Students Move Further Down School-to-Prison Pipeline With Every School Suspension via Ed Week

Students Move Further Down School-to-Prison Pipeline With Every School Suspension

Education Week: 7.12.2019 by Sarah D. Sparks

On the school-to-prison pipeline, school suspensions may be a key shut-off valve.

That's because, regardless of students' past behaviors, every school suspension weakens their connection to school and increases their odds of committing theft, assault, and other crimes. This is the conclusion of a new national longitudinal study published Friday in Justice Quarterly, a journal of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

"I really expected to see that once we accounted for the effect of prior offending on future offending, the effect of suspension would go away," said Thomas Mowen, an assistant professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, who led the study. "Actually what we found was almost the opposite. ... It's not offending that's predicting future offending so much as it is actually that punishment that the child receives at school."

Using federal longitudinal data, Mowen and colleagues at Bowling Green and Eastern Kentucky University tracked more than 6,800 middle and high school students in four "waves." Each year, the students were asked how many times they had been suspended in or out of school, and how often they had engaged in six different criminal behaviors: assaulting someone, carrying a gun, selling illegal substances, destroying property, and stealing items worth less and more than $50. The students were also asked whether they thought the school's discipline and grading systems were fair, whether they liked and felt safe at school, and whether they felt their teachers were interested in them.

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'Cumulative Disadvantage'

The risk of offending rose for students of every race and income level, but additional punishments created a "cumulative disadvantage," particularly for vulnerable students. For example, black and Hispanic students reported fewer crimes than white students over time, but they were suspended more often; and being suspended had a stronger effect on them than on their white peers.   READ MORE >>