CW: Mention of sexual abuse
The past two weeks, I wrote about the first two steps of the school-to-prison pipeline: school discipline and status offenses. This article encapsulates how these two elements lead students to the justice system and the long-lasting effects of youth confinement.
Punitive Means of Punishment
Punitive punishment refers to programs designed to deter and punish behavior and emphasize deterrence of criminal behavior through punishment instead of rehabilitation. The most punitive means of punishment for juveniles are home confinement, group home, bootcamp, probation, and finally, the juvenile detention center. These methods all have the same commonalities of enforcing detention, discipline, and surveillance. They represent the same tough policies and harsh treatment that are seen in the adult prison system, but instead administered on youths.
Origins of these Punitive Punishments
Throughout the mid 1980s and early 90s, there was a wave of crime among teenagers sparking panic and fear of adolescents and their increase in violent crime. This response wasn’t completely unfounded– there was a spike in violent crime among teenagers.
This increase caused the public to put pressure on local, state, and federal officials to make laws that would incite harsher punishments against these teenagers and made it easier for teens’ crimes to be allowed to be transferred to the adult criminal system.
This heightened the emphasis on punitive punishments as opposed to therapeutic punishments. Therapeutic punishments emphasize restorative justice through building connections among peers, problem-solving, and communication skills. These means have seen significantly more positive outcomes in preventing adolescents from reoffending compared to these punitive measures.
Trapped in the System
These punitive punishments often have measures reflective of what we would expect to see in the adult prison system. They have very sterile accommodations, shackles, and a repeated emphasis on control. These rigid structures make it seem like an impossible task for students to be able to climb out of this system, instead getting caught in it.
Furthermore, the concept of socialization also helps explain how individuals get caught in the system. School is one of the most formative experiences of a youth’s upbringing, and aside from their home it is where they spend the most time. Their friends, peers, and teachers illustrate social norms for them to follow and they learn the behavior of the people around them. Removing students from this system takes the structure out of their lives, can cause more harmful behavior and hurts their development in the long term.
On the other side, when you put youths in the criminal justice system, you are telling them that is what they are. Now, they are spending time with other criminals which increases the likelihood of them spending time engaged in further criminal activity.
Additionally, by punishing students and referring them to law enforcement, that student’s support and trust in authority figures like educators is lessened and can lead to further conflicts with teachers if that student does return to school. In turn, this causes them to be punished more and this system of exclusion and harm perpetuates.
Who is In The System
Like the other stages of the pipeline, black and hispanic youth are disproportionately put into confinement compared to their white counterparts. According to statistics from New York City, Blacks and hispanics represent 66 percent of the school population, but are 93 percent of students who are detained by police in juvenile detention facilities.
As adults, one in three black men in this country will spend time in a U.S. prison. This mass incarceration is a structural problem partly caused by this use of the justice system from an early age to discipline students and youths when the education system has failed them.
Additionally, this leads to significantly fewer Black and hispanic students graduating from high school on time, and significantly more Blacks, hispanics, and American Indians ending up in jail or prison.
Incarceration of Girls
Another youth demographic that are disproportionately harmed by the juvenile justice system are girls of color and girls that have been sexually abused. Of the girls who enter the juvenile justice system, over 70 percent say they have been a victim of physical and/or sexual abuse. This can cause a disrupted home life, physical injury and traumatic stress which can all contribute to a struggle to concentrate and learn in a classroom, and the willingness or ability to show up for school. As we have seen, this battle to be present or focus in school can be a means for punishment and makes this population more vulnerable to school suspensions and discipline.
While girls are 3-5 times more likely to experience sexual abuse than boys, and black and Latina girls are twice as likely as other groups to experience sexual abuse. The intersection of these issues, combined with other harmful school practices such as the punitive punishments, implicit biases, and tracking put this group at an even greater risk for harsher discipline and exposure to the juvenile justice system.
What This Tells Us
Overall, this data shows us the harm and racial bias that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline and causes alarming numbers of students to wind up in confinement instead of in school. This system does not need to be a foregone conclusion– there are steps that schools and policymakers can take to combat this. Additionally, state and local jurisdictions should be looking to therapeutic measures to help these students and help improve their life outcomes instead of the punitive punishments that make them more likely to reoffend in the future.
My next and final article in this series will address this, and build on training and reforms that can be done at all levels of government to help these students. I will also be discussing what you as a voter and member of society can do to speak up and advocate for youths.
- Inside the Systems that Fuel the School-to-Prison Pipeline - August 20, 2020
- Is Teaching Political? - August 5, 2020
- The Battle Over Reopening Schools: A Teacher’s Perspective - July 29, 2020