School-to-Prison Pipeline

The For-Profit Prison Industry

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contends that the existence of the school-to-prison pipeline reveals an ugly societal priority—that of incarceration over education or of education for incarceration. Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization working to eliminate the prison system, maintains that profit, buoyed primarily by racism, is driving this priority. Practitioners and scholars across a broad range of professional and academic areas have coined the phrase prison-industrial complex to describe the increasingly central role that incarceration plays in the U.S. economy.

Though they would typically not find themselves in accord, one point on which U.S. prison abolitionists, criminal justice reform advocates, and correction corporation chief executive officers (CEOs) agree is that for the last 20 years the business [Page 1895]of imprisoning individuals has been one of the fastest growing multibillion dollar a year industries.

Abolitionists assert that the fiscal addiction to war is now an “intra” U.S. phenomenon, where Black and Latino males are the enemy, and the culture of standardization and remediation in urban public schools has become the weapon of their mass destruction through mass incarceration. Anti-prison activist and historian Angela Davis promotes “decarceration” through the demilitarization and revitalization of schools.

Reform advocates contend that through discrete and large-scale progressive educational and workforce training interventions, public economic interest could be cultivated to appropriately support the development of Black and Latino male youth into contributing taxpayers. According to a report prepared for the Corrections Education Association, for every $1 invested in education and training, $2.50 is paid back in taxes.

Correction industry executives argue that corporate investment in imprisonment, including that of Black and Latino male youth, is simply “good business.” In fact, in a study of predictors of suspension in South Florida schools, chronicled in Johanna Wald and Daniel Losen's report on the school-to-prison pipeline, fourth-grade reading levels were found to be effective benchmarks for projecting needed prison construction longitudinally.

Discipline and Punish: The Rise of Zero-Tolerance Policies

In 1975, French philosopher, historian, and sociologist Michel Foucault described Western society as one predicated on a system of control, initially exacted through visibly violent state apparatuses (e.g., slavery, death penalties), subsequently carried out by informal state agents (e.g., teachers, social service providers), and finally enacted by state citizens. Through this “carceral continuum,” behavior deemed unacceptable (not conforming with dominant cultural, social, economic, and political norms) in some individuals, is policed at the institutional and organizational levels of society, and by other individuals as well. The visibility of this system of control, Foucault argues, is mistaken for transparency (openness, fairness), rather than understood as the knowledge (of) and power (over) that it gives the state to supervise all individuals from birth to death.

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