Prelude to Prison: Student Perspectives on School Suspension

By Marsha Weissman

By the close of the twentieth century, the United States became known for its reliance on incarceration as the chief means of social control, particularly in poor communities of color. The carceral state has been extended into the public school system in these communities in what has become known as the "school-to-prison pipeline." Through interviews with young people suspended from school, Weissman examines the impact of zero tolerance and other harsh disciplinary approaches that have transformed schools into penal-like institutions. In their own words, students describe their lives, the challenges they face, and their efforts to overcome those challenges. Unlike other studies, this book illuminates the students’ perspectives on what happens when the educational system excludes them from regular school.

Weissman draws attention to research findings that suggest punitive disciplinary policies and practices resemble criminal justice strategies of arrest, trial, sentence, and imprisonment. She demonstrates how harsh school discipline prepares young people from poor communities of color for their place in the carceral state. An invaluable resource for policy makers, Prelude to Prison presents recommendations for policy, practice, and political change that have the potential to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815652984

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Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated my husband, Jim, and my sons, Evan and Casey, and to the memory of my parents, Al and Lillian Weissman, whose belief in education as a liberating force has guided my life.

MARSHA WEISSMAN is the founder and executive director of the Center for Community Alternatives. For more than thirty years, the Center has worked to end mass incarceration through alternative-to-incarceration programs for youths and adults, and research and policy advocacy to educate the public and policy makers regarding the need for a more effective juvenile and criminal justice system. Dr. Weissman holds a PhD from the Maxwell School of Citizenship, Syracuse University.

Contents

List of Illustrative Material

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Learning from Jayda

2. The American Gulag

Entwining Schools into the Carceral State

3. Alternative Schools and Zero Tolerance

From Liberation Learning to Social Control

4. Engagement in the Question

Reflections on Setting and Method

5. Backstories: The Lives of Marginalized Kids

6. Bad Decisions: The Suspension Incidents

7. They Never Want to Listen to Us

The Process of Being Suspended

8. It’s So Non-Regular: Going to Alternative School

9. We Have a Mike Tyson Here

Labels, Rejection, and Stigma

10. At Least Somebody Wanted to See Me Do Good

What Kids Think Makes a Difference

11. Schools, Social Reproduction, and the Making of Prisoners

Theory and Literature

12. Conclusion: "We All Activists Now"

References

Index

Illustrations and Table

Figure 1. Suspension by sex, race, and ethnicity, 2006

Figure 2. Risk for suspension by selected subgroups

Table 1. Demographic characteristics of youths interviewed

Preface

THE MOST INSPIRING experience in my work life—and there have been many—came when I traveled with four young people engaged in programs operated by my organization, the Center for Community Alternatives, to Geneva, Switzerland as part of a US Human Rights Network delegation. The youths, along with other delegation members, would testify before the United Nations Commission on Ending Racism in All Forms. The kids were asked to speak about their direct experiences in the juvenile justice system, and the increasing nexus with school discipline that had come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

I spent a week in awe of these young people, observing their poise in traveling on an airplane for the first time, taking what was their first trip out of their home communities, and their openness to meeting other members of the delegation that represented virtually every dispossessed and marginalized group in the United States. I watched with delight as they relished new foods, the free transportation available in Geneva, and the French language spoken by native citizens. I sat proud as a peacock as they testified with dignity about the conditions in their lives, their entrapment in schools that offered them no hope but instead relegated them to educational settings without opportunities for real learning, and worse yet, the dungeons of this country—its jails and prisons.

This experience inspired me to write a book, this book, that elevates the voices of these young people. I have tried to do justice to their stories, neither sugarcoating them, nor ignoring the ways that so many adults in their lives have failed them. I have tried to connect their individual experiences to a set of structural conditions and policy choices that dismisses their humanity and promise.

Almost all of the youths interviewed said something to the effect that their success in school rested solely on their shoulders. At the end of the interview, I would tell them that adults in their lives—parents, guardians, teachers, faith leaders, neighborhoods—are obligated to help them negotiate their transition to adulthood and that all of us are responsible for their struggles. Absent significant social change, this will be an empty promise.

The book begins with chapters that present the big picture, the data and research that describe the advent of mass incarceration in the United States and how social control has been extended to multiple domains, including schools. The middle chapters describe this school-to-prison pipeline experience through the eyes and voices of the young people who travel this path every day. The concluding chapters place these insights into a body of literature that speaks to the role of schools in the reproduction of current social patterns. Tragically, in twenty-first century America, this means inuring poor, young people of color to the carceral institutions of the United States.

Acknowledgments

THIRTY YEARS AGO, I left academia to pursue a life that involved working on the ground with kids pushed out of school and into prisons. Yet I always had a desire to return to research, a desire fulfilled with the publication of this book. None of this would have been possible without the leap of faith and the intellectual support of colleagues, friends, and family, and of course, the generosity of the young people who shared their stories with me. Although there are many who have encouraged this work, Robert Rubinstein quite simply stuck his neck out for me, prodded me, and shared his considerable wisdom. To be fair, Robert’s neck would not have been extended so prodigiously had it not been for the inestimable Sandy Lane, Robert’s partner in crime, so to speak. Sandy Lane reflects the scholar as mountain climber: there is no peak that she considers too high to scale. Don Mitchell, Diane Murphy, and Arthur Paris made time to provide thoughtful comments as I completed this study.

This work has fundamentally been inspired by the young people who agreed to be interviewed for the study. The kids gave freely of themselves, answered all my questions with detail and feeling. The stories that they told me, not only of their suspensions, but their lives, are what make this study important. We simply have to do something to stop pushing young people with such promise into the margins of community life and into prisons and ghettos. I hope that I have done justice to their narratives.

I am also fortunate to be part of a community of advocates, many of them part of the Dignity in Schools Campaign, and most especially, my colleagues at the Center for Community Alternatives, the organization I have been privileged to lead for three decades. My life and work has been enriched beyond measure by a network of friends who have, in their own ways, traveled a journey in the struggle for justice with me. These range from the hula girls who take me on an annual bacchanal that keeps my spirits going, to Susan who has been just about everything to me including my labor coach. My comrade in heart, Alan, has shaped my thinking and has been a model of principle and dedication to social justice from our first day of college to this day.

At the end of the day, however, it does come down to family. In some respects, I have a family like the kids I interviewed—serpentine connections that defy easy definition. My parents, Al and Lillian, long deceased, privileged education above all else, and thus allowed for whatever path it took me on, as long as it was grounded in learning. Lolly and Ted Levy offered their generosity of spirit and material support that has seen me through a lifetime. Debby Weissman and Louis Perez have shared wonderful, magical summers of work, debate, discussion, and the goofiest moments of my life.

My husband Jim Vermeulen has been quite simply my rock. He reminds me that life can be joyous, calm, reasoned, and stable. His parenting has made it possible for me to take on my crazy work and know that our kids would be fine. I end with a very special thank you to the children of my family who are now taking up their responsibilities in the struggle for justice as community organizers, agitators, people’s lawyers, teachers, artists, and doctors. My sons, Evan and Casey, their partners, Erin and Sarah, the cousins, Lisa, Josh Alann Rima, Keith and Greg cement my hope for the future. The building of the movement now passes to them and their children, Rowan, Èamon, Desmond, and Lorna and those yet to be born. I have no doubt they will live to see the kind of just society that I have dreamed of.

1

Introduction

Learning from Jayda

JAYDA

¹ WAS sixteen years old when she accompanied me and three other young people as part of the 2008 US Human Rights Network delegation to review the United States’ compliance with the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.² The review was held in Geneva, Switzerland, a place that Jayda never heard of a mere three months before. It was Jayda’s first trip on an airplane . . . her first trip anywhere beyond her hometown. She was off to testify about her experiences being suspended from school. This is an excerpt from her testimony:

I would like to tell you what it is like to be sent to an alternative school. You always feel judged; teachers don’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Out of the seventy students [who] actually attended school every day, I remember seeing only one white boy. At my regular school about 60 percent of the population is white.

Mid-year I was put in a program, called three to five, which means I went to school for two hours a day. I fell behind in my schoolwork and was only taught math once a week. The teacher who was there every day didn’t really teach, either; she only gave me worksheets. I am in the tenth grade but I have to take ninth grade classes.

I felt like I was in jail when I was in the alternative school. Sometimes I had to be checked three times a day and checked before I went into certain classrooms. It is very uncomfortable being searched because I really don’t like being touched by other people, especially people I don’t know very well. It is more uncomfortable for girls because sometimes they check you around your most private areas, and it’s just uncomfortable.

I feel like the alternative school system has set up kids like me to fail. You go back to school so far behind that you just want to drop out of school or sometimes you get sent back to a regular school where you get targeted, and you just get fed up and drop out. I would like to end by saying that we need to look at why kids like me are suspended and if at all possible get rid of alternative schools.

Jayda, whose testimony introduces this study, is one of the twenty-five students I interviewed who spoke to me about their experiences and perceptions of being suspended from school. The students interviewed all attended school in the Syracuse City School District, a poor urban district in a mid-sized city in the northeastern United States. The students were in the seventh, eighth, or ninth grade at the time of their suspension and were sent to an alternative school (named Brig) for students in grades K–8, or an alternative school (named Steel) for youths in grades 9–12. Almost all were children of color—predominantly African American. Thirteen of the youths were girls and twelve were boys. Jayda’s story was repeated to me many times by teenagers who were also suspended from school for behaviors that ranged from acting the class clown to more serious incidents and fights.

Her story is likely typical of children across urban America. The City of Syracuse faces myriad challenges typical to northeastern, rust belt cities, including a deteriorating economic base, declining population, and concentrated poverty. The 2011 Syracuse population is estimated to be just over 145,151, representing approximately a 6 percent decline since 2000, and almost a 60 percent decline since 1950. The city’s minority population is 30 percent (compared to the county’s minority population of 11 percent). Nineteen census tracts—roughly one-third of all Syracuse communities—are characterized as census tracts of extreme poverty, defined as neighborhoods with more than 40 percent of their residents residing below the poverty line (Kneebone, Nadeau, and Berube 2011). The Syracuse metropolitan area ranks as the ninth most segregated housing area in the country (Frey 2010). Correspondingly, for blacks, the Syracuse metropolitan area ranks the seventh in the country for segregated public primary schools (Osypuk et al. 2009). Forty-five percent of all children in the city are below the poverty line (New York State Community Action Association 2009). The majority of the youths sent to alternative schools come from three inner city neighborhoods that form the urban core of these census tracts, which are 70 percent African American, 10 percent Latino, 2 percent Native American, and 20 percent Caucasian.

Forty-three percent of the population in these neighborhoods is under the age of twenty-one, with 44 percent of families living below the poverty line, compared to a citywide average of 20 percent. Syracuse City Police data show that 60 percent of juvenile arrests are made in these neighborhoods; in contrast, these neighborhoods only comprise roughly 30 percent of the total population of the city.

The high poverty rates among Syracuse minority communities are due to the loss of employment opportunities, notably the loss of the industrial base that once made Syracuse known as a city with a diverse economic base. One by one, industries have moved out of Syracuse—Carrier Corporation (absorbed into United Technologies), Solvay Process (absorbed by Honeywell), General Electric, and even the city’s Syracuse China—taking with them good-paying blue collar jobs, some of which were even available to the black population.

Even as the metropolitan area as a whole declined, Syracuse was particularly hard hit as the remaining industry and white middle class moved to the suburbs. The city, which is home to 30 percent of the Onondaga County population, has only 18 percent of its taxable property (American Institute of Architects 2006). The limited tax base supports 60 percent of the low income population in the county, who are disproportionately minority and are concentrated in neighborhoods characterized by abandoned and substandard housing, high crime rates, and a lack of neighborhood amenities such as grocery stores. Socioeconomic and health risks are prevalent in these inner city neighborhoods, as well. The neighborhoods exhibit high rates of unemployment, the lowest [adult] educational levels, the greatest indices of health problems (HIV and AIDS, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, low birth rates, STDs, cocaine, and opiate hospital discharges), and other measures of social disorganization (New York State Department of Health 2000; Lane et al. 2004).

The War on Drugs has taken a particularly hard toll on Syracuse’s black population. More than two-thirds of people arrested for drug crimes are black and most arrests are made in the poor, black, inner city neighborhoods (New York Civil Liberties Union 2009). The prison admissions in some of these neighborhoods are as high as twenty to forty residents per 1,000 people. The profound racial disparities in incarceration rates are demonstrated by data that show that in Syracuse, ninety-nine blacks are incarcerated for every one white when the crime involves illegal drugs (Beatty et al. 2007).

The high rates of incarceration in Syracuse, as in most if not all inner city neighborhoods, has come to be known as mass incarceration. This phenomenon affects virtually all aspects of ghetto life—the absence of fathers and husbands, the language and fashion of urban youth—reflecting what Wacquant (2001) refers to as the deadly symbiosis between ghetto and prison. Increasingly, this deadly symbiosis extends to urban school systems, which become institutions focused on social control. This book explores how social control through school suspension and exile to alternative school becomes a prelude to prison for young people like Jayda.

A Troubling Symbiosis: Schools and Prisons in the Age of Mass Incarceration

There are likely no more distinct institutions in a society than schools and prisons. One, the school, is considered an institution that builds capacity, a ticket out of poverty, and the gate that opens to a better future. The other, the prison, is used to contain those whom we consider a drain on and threat to social well-being, a barrier that closes off a segment of the population from the rest of us. For most of the history of the United States, schools were celebrated as an institution with open access to all, while prisons were relegated to a despised and marginal role (Coleman 1966; Rothman 1971).

By the close of the twentieth century, however, these two institutions had dramatically reversed their place in the social order. Public schools are now under attack for their failure to educate children, and are disparaged as bureaucratic, violent, and amoral, if not immoral. Charter schools, school vouchers, eroding property tax bases, and general taxpayer revolt undermine funding for public schools. In contrast, the US prison system is robust, taking up increasing portions of state and federal budgets. By 2009, the United States had imprisoned 1.94 million people—making the United States the global leader in terms of total numbers and per-capita incarceration rates (Glaze and Parks 2012). The widespread use of incarceration or mass incarceration is characterized by a rate of imprisonment that is both historically and comparatively high and concentrated in specific segments of the population (Garland 2001a).

For poor children in the United States, particularly children of color, the view of school as a ticket to the future has always been fraught with contradiction. There is no doubt of the correlation between academic achievements (graduation, college, and post-baccalaureate degrees) and improved life chances on a range of outcomes from economic well-being to health (Stoops 2004; Ross and Wu 1996). Yet poor children of color are less likely to succeed in school, as evidenced by various traditional measures of school success—graduation rates, academic diplomas, test scores, attendance rates (Rouse and Barrow 2006; Kozol 1991; Orfield et al. 2004). Conversely, they are more likely to be suspended and then drop out of school without graduating (Orfield et al. 2004; Wald and Losen 2003).

Starting in the latter part of the twentieth century, for children of color, the absence of a high school diploma has done more than relegate someone to the economic margins of society. For youths of color, dropping out of school not only diminishes one’s employment prospects, it increases the likelihood of winding up in jail or prison. By the time they reach their early thirties, 52 percent of young, male, African American high school dropouts have spent some time in jail or prison (Western, Pettit, and Guetzkow 2002).

The junctures throughout the educational experience that move a child away from education and graduation to incarceration have come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline. The connecting links in this pipeline are policies such as high stakes testing and zero tolerance disciplinary codes that push youths out of mainstream school and into alternative schools. Suspension to alternative schools is often the last step before youths drop out of school completely, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will get arrested and incarcerated.

The role of school in pushing young people into the prison system contradicts the view of public education as a transformative institution in American culture. Education in American mythology is enshrined for its ability to introduce young people to new worldviews, which in turn help to shape their future goals and aspirations. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education aptly captures the American belief in education as our chief means of providing equal opportunity, deeming it perhaps the most important function of state and local governments, and essential to both individual opportunity and democratic society.

Yet a body of conceptual literature and empirical research calls into question whether schools facilitate upward mobility or instead preserve the existing social structure. Social reproduction theory asserts that the methods and processes embedded in schooling perpetuate social inequality across generations. Subsets of this literature—correspondence theory, cultural reproduction theory and critical resistance theory—address the interaction between the school environment, its culture, curricula, rules, policies, and the student and how these aspects of the school experience slot youths into predefined economic and social roles.

Althusser (1971) and Bowles and Gintis (1976) argue that schools play a major role in reproducing the class structure necessary to sustain a capitalist economy and specifically socializing young people into workplace hierarchy. However, Bowles and Gintis’s articulation of correspondence theory, which looks at the relationship between education and labor status, may seem to have little utility in explaining the school-to-prison pipeline, as they considered how schools help sort students into their future places in the workplace. The school-to-prison pipeline metaphor does not foresee youth entry into the workforce. Rather it is concerned with the pathway from school suspension, to dropping out, to the criminal justice system. Instead of joining the workforce, the young people pulsing through the pipeline will become part of a permanent underclass whose future lies behind prison walls. However, the tremendous expansion of incarceration and the particularly high rate of incarceration of people of color that has taken place since Bowles and Gintis authored their 1976 study make it important to examine the role of schools in reproducing prisoners.

There is no question that school suspensions have increased, particularly since the introduction of zero tolerance laws enacted as part of the federal Safe and Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994. Despite the rhetoric suggesting that suspensions are used to respond to the most egregious behaviors, such as the possession of dangerous weapons, students are suspended for a hodgepodge of behaviors that reflect subjective, sometimes racially biased, decision making by teachers (Skiba et al. 2003). Bowditch’s study of a northeastern urban high school found that most suspensions were a response to behaviors that require subjective interpretation on the part of teachers and administrators. She concluded that schools punish behavior that threatens the school’s authority rather than its safety (Bowditch 1993, 499). The application of disciplinary sanctions can also vary by school characteristics (Brantlinger 1991; Kaeser 1979; Wu et al. 1982).

Bowles and Gintis’s thesis has been enriched by consideration of the role of resistance and human agency, and of the ways that race, gender, ethnicity, and culture shape the interactions between schools and students (Walker 2003; MacLeod 1995; Giroux 2003; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Willis 1977; Rikowski 1996, 1997). The dominant school culture rewards the cultural capital of the middle and upper classes with its emphasis on preparation for learning and a belief in education as the means to social and economic success (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). As the ethnographies of Willis (1977) and MacLeod (1995) show, students who come to school with behaviors and attitudes that match the achievement ideology of schools are rewarded for their conformity, while those who do not fail and are pushed out or jump out of schools because they do not fit in. Family and life circumstances that impede success in school are often treated as indicators of troublesome behavior rather than risk factors (Bowditch 1993). Students who miss school because of other family responsibilities are classified as truants comparable to students who willfully miss school. Parents who do not show up for teacher conferences because of a lack of family-friendly work policies are viewed as dysfunctional (Bowditch 1993; Fine 1991). These assumptions constitute a form of profiling that inflicts particular harm on youths of color much in the same way that police profile youths of color on the streets (Bowditch 1993; Solomon and Palmer 2004). Fine’s (1991) study of students in a New York City high school describes how disrespectful or dismissive treatment of parents, discouraging comments from teachers predicting students’ life outcomes, unintentional but nonetheless disparaging comments about neighborhoods and communities, and Eurocentric curriculum produce school dropouts. These experiences make it difficult for poor, largely minority, students to believe that formal education has relevance to their lives.

Resistance theory helps to explain how the behaviors of young people contribute to their journey through the pipeline. Giroux (1982) asserts that student resistance is a logical response of young people to an educational system that has little meaning or value to their lives. By responding to the ways that schools push them out through behaviors that are likely to result in suspension, young people in a sense become complicit in their own marginalization. These dual forces, the conditions of school and the behaviors of youths, in combination produce dropouts.

The role of agency—deliberate actions on the part of youths that contribute to their suspensions—is intertwined with the school environment and culture. Youths come to believe that schools dismiss them because of their cultural, racial, and class differences. Their misbehavior is a form of resistance to messages that they should become something or someone they are not. The working class youths, the lads in Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labour, rejected the dominant middle and upper class aspirations projected in schools because these did not reflect their own experience, culture, and identity. In the world of these lads, academic success was considered unmanly. Fordham and Ogbu (1986), Fordham (1996), and Howard (2003) document how black students are forced to choose between acting white to achieve academic success or maintaining the integrity of their racial and ethnic identities as African Americans, identities that are not rewarded by schools, which have been made in the image of the white middle class. Students who feel misplaced in and dismissed by schools also experience a forceful assault on their self-esteem. They in turn repudiate their educational environments through behaviors that reject and are antagonistic toward school.

This book extends the inquiry about youths’ perceptions of why and how they are pushed from or jump out of schools to explicit questions about whether or not young people in this predicament see that the school environment may be putting them on the prison or jail track. Existing research informs us about the various forces that contribute to youth suspensions and expulsions, such as zero tolerance policies. However, we know less about how young people themselves evaluate processes associated with zero tolerance and the impact on their future lives (Giroux 1982; Willis 1977; Smith 2000; Stevick and Levinson 2003; Fine 1991). Dunbar provides one of the few studies that explicitly look at young people who travel the school-to-prison pipeline, from alternative school to detention and prison. These young people clearly articulate a lack of hope and a sense that they will wind up in prison or dead: "By da time I’m 21, I don’t know where I’ll be. I don’t even know. Da way I’m going now, I’ll probably be in jail or dead. I be gangbanging, carrying guns, and all that" (Dunbar 2001, 162). This young man (Peter) was prescient as Dunbar tells us that he was subsequently incarcerated.

With few exceptions, the research has not explored the school-to-prison pipeline experience through the voices of youths despite the growing quantitative evidence of the connections between school suspensions, dropouts and incarceration, that is, the school-to-prison pipeline. We know almost nothing about the extent to which youths perceive themselves to be driven not only out of school, but into the justice system and prison. Are youths aware of the similarities between school and prison, or is this a meaningless analogy for them? Do they expect that in light of their lack of success in school, they too will become a prisoner like many of their relatives and neighbors?

The Deadly Symbioses of School Suspension and Criminal Justice: Observations on Parallel Processes

I have spent time in courtrooms, jails, and prisons for almost twenty-five years as part of my work, first as a sentencing advocate, working with defense attorneys to provide information to judges and prosecutors to reduce the use of incarceration, and eventually as the director of an advocacy organization, the Center for Community Alternatives (CCA). I have spent almost as much work time with young people, also in courtrooms, jails for children, and alternative schools. Over these many years, I have seen the two systems converge. Messages conveyed to youths about why they are in an alternative school, the organization and structure of the school, and the role of the police in the school often mirror the rhetoric and practices of prisons and the criminal justice system.

The Syracuse Police Department makes no secret that they view their roles and responsibilities in the schools and the streets as one and the same. During the writing of this book, a widely publicized altercation between a school-based police officer and a female student took place in one of the district’s high schools (Kollali 2008). The girl suffered a broken nose when she was punched in the face by the police officer. The incident resulted in an outcry from parents and the district convened a public meeting, which I attended. The meeting was led by the superintendent of the district: the police chief was given an opportunity to describe the incident to the audience, which was largely made up of the parents of the students who attended the high school. In his presentation, the chief referred to the student as the female suspect and painstakingly explained the growing problem of aggressive violent females who were

Reviews for Prelude to Prison

[karen59_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This heartbreaking book shows how poor students, mostly students of color, are tracked through the educational system to prison through the use of suspensions, surveillance and heavy handed tactics by police and school officials. Due to tracking, which begins in middle school, students begin the process of being delegitimatized and marginalized and sent to "alternative" education which is the first step in the process towards prison. One unique feature of this book is how Weissman prioritizes student perspective and gives voice to their understanding of the school to prison pipeline. I could not stop listening to the smart and insightful students in this book and how the author supports them in their explorations. One issue that did seem missing is the impact of privatization of education and the growth of charter schools. Overall excellent read and I have already begun to recommend this book to educators, students and organizers.