The School-to-Prison-Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline refers to a growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily through zero-tolerance policies, and into the juvenile and adult criminal legal systems. When schools refer students to law enforcement, they are directly turning students over to the criminal legal system, particularly students of color and those with disabilities. Even when schools do not directly send students into the criminal system, certain types of discipline can make it more likely that they will end up there. Students in schools with higher-than-average suspension rates are 15 to 20 percent more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults.23 The 229,470 referrals to law enforcement and 54,321 school arrests in the 2017-2018 school year have fueled the school-to-prison pipeline.24 And this pipeline starts early. Between 2000 and 2019, there have been more than 2,600 school arrests of students between the ages of 5 and 9 years old.25 Many of these school-based arrests are for minor violations that do not pose a serious or ongoing threat to school safety and can be addressed without help from the police or courts.26 Harsh disciplinary penalties for minor offenses such as talking back or being disruptive shorten the path from school to prison. Students who are expelled or suspended are more likely to commit crimes and drop out of school, leading to a cycle of poverty and criminality that is often difficult to break.

School discipline can have long-term impacts on a child’s social outcomes. Today, the net worth of white households is 10 times higher than Black households, and these economic disparities flow directly from racial injustices in the nation’s criminal legal system.27 The over representation of Black and Latino people in the criminal system has concentrated the negative economic impacts of system involvement, including lifetime wage losses, in those communities.28

Mental Health Impacts

Today, students are experiencing record levels of depression and anxiety and many forms of trauma.29 However, schools have invested few funds to serve students’ mental health needs, but instead have invested more dollars into putting police in schools.30

Schools with mental health services see improved attendance rates, better academic achievement, and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspension, expulsion, and other disciplinary incidents. School-based mental health providers improve outcomes for students and overall school safety.31 Yet, public schools face a critical shortage of counselors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers, and even schools offering some mental health services are severely understaffed. In contrast, while there is no evidence that police presence in schools improve school safety, 14 million students are in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker.32 In fact, data suggests that law enforcement in schools creates harm, including student alienation and creating a more threatening school climate.33

The combination of deficient in-school mental health services and the growing number of school-based law enforcement has funneled the most vulnerable students into the pipeline to prison. School referrals to law enforcement and school-related arrests shift a student’s focus from learning and leave them vulnerable to removal from class, physical restraint, interrogation, and risks to their constitutional rights. Even just a slight interaction with law enforcement can have an impact on their long-term mental and physical health.34

Restorative Justice

Oakland Unified School District, a public education school district in California serving more than 35,000 students in about 80 schools, has been funding restorative justice initiatives in some of its schools for over two decades. However, a $2.5 million investment in 2017 took the practice district-wide.35

Restorative justice—also known as positive discipline or responsive classroom—serves as an alternative to traditional discipline. It attempts to break the cycle of violence by addressing its underlying cause, which is often a traumatic experience for the offending individual. In schools, it focuses on fostering a sense of community within classrooms to prevent conflict and reacts to misconduct by encouraging students to accept responsibility for the harm caused by their misbehavior to rebuild relationships. In Oakland, restorative justice is implemented through a three-tier, school-wide model.36 Under the model, all students in the district participate in community building practices such as conversation circles, where students talk about their emotions or how an incident affected them. This first tier of the model aims to prevent conflict by helping students learn to relate and respect each other, build friendships, and take responsibility for their actions. About 15% of Oakland students participate in the second tier, restorative practices, which is characterized by non-punitive responses to conflict. With the goal of intervening and repairing harm, this tier responds to disciplinary issues with harm circles, mediation, or family-group conferencing with the hope of addressing the root cause of harm, supporting accountability for the offending student, and promoting healing for the victim and school community. Another 5% of students participate in the model’s third tier, activities supporting re-entry to the school community following suspension, truancy, expulsion, or incarceration. This tier is implemented on an individual basis to welcome youth back to school by providing wraparound services.

The Oakland Unified School District has seen positive results implementing restorative practices at its schools. In 2008, the district began a pilot program using restorative justice practices at Cole Middle School, where it saw an 87% reduction in suspensions and a complete 100% drop in expulsions.37 Over the past five years of implementation of its comprehensive restorative program, the district’s Fremont High School has transformed from a school with the some of the highest discipline rates and lowest attendance in the city to seeing a 20% jump in its enrollments and a tripling the number of its students qualified for college admission.38

Overall, school suspension rates in the district’s schools dropped about 20% within three years of hiring a restorative justice coordinator. Between the 2015-2016 and 2019–2020 school years, the number of Oakland students suspended declined by nearly 31%.39 Further, 88% of teachers in the district report that restorative justice practices are very or somewhat helpful and managing difficult student behavior in classrooms.40 The Oakland Unified School District provides a toolkit and a host of other resources for implementing restorative justice practices, and the International Institute for Restorative, the world’s first accredited restorative justice graduate school program, consults with districts across the country to transform school climates.

Discipline Reform Snapshots

• Des Moines, Iowa: In the 2021-2022 school year, Des Moines Public Schools became one of the first districts to concurrently remove SROs and implement restorative justice practices. Prompted by the protests related to the death of George Floyd, the school district ended its relationship with SROs in 2020. With the $750,000 save from the broken contract with local police, the district hired 20 new staff trained in restorative practices across five of its public schools. It even invites students to participate in the hiring process. Within a year, district wide school arrests dropped from 538 to 98.

• Dallas, Texas: In August 2021, the Dallas Independent School District opened Reset Centers, which allow students to de-escalate and discuss their behaviors with trained staff for a period ranging from hours to days (depending on the offense). These dedicated classroom spaces with seating for restorative circles, calming colors, flexible seating, and stress squeeze balls, and fidget tools. In 2022, the district reported significant drops in suspension rates a year after implementing the new approach. The district also set goals for strengthening tiered student behavior supports based on consideration of first, second or third offenses; increased teacher classroom management training; and improved discipline data collection. The school district spent $4 million from its Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief allocation for the discipline reforms but saw about $2 million in savings, since the Reset Centers reduced the number of out-of-school suspensions and Texas school districts are funded based on in-person daily average attendance.

• Chicago, Illinois: In 2020, rather than issue a blanket removal, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Public Schools officials informed local school councils that they could decide whether to keep their SROs. At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, 19 of the city’s 91 high schools kept two full-time officers while 22 kept one officer. Within two years, the district cut the number of SROs in schools by about 30% and reduced SRO funding from $33 million in 2020 to $11 million in 2022. While it has been reported that more schools serving majority Black students kept their officers when compared to schools serving Latino and white students, in 2021, about $3.8 million was invested in policing alternatives such as professional devolvement for staff and mental health programs.