Exclusionary Discipline Policies, School-Police Partnerships, Surveillance Technologies and Disproportionality: A Review of the School to Prison Pipeline Literature

Abstract

For this review I sought to understand how the field of education has come to conceptualize and study the relationship between schools and prisons. In doing so, I found that the vast majority of scholars who have studied the relationship(s) between school and prisons have done so within the context of the school to prison pipeline conceptual framework. This review both explores the affordances and contributions of the school to prison pipeline framework, as well as some of the limitations and critiques of the framework when used as the most preeminent frame by which we understand and study the ties between schools and prisons. I examine these limitations by focusing on four principal areas of study within the school to prison pipeline literature: (1) school discipline policies and practices, (2) school-police partnerships, (3) surveillance technologies in schools, and (4) disproportionality. The broader aim of this review is to develop the way we conceptualize the relationships between schools and prisons by building on what we have already learned in using the STPP framework, while also exploring new ways of theorizing and empirically studying the growing relations between schools and prisons.