Understanding, Dismantling, and Disrupting the Prison-to-School Pipeline

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Description

This volume examines the school-to-prison pipeline, a concept that has received growing attention over the past 1015 years in the United States. The pipeline refers to a number of interrelated concepts and activities that most often include the criminalization of students and student behavior, the police-like state found in many schools throughout the country, and the introduction of youth into the criminal justice system at an early age. The school-to-prison pipeline negatively and disproportionally affects communities of color throughout the United States, particularly in urban areas. Given the demographic composition of public schools in the United States, the nature of student performance in schools over the past 50 years, the manifestation of school-to-prison pipeline approaches pervasive throughout the country and the world, and the growing incarceration rates for youth, this volume explores this issue from the sociological, criminological, and educational perspectives. Understanding, Dismantling, and Disrupting the Prison-to-School Pipeline has contributions from scholars and practitioners who work in the fields of sociology, counseling, criminal justice, and who are working to dismantle the pipeline. While the academic conversation has consistently called the pipeline school-to-prison, including the framing of many chapters in this book, the economic and market forces driving the prison-industrial complex urge us to consider reframing the pipeline as one working from prison-to-school. This volume points toward the tensions between efforts to articulate values of democratic education and schooling against practices that criminalize youth and engage students in reductionist and legalistic manners.

Reviews

How does one begin to unwind the weft of fear, anger, and misrepresentation of the Black American male It is impossible to go three consecutive days without the murder of a Black man by mistake and misrepresentation, yet clearly on purpose. Multiple incarcerations of Black men happen consistently, with blatant comparison to White men who serve no time for similar crimes. This book begins the task of historicizing, documenting, and positioning the incarceration of Black Americans as authors investigate policy, laws, and the injustices which have become daily and unremarkable in the United States. Authors argue for a rational and fair examination of the penal system and direct pipeline which streams Black men into prison. Prepare yourself for research which uncovers an American travesty, a twenty-first century Middle Passage. -- Shirley R. Steinberg, The University of Calgary
The effectiveness of schools in fueling the carceral nation, and of prisons in necessitating educational apartheid, are neither accidental nor signs of failed systems. In Understanding, Dismantling, and Disrupting the Prison-to-School Pipeline, Fasching-Varner and colleagues shed light on the numerous and entrenched ways that the school-prison nexus is structured as such, and ways to find hope in its abolition. -- Kevin Kumashiro, University of San Francisco

Author Bio

Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner is the Shirley B. Barton Endowed Associate Professor of Education and director of the Higher Education Administration Program at Louisiana State University. Lori Latrice Martin is associate professor of sociology and African & African American studies at Louisiana State University. Roland Mitchell is the Jo Ellen Levy Yates Endowed Professor and associate dean of research engagement and graduate studies in the College of Human Sciences and Education at Louisiana State University. Hon. Karen P. Bennett-Haron serves as Justice of the Peace in Department 7 for the Las Vegas Justice Court, and is past Chief Justice of the court. Arash Daneshzadeh is a faculty member at the University of San Francisco School of Education, and director of Programs for Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ).