Who’s Getting Caught In The “School-to-Prison” Pipeline? And Why?
EDUCATE! EDUCATION, MASS INCARCERATION, RACISM
By Frederick Reese, www.mintpressnews.com
September 27th, 2014
By Frederick Reese, www.mintpressnews.com
September 27th, 2014
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The U.S. prison population is disproportionately black. The same racial disparity can be seen in the students who are punished in the nation’s schools. The connection between these two phenomena are stronger — and more insidious — than many may understand.
A crisis continues to unfold in the United States’ prisons, where the prison population is vastly disproportionate to the country’s general population demographics. Per 2013 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, blacks represented 13.2 percent of the U.S. population, yet, according to the Sentencing Project, blacks represented 38 percent of all individuals in federal or state prisons, as of 2011.
This imbalance has manifest at a time when for-profit prisons are posting record profits and announcing their expansion into other segments of the post-judicial corrections portfolio. For example, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Corrections Corporation of America — the nation’s largest for-profit prison operator — has responded to calls coming from some states regarding the high cost of long-term housing of inmates by announcing expansions of the company’s prison rehabilitation, drug counseling and prisoner re-entry programs.
This diversification has created the impression that the CCA is not only seeking to be the primary jailer in many states, but is also seeking to offer the alternative to incarceration in these communities. In light of the CCA’s and other for-profit prison operators’ heavy political lobbying and the private prison industry’s record for having a higher racially disproportionate population than what exists in comparable public prisons, there is reason to believe that CCA and other for-profit prison operators are succeeding in “gaming the system.”
“What CCA is doing is vertically-integrating,” said Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology and criminology department at La Salle University, to MintPress News. “The for-profit prison population has increased recently, so there is little need for the for-profit prison providers to hedge against losses. What the for-profits are doing is trying to corner the after-prison market — the halfway houses, the drug treatment centers, etc. — with the understanding that if they were to enter this market, they would likely end up controlling it.”
While there is evidence to suggest that the growth in non-violent crime apprehension and sentencing is a component of both the race disparity in prisons and the profit spike among for-profit prisons, there may be a more prominent explanation of why there are so many blacks and Latinos in the prison system today.
The school-to-prison pipeline
In the years since the Columbine High School Massacre, in which two high school students — Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — killed 13 students and teachers and injured 21 others at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, schools have increasingly taken a “zero-tolerance” approach to in-school disruptions. While this approach may help ease parents’ concerns about a school’s safety, the realities of these policies cast a troubling image.
In 2009, for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District reported that among its students who were given out-of-school suspensions, 62 percent were Hispanic and 33 percent were black. Only 3 percent were white. Similarly, the West Valley School District in Spokane, Washington, reported that of the students who were expelled that year, 20 percent were black and 60 percent were white — this, for a school district whose student body is 86 percent white and 4 percent black.
Also in 2009, in the Normandy School District of St. Louis, 100 percent of all students who received more than one out-of-school suspension, 100 percent of all students expelled Who’s Getting Caught In The “School-to-Prison” Pipeline? And Why? | PopularResistance.Org: