The Role of School Discipline in Punishing and Perpetuating Disadvantage

• In Event: Roundtable: Class Inequality in Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

Abstract

Prior research documents the criminalization of school discipline, referring to increased school discipline and security measures within the hallways of U.S. K-12 schools. Mirroring broader trends within punishment and mass incarceration, racial and ethnic minority, poor, and male youth are at an increased risk of experiencing punitive school punishment than their counterparts. Despite increased attention to these inequalities caused by increasingly criminal-justice based school discipline, little work has examined how students' place of residence relates to school discipline. Through an analysis of state-wide data from Delaware, we find that students' place of residence matters in that inner-city students are, overall, placed at a significantly higher risk of experiencing punitive punishment in schools than students from suburban or rural communities. This pattern holds even while accounting for individual characteristics such as race, economic standing, and self-reported delinquency as well as a number of school-level factors. These results suggest that criminal justice-based school policies are furthering inequality by punishing students from dispossessed areas above and beyond racial/ethnic and economic standing.

Authors

• John Brent, Georgia Southern University

• Thomas Mowen, University of Wyoming