The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform

The "School-to-Prison Pipeline" is an emerging trend that pushes large numbers of at-risk youth---particularly children of color---out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice system. The policies and practices that contribute to this trend can be seen as a pipeline with many entry points, such as under-resourced K-12 public schools, the over-use of zero-tolerance suspensions and expulsions, and the explosion of policing and arrests in public schools.

In this comprehensive study of the relationship between American law and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, co-authors Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt---civil rights attorneys specializing in a combination of education and juvenile justice issues---analyze the current state of the law for each entry point on the pipeline and propose legal theories and remedies to challenge them. Using specific state-based examples and case studies, the authors assert that law can be an effective weapon in the struggle to reduce the number of children caught in the pipeline, address the devastating consequences of the pipeline on families and communities, and ensure that our public schools and juvenile justice system further the goals for which they were created: to provide meaningful, safe opportunities for all the nation's children.

Catherine Y. Kim is a former attorney for the Racial Justice Program of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, National Legal Department. She currently teaches at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill.
Daniel J. Losen is a former lecturer at Harvard Law School and a senior education law and policy associate at The Civil Rights Project/Projecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA.
Damon T. Hewitt is director of the Education Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) and founder of its "Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline" initiative.