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School To Prison Pipeline Analysis

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In “Defining and redirecting a school-to-prison pipeline,” Johanna Wald and Daniel Losen discuss the phenomenon known to observers, advocates, and educators as the prison track, or the school-to-prison pipeline. This appallingly racist system funnels minority youth into the for-profit, industrialized prison system, which was designed to maintain the racial status quo, to replace slavery in all but name, and to cripple the minority vote to ensure its persistence. Recent trends in educational policy have made this school-to-prison pipeline a nigh-inevitable consequence for disenfranchised youth of color, despite the considerable evidence that American educational policy is terrible. American students lag behind their international peers in …show more content…
Just as the enforcement of adult law is disproportionately applied to people of color, the enforcement of these juvenile policies is more harshly applied to minority youth. As Wald and Losen state, “this get-tough approach to discipline in schools is mirrored in the treatment of youths in the criminal justice system.” Since 1992, 45 out of the 50 US states had passed laws making it easier to try juveniles as adults, and 31 stiffened sanctions for a variety of offenses. Once again, these policy changes are not based in reality. “Despite a precipitous drop in juvenile crime during the last half of the 1990s, the number of formally processed cases involving juveniles–most of them nonviolent cases–increased, along with the number of youths held in secure facilities for nonviolent offenses” […] While comprising one-third of the country’s adolescent population, [POC] represented two-thirds of all youths confined to detention and correctional placements” …show more content…
Regrettably, the powerful entities that put the school-to-prison pipeline in place are unlikely to support its dismantling, preferring to rely on the “simplistic rhetoric of zero tolerance and getting the ‘disruptive kids out of class,’” (14) no matter how ineffectual it has proven. However, “effective interventions and programs that reduce risk and enhance protective factors for youths at risk for delinquency exist [and] these have the potential to reduce the human costs of victimization and save tax dollars” (13). It’s clear that the current systems “not only fail to serve the neediest children but, in fact, […] create conditions that exacerbate the harm inflicted on them” (12). Political leaders and policymakers must “address these complex problems and glaring racial disparities with compassion, care, knowledge, and determination” (14). Given the truly overt racism present in American politics today, perhaps the most important step in overcoming the school-to-prison pipeline is going to the polls and electing new, diverse candidates with the future of the nation, and not their bottom lines, at

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