Prison Prep School
‘Zero-tolerance’ and ‘tough-on-crime’ policies put students in a school-to-prison pipeline.
Student leaders launch the Solutions Not Suspensions initiative in August 2012. (Courtesy of Dignity in Schools)
Schools have redefined developmentally appropriate behaviors as crimes. Pushing and shoving in the schoolyard is now a battery, and talking back is nowdisorderly conduct.
Metal detectors and uniformed security guards greet students each day at Orr Academy on Chicago’s West Side. “My high school seemed like its own personal prison,” Edward Ward, a 2011 Orr graduate, told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his testimony in December 2012. He recalled how a police processing center was even set up to book students on school grounds.
Ward’s testimony was part of a historic congressional hearingon the school-to-prison pipeline. With more than 3 million students suspended or expelled each year, U.S. schools are “increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system,” according to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who convened the hearing.
Activists warn that this trend is exacerbating the racial disparities that already permeate the prison system. A 2010 study from Indiana University found that, compared with their white