Tuesday, April 04, 2006

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

OK, it's time to remind myself that I know some things about what I'm supposed to know about -which is to say, social work.

There's been a murder in this little burg. There hasn't been a murder here in something like 4 years, so it's quite literally the talk of the town. Add to the general shock of any murder the twin facts that the victim and the alleged perpetrator are both heart-breakingly young. And gang-involved, apparently.

That's pretty much the extent of what I've gleaned from the water-cooler chit-chat. From here on out, I'm generalizing and theorizing from ideas rather than the particular case. It's just that it was this particular case that brought these questions forward in my mind.

There's just one high school in this town. Mind-bending, but true. And I thought, when my kids were still there, that the school district was very quick to give up on some kids. And no big surprise, the kids they were giving up on look a lot like social work clients. I attributed it to the fact that this is a split-personality town. There are the university-types, and the farmer-types, and the none-of-the-above types. Maybe the kids of professors and the kids of farmers get away with more than the other kids. I don't KNOW that. And of course, it wouldn't be true in every case, anyway. But I think it merits examination.

Then, midway through our family's tenure at the high school, a police officer was assigned full-time to the schools. This seems commonplace now, but I'm still not convinced it's a great idea. Right in here somewhere, we also got zero-tolerance policies. Back in my day (be very wary of sentences that start like that....), we had a system of graduated discipline. The punishment intensified as the crime intensified -or based upon the number of times the little "criminal" had perpetrated the crime. Now with zero tolerance, the first miss is as good as a mile -and frequently results in mandatory referral of the student to law enforcement for school code violations.

But once a kid has been referred to law enforcement, how likely is he to re-enter the classroom as a successful student? This is a little town. The teachers totally know which kids have had referrals and which ones haven't. Heck, the people at the grocery store know. A strong kid with good support could start to follow the straight and narrow, but really... the deck is stacked against him. And if people now interact with that person in ways that imply an expectation that he will fail... well, some prophecies are self-fulfilling.

Add to this "tough-love" facsimile, the corresponding fact that the punishment on the law enforcement side of the equation has also toughened. It's much easier to try juveniles as adults than it used to be, and sentencing for juvenile offenses has stiffened as well. So, in some cases, we may never know if a kid could have re-entered the classroom. He's just plain in jail, where education is treated as a privilege rather than a requirement. Even if he gets out of jail in time to return to high school, he'll be behind his peers. Now he's guaranteed to be in "alternative education."

And of course I haven't even added in the racial and other socio-economic disparities of any social system. But what we have is clearly a school system with not only no safety net, but a system that's been so punitive for some of its participants that jail is almost the inevitable outcome.

I'm not arguing that the school system pulled out a gun and killed that child. There were dreadful choices made that night, and no one else is to blame in quite the way that the perpetrator is. My point, though, is that he may not be the only one to blame. The question is whether or not we have the political will to change this. No child left behind, indeed. Sigh.

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