Social Justice

A man working in a munitions factory explains that he is not killing; he's just trying to get out a product. The same goes for the man who crates bombs in that factory. He's just packaging a product. He's not trying to kill anyone. So it goes until we come to the pilot who flies the plane that drops the bomb. Killing anyone? Certainly not, he's just pushing a button.... [Lastly] there is a Vietnamese peasant, dead, but not killed, you might say. The consequence is there, but born of a process so fragmented as not to register in the consciousness of those involved in it. --Charles Payne, quoted in Smith (2009) The concept of the school-to-prison pipeline (the pipeline) has drawn important attention to the linkages between education, police power, and incarceration. Academic scholarship, grassroots and national activism, critical and mainstream journalism, and a wide range of policy work have identified key areas that have produced and continue to sustain the pipeline--a fundamental feature of the prison-industrial complex (the PIC). These include the implementation of zero tolerance measures for disciplinary infractions on school grounds, the growing presence of police in schools, and the concomitant criminalization and juridification of school discipline (see e.g., Ayers, Dohm, and Ayers 2001; Giroux 2004, 2012; Monahan and Torres 2010). Such measures and policies arose, in part, as a response to the infamous and racialized prediction by criminologists James Q. Wilson and John J. Dilulio, Jr., about the rise of the youth superpredator, which they envisioned would hit the streets of the United States in the mid-1990s (see Barrett 2013; Chura 2011). The youth superpredator never arrived, but the policies substantiating and perpetuating the pipeline remain. Moreover, the direct complicity of two of the most notorious late-twentieth-century right-wing scholars belies the larger epistemic, ideological, and practical ways in which the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice structure the pipeline. (1) Indeed, c...

Building, Staffing, and Insulating: An Architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline