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Fact Sheet - The School-to-Prison Pipeline in the National Context
- The "school-to-prison pipeline" describes an alarming trend wherein public elementary, middle and high schools are pushing youth out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice and criminal justice system.
- Under the banner of "zero tolerance," schools increasingly are relying on inappropriately harsh discipline and, increasingly, law enforcement, to address trivial schoolyard offenses among even the youngest students.
- Children are far more likely to be arrested at school than they were a generation ago. And these school-arrests are not for violent behavior. For example, in one Texas school district, 17 percent of school arrests were for disruptive behavior, and 26 percent were for disorderly conduct.(1)
- Defenders of the pipeline cannot attribute the explosion of school-based arrests to an increase in school violence. On the contrary, empirical evidence shows that between 1992 and 2002, school violence actually dropped by about half.(2)
- Rather than nurturing and educating children perceived to pose a disciplinary problem, schools are turning to law enforcement to simply get rid of the child.
- Unfortunately, children of color and children with disabilities bear the brunt of these harsh trends.
- Nationally, minority students are suspended at rates of two to three times that of other students. They are also more likely to be subject to office referrals, corporal punishment, and expulsion.(3)
- Children of color also are more likely to be referred by their school to the juvenile justice system.(4)
- Minority students with disabilities are particularly vulnerable. African American students with disabilities are three times more likely to receive short-term suspensions than their white counterparts, and are more than four times as likely to end up in correctional facilities.(5)
- Native American students in particular suffer harms from the pipeline, even when they are not incarcerated because of school discipline
- Alienated by school policies, students may perform poorly academically. In 2003, the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights reported that Native American children score lower than any other racial/ethnic group in standardized test scores.(6)
- In addition, they are more likely to drop out of school. Only 51 percent of Native American students graduate high school nationally, as compared to 75 percent of Caucasian students.(7)
1 The Advancement Project, "Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track At-A-Glance," at 15, available at http://www.advancementproject.org//reports/FINALEOLrep.pdf. (March 2005)
2 Id. at 11.
3 Russ Skiba, "Zero Tolerance: The Assumptions and the Facts," 2 Indiana Youth Servs. Ass’n, Education Policy Briefs at 4 (2004)
4 "Education on Lockdown," supra n.1 , at 18.
5 Johanna Wald & Daniel Losen, "Defining and Redirecting a School-to-Prison Pipeline," Framing Paper for the School-toPrison Pipeline Research Conference (May 2003) (citing U.S. Dept. of Educ., Office of Special Education Programs, Data Analysis Systems (DANS)).
6 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country," (July 2003)
7 Gary Orfield, et al., Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind By the Graduation Rate Crisis, (March 2004)
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