The School-to-Prison Pipeline Has an Architect, a Budget, and a ZIP Code

There is a pipeline in this country that moves children from classrooms to courtrooms with the efficiency of a well-designed industrial process, and like all well-designed industrial processes, it has inputs, outputs, throughput metrics, and a budget. The inputs are Black children, disproportionately male, disproportionately poor, disproportionately attending schools in ZIP codes where the property tax base cannot fund adequate instruction, let alone adequate counseling, conflict resolution, or behavioral health services. The outputs are inmates, disproportionately Black, disproportionately male, disproportionately from the same ZIP codes, carrying criminal records that will follow them for the rest of their lives and that began not with a crime but with a school disciplinary action that any reasonable adult would recognize as ordinary adolescent behavior. The throughput is measured in suspensions, expulsions, school-based arrests, juvenile detentions, and adult incarcerations. The budget is public. The architects are identifiable. And the pipeline is operating, at this moment, in virtually every major school district in America.

The data describing this pipeline is not ambiguous. The United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights collects disciplinary data from every public school in the country, and the pattern it reveals has been consistent for decades: Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. This disparity begins before most children can read. Black preschoolers — children who are three and four years old — represent 18% of preschool enrollment and 48% of preschool suspensions. A child who cannot yet tie his shoes is being formally excluded from the only institution charged with preparing him for participation in society, and the child who is being excluded looks, with a consistency that defies coincidence, like a particular kind of child.

The Suspension-to-Incarceration Corridor

Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University who has spent decades studying disciplinary disparities, conducted a national investigation that produced a finding so clear in its implications that it should have rewritten every school discipline policy in the country: the racial disparity in suspensions cannot be explained by differences in student behavior. Skiba’s research found that Black students are not suspended more often because they misbehave more often. They are suspended more often because the same behavior that earns a white student a warning, a conversation, or a trip to the principal’s office earns a Black student a suspension, a referral, or a call to the school resource officer.

The mechanism is not mysterious. It is the same mechanism that operates in every other system where human beings exercise discretion over other human beings: implicit bias. Teachers and administrators, who are overwhelmingly white in schools that serve predominantly Black students, interpret identical behaviors differently depending on the race of the student. A white student who talks back is “assertive” or “going through a phase.” A Black student who talks back is “defiant” or “threatening.” A white student who is restless is “energetic” or “needs to burn off energy.” A Black student who is restless is “disruptive” or “unable to follow rules.” The discretion is the discrimination, and the discrimination is embedded in a system that has no mechanism for detecting it because the people exercising the discretion do not know they are discriminating.

Daniel Losen and Jonathan Gillespie of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA quantified the educational cost of this disparity. Their analysis found that in a single academic year, Black students lost approximately 66 days of instruction per 100 students due to out-of-school suspensions, compared to 14 days per 100 students for white students. This is not a gap. It is a chasm. It means that in a school serving 500 Black students, those students collectively lost 330 days of instruction in a single year — nearly two full school years of combined learning time, removed from children who were already attending schools that provided fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and fewer advanced course offerings than schools serving white students in the same district.

Zero Tolerance: The Policy That Created the Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline was not an accident. It was a policy choice, and the policy has a name: zero tolerance. The term entered the educational lexicon through the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, which required states receiving federal education funding to implement a one-year expulsion for any student who brought a firearm to school. The original law was narrow — it addressed a specific and serious safety concern — but it provided the template for an expansion of punitive discipline that swept through school districts across the country with a speed and uniformity that suggests something more than coincidence.

By the late 1990s, zero-tolerance policies had expanded far beyond firearms. School districts adopted policies mandating suspension or expulsion for offenses that included possession of over-the-counter medications, wearing clothing with prohibited images, making verbal threats (including statements that teachers interpreted as threats but that the students did not intend as such), and engaging in “disorderly conduct” — a category so broad that it could encompass virtually any behavior that an authority figure found objectionable. The result was a disciplinary apparatus that criminalized adolescence itself, that treated the ordinary developmental behaviors of children — boundary-testing, impulsivity, emotional volatility, poor judgment — as offenses warranting exclusion from the only institution designed to address them.

The landmark Texas study by Tony Fabelo and colleagues, which tracked nearly one million students over a six-year period, provided the most comprehensive evidence of the pipeline’s operation. The study found that students who were suspended or expelled were nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the following year than students who were not. It found that this effect was independent of the students’ socioeconomic status, prior behavior, and school characteristics. And it found that the students most likely to be suspended — Black students and students with disabilities — were also the students most harmed by the suspension, creating a feedback loop in which the most vulnerable children were both the most likely to be removed from school and the most damaged by the removal.

“Children who have never committed a crime are being turned into criminals by a school system that has decided the easiest way to deal with a problem child is to make that child someone else’s problem.”
— Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative

The Cop in the Hallway

The school resource officer — the armed law enforcement officer stationed permanently in a public school — is the physical embodiment of the school-to-prison pipeline. The SRO program began in the 1950s but expanded dramatically after the Columbine massacre in 1999, when a wave of fear-driven policy responses placed police officers in thousands of schools that had never had them. By 2018, approximately 58% of public high schools and 42% of public middle schools had a sworn law enforcement officer on campus.

The theory was safety. The reality was criminalization. When a police officer is stationed in a school, behaviors that were previously handled by teachers, counselors, and administrators become matters of law enforcement. A schoolyard fight that would have resulted in detention becomes an assault charge. A verbal altercation that would have resulted in a parent conference becomes a disorderly conduct arrest. A student who refuses to leave a classroom when directed — a common expression of adolescent defiance that generations of educators managed without police assistance — becomes a resisting arrest case that introduces a child to handcuffs, a squad car, and a booking process before they are old enough to drive.

The racial disparity in school-based arrests mirrors the racial disparity in suspensions, but with higher stakes. Black students are more likely to be arrested at school for the same behaviors that earn white students a disciplinary referral. The Advancement Project, in its comprehensive report on school discipline, documented cases in which Black students were arrested for offenses including throwing a paper airplane, stepping on another student’s foot, and drawing on a desk. These are not isolated anecdotes. They are data points in a pattern so consistent that it constitutes a policy, even if no one wrote it down.

The Money Behind the Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline is not merely a failure of educational policy. It is a success of economic policy — someone else’s economic policy. The private juvenile detention industry in the United States generates billions of dollars in annual revenue, and that revenue depends on a steady supply of detained youth. Companies that operate juvenile detention facilities have a financial interest in policies that increase the number of youth entering the juvenile justice system, and they have exercised that interest through lobbying, campaign contributions, and the revolving door between the private detention industry and the public officials who set detention policy.

The most infamous example is the “Kids for Cash” scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where two judges were convicted of accepting $2.6 million in bribes from the operators of private juvenile detention facilities in exchange for sentencing juveniles to those facilities, often for trivial offenses and often without adequate legal representation. The scandal was treated as an aberration — two corrupt judges in a small Pennsylvania county — but the structural incentive it revealed is not aberrant at all. It is the logical endpoint of a system that profits from the detention of children and that has no economic incentive to reduce that detention.

Even without corruption, the financial structure of the pipeline creates perverse incentives. Schools that suspend students reduce their short-term behavioral management costs. Districts that expel students transfer the cost of educating them to other institutions. Juvenile courts that detain youth generate revenue for facilities. Adult prisons that incarcerate the adults those youth become generate employment for communities that have organized their economies around incarceration. At every stage, someone benefits financially from the child’s movement through the pipeline, and at no stage does anyone benefit financially from keeping the child in school.

What Works: The Oakland Model

The solutions are not theoretical. They have been implemented, measured, and documented, and they work. Oakland Unified School District’s implementation of restorative justice practices, beginning in 2006, provides the most compelling evidence that an alternative to the punitive model exists and produces dramatically better outcomes.

Restorative justice replaces the punishment paradigm with a repair paradigm. Instead of asking “What rule was broken, who broke it, and what punishment do they deserve?” the restorative model asks “Who was harmed, what are their needs, and whose obligation is it to meet those needs?” In practice, this means that when a conflict occurs, the parties involved — the student who caused harm, the student who was harmed, their families, and relevant school staff — participate in a structured conversation facilitated by a trained restorative justice coordinator. The goal is not to excuse the behavior but to address its root causes, repair the harm it caused, and reintegrate the student into the school community with a concrete plan for different behavior in the future.

The results in Oakland were transformative. Suspensions dropped by 87%. Graduation rates increased significantly. Chronic absenteeism decreased. And the racial disparity in discipline, while not eliminated, narrowed substantially. The program demonstrated that the behaviors that trigger the pipeline — the defiance, the conflict, the impulsivity that are treated as criminal offenses in punitive systems — are addressable without exclusion, without police, and without pushing children out of the only institution equipped to change their trajectory.

PBIS and the Evidence Base

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, known as PBIS, provides a complementary framework. Developed from decades of behavioral research, PBIS operates on a tiered model: universal supports for all students (clear behavioral expectations, consistent positive reinforcement, a school culture organized around respect and responsibility), targeted supports for students who need additional assistance (small group interventions, mentoring, behavioral coaching), and intensive supports for the small percentage of students with chronic behavioral challenges (individualized behavior plans, mental health services, family engagement). The model is evidence-based, widely implemented, and consistently effective at reducing suspensions, reducing office discipline referrals, and improving academic outcomes.

The argument against removing school resource officers from schools — an argument that is made with great urgency by people who have never been the student on the other end of the officer’s attention — is that schools need security, and security requires police. The evidence does not support this claim. Schools that have removed SROs have not experienced increases in serious safety incidents. The overwhelming majority of incidents that SROs respond to in schools are low-level disciplinary matters that trained educators and counselors are equipped to handle, and that are handled better by educators and counselors because those professionals are trained to de-escalate, to understand developmental behavior, and to maintain relationships with students, while police officers are trained to command compliance, assess threats, and enforce the law.

The school-to-prison pipeline is not a metaphor. It is a system with identifiable components, measurable inputs and outputs, documented racial disparities, and proven alternatives. The suspension data is public. The arrest data is public. The incarceration data is public. The disparity data is public. And the data on what works — restorative justice, PBIS, removing police from schools, investing in counselors and mental health professionals — is public as well. The pipeline continues to operate not because we lack the knowledge to dismantle it but because we lack the will, and the will is lacking because the children inside the pipeline are not the children of the people who design education policy. The pipeline has an architect, and the architect’s children attend schools where counselors outnumber police, where behavioral infractions are addressed with conversations rather than handcuffs, and where the worst consequence of a bad day is a parent phone call, not a juvenile record. Until that disparity is as intolerable to the people who make policy as it is to the people who live with its consequences, the pipeline will continue to do what it was built to do: move Black children from desks to cells with the quiet efficiency of a system that has never been asked to justify its existence to the people it consumes.