Black youth are systematically profiled and targeted by police, and make up 35% of arrests of people under 18; twice as likely to be arrested as white youth; disproportionately tried as adults; twice as likely to be sentenced to life without parole; five times as likely to be incarcerated or committed; and more likely to be sent to adult facilities, and to be held in solitary confinement. Disabled youth enter the system at 5 to 6 times the rate of nondisabled youth, and LGBTQ youth are disproportionately incarcerated in juvenile detention facilities.
Schools, instead of serving as places of learning, nurturing, and growth, have become pathways to prison. Black students are more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled, subjected to corporal punishment ,arrested, and referred to law enforcement while attending school, and are routinely denied the opportunity to fully participate in public education. Black students are twice as likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement while at school.
These disparities increase at almost every step of the criminal punishment process, stealing the dignity of young Black people and forcing them onto lifelong pathways of criminalization and diminished opportunity. Once pushed into the criminal punishment system, Black youth face myriad collateral consequences that harm their future, their families, and their communities, including: increased risk of:
For some youth, this means that a minor schoolyard scuffle could ultimately result in their family being evicted from public housing or deported.
These consequences only exacerbate entrenched racial educational and economic disparities faced by Black youth:
There is mounting research that children under the age of 23 do not have fully-developed brains and that the cheapest, most humane, and most cost-effective way to respond to normal youth behavior is not incarceration, but programs and investments that strengthen families, increase stability, and provide access to educational and employment opportunities. Prosecuting and punishing youth is not only cruel, it also permanently disadvantages them with a criminal record, which creates often insurmountable obstacles to completing their education, getting a job, finding housing, and thriving.
Across the country, Black children attend under-resourced schools, where they are often pushed off an academic track onto a track to prison. School policing is inextricably linked to this country’s long history of oppressing and criminalizing Black people based on the belief that Black people need to be controlled and intimidated. Historically, school police have acted as agents of the state to suppress student organizing and movement building, and to maintain the racially segregated status quo. Beginning in the 1950s, local, state, and federal government agencies, designed to protect dominant white institutions, made an intentional decision to police schools to exercise control of growing power in Black and Brown social movements. More recently, increased police presence in schools attended by youth of color, along with increased surveillance and social media monitoring, has been justified by shootings at predominantly white schools like Columbine and Parkland. Additionally, efforts to arm teachers have begun to spread.
“Zero tolerance” policies—a combination of exclusionary disciplinary policies and school-based arrests—are often the first stop along the school-to-prison pipeline, and play a key role in pushing students out of the school system and funneling them into jails and prisons.
Black students are more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled, arrested, and referred to law enforcement while attending school, and are routinely denied the opportunity to fully participate in public education. There is evidence that suspensions significantly reduce the likelihood of graduation, and have a cumulative effect.
In the 2013-2014 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, more than two-and-a-half-million students were suspended from school—often for vague and subjective infractions such as “willful defiance” and “disrespect”—amounting to countless hours of lost instructional time. Forty percent of these students were Black, even though Black students only made up 15.5% of students. Across the country, Black students were more than twice as likely as their white classmates to be referred to law enforcement or arrested at school. As a result, Black students are denied an opportunity to learn and punished for routine child and adolescent behaviors that their white peers are often never disciplined for. For Black youth, the impact of exclusionary school discipline is far reaching—disengaging them from academic and developmental opportunities, and increasing the likelihood that they will be incarcerated later in life.
Black girls have historically been overlooked in the national conversation around youth impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline. Yet, there are higher disciplinary disparities between Black girls and white girls than disciplinary disparities between Black boys and white boys.; In 2015-2016, nationwide, in comparison to white female students,
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/ questioning, intersex, asexual, and gender non-conforming (LGBTQIA+ and GNC) students are disproportionately affected by exclusionary discipline and school policing. Schools can already be hostile environments for LGBTQIA+ and GNC students of color, and acting in self-defense to bullying often results in discriminatory punishment.
The withdrawal of federal guidance directing schools to treat trans youth according to gender identity has contributed to this reality, prompting schools to enforce use of sex-segregated facilities, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, according to sex assigned at birth, often through arrests.
School policing further funnels LGBTQIA and GNC students into a youth punishment system where they are twice as likely to be arrested and detained for a nonviolent offense. LGBTQIA+ and GNC youth have reported feeling targeted and “watched” by increased surveillance and school policing, as well as being cited for expressions of their gender identity. Additionally, rather than responding to bullying from their peers with support and restorative practices, LGBTQIA students have shared that school staff often blame them for their victimization.
Black youth are also more likely to experience higher rates of corporal punishment. According to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education, in 2013-14, Black students constituted 17.1% of the nationwide student population, but 38.3% of those physically punished for school-based behavior. For Black students with disabilities, the number increased to 40.5%. In addition, while girls experience corporal punishment less than boys, in the 13 states that subject more than 1,000 students per year to physical punishment, Black girls are 2.07 times as likely as white girls to be beaten.
According to the most recently available data, 24% of elementary schools and 42% of high schools have police on campus. Those that do disproportionately serve young people of color: as of 2013, 51% of high schools with majority Black and Latinx enrollment had law enforcement officers on campus. The rate at which students are referred to law enforcement for lower-level offenses more than doubles when a school has regular contact with a “school resource officer”.
Additionally, the presence of law enforcement officers increases the likelihood that students will be subjected to sexual harassment and assault and uses of force including Tasers, batons, and pepper spray. Some schools have even obtained military equipment through a Department of Defense military weapons transfer program (1033 program).
According to the Alliance for Educational Justice, every week of the school year, a Black student is assaulted by a school police officer.
Police officers need not be stationed at schools to impact the lives of Black students: according to the Black Organizing Project, the Oakland School system calls police on students 6,000 times a year, while those in Birmingham, AL and Durham, NC make 4,000 such calls a year. The presence of law enforcement in and around schools also fuels the school-to-deportation pipeline for immigrant Black youth.
Black youth have consistently been demonized in the media and popular culture as “superpredators,” “gangsters,” “thugs,” “hos,” and “welfare queens,” with devastating consequences for young Black lives. These narratives have served as primary drivers of the systemic criminalization of Black youth: every crime bill passed by Congress throughout the 1980s and 1990s included new federal laws against juvenile crimes and enabled increased criminal penalties for children. Similar trends can be seen throughout state legislation. Policing practices like traffic stops, “stop and frisk,” and “broken windows policing” disproportionately, and often explicitly, target Black youth, contributing to disproportionately high rates of arrest and incarceration. Tens of thousands of youth under the age of 21 are currently incarcerated for offenses ranging from truancy to more serious charges.
There is a critical need for a coordinated strategy in local communities to address rampant racial disparities in the application of zero-tolerance policies and criminalization practices that impact Black boys, girls, trans, intersex, gender nonconforming, and disabled youth. Fortunately, a powerful grassroots movement, led primarily by youth and parents of color, has taken shape across the country to address these harmful policies—but much more work remains. We need to collectively advance a grassroots organizing strategy at the local and state level that centers the work of ending the criminalization of Black youth through a racial, gender, and disability justice framework—led and informed by youth and parents.
We demand that policymakers address deprivation of resources to public schools and the state-sanctioned violence that stems from law enforcement presence, including ICE, and criminalization in schools by:
Schools, instead of serving as places of learning, nurturing, and growth, have become pathways to prison. Black students are more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled, subjected to corporal punishment ,arrested, and referred to law enforcement while attending school, and are routinely denied the opportunity to fully participate in public education. Black students are twice as likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement while at school.
These solutions address exclusionary and punitive school discipline policies, surveillance, and criminalization in public schools across the nation that deny Black youth an opportunity to learn.
These policies have the greatest impact on queer and trans youth, disabled youth, youth in foster care, migrant youth, and Black girls. The reinvestment aspect of the legislation would positively impact low, no-income, and homeless and precariously-housed youth by providing increased services.
