Captive
On the endurance of the school-to-prison pipeline in NYC
That schools can be places of violence was never a foreign concept to me.
When I was in 7th grade, I would sit in fear as my science teacher would flirt with (or more accurately, I eventually learned, verbally harass) the young girl sitting across from me. Sometime later that year, friends shared how he threw a desk across the room out of frustration. He was never fired. Years later when I had moved out of Jersey City already, I visited some friends who told me they’d seen him in a police uniform around the city.
This is just one story.
Years have passed since I was that scared, confused teenager. I taught AP Psychology this year. One of our first lessons was correlation doesn’t mean causation, that two things happening at the same time doesn’t prove they are linked. I can’t assume, nor prove, that there’s a relationship between a predatory, violent teacher becoming a cop later on. I can just tell you that my first response when I heard that was, “That makes sense.”
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Every public school in NYC has police officers. There’s a long history of how the NYPD and NYC schools established a relationship, dating back to the 1930s.
In the 1990s, NYC Police commissioner William Braxton and mayor Rudy Giuliani popularized a 1982 article on the “broken windows theory.” The idea was that even the smallest visible signs of disorder, such as public drinking or jaywalking, encourage more serious crime. The solution was that police targeting minor crimes will create an atmosphere of “law and order” that will prevent the more serious crimes.
When these policies were enacted in the 1990s, crime did drop in NYC, but crime dropped in almost every city in the United States, whether or not they adopted the broken windows policies.
Almost 40 years later, as New York City’s mayor Eric Adams returns to a focus on small crimes such as fare evasion, evidence of broken windows theory remains elusive. Causation still has not been proved, it remains a correlation. Yet the fantasy still lives vividly in policy and the imagination.
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“Miss you didn’t know what this school name, KIPP, stands for? It’s “Kids In Prison Program.”
The first time a student said that to me in my current school, I felt confused. The windows were big, the bathrooms, halls, classrooms all meticulously cleaned and stocked. The clocks and water fountains all worked. The school ran its own food program– public school funding for lunch was used to order fresh food that was cooked in house everyday by the kitchen staff instead of the status quo of ordering and heating up frozen food. There were no metal detectors. Prison? Here?
This statement didn’t confuse me in the previous school I taught in five years ago, though. I remember that year, one of the eighth graders I worked with had restrained himself from punching an administrator but instead punched and shattered the glass window of a door. He was crying while he waited in the main office to have cops pick him up and bring him to the juvenile detention center. I, in turn feeling helpless, went to the school bathroom, the one with no windows, where it was luck of the draw if there was both toilet paper and soap available at the same time, sat down and cried at the futility of the situation.
And then I caught it. Revisiting these parallels, I, too, had been distracted by the windows.
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The “school to prison pipeline” refers to a system of national, state and local policies that exclude students from schooling and thereby increase their chances of entering the criminal justice system.
For example, a student can attend a school that takes a zero tolerance stance on enforcing dress code or cell phone policies with the same belief that cracking down on these low level offenses or visual markers of disorder will prevent larger issues like fights. In some schools these policies are carried out by various adults employed by the school. In others they can be carried out by the police officers in the building.
Schools are segregated and unequal in New York City along lines of race, class and digital access, so it’s not a surprise that this pattern reflects also in the discipline practices of a school.
A report by the NYCLU in 2017 found that Black and Latino students comprised about 66% of the school population in the city, but were overrepresented in 90% of arrests. They represented almost 88% of “child-in crisis” incidents, which are moments when young people are displaying “emotional distress”, as qualified by school staff and the NYPD, that require taking them to a hospital for psychological evaluation. Handcuffs are almost always used for these children in crisis.
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“Miss, I don’t know why they talk to me like that. It makes me feel like I’m in prison. I just want to take my test.”
“Man, all you teachers are like this. I don’t trust a single one of you.”
“I want to feel free in this building but you keep telling me to sit down, where to sit down, what to wear, when to eat.”
“I don’t care anymore. Fail me. Send me home. Call my mom. I don’t care.”
Late this year in AP Psychology, I taught my students about Martin Sieglman’s dogs. Two groups of dogs were given electric shocks. One group of dogs were able to press a lever that stopped the random shocks they were given. They quickly learned to use it. The other group was shocked randomly, but when they pressed the lever nothing happened, the shocks simply continued. When the dogs were later given the opportunity to escape, only the dogs in the first group tried to escape. The second group of dogs didn’t try anymore. They just accepted the shocks and stayed there. Siegelman called this “learned helplessness.”
When educators and criminal justice advocates discuss the school to prison pipeline, the emphasis is rightfully on the students who are being visibly pushed out of school through suspensions or removals. Social services usually operate in the energetics of scarcity– enough funding, staff, time are elusive– so a focus that starts on advocating for the children being handcuffed in school often ends there. The downstream consequences of what young people watch their peers experience and what they internalize about their own autonomy, motivation, and self-worth gets relegated to the realm of anecdotes and afterthoughts.
When I was 13, my school was next to a police precinct, I walked through metal detectors meant to keep me safe only to sit and watch my teacher harass another young teenager. I never encountered the handcuffs myself but I still felt a fear daily that left me immobile, left a feeling of helplessness.
A decade and some later, despite all of our new understandings, this fixation on order as a remedy and its negative impacts on the psyche of those over-policed, continues to exist.
