In recent years, journalists and academics have shed light on the way that policies that seem race-neutral are, in fact, causing immense devastation to communities of color. In the critically acclaimed book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the age of Color Blindness, Michelle Alexander lays out the thesis that the War on Drugs was – and still is – a mode of racial control comparable to the Jim Crow laws in the South before the Civil Rights Movement.
Indeed, this year, six year after Alexander’s book was published, a former aide to President Nixon revealed that the intention behind the War on Drugs was to criminalize black communities. “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” the official told CNN.
While the War on Drugs continues to be one of the most overtly racist U.S. policies, there are other lesser-known policies, such as school suspensions, that are also negatively impacting black communities.
Have you ever seen The Breakfast Club? If you haven’t, you should. Not only is it a pretty good movie, it has a powerful message about how to approach discipline in schools. To recap: the movie centers around five high school students, each one from a different social group – “the criminal”, “the princess”, “the athlete”, ‘the brain”, and “the basket case”… you get the idea – who all have to come in on a Saturday morning for detention. During the nine hours of their detention, these students, who supposedly come from different worlds, learn that they are more alike than they thought, and by the end of the movie they become friends. It may sound weird, but in-school detention is what brought them together.
While The Breakfast Club is clearly just a movie, in many school districts – particularly in affluent, primarily white suburbs like the one in which the movie takes place – in-school detention (rather than suspension) be beneficial to students by exposing them to peers they might not have met before, as well as helping them develop interpersonal skills.
The movie would be very different if it was set in a New York City public school. The plot would go something like this: five students – mostly male, about three of them black – get suspended from school instead of detention. They find themselves on the streets, wandering aimlessly, and then one of the three black students ends up in Rikers Island for committing a non-violent misdemeanor. He then has a cash bail that his family cannot pay, and he ends up missing the next 70-something days of school awaiting a trial. Unfortunately, this will probably be one of many encounters he has with the criminal justice system.
The plot I described above is not made up. It is a daily reality many adolescents face all over the country. It is the reality known as the school-to-prison pipeline. It is the parallel to the school-to-college pipeline that the American Dream is built on – and that the group in The Breakfast Club was able to enjoy (something tells me that even the “bad boy” of the group, John Bender, probably went on to some sort of a productive life outside of the criminal justice system).
The sorting process between the pipelines is not done by merit or by some test to criminality. It is done by race. The racial divide in the criminal justice system starts in the schools. Although black students represent only 17 percent of the public school population in the U.S., they accounted for 34 percent of all suspensions. These disciplinary measures plague these students for the rest of their lives. School disciplinary measures are recorded and make entry to community college – let alone a four year college – less feasible.
It’s important to note that not all disciplinary measures are created equal; by far, suspensions are the most harmful way to discpline students. In New York City, a student could be suspended from school for ten days for “being-insubordinate” and up to three months for “intimidating behavior.” School suspensions, originally intended as the most extreme form of punishment in schools, are now used more than ever. This is extremely troubling because students who have been suspended are much more likely to find themselves entangled with the criminal justice system – the NYCLU estimates that the disparate impact of suspensions on black students leads to their higher representation in the incarcerated population.
To combat the school-to-prison pipeline, we must advocate for a Breakfast Club policy. Instead of relying on suspensions for minor disciplinary issues, schools should implement more after school detention programs. Of course, this would likely lead to an increase in spending on education – after all, Mr. Vernon had to be paid for the nine hours he sat in his office on that Saturday in 1984 supervising the group. But these costs are minimal compared to the societal costs that we will continue to incur if we keep feeding the school-to-prison pipeline by suspending students at such an alarming rate.
Ending school suspension should become a priority in policymaking and more central to the debate regarding mass incarceration. There is nothing neutral about the race-neutral disciplinary actions in schools, and it is our job as students of public policy to advocate for equity and justice.