Defining and redirecting a school‐to‐prison pipeline

Abstract

The school-to-prison pipeline needs to be better defined and redirected toward greater opportunities for all youth.

You Learn What You Live: Prevalence of Childhood Adversity in the Lives of Juveniles Arrested for Sexual Offenses

“…ACE factors are inter-related, and high-risk youths are especially vulnerable to increased odds of multiple adversities . The emotional and behavioral self-regulation deficits commonly seen in maltreated youths can pave the way for disciplinary problems in school which can shift a child's trajectory toward the "pipeline to prison" (Wald & Losen, 2003).…”

Living with the Liminal: Unwieldy Unknowns of Facilitating an Urban Education Cohort of Student Teachers

“…With the student teachers I observed, I explicitly connected the research about the positioning of black and brown students, especially boys, as eventual criminals and on the path to dropping out (Lewis, 2005) and as part of the "school-to-prison pipeline" (Wald & Losen, 2003) each time these children were disciplined for behavior that didn't seem particularly offensive to me. Could I blame children who wanted to move and wiggle, especially when the instruction-often based on mandated curriculum-was dry?…”

Is there an educational penalty for being suspended from school?

“…For example, over three million students, or about 7.4 percent of all K-12 students, were suspended at least once during the school year 2009-2010(Losen and Gillespie, 2012. The use of suspension also appears to be on an upward trend in the U.S. For example, Wald and Losen (2003) note that the number of 1 One of the underlying arguments for sanctioning disruptive behavior by suspension is the spillover effects that such behavior might have on other students. Estimated average peer effects in educational achievement tend to be small, but there is growing evidence that they may be heterogeneous (e.g.…”