Fifteen-year-old A.G. screamed in disbelief when Knox County Juvenile Court Judge Tim Irwin ruled in April 2008 that she would be incarcerated for her chronic truancy, even though she explained that her frequent absences were due to her struggles with “crippling anxiety” and “relentless bullying at school.”
With her legs shackled, A.G. was led directly out of a courtroom and into a cell at the county’s juvenile detention center. Because she had missed too much school, she would live in a cell with a sliver of a window and a mattress on a slab of concrete.
“I cried all night long,” A.G. said. “It seemed like everyone was against us in court.”
When she was released the next morning, her parents took her straight to a doctor. Her night in prison had left her suicidal, and she spent the next week in a psychiatric hospital.
Around 100,000 minors like A.G. are imprisoned every year in the United States for non-criminal infractions, or “status offenses,” such as skipping school, running away, dress code violations, underage drinking or smoking, and violating curfews, as schools — predominantly underfunded ones — have turned to zero-tolerance discipline policies instead of investing in educational and social services that are proven to help children succeed.
What’s so concerning for many children’s, civil and human rights organizations, is that many of these children end up in prison because of the zero-tolerance policies that were enacted after tragic events such as the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Even relatively minor offenses have come to be interpreted as an indication of criminal behavior rather than typical adolescent rebellion, hence why this phenomenon is commonly referred to as the “school-to-prison” pipeline.
But as Jerri Katzerman, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, tells MintPress, that abbreviated description of the “school-to-prison” pipeline doesn’t fully describe the depth or breadth of the problem. It also fails to highlight other issues such as the underidentification and undertreatment of mental health issues children face.
For example, Katzerman says that in the Deep South, parents are often frustrated by the absence of services and therapies available to help their troubled children. In some extreme cases, parents have reported that law enforcement officials told them to hand their children over to the state or prisons so they could receive help.
“The private prison industry has an insatiable appetite,” Katzerman said, explaining how the industry’s business model “requires a steady stream of consumers.” When schools push them out, these young people — many of whom don’t feel welcome in school or don’t recognize the importance of an education — either drop out of school or end up in prison.
She said the pipeline was created by the emergence of the myth of a super predator in schools that led people to believe that there were “rogue children who were predators that would prey on society.” The result of this, she says, was that children were taken out of the education system and put into the “costly” criminal justice system.
Influence of racism
According to Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program, other issues at play that have allowed the school-to-prison pipeline to not only develop, but thrive, include the belief that zero-tolerance policies are necessary to combat school violence, despite studies showing that school is one of the safest places for children. Another factor is the institutionalized racism in the country, which fosters the belief that black and Latino students are more dangerous than their white peers.
While Brown v. Board of Education passed about 60 years ago, essentially granting children of all races and backgrounds the chance to obtain an equal education, study after study has found that children of color — especially black students — are disciplined more often than their white peers. Further, students of color are more often disciplined for what Katzerman refers to as “ticky-tacky” or subjective offenses, such as disrespect or insubordination, while their white peers receive punishment for more clear-cut infractions, such as weapon or drug possession.
Children with disabilities are also disciplined at a higher rate than their peers.
Regardless of what created the pipeline, Parker says, behaviors that would have once resulted in a trip to the principal’s office or detention now land a student, handcuffed, into the backseat of a police car, especially in low-income neighborhoods where black and Latino families predominantly live.
Katzerman agrees that the racial component is undeniable, pointing out that when the charges against a student are more subjective, such as disrespect, most often the teacher is white and the student is black or Latino. The reason for this, according to Katzerman, is likely because the least experienced teachers are often put in the toughest situations without training or support.
Parker says that because someone’s response to instructions varies based on culture, and students of color are commonly perceived as being more disrespectful and dangerous than their white counterparts, this could explain the discrepancy in punishment among races. This bias is not necessarily something teachers and other professionals are aware of, he continues, since we all respond at some level to racial biases for reasons that we may not fully be aware of or understand.
As a result, Parker says cultural differences are often misinterpreted, and when zero-tolerance policies are in place, the police get called.
Because “status offenses” are technically not crimes, as only minors can be charged with them, constitutional rights are not extended to the offenders. This means, among other things, that an attorney will not be provided to a child who can not afford one.
A.G.’s family was unable to afford a lawyer, which made it more difficult for the girl to argue why her absences could be justified, nor was there anyone who could highlight the illegality of immediately jailing A.G. after she agreed to plead guilty to truancy.
“A.G.’s incarceration immediately following her guilty plea for truancy, a status offense, was illegal under state and federal law,” said Dean Rivkin, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, who also represented A.G. and oversees the Education Law Practicum at the Knoxville campus.
Many advocates are also concerned that the time students spend in juvenile detention for status offenses becomes part of their permanent delinquency record, which could negatively affect their ability to obtain a job or home, for example. Students can have these offenses and their time served expunged from their records, but oftentimes the students don’t often know that removing the arrest from their records is an option or how to go about doing so.
Call for reform
Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center — which Katzerman says believes in the public education system and wants to help support public school teachers — have tried for years to help eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline by gifting every school in the nation with free programs to teach tolerance.
The ACLU, too, has worked to bring the public’s attention to the school-to-prison pipeline. In doing this, it hopes to generate support for ending the practice that Parker says “deprives people of reaching their potential” and is more costly than actually educating these students — many of whom later find themselves unable to contribute to society.
Thanks to the work of these groups, Parker notes, states and school districts throughout the country have questioned the effectiveness of zero-tolerance policies. For example, in November, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the largest public school district in the nation — announced that the school district’s police force would stop ticketing students age 12 and younger for minor infractions starting in December.
Students would no longer be forced to miss school, go to court, and either pay court fees or perform community service for offenses including tardiness or dress code violations.
It’s not yet clear how students in Los Angeles have benefitted, but based on what has occurred in other school districts that have dropped zero-tolerance policies, the school district could see upwards of a 40 percent decline in the number of students who are expelled or suspended.
Take the Baltimore, Maryland, public school system for example. According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 26,000 suspensions were handed out to the some 88,000 students in the district for minor infractions in 2004. But when Andres Alonso stepped in as CEO of the school district in 2007, Alonso determined that the rate of suspensions was unacceptable and placed mental health professionals in schools. Instead of just suspending students, professionals were made available to resolve issues through channels such as mediation, counseling and parent-teacher conferences. As a result, the number of suspensions dropped to 8,600 in 2013.
Federal intervention
As the public has become increasingly aware of the school-to-prison pipeline in the past five years or so, there has been a push for reform in some parts of the county, but both Katzerman and Parker agree that the biggest step taken thus far to eliminate the pipeline was when the Department of Education teamed up with the Justice Department to release a report in January on how to eliminate racial discrimination in school discipline.
The report analyzed 97,000 of the public schools in the U.S., representing 16,500 school districts and 49 million students, and found that in the 2011-12 school year, black students were suspended around three times more often than white students.
For example, although only 18 percent of preschool students are black, 42 percent of all preschool-aged students who were suspended were black, and 48 percent of those who were suspended more than once were black.
“This critical report shows that racial disparities in school discipline policies are not only well-documented among older students, but actually begin during preschool,” said Attorney General Eric Holder in a statement announcing the release of the report earlier this year. “Every data point represents a life impacted and a future potentially diverted or derailed. This Administration is moving aggressively to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline in order to ensure that all of our young people have equal educational opportunities.”
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan agreed. In a statement he said, “The need to rethink and redesign school discipline practices is long overdue.”
“Too many schools resort too quickly to exclusionary discipline, even for minor misbehaviors,” he said. “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.”
Duncan went on to say that while he recognizes that issues such as classroom disruption, disrespect, tardiness, profanity and dress code violations must be addressed, he said 95 percent of out-of-school suspensions for these kinds of nonviolent misbehavior is not acceptable. The goal, he said, should be to educate students, not incarcerate them.
“The school-to-prison pipeline must be challenged every day,” he said, especially since, for example, “In Texas, a single suspension or expulsion for a discretionary offense that did not include a weapon almost tripled a student’s likelihood of becoming involved in the juvenile justice system the next school year.”
Nearing the end of the pipeline?
While it’s too early to determine the effect the report has had on the school-to-prison pipeline, Parker applauded the Department of Education’s push to report more civil rights data, which he says makes it possible to go beyond anecdotal concerns about what is happening in schools across the country. For example, he says an individual could look up the Minneapolis Public Schools and learn how many students have been referred to police or suspended, or analyze the number of advanced placement courses offered and the races of the students taking those classes.
He told MintPress this information lays a foundation for addressing the pipeline issue. It also gives the public insight into what’s happening in the schools in their community. If someone finds there is a disproportionate amount of students being suspended or expelled, and especially if there’s a racial component involved, he or she can file a complaint with the civil rights office and encourage the school district to take a different approach to discipline.
“People should become aware of what the graduation rates are because there’s a huge correlation between dropouts and involvement in the criminal justice system,” he said.
If it appears that a low percentage of students of color is graduating, Parker recommends asking school officials why these differences exist and what is being done to address the problem.