The School-To-Prison Pipeline is a Myth

In the wake of recent events, America has been frothing with rage and confusion about the relationship between racism, police brutality, the prison industrial complex, hooliganism, and young murdered children. Everywhere, people are weighing in on it, and my intuition has been to try to draw my students into something like safety.

Of course, there’s no such thing as safe. The second my students step outside the door, they’re in a scary world where adults mistrust them, where people their own age might attack them, where they could get caught in a crossfire between rival gangs on their way to third-period biology class. It's not them-- it's their environment.

In my little trailer in the far back of the school, I don’t see most of this. It’s not that my students are so much better than other students (maybe a little), but that, I think, our class is one in which they have responsibility and direct say in the proceedings, and they return that sense of trust by rising to it magnificently. Unlike last year, now I give my phone to students to film our class with, allow students to run the discussions and vote on things like class procedures, and ask students to pick up our box of class ipads from the library. I have very little part in the balagan on campus.

My part of it is telling students to put away their phones and stop rewatching the fights that have been uploaded to worldstar. My part is to elbow my way into the in-school-suspension room, past a burly behavior management technician, and force some homework into my student’s hands so that she can stay caught up during her ten-day suspension for fighting that lunch period. My part is to provide a forum for discussions about race and violence in America in which students can speak their minds and compare their ideas and state their fears.

Many of those fears revolve around being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. My kids tell countless stories of being approached by law enforcement for walking down the street with a group of their friends, or for sitting outside a store, or for simply being. What gets to them more than anything is the fact that they’re automatically mistrusted. They’re smart kids; they get the message. Everyone thinks they’re up to no good. So they look around to see what it is that they’re supposed to be doing. Most of them sniff at it and walk away. A few others dabble in it. Some become caught in it. But for the most part, they’re just tired of being mistrusted.

 

Recently, during my planning, I came across a student sitting outside a classroom, playing his music loudly. He looked sullen and uncooperative, but I was in the mood for that. I hopped up on the fence beside him, asked him to turn off the music for a second, and asked what class he was supposed to be in.

“That ‘un.”

“What is it? Math? History?”

“English.”

“Oh. Why aren’t you in it?”

“I know how to read.”

“Yeah, but English class is all about making use of that talent. What are you guys reading in there?”

“A book. I forget the name.”

“What’s it about?”

“A guy who’s trying to… I forget.”

“Better get in there and find out.”

Sheepishly, he rolled off the fence, tucked away his beats, and entered the room. As I walked away, I pondered how if I’d had a little less time that day, and merely barked at him to get to class, he probably wouldn’t have bothered, but just cussed me out and stayed on his fence post. Most kids, nay, most people, respond better to being spoken to than being screamed at. And yet that’s what our students hear all day long.

At this week’s staff meeting, the administration addressed fears about the recently stolen technology from our trailers, and complaints from the community about students venturing off campus during school hours. They’re building a fence, with a barbed wire top, around the back part of campus.

Geez, I thought, it will be awful to teach with that surrounding us. We need it, very much, but it will be awful. Will we still have money left to replace the educational technology after we’ve built that? Then I tuned in to the jokes being cracked in the meeting. Someone suggested watch towers, another, a moat, and a third cracked, “anybody have a pit bull we can leave in the woods?” I cringed in my seat, thinking that this is the exact same attitude that people in Ferguson are dealing with. Their attitude towards our students was one of suspicion. Even the good kids are going to be surrounded by barbed wire. Even the hard workers, the morally upright, the sweetest and the kindest, are included in cracks about getting dogs that can savage them. And this is from the people who are supposed to take care of them. What are they facing in the outside world?

Our campus is flush with police officers, more every day, it seems. Students are subject to barked interrogations when walking the halls. Soon we will have a barbed wire fence surrounding us. How long until our school is razed and reconstructed on the principle of Bentham’s Panopticon?

The school-to-prison pipeline is a pretty little myth. From this vantage point, standing in an American public school, it looks more like a prison-to-prison pipeline than anything else. How can students raised in this environment end up anywhere else? They will have to work hard to break away. And the rest will stay.