alternative schools, and secured detention to marginalize our most at-risk youth and deny them access to education."
Zero-tolerance disciplinary policies are often the first step in a child’s journey through the pipeline. Zero-tolerance policies impose severe discipline on students without regard to individual circumstances. Under these policies, children have been expelled for giving Midol to a classmate, bringing household goods (including a kitchen knife) to school to donate to Goodwill, and bringing scissors to class for an art project.
According to the ACLU, schools rely on poorly trained police, rather than teachers and administrators, to handle minor school misconduct.
The ACLU also contends that resources that could be put towards improving under-resourced schools are instead used for security, despite the fact that these very schools are the ones lacking basic educational resources like textbooks and libraries.
The ABA also condemned zero-tolerance policies: “zero tolerance has become a one-size-fits-all solution to all the problems that schools confront. It has redefined students as criminals, with unfortunate consequences…Unfortunately, most current [zero-tolerance] policies eliminate the common sense that comes with discretion and, at great cost to society and to children and families, do little to improve school safety.”
The ACLU contention that these officers approach youth as they would adult “perps” on the street, rather than children at school does not appear to be supported by peer reviewed research. The contention that children "as young as five years old are being led out of classrooms in handcuffs. The contention that students have been "arrested for throwing an eraser at a teacher, breaking a pencil" are out of context and a reasonable person would not assume that there could not have been additional facts which would support a conclusion that the arrest may have been based upon more than the bare fact of pencil breaking or eraser throwing. In short, the brief allegations do not sufficiently establish the case that such police actions are unreasonable, nor do their talking points include adequate citations in their publicly available formats.
Others contend that "Arguably, suspensions remove disorderly students and thereby improve the school environment so that well behaving students can learn without distractions. In some cases suspensions are also aimed at getting parents’ attention to persistent problems at school. Many proponents of harsh “zero tolerance” discipline codes will assert that you need to suspend kids as a deterrent to violence and unlawful drug activity.[5]
The NYCLU takes an active role in fighting the school-to-prison pipeline and in educating New York public school students about their rights within the confines of their schools. These rights range from those pertaining to interactions with school safety and school resource officers to how to deal with metal detectors.
In January 2010, the NYCLU, ACLU and the law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP filed a federal class action lawsuit[6] challenging the New York City Police Department’s practice of wrongfully arresting and using excessive force against children in New York City schools.
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