Case Study: Dismantling The School To Prison Pipeline

Dismantling the School to Prison Pipeline

Current African American high school students in Milwaukee encounter interminable punishment from biased teachers and as a result, they are incarcerated. This issue is known as the “school-to-prison” pipeline, which describes the process of students getting arrested from schools and being imprisoned. Milwaukee Government officials have passed legislation which contributed to the pipeline, allowing teachers to have biases in schools. Professionals, such as lawyers and businessmen, have conducted studies in Milwaukee to establish if a racial disparity exists between the incarceration of African American and Caucasian students. Also, members of school communities have pushed for legislation to reduce the

Like government officials, professional individuals have noted the predominant causes of the “school-to-prison” pipeline and have performed studies to find ways to eradicate the mass incarceration of students. Numerous studies have determined that a racial disparity in high school consequences exists between African Americans and Caucasians. A study by the Joint Task Force on Reversing the School-to-Prison Pipeline, created under the American Bar Association, revealed that “the causes of the school-to-prison pipeline are many, complex, and interrelated… throughout these causes runs evidence of implicitly biased discretionary decisions, which, unintentionally, bring about these results” (Nagel 4). The pipeline, according to lawyers, is caused by the racial bias of executive decisions. This refers to teachers who punish African American students more harshly than Caucasian students. In schools today, the increase of exclusionary discipline, punishments like suspension and expulsion, have contributed to the rising “school-to-prison” pipeline. In another study performed by the American Bar Association, an organization of lawyers in the United States, “ it was estimated that U.S. public school children lost nearly 18 million days of instruction in just one school year because of

Milwaukee has seen a dramatic increase in suspension, detention, and expulsion in the last decade. Officials and parents in the public school system are currently attempting to reduce the “school-to-prison” pipeline. In Milwaukee at a school board conference, Mr. Mensah, a parent of several kids in attendance of Milwaukee schools, argued that “ all the police have done is they’ve told me to hold on to my kids that much closer because what you’re trying to do is arrest them and get rid of them” (Quaylan 453). So, parents are concerned that the main goal of public schools is to decrease the school population and they are doing so by arresting and incarceration more children each month. The rise of law enforcement in public schools gave rise to the increased student arrest, contributing to the increasing “school-to-prison” pipeline. Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund, stressed the need that “zero tolerance policies responsible for mass suspensions and abusive treatment of young children must be terminated (Edelman 19). Zero tolerance policies refer to legislation that allows teachers to tolerate “absolutely nothing” in their classrooms, contributing to their frequent punishment of students. This leads to the increased “school-to-prison” pipeline as more students are incarcerated by teachers. As a result, teachers have “less margin for error”