Stemming the Flow of the School-to-Prison Pipeline
By Cindy Long
There’s a disturbing trend taking place in our public schools, especially in high poverty neighborhoods – where hallways and grounds are patrolled by police and disciplinary problems are no longer handled by counseling and detention but by suspension and arrest. Known as the school-to-prison pipeline, the trend is turning our adolescent students into criminals at alarming rates.To learn more about the school-to-prison pipeline,NEA Today spoke to author and scholar Byron E. Price, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Business and professor of public administration at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York in Brooklyn, New York, and and co-editor of Prison Privatization: The Many Facets of a Controversial Industry.
Can you briefly define the school-to-prison pipeline and talk about the students impacted the most?
The school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon can be characterized as a deliberate strategy to push at-risk children out of our nation’s classrooms and into the carceral state. Research shows that minority students
