School To Prison Pipeline Quotes

A recent report, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline,” highlighted the way in which girls, particularly girls of color, are criminalized as a result of their sexual and physical abuse. ...quite often ignored is how sexual violence can also become a pathway to confinement.

A political movement that focuses on class and ignores the specific ways in which race determines financial health and well-being for people of color in this country will be a movement that maintains white supremacy, because it will not be able to identify or address the specific, race-based systems that are the main causes of inequality for people of color. Health care discrimination, job discrimination, the school-to-prison pipeline, educational bias, mass incarceration, police brutality, community trauma—none of these issues are addressed in a class-only approach. A class-only approach will lift only poor whites out of poverty and will therefore maintain white supremacy.

We often focus on the outcomes of the school-to-prison pipeline as the ultimate tragedy—the high drop-out rates, future poverty and joblessness, the likelihood of repeated incarceration—but when I look at our school-to-prison pipeline, the biggest tragedy to me is the loss of childhood joy. When our kids spend eight hours a day in a system that is looking for reasons to punish them, remove them, criminalize them—our kids do not get to be kids. Our kids do not get to be rambunctious, they do not get to be exuberant, they do not get to be rebellious, they do not get to be defiant. Our kids do not get to fuck up the way other kids get to; our kids will not get to look back fondly on their teenage hijinks—because these get them expelled or locked away. Do not wait until black and brown kids are grown into hurt and hardened adults to ask “What happened? What can we do?” We cannot give back childhoods lost. Help us save our children now.

This complicated picture means that each of our paths to reshaping the world must pass directly through violence against women. Whether our passion is to improve healthcare access, end school-to-prison pipelines, increase the GDP, build an immigration system that respects the dignity of human beings, or create pathways to justice - all of that work requires ending and responding effectively to violence against women.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.

Getting intimate means giving a damn, worrying about what happens to people in our everyday lives. It means attending to their individual needs, perspectives, & interests--by asking the basic questions: who, where, when, why, & how. It means accepting that the answers to these questions may bring an uneasy & jarring level of consciousness to the ways in which we receive, recognize & respond to others & ourselves.

The idea that a story or the mobilization of a bunch of stories is futile flies in the face of everything we now about the history of social movements in the United States. The Labor Movement, the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, the LGBT Movement, the movement to Occupy Wall Street--all of these social transformations & the legislation they inspired were sparked & carried on at particular moments by tales of unrest, resistance & desire that were somehow documented & shared widely.

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the “school-to-prison pipeline” that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America’s racialized poor, and then “tracks” them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

Disproportionality affects test scores, educational systems, child welfare systems and governmental systems. Test scores determine the need for prisons in reference to the school prison pipeline” (McEachern 83).

While the drug war is undoubtedly a primary driver of our nation's incarceration explosion, it is inaccurate to depict it as the independent impetus of mass incarceration. The War on Drugs is only one of five pipelines currently funneling people into prison, jails, and detention centers nationwide. The other four carceral conduits are the crackdown on immigration offenses, decreased funding for mental health, private prisons and detention centers, and the school-to-prison pipeline.

This is the start of a toxic mismatch between the child’s capabilities and the unrealistic expectations of an education system that is all too often underresourced, developmentally uninformed, and trauma-ignorant. Even if the child “progresses” to the next grade, they are still behind, and this sets them up to fail. Year after year, they fall further and further behind. Their delays in developing skills, together with their trauma-related symptoms, begin to attract mental health labels (see Figure 6). The hypervigilance from their sensitized stress response is labeled ADHD; their predictable efforts to self-regulate—by rocking, chewing gum, doodling, daydreaming, listening to music, tapping their pencil, etc.—are prohibited. They will be labeled, medicated, excluded, punished, perhaps expelled, and then, all too often, arrested. When they try to avoid the constant humiliation of school, they’re charged with truancy; when they try to flee and the school staff tries to stop them, a restraint incident results in charges of assault—against the child. This is the school-to-prison pipeline.

The truth is, you don’t even have to “be racist” to be a part of the racist system. The dude shouting about “black-on-black crime” is reinforced by elected officials coding “problem neighborhoods” and promising to “clean up the streets” that surprisingly always seem to have a lot of brown and black people on them—and end with a lot of black and brown people in handcuffs. Your aunt yelling about “thugs” is echoed in our politicians talking about “super-predators” while building our school-to-prison pipelines that help ensure that the widest path available to black and brown children ends in a jail cell. But a lot of the people voting for stop-and-frisk crime bills or increased security in schools would never dream of blaming racial inequity on “black-on-black crime” or calling a young black man a “thug.

Copious research attests to the disdain of whites for African Americans, from the school-to-prison pipeline, to mass incarceration, to white flight.4 For example, on attitude surveys, most whites say they would prefer neighborhoods that are no more than 30 percent black, and more than half of whites say they would not move into a neighborhood that is 30 percent black or more. Studies of actual mobility patterns not only confirm these preferences, but also show that whites downplay them. White flight has been triggered when a formerly white neighborhood reaches 7 percent black, and in neighborhoods with more than a few black families, white housing demand tends to disappear.5 (That is, the demand disappears unless white people need that housing because of unaffordable home prices in other neighborhoods. In that case, black people are pushed out as gentrification increases. Brooklyn, Harlem, Oakland, and Seattle are prime examples.)

Think about the radical difference between being told you are having trouble in school because of a problem with your attention versus attributing it to being defiant and disruptive. One diagnosis assures the student that it is not their fault; the other asserts that it most certainly is. A diagnosis of ODD colors not just how a student views themselves but how teachers and other administrators view them. The increasing presence of police and accompanying harsh disciplinary measures in our schools has created a school-to-prison pipeline, and giving a child a diagnosis of ODD allows them to pass to the front of that line.