How the Justice System Pushes Kids Out of Classrooms and Into Prisons

This is the third installment in our series examining the intersections of education and entertainment in 2016. Read previous entries on a documentary and late-night comedy, and check back for future pieces on animated movies and television.

The school-to-prison pipeline refers to a system in which school-discipline practices—from suspensions to corporal punishment to disturbing-school laws—push children out of education and into the criminal-justice system.

It’s a pipeline with which disadvantaged kids and families of color are particularly familiar. Black children, for example, comprised just 16 percent of the country’s student population in the 2011-12 school year yet roughly a third of those suspended at least once or expelled (and nearly half of the preschoolers who were suspended). They were also disproportionately referred to law enforcement or subject to school-based arrests. The problem, of course isn’t limited to black children—or to, as stereotypes might suggest, boys: In equally insidious yet perhaps more invisible ways, it also afflicts girls, Native Americans and Latinos, and students who identify as LGBT or have special-needs. Earlier this year, an American Bar Association task force called the school-to-prison pipeline one of the “nation’s most formidable challenges.”

Despite the gravity of the problem and growing attention on the issue, the discipline numbers continue to rise and continue to funnel children who already have it rough into a vicious cycle of low expectations, criminalization, and lifelong disenfranchisement and poverty. It’s almost as if a sense of apathy, or some other sort of disconnect, has hobbled efforts to address the pipeline beyond the where schools are actually rethinking student discipline. Maybe it’s the buzz-phrasey-ness of the term “school-to-prison pipeline.” Maybe it’s because the pipeline has become so entrenched that people feel there’s little they can do except give up. Maybe it’s because, as dire as the problem is, for privileged people it’s also incredibly abstract—something intangible that happens to faraway communities because of a foreign set of forces.