Hillary Clinton's plan to undo the school-to-prison pipeline, explained
At a speech in Harlem on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton will call for a $2 billion plan to help end punitive school policies that can push black children from schools to jails and prisons.
The new $2 billion plan, which goes after the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline," will incentivize the hiring of "school climate support teams" — made up of social workers, behavioral health specialists, and education practitioners — to work with school staff to reorient and develop comprehensive reform plans for school discipline policies.
Specifically, reform plans should try to establish "early warning systems" to identify and help at-risk students and provide training to school staff on conflict deescalation and other ways to defuse a situation without resorting to harsh discipline measures, according to Clinton's campaign.
Clinton's staff said Clinton acknowledges that students who commit violent offenses should be removed from the classroom. But she also believes such incidents are very rare (they are), and that the rush to handle school discipline through the criminal justice system does more harm than good.
The proposal is part of a much broader plan — what Clinton's campaign calls the "Breaking Down Barriers" agenda — which would direct $20 billion to youth jobs, $5 billion to reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people, and $25 billion to support entrepreneurship and small business growth in underserved communities.
But the proposal to tackle the school-to-prison pipeline in particular, while somewhat vague, is the latest major salvo against a system that has gotten more attention over the past several years as the Black Lives Matter movement protests the massive racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
The school-to-prison pipeline, explained
When lawmakers and politicians — including Clinton — began calling for and enacting tough-on-crime policies in the 1970s through '90s, some of the concepts trickled down to schools, which began outsourcing discipline to police through school resource officers Hillary Clinton's plan to undo the school-to-prison pipeline, explained - Vox:
