NYT Article on School-To-Prison-Pipeline

Photo credit Michael Stravato for the New York Times.

Today’s New York Times story addresses the school-to-prison pipeline:

The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear. The new N.R.A. report cites the example of a Mississippi assistant principal who in 1997 got a gun from his truck and disarmed a student who had killed two classmates, and another in California in which a school resource officer in 2001 wounded and arrested a student who had opened fire with a shotgun. 

Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts. 

“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”

Of course, all of this echoes Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime, in which he talks about the increasing management of education as an enterprise of crime control. But it also echoes recently deceased Stanley Cohen‘s Visions of Social Control, where he spoke of “widening the net.”

The accompanying slideshow tells the story as only photos can.