Question

According to Nancy A. Heitzeg, what is the school to prison pipeline and what are its effects on the lives of African American and minority youth with respect to education and incarceration?

Answer 1

Nancy A. Heitzeg describes the system of policies and practices that racialize criminalization by routing youth of color out of school and towards prison via the school-to-prison pipeline while simultaneously medicalizing white youth for comparable behaviors. The author also examines the racial dynamics of the school to prison pipeline as documented by rates of suspension, expulsion, and referrals to legal systems and sheds light on the comparative dynamics of the related educational social control of white and middle-class youth in the larger context of society as a whole.

Even though the people had elected black president Barack Obama and zero tolerance policy, then also racialism could be found. Many black Americans and minorities in the country faced the racialism and this have humongous effect on them personally and professionally.

Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, according to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, and research in Texas found students who have been suspended are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school entirely. Those facts have led to concern among some people, including the Obama administration, that schools are suspending students too much and need to find other ways to discipline them.

Schools themselves are the ones pushing students into the juvenile justice system, often by having students arrested at school.

The risk of later incarceration for students who are suspended or expelled and unarrested is also great. For many, going to school has become literally and figuratively synonymous with going to jail.