ABSTRACT
The school-to-prison pipeline (S2PP) is a form of institutionalized racial violence. While the "pipeline" metaphor is the most commonly used, the processes the pipeline is said to capture may be better described as a series of pipelines, a nexus, or a net as there are multiple indirect and direct routes from schools to the criminal justice system. School criminalization entails "casting students as quasi-criminals and responding to student problems with quasi-criminal justice solutions". Current punitive climates in US public schools do little to teach children the civic values necessary for a healthy democracy. Federal regulatory agencies, such as the Office for Civil Rights and state-level equivalents offer some hope for addressing components of the S2PP. An approach for subverting the S2PP is addressing implicit bias in school personnel. Meiners and Hirschfield make a compelling case for why studies of educational practices cannot be divorced from an understanding of criminal justice policy.
