ABSTRACT
In recent decades, criminal justice trends and policies like “broken windows” policing, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the mass incarceration of people of color, have found their way into schools, in the form of “zero-tolerance” policies which target young African American and Latinx students (Heitzig 2016). Experts name the phenomena, the points of connection between the criminal justice system and education, as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The “school-to-prison pipeline” manifests itself in multiple ways: firstly, the school buildings and administration increasingly resemble prisons, with metal detectors at the doors and hired police in the hallway ready to do search-and-seizure operations (Mallett 2015). Secondly, schools are mimicking the punitive character of the criminal justice system, in popular “zero-tolerance” approaches that criminalize minor infractions, suspending and expelling students for first and second offenses like fighting in the hallway, swearing, or being disrespectful to a teacher. Suspension, temporary removal from school, and expulsions, semi-permanent to permanent removal from school, are extreme mechanisms of marginalization and isolation, yet they are often used as a first line of defense against difficult behavior (Heitzig 2016). Loïc Wacquant contextualizes this marginalization that black and brown children experience in school within the history of the evolution of racialized practices of punishment in the United States (Wacquant 2008). In fact, zero-tolerance school policies were modeled after the “get tough on crime” drug enforcement laws of the 1980s (Skiba and Peterson 1999). Thirdly, schools are feeding their children into the criminal justice system. Increasingly, middle and high schools are referring their students to the police and the courts on issues that could be resolved within the school, and students end up in juvenile detention or prison instead of continuing to learn in the classroom. Also, as with the increase in private prisons, so there has been an increase in private “alternative” schools specializing in discipline (Gonzalez 2012).
