January 7, 2013: The "first-ever" congressional hearing on what advocates call the "school-to-prison pipeline" was held before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on constitution, ciovil rights and human rights, chaired by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL).
At issue: the more than 3 million U.S. students who are suspended or expelled from school each year (240,000 of which -- in what may be limited data -- were referred to law enforcement officials).
Durbin and others attributed much of the problem to the surge of zero-tolerance policies and police presence that took hold in schools in the 1990s and increased in the aftermath of the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. “A schoolyard fight that used to warrant a visit to the principal’s office can now lead to a trip to the booking station and a judge,” Durbin said.
Covering the hearings for the Washington Post, Donna St. George writes:
...“Police are arresting students for behaviors like talking back — that’s disorderly conduct. Or writing on desks — that’s vandalism,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization long active on the issue. .
“It raises substantial concerns,” she said, citing the case of a black kindergartner who drew a five-day suspension for setting off a fire alarm, while a white ninth-grader facing the same infraction in the same district was suspended for one day.
Melodee Hanes, acting administrator of the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said the pipeline could be summed up as “the pervasive use of court referrals as a means of disciplining kids in school.”
The landmark hearing lost the press traction it had hoped for by the tragedy of the Newton school shootings, which occurred two days later.
Julianne Hing, writing for Colorlines, reported:
...The phrase “school-to-prison pipeline” alludes to the structural dynamics within schools and the juvenile justice system that work to push the most vulnerable students, a disproportionate number of them black and Latino, out of school... into the waiting arms of a criminal justice system that’s all too prepared to dominate their lives. On a practical level, it refers to the rise of so-called zero-tolerance policies, which ...critics argue have criminalized students...Research has shown that the more interaction a young person has with the criminal justice system, such as when students are introduced to the insides of police cars and detention facilities via harsh punishments for school-based infractions like talking back to a teacher or getting into a schoolyard fight, the more likely they are to come into contact with the criminal justice system in the future...
Three months ago, Teresa Watanabe, reporting in the Los Angeles Times, announced that a "new approach" was being undertaken by the LA County Probation Department to keep students out of the court system.
...The move away from punitive law enforcement actions and toward support services reflects a growing awareness, grounded in research, that treating minor offenses with police actions did not necessarily make campuses safer or students more accountable. Instead, officials and activists say, it often alienated struggling students from school, pushing some to drop out and get in more serious trouble with the law.
The shift is being directed by new city and county leaders who community groups say are far more responsive to the groups' long-running complaints. L.A. Unified Schools Supt. John Deasy, school Police Chief Steven Zipperman and L.A. County Chief Probation Officer Jerry E. Powers — who all took office last year — have embraced the changes for low-level student offenses.
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