The Plague of the School to Prison Pipeline

By Neftaly Gonzalez

For generations, our schools have utilized suspensions and expulsions as a way to handle behavioral or physical misconduct by students to serve as a consequence of their actions. Zero-tolerance policies were established in the 1970s with the war on drugs, which increased police presence in schools, feeding into the criminalization of our youth and the school-to-prison pipeline. These strict disciplinary actions comprise the school-to-prison pipeline which disproportionately affects students of color, students with disabilities, and other marginalized groups in our education system. They are extremely outdated and do not provide long-term support for the success or wellness of our students in these situations. Instead, schools should be shifting to provide alternative and restorative practices for inclusiveness, and problem-solving to assist building relationships with adults and students. 

I am well aware of the impacts of the school-to-prison pipeline, as I witnessed it occur in my own K-12 school district. It was in my junior year in high school when the District of Visalia Unified was sued for disproportionality suspending Black students and students with disabilities, with rates growing annually. An analytic report came out for the 2018-2019 school year that revealed “more than one-in-four African American students -28% of those enrolled - were suspended…more than triple the average - about 9% - across California and Tulare County's other districts'' (Joshua Yeager Visalia Times-Delta). The report also revealed that 15% of students with special needs were suspended despite only making up 8% of VUSD’s students. Kicking students out of school does not solve the root of the problems they are facing, but rather leads them to drop out of the classroom, paving the way into the criminal justice system.

By providing restorative justice alternatives in our education, students will learn how to solve future conflicts that may arise in their personal or professional spaces. We must address the school to prison pipeline in our educational environment in order to dismantle and replace this broken system.