Article Review: Turning Off The School-To-Prison Pipeline

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For my second article review I decided to do mine over the article Harry Wilson titled Turning off the School-to-Prison Pipeline. The main theme that this particular article deals with is how our school systems have become a direct pipeline for kids to end up in prison and the way to break this pipeline is through our schools changing certain policies they operate by. The main topic of this article that the author talks about frequently that contributes to the “pipeline” is the zero tolerance rule that school systems follow. The author speaks frequently about how the zero tolerance policy is a key factor to the school-to-prison pipeline being eliminated. Throughout the entire duration of the article the reader can expect to be confronted with …show more content…

He makes some very valid points pertaining to the zero tolerance policy practiced by schools and how it has a negative effect on children in our school systems and essentially pushes them into our juvenile and prison systems. I am a firm believer that the zero tolerance does nothing good for students in school. In my mind it completely goes against everything our schools supposedly stand for. We tell kids to go to school to learn, but the first time they break a rule we suspend them and send them home or even worse we expel them for the entire year. I just don’t see how that isn’t setting kids up for failure down the road and neglecting them of a quality education. One statistic the author presented that really caught me off guard was when they said that when someone is suspended or expelled even once in their entire time in school their chances of ending up behind bars is increased at a rate of five times than that of someone who doesn’t get suspended or expelled. This made me really reflect on how many friends I had in high school that were suspended and ultimately flunked out. It made me wonder if the system truly wasn’t there for them to help them get an

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