ABSTRACT
The school-to-prison pipeline was coined by social justice commentators in the US to explain the link between exclusion of students of colour from school and their eventual involvement with the criminal justice system. Schools that develop a strong culture of high expectations of proper conduct and which consistently reinforce consequences for misconduct are bound to do better than schools which allow or make excuses for bad behaviour. Like any social phenomenon, factors leading to criminal activity are many and complex, but low literacy can be, as many in the field have pointed out, ‘the first link in a causal chain’ towards negative life circumstances, including crime and incarceration. Along with the social and economic disadvantages of low literacy, there is also the shame. So much shame and poor behaviour could be avoided through high quality early reading instruction, early identification of language impairment and effective intervention.
