School to Prison Pipeline

"The systems broken the schools closed the prisons open, I aint got nothing to lose mafucka we rolling."

With the first line in the first verse of his chart topping single "Power" Kanye west hides the harsh realities of the school to prison to pipeline, a phenomenon that affects low income students of color all over the country. With that one line Kanye draws a comparison against two opposite institutions, institutions that we as a society want to believe that have no correlation. We want to believe that the schools are open and that the prisons are closed but that simply is not the way that it is, hence why the system is broken. The schools are segregated and the prisons are open, this line is alluding to the segregation of both institutions. The school system is segregated because the culture of power has access to the best educational opportunities and they close it to students of color. In contrast the prisons are open to students of color as the population of the prison system is predominantly African American and Hispanic. This week I really wanted to learn more about the school to prison pipeline that Kanye West is alluding to in his song Power.

On rethinkingschools.org I chose to read Arresting Development. Zero Tolerance and The Criminalization of Children by Annette Fuentes, and a short article titled, School to Prison Pipeline in Mississippi. The Arresting Development article focuses on the school to prison pipeline and zero tolerance policies. The term Zero tolerance traces its roots to the Reagan presidency and the war on drugs in the 1980’s, “Congress enacted the Drug Free Schools and Communities act in 1986 bringing the war on drugs to school”. During the Clinton administration zero tolerance was taken further with the 1994 Safe and Gun-Free Schools Act, that made bringing a gun to school warrant a one-year expulsion for students and also provided federal funding for anti-violence programs directed at youth. These policies were viewed as a way to sway the prediction that was made by criminologists like James Q Wilson and John Dilulio that viewed African American and Latino males as “super predators” that would incite a new wave of violence in the late 90’s. The 1999 shooting at Columbine High School spearheaded the national move for police in our schools, and while Columbine was a predominantly white high school most schools that implemented having police in the schools were schools that had a high population of Blacks and Hispanics. The schools that were mostly segregated began to become a pipeline for youths of color to end up in prison.

  Although Zero Tolerance in schools began, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that incidents of gun violence have been dropping steadily since 1993. Zero tolerance one focused on guns, alcohol and guns now targets an ever expanding range of behaviors. It is estimated that from 1997-2007 police officer presence in high schools increased by a third. Zero tolerance combined with the increasing police presence in our nation’s high schools are taking away the disciplining of students from a school to issue to a law enforcement issue.  According to Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project a civil rights and advocacy group, “Things a police officer might not arrest someone in a bar fight for, your seeing them make arrests in schools for.   There are a lot of children arrested for disorderly conduct, which has a very subjective definition. Whoever is standing there gets to define it.” Schools with officers are 5 times more likely for a student to be arrested for disorderly conduct. Disorderly conduct is an offense that is most often left to the interpretation of the school system and that in my opinion should not be a reason to arrest a student instead it should be a time for the school to discipline a student and not to criminalize a student.

Zero tolerance by the numbers.

In 2009-2010 school year California recorded 757,000 suspensions it was only second to Texas that had 1.67 million suspensions and the population of texas schools is only 4.7 million students.

According to the ACLU there are more African Americans in the US justice system than there were slaves in the 1850’s.

40 percent of students expelled in the US are Black

70 percent of students arrested in school are Black and Latino

Currently African Americans and Hispanics youth make up 3/5ths of the juvenile delinquent prison population.

Regan’s war on drugs was primarily waged in communities of color. Although people of color are no more likely to sell drugs as their white counterparts, Blacks and Hispanics historically have higher rates of arrests.

African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.

From 1980-2007 about one in three of 25.4 million adults arrested for drugs was Black

Zero tolerance often targets students in populations of color. Schools that are segregated are more likely to have a police presence at their high schools. According to Russel Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University, Skiba suggests that when teachers are inexperienced and come from different racial and class backgrounds they teach “cultural discontinuities” and they create adversarial dynamics in the class room. An alienating curriculum poor classroom management skills and negative stereotypes of black youth can lead to authoritarian disciplining and overreliance on suspensions.  Hence what we talk about in the Finn article and the segregation of schools. Below you can find a great video explaining the school to prison pipeline. 

This brings me to the short article on Meridian Mississippi, a town who was sued by the Department of Justice in 2012. Meridian is a perfect example of how the prison to pipeline works in some of our school systems. The lawsuit alleged that the city’s juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice system violating young people’s due process rights along the way”.

In Meridian when schools wanted to discipline students they called the police instead arresting students as young as 10 years old, in most times the officers didn’t even know if the offense was worthy of an arrest. The complaint read that the students were incarcerated without for days without a hearing or even knowing why they were arrested.  The department of justice lawsuit came after years of research by organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, (SPLC) that determined that 67 percent of youth in detention centers in Mississippi arrived from the Meridian school system. In between school and detention-schools, students were denied access to lawyers and due process, “the administrators were the judge and executioner”. The managing attorney of the SPLC states, that although Meridian is a city comprised of 61 percent African American over a five-year period, “there was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for”.

                                                       NOT ONE!

One middle school student was suspended over 30 times for offense including wearing the wrong colored socks and being late to class. The Department of justice in its lawsuit said “that the city police department served as a “de-facto taxi service” shuttling students away from school and into youth jails.

Lastly I will leave this hip-hop-centric blog post with a very brief analysis of another Kanye West song, titled new slaves. The song is a song dedicated on talking about the Prison Industrial complex and the privatizations of our prisons. Prisons owend by private corporation and not by the judicial system. The biggest private prison system corporation is the CCA. The way that they work is that they receive tax payer dollars for ever inmate in their prisons. In Kanye West song New Slaves, he states

I know that we the new slaves...
Meanwhile the DEA, teamed up with the CCA
They tryina lock n---s up, they tryna make new slaves
See that's the privately owned prison, get your piece today
They prolly all in the Hamptons, braggin 'bout what they made

With this verse Kanye is referring to the war on drugs. The DEA being the Drug Enforcement Agency and the CCA being the largest private prison corporation in the world, and the profits that exist with having a private prison be filled with prisoners. This song expresses a sentiment about the distrust of minorities and the judicial system, and the Reagan era war on drugs that sent majority African Americans and Hispanics to prison at alarming rates. He compares the prison system to slavery because it seems that it is mostly the people with slave ancestry who are getting arrested and who are being profited from in the prison industrial complex.  This is why I feel that the, 
                                                The system is broken,

The schools are closed

The prisons open