The School-to-Prison Pipeline in America, 1972–2012

The school-to-prison pipeline is the collection of education and public safety policies and practices that place youth at an increased risk of prematurely discontinuing their academic careers while concurrently increasing their likelihood of correctional contact over the life course. This article argues that such a pipeline has its antecedents in the organization of work, the distribution of rewards, and the expansion of mass incarceration and punishment in America.

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1944) were the first to present a generalized set of stratification principles to explain the allocation and distribution of individuals to various social positions; the two determinants of differential positioning that explain the distribution of rewards are (a) positional importance and (b) training or talent, where the former factor concerns the relative significance of the position and the latter concerns the means and scarcity of skills. These factors are integral for understanding the development of the school-to-prison pipeline, for youth occupy a minor role in the occupational structure as they develop their skills and talent for adulthood.

Other stratification scholars argue that the educational system reproduces social inequality by preparing students for their class location through the structure and organization of schooling in America (Bowles and Gintis, 1976). The emergent conflicts associated with transformations in the social organization of work and the distribution of its rewards led to the creation of primary schooling and the development of high schools to meet business needs (Bowles and Gintis, 2002). Consequently, the social rewards (and punishments) derived in school replicate and mimic those found in the workplace, leading to what Bowles and Gintis (2002, p. 1) termed a “correspondence principle” between educational and labor market institutions.

This article explores the origins, functions, and consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline within the Davis–Moore and Bowles–Gintis stratification frameworks. While there are many different and inextricably linked pipelines into prison (recidivism, intergenerational incarceration, disadvantaged neighborhoods, etc.), this article explicates how social inequality associated with mass imprisonment and the corresponding punishment policies adopted by educational institutions have converged to create the school-to-prison pipeline in America. Past scholarship shows how the adult penal institution affects labor market and racial stratification (Western and Beckett, 1999; Western and Pettit, 2005; Pager, 2007), but little quantitative research explores how juveniles, within their social and educational ecologies, are prepared to occupy their positions within the adult correctional system.

We draw five conclusions in this article:

The first section describes the historical shift and decoupling of crime and mass incarceration for adults to explain the rise in punitive school sanctions for minors. The following section explicates how school punishment practices are differentially constructed and exercised on socially disadvantaged youth. The third section presents new estimates of juvenile incarceration rates since the early 1970s by race and gender, and the fourth section proposes policy prescriptions to reduce adolescent detention and incapacitation. In the final section we present general conclusions and questions for future research.

The social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s ushered in radical changes to American life that paved the way for mass incarceration in the United States. Garland (2001) contends that societal changes in the discourses of racial, gender, and sexual equality during the coming of late modernity shaped the neoconservative political movement, which subsequently implemented extremely harsh and punitive sanctions in order to reassert moral and social control around race relations, sex, employment, and policy throughout the 1980s. The loss of manufacturing jobs in urban areas during the 1970s and 1980s left inner-city residents, particularly the urban poor with low levels of education, without many economic and employment alternatives (Wilson, 1987).

Prior to deindustrialization in America, the use of incarceration as a social control mechanism was minimal and constant for over forty years, despite the rising crime rates of the 1960s and 1970s. Criminologists pronounced punishment as stable in part because public recognition of certain types of deviance reflected the Durkheimian social mores of the collective (Blumstein and Cohen, 1973). However, as crime rates continued to rise throughout the 1980s—in response to deindustrialization, rising unemployment, and the inflationary costs of various goods—the use of incarceration as a social control method became more common. The ensuing violence associated with emerging drug—especially crack-cocaine—markets contributed to the moral and political panic, resulting in the creation of two- and three-strikes legislation, mandatory minimums, reduced use of parole, and increases in truth-in-sentencing laws as formal social-control policies (Western, 2006; Pettit, 2012).

Yet the 1990s crime decline left punishment practices unaltered (see Zimring, 2006), resulting in a prison population explosion that led to overcrowding and the construction of new correctional facilities to house inmates (Pettit, 2012). Between 1980 and 2000, state spending on corrections outpaced educational investments six-fold (Wald and Losen, 2003). The massive growth of the adult penal population continued unabated until the Great Recession of 2008, when state legislatures sought ways to reduce budget deficits (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010).

Major consequences of the prison buildup included race, class, and gender inequalities in the likelihood of imprisonment (Tonry, 1995; Pettit and Western, 2004; Western, 2006; Pettit, 2012). By 2008, when the prison population reached its zenith of 2.3 million Americans or roughly 1% of the adult population (Pew Center on the States, 2008), 37 percent of young, African American men without high school diplomas were behind bars on any given day of the year (Pettit et al., 2009). The lifetime risk of incarceration for men in this demographic group is close to 70 percent (Pettit et al., 2009; Western and Wildeman, 2009; Pettit, 2012).

While some research questions the directionality between formal schooling and institutional confinement, as well as the pipeline metaphor in general (Pantoja, 2013), the expansive forms of punishment and corresponding surveillance techniques developed to contain the adult population extend to both adolescents and youth. Foucault (1977) contends that these panoptic techniques of knowing and maintaining control over bodies can be adapted easily from prisons and implemented in schools, barracks, hospitals, and labor market institutions, producing a form of productive power that institutionalizes inequality associated with such apparatuses. The school-to-prison pipeline, as a moniker and marker of diffusive panoptic practices and formal social control, highlights the role of total and competing institutions in the lives of youth and young adults. The reimagined and reconstituted implementation of these policies in school systems now links childhood punishment regimes within academic environments to correctional practices developed for adults, with the major protestation that social inequality in school discipline should mirror the disparities observed in the adult penal system.

As a response to the rising crime rates of the 1980s and early 1990s, many school districts adopted a zero-tolerance policy for school infractions and began to employ a punishment-centered crime-control response (Burns and Crawford, 1999; Hirschfield, 2008, p. 80; Bartolome et al., 2013). The use of tough-on-crime rhetoric espoused by politicians and public servants emboldened school administrators and law enforcement to create such policies to criminalize youth (Mora and Christianakis, 2012). The practices employed within many schools to formally control and correct student behavior include the use of metal detectors, drug sweeps, surveillance cameras, and on-site police officers (Price, 2009; Hirschfield and Celinska, 2011; Bonnie et al., 2012). In 2009, nearly all students in America (99 percent) ages 12 to 18 reported that they had observed the use of at least one security measure at their school (Robers et al., 2012), and qualitative research shows that the punitive practices once reserved for minority and poor schools have become increasingly common among white, middle-class institutions (Kupchik, 2009), suggesting that perhaps racial threat—the heightened level of punishment associated with an increasing percentage of minorities—depends on other social or structural factors such as social status or environmental context. However, studies show that the racial composition of the school predicts greater use of punitive practices regardless of levels of misbehaving and delinquency, supporting racial threat theories in educational contexts (Welch and Payne, 2010; Payne and Welch, 2010).

Crime-control efforts and correctional mechanisms have reshaped academic institutions so profoundly that scholars now refer to their contemporary disciplinary techniques as the “New American School” (Kupchik and Monahan, 2006, p. 617) to differentiate between past and present educational regimes of cognitive development and socialization. The placement of school personnel or police officers “in-house” to deal with disciplinary and criminal offenses (Kupchik and Monahan, 2006; Price, 2009; Bonnie et al., 2012) is a marked departure from the academic environments and educational objectives of past generations. The emergence of zero-tolerance policies in American schools can be traced back to the 1994 Safe Schools Act, which mandated expulsion for at least one year for any student bringing a weapon to school if the institution wanted to continue to receive federal funding (Kupchik, 2010).

A consequence of these zero-tolerance policies in schools has been the production of outcomes similar to national incarceration rates (Casella, 2003). The number of students suspended from school has increased by over 80 percent, rising from 1.7 million minors in 1974 to roughly 3.1 million in 2000 (Wald and Losen, 2003). By the close of the 2009–2010 academic school year, 39 percent of public schools (about 32,300) had taken at least one serious disciplinary action against a student, with roughly 433,800 punitive actions taken overall (Robers et al., 2012). Moreover, 74 percent of these corrective measures were suspensions for five days or more, 20 percent were transfers to specialized schools, and 6 percent were removals with no services for the remainder of the school year (Robers et al., 2012).

The formal response to these infractions, however, is not administered in a color-blind manner. Minority students, especially African Americans, are overrepresented in punishment and disciplinary statistics, particularly with regard to school suspension (Gregory, 1995; Skiba et al., 2002; Taylor and Foster, 2007; Cregor and Hewitt, 2011; Fabelo et al., 2011; Togut, 2011). These disparities have neither abated nor leveled off, with suspensions nearly doubling between the 1970s and 2000s (Wald and Losen, 2003; Wallace et al., 2008). For instance, in a nationally representative study, Wallace et al. (2008) found that black, Hispanic, and American Indian youth were substantially more likely to be sent to the office, suspended, or expelled than their similarly situated white and Asian peers between 1991 and 2005. Moreover, the most current data shows that minorities, and students with learning and emotional disabilities, continue to exhibit the highest suspension rates (Noguera, 2003; Skiba and Rausch, 2004; Lospennato, 2009; Fabelo et al., 2011; Tulman and Weck, 2009–2010) and that the use of suspensions has increased dramatically during middle and high school enrollment (Losen and Martinez, 2013), which helps to bring forth a sort of cumulative disadvantage within the school context (e.g., Sampson and Laub, 1997). Interestingly, the vast majority of suspensions are not for serious, criminal behavior but instead for minor school rule infractions (Losen and Martinez, 2013, p. 1). In a very comprehensive Texas study, Fabelo et al. (2011, p. x) found that the majority of disciplinary actions were those with high discretion (i.e., for violation of school conduct codes) and not for conduct that mandated suspension and expulsion under state law. The differential enforcement of these policing and punishment strategies shapes perceptions of fairness and consistency, with African American students perceiving such security measures as unfair when compared to white students (Kupchik and Ellis, 2008).

School disciplinary infractions, and the resulting suspensions, can potentially lead to direct involvement in the criminal justice system, as there is a direct link between school discipline and the juvenile justice system (Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2009) and potentially deeper penetration into corrections as adults (Aizer and Doyle, 2013). This is best highlighted by the fact that many states now mandate police referral for a variety of school crimes, including drug and weapon violations, thereby ensuring a direct connection between the school and the criminal justice system. At the same time, these race-based differences in school discipline lead indirectly to race-based differences in school achievement and to increases in school dropout rates (Bowditch, 1993), which not only have negative implications for students continuing in school and experiencing success in the labor market but are also strongly related to juvenile and criminal justice system involvement (see Thornberry et al., 1985; Arum and Beattie, 1999; Pettit and Western, 2004). Aizer and Doyle (2013) found that juvenile incarceration decreases the likelihood of high school completion and increases the likelihood of adult incarceration, with an added consequence of then being rendered invisible from formal dropout statistics (Heckman and LaFontaine, 2010; Pettit, 2012; Ewert et al., 2014). In the Texas study discussed earlier, the likelihood of contact with the juvenile justice system was found to increase with repeated suspensions or expulsions. As noted by Fabelo et al. (2011, p. xii), “Nearly half of those students who were disciplined 11 or more times were in contact with the juvenile justice system. In contrast, 2 percent of the students who had no school disciplinary actions were in contact with the juvenile justice system.” Faced with low academic attainment and diminished employment prospects, individuals may turn toward the illicit labor market to gain resources, which may lead to crime and result in criminal justice contact. In short, the extent to which school failure leads to criminal justice system involvement likely follows both direct and indirect pathways. Unfortunately, and as was recently observed by the National Academy of Sciences in its report on juvenile justice, “more research is needed to understand the pipeline process and the role that various actors play (school resource officers, school management) in these [disciplinary] referrals” (Bonnie et al., 2012, p. 240).

Marxist criminology provides a useful analytic framework for understanding the distribution of position and rewards inherent in the Davis–Moore and Bowles–Gintis stratification principles. Spitzer (1975, p. 640) argues that the production of deviance must be understood in relation to the forms of socioeconomic organization because “deviance production involves all aspects of the process through which populations are structurally generated, as well as shaped, channeled into, and manipulated within social categories defined as deviant.” Differing definitions of deviants, problem populations, and control systems develop and change in response to structural conditions. Further, Colvin and Pauly (1983) posit that school environments offer various levels of social control and that these gradations are closely related to the employment environments of the students’ parents. In disadvantaged families, where parental occupations are likely associated with more strict external control and less autonomy, conformity to external authority is instilled in children through discipline. Alternating levels of social control in homes and schools contribute to an unpredictable control structure that frequently changes between lax (at home) and highly punitive (at school). The inconsistent approach to control applied at home often mirrors the uneven nature of coercion applied in educational settings, Colvin (2000) argues, and can lead to the social-psychological issues that contribute to further delinquency and increasingly strict forms of social control, which can eventually reflect those experienced in an adult correctional facility.

Research shows that being arrested as a juvenile has large and robust impacts on both high school dropout rates and gaps in college enrollment rates between students with and without arrest records (Kirk and Sampson, 2013). Since the early 1990s, the vast majority of states (forty-five) have passed laws making it easier to try juveniles as adults (Wald and Losen, 2003). The stiffer sanctions attached to a variety of offenses in more than thirty states (Wald and Losen, 2003) means that the number of students at risk of dropping out of high school may have increased over time. To quantify the number of youth at risk of dropping out high school, we used data and methods outlined in previous studies (Pettit et al., 2009; Pettit, 2012; Ewert et al., 2014; Sykes and Pettit, 2014) to present adolescent incarceration rates in America since 1972 by race and gender for 13-to 17-year-olds. Because these youth are on the verge of transitioning to adulthood upon completion of their secondary education, understanding how the school–prison nexus impacts different groups is vital to the discussion of institutional linkages and historical transformations in punishment (Alexander, 2010).

Figure 1 displays the total juvenile incarceration rate for all adolescents. In 1972, roughly 35 adolescents per 100,000 were behind bars. There was also a precipitous decline in formal punishment between 1975 and 1980. However, by the time the Safe Schools Act of 1994 was passed, juvenile incarceration had more than doubled its 1972 rate, with approximately 81 adolescents per 100,000 in state, federal, and local facilities. Three years later, the trend reached an apex of 92 minors per 100,000 in custody. Subsequent declines were observed through 2005 when the trend reversed. Current estimates of incarcerated juveniles are on par with levels observed in 1991.

Race and gender inequality in state-sanctioned punishment is concealed in the overall trend presented in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows the juvenile incarceration rate for adolescent boys by race. The steep decline during the 1975 to 1980 period observed in Figure 1 was largely driven by reductions in the incarceration rate of black boys. Yet black boys have extraordinarily high levels of incarceration, increasing from 140 (per 100,000) in 1980 to almost 634 in 1997, a 453 percent increase over this period. Contemporary rates for 2012 are at levels 3.2 times greater than estimates observed in 1980.

An examination of white juvenile incarceration rates reveals more modest increases over time. In 1972, roughly 32 white boys (per 100,000) were behind bars, and by 1980 that figure had dipped to roughly 24. Like blacks, white boys experienced a 250 percent increase in formal punishment between 1980 and 1997, but these levels are not comparable to those of African American boys. Current incarceration rates of white males have been relatively unchanged since 1998.

Growing concern over immigration also places Latino youth at risk of increased surveillance and punishment (Bartolome et al., 2013), with their levels of juvenile incarceration hovering between whites and blacks. In 1980 more than 140 Latino boys were incarcerated, but the trend reached a peak of 190 inmates in 1993 and 1996 before leveling off at a rate of 133 (per 100,000) in 2012.

The increased punishment of girls is largely absent in the school-to-prison pipeline literature, and when coupled with issues surrounding the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality, young women may be overlooked in the development of social policy to meet their needs (Meiners, 2011). This is unfortunate because women represent the fastest-growing demographic group in the penal system, particularly for violent offenses (Simkins et al., 2004; Carson and Golinelli, 2013). The scholarship that does exist highlights the role of physical and sexual abuse that young girls face (Simkins et al., 2004), but much of the work in this area aims to give female youth agency in discussing how the school–prison discourses formally exclude and underserve their interests (Winn, 2010; Sharma, 2010).

Figure 3 presents incarceration rates for young girls from 1972 to 2012 by race. Several important similarities and differences exist in these trends, compared to boys. First, black girls experienced the same decline in their juvenile incarceration rates throughout the 1970s, and their rates remained relatively flat throughout the 1980s. Yet between 1990 and 1997, rates of punishment increased 332 percent. Second, contemporary levels of incarceration for black girls are almost 5 times greater than those of 1980, and when compared to black boys over the same period, the change in the incarceration rate is greater (or faster) among black females than black males.

White girls experienced a similar decline in incarceration during the 1970s. However, there was a slight increase in the number of young women incarcerated; they are the only racial group to have experienced a second decline starting in the late 1980s. Their current levels of incarceration are on par with rates observed in the late 1970s.

Latina youth incarceration rates also declined steadily throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Yet by the early 1990s their rates of punishment had rapidly increased to levels that were on par with African American girls. The subsequent decline in their punishment rates began in the late 1990s, and their current rates of incarceration are similar to those observed in the 1970s.

In December 2012 the US Senate held a hearing on “Ending the School to Prison Pipeline” (Committee on the Judiciary, 2012). On behalf of the Dignity in Schools Campaign, Matthew Cregor, assistant counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund, sent a letter to the committee outlining a number of reforms that included collecting and reporting annual estimates of school discipline for all educational institutions, using high disciplinary rates as an indicator of additional support and not increased punishment techniques, and placing meaningful restrictions on federal grants for school policing (Cregor, 2012). In addition to several legislative reforms, a variety of strategies have been proposed to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline that focus on the roles and responsibilities of families, school communities, and the justice system. Importantly, although a few evaluations of these and other policy and reform efforts that offer some promise exist, the kind of methodologically rigorous, evidence-based, quasi-experimental and experimental evaluations that are needed before any efforts can be billed as promising and/or effective is lacking. As such, there is a pressing need to undertake such evaluations to identify the most promising approaches to curtail the school-to-prison pipeline.

Family and peer networks are the primary sources of socialization for youth. Parental involvement in the educational development of children is paramount, for children are highly influenced by their parents, and youth develop at a much faster pace when they receive positive support (Nandagave, 2012; Hofferth and Sandberg, 2001; Coleman and Hoffer, 1987). The No Child Left Behind Act mandates that schools engage parents in the learning process, in part by providing parental education on how to increase student achievement (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 2002; Shippen et al., 2012). Providing parents with increased educational opportunities and tools to assist in the learning process of their at-risk children helps them secure the advantages that more educated parents may have (Nandagave, 2012; Black and Engles, 2008). Learning at home; partnering with schools; interacting socially and educationally with children; and raising children to be caring, responsible, and ethical are some ways families can disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline (Barbarin, 2010).

An added layer of educational complexity involves parental absence in the lives of children. Children from single-parent households face immense developmental and academic difficulties (Jayakody and Kalil, 2002; Dodson and Luttrell, 2011). Policy should focus on drawing fathers into the academic careers of their children, as studies show that children flourish when fathers support the mother’s ability to engage her children in cognitively stimulating ways (Jayakody and Kalil, 2002; Biblarz and Raftery, 1999) and when disadvantaged youth’s lives include male mentors (Wilson, 1987; Barbarin, 2010).

Perhaps the most central area in which reforms can be swiftly implemented, thereby yielding the greatest effectiveness in disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, is in school communities. Research shows that data contradict key assumptions that underlie zero-tolerance policies in schools (Skiba and Noam, 2001; American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008), leading scholars to propose a number of strategies to curtail the use of disciplinary sanctions in schools. The most important and cost-effective among them is moving to a youth court or restorative justice framework (Cole and Heilig, 2011; Gonzalez, 2012; Shippen et al., 2012). Restorative justice in schools would repair harm more expeditiously because all parties are involved in the process, and this approach strengthens academic communities without involving the justice system. Yet research shows that racial threat continues to operate within American schools, with the percentage of black students influencing the likelihood of a school implementing restorative justice programs (Payne and Welch, 2013).

Additionally, academic institutions should review their removal policies to prevent grade retention and dropout. Schools generally justify removals from classrooms on the basis that the learning environment is disrupted when badly behaved students remain in class (Noguera, 2003). This practice of removal, as a form of discipline, is akin to the academic tracking programs that shape the educational transition decisions of minors (Mare, 1980; Lucas, 1999; Lucas, 2001) by funneling and sorting students into different educational locations and labor market careers.

Another possibility for academic reform is to critically examine the role of teachers in the disciplinary actions and criminalization of youth (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008). Retraining teachers to academically engage more and panoptically surveil less may help to curb disciplinary referrals of youth with emotional and educational challenges (Raible and Irizarry, 2010), thereby retarding the flow of minors into the school-to-prison pipeline.

Several other strategies also exist that schools may employ to lessen the use of disciplinary sanctions in academic institutions. Price (2009) proposes that school resource officers be treated like police officers, ensuring that they follow acceptable standards of police conduct when investigating crime in schools. Moreover, schools can implement early intervention programs, reduce punitive practices (detention, suspension, and expulsion), address inequalities in special-education placements, and have counselors available to meet the emotional needs of youth who have suffered physical and mental abuse (Wald and Losen, 2003; Casella, 2003; Simkins et al., 2004; Lospennato, 2009; Shippen et al., 2012).

A number of policy changes within the justice system could also help better serve the needs of academically and behaviorally challenged students without placing them at risk of future correctional contact as juveniles and adults. First, increased use of court diversion programs would prevent youth from being stigmatized for their criminal justice contact (Kim et al., 2010; Shippen et al., 2012), though the extent to which such programs are considered successful depends on the availability of various services within the community (Hamilton et al., 2007).

Second, minors in detention centers should be encouraged to continue their learning, thereby ensuring student academic success (Feierman et al., 2009). However, the academic environment behind bars should be dynamic and organic. Research shows that both students and teachers in prisons feel marginalized, as the culture of correctional institutions command acquiescence and obedience among inmates, which stifles learning and creativity (Bhatti, 2010). Still, there is some evidence that educational attainment during prison is associated with not only a greater likelihood of continued education post-release but also significant reductions in reoffending (Blomberg et al., 2011) and that such programs seem to be especially beneficial to blacks (Blomberg et al., 2012).

Third, the justice system should ensure that the reentry process is streamlined for youth. Youth returning from suspensions, expulsions, and placement in correctional facilities are at significant risk of dropping out (Wald and Losen, 2003). The time away from learning means that they may have fallen behind, making reentry into academic institutions more challenging as they attempt to catch-up with the work they missed (Wald and Losen, 2003; Casella, 2003). The justice system could coordinate lesson plans in detention centers to ensure a smoother reentry process into the student’s school, ensuring that the student remains connected to his or her education and becomes less susceptible to dropout and delinquency due to grade retention or being overage for their grade level (Gottfredson et al., 1994; Roderick, 1994; McNeely et al., 2002). This policy is vital, because the labor market returns differ significantly between individuals with GEDs and those possessing high school diplomas (Cameron and Heckman, 1993).

Despite growing attention to the intersectional linkages between educational and correctional institutions, very little peer-reviewed, theoretically motivated, and quantitatively tested scholarship exists, with “even basic conceptual issues remaining unsettled” (Hirschfield and Celinska, 2011, p. 1). Racial disparities in school disciplinary systems and suspensions mirror observed effects of criminal justice contact for disadvantaged populations (Taylor and Foster, 1986; Casella, 2003). Interestingly, whereas school discipline rates decreased over time for other ethnic groups, black students experienced increases in the likelihood of punishment, even after controlling for limited parental education, family structure, and regional effects (Wallace et al., 2008).

Yet the mechanisms that produce race-based disparities in school punishment are not entirely clear. It could be that nonwhites have higher rates of recalcitrant behavior that may lead to greater discipline, or it could be that enforcement policies and procedures by teachers and administrators differentially target and punish nonwhite students more harshly. In the absence of considering both inputs to this disciplinary model, it becomes difficult to understand variation in behavior and punishment associated with race, net of important social background characteristics. Fenning and Rose (2007) conducted an extensive review of these issues and argued that ethnographic evidence would support the conclusion that loss of classroom control and fear of students were contributing factors for the differential punishment of poor and nonwhite youth.

As a result of the overrepresentation of minority and poor students in school punishment (Fenning and Rose, 2007), racial disparities in school disciplinary systems now mirror inequalities experienced by adults in the criminal justice system. The two-pronged explanation for understanding school discipline and suspension—that measures of student behavior and administrative enforcement are not always present in available data—is similar to concerns about race and class inequality in adult punishment. It is difficult to know which of these processes accounts for differences between students, or what percentage of the dependent variable is explained by each process. This problem arises because offending data generally contain official measures and not self-reported responses about behavior, which are needed to assess differential participation and punishment. In studies that do possess measures of behavior, the evidence is mixed about whether differential participation or differential enforcement primarily accounts for race and class differences in student punishment. On this score, Piquero (2008) has called for research to move beyond arguing in favor of one explanation over the other and instead think about the proportion of variance in these disparities that is attributable to each approach.

Consider, for example, the incarceration rates in Figures 2 and 3. Current punishment rates for black girls are on par with levels observed for white boys in the early 1980s. Have (black) girls gone wild, or have the surveillance and punishment techniques used to discipline minority youth been heightened to levels where the intersection of race and gender now means that contemporary punitive sanctions for one group represent the historical levels of a different group when punishment was less ubiquitous? The “moral panic” associated with the behavioral and learning challenges of minorities, and black youth in particular, is the result of rising social inequality (Farmer, 2010) and has led to the criminalization of adolescent development. Understanding how the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality matter for punishment of minors needs to be studied in greater detail (Meiners and Winn, 2010; Meiners, 2011).

Another issue future school-to-prison pipeline research should address is the role of intergenerational inequality in the transmission of delinquency and incarceration. Research shows that the risks of parental incarceration have increased over time (Wildeman, 2009; Pettit et al., 2009; Pettit, 2012) and that rising multiple partner fertility may place additional youth at risk of delinquency if behavioral challenges and incarceration diffuse within families and social networks (Sykes and Pettit, 2014; Lum et al., 2014). Children exposed to parental incarceration are more likely to exhibit and be at risk for a host of negative behavioral and emotional challenges (Wildeman 2010; Geller et al., 2009, 2011, 2012). Inequalities in parental incarceration pose a threat to the educational completion of minors and their social inclusion (Foster and Hagan, 2007; Hagan and Foster, 2012). Given the race and class differences in incarceration and stratification (Pettit and Western, 2004), as well as the material and psychological hardship parental incarceration presents for youth (Comfort, 2008), the school-to-prison pipeline may solidify systems of inequality by insuring the creation of a caste through the alteration of life chances (Wakefield and Uggen, 2010).

Consequently, the interlocking systems of institutional inequality have created a peculiar pipeline between academic and correctional environments that have their antecedents in the transmogrification of punishment in schools (i.e., the changing methods of school discipline over time). Research on the school-to-prison pipeline is largely disconnected from scholarship on labor stratification and mass incarceration via educational attainment and sorting mechanisms. Western (2006) argues that when labor is scarce, judges and officials are less likely to employ harsh punishment techniques for minor infractions; however, when labor is abundant and cheap, new criminal statutes and codes emerge to regulate the poor because they challenge the social system in very fundamental ways, one of which is to withhold their “labour power” (Marx, 1992, p. 270). Employment laws and compulsory education requirements preclude youth from working full-time, and when coupled with misbehavior and academic failure, punishment regimes within schools stratify minors by preparing them for imprisonment or the adult workplace (Bowles and Gintis, 1976).

Educational attainment is its own reward, but for youth unable to afford college or who face tenuous labor market opportunities upon graduation, the benefits of a secondary education may not be readily apparent. Mendel (2011) proposes that states eliminate financial incentives that encourage correctional placements and redistribute these resources to programs and opportunities that prepare youth for a global market (Heckman, 2011; Leitsinger, 2013). The creation of these rewards, from the redistribution of monies allocated for correctional placements, may serve to increase the positional importance and training of youth in a manner consistent with the stratification postulates proposed by Davis and Moore (1945). The creation of such educational resources and programs to promote additional schooling would unequivocally reduce the likelihood of incarceration (Lochner and Moretti, 2004; Arum and LaFree, 2008). Incentivizing academic success for minors at risk of educational failure and criminal justice contact is one of many methods needed to shut off the school-to-prison pipeline valve.