The Placement of Police and Probation Officers in Schools: Goal Alignment or Goal Conflict?

• In Event: Predicting Future Delinquency and Improving Youth Outcomes

Abstract

Amid concerns about the school-to-prison pipeline, some school districts have sought to work with the juvenile justice system to improve student outcomes. One strategy has been to place police and probation officers in schools. These efforts may help to overcome “silo effects”— situations where schools and the juvenile court view at-risk youth as problems who “belong” to one or the other organization and thus fail to collaborate to intervene most effectively with students. The placement of police and probation officers in schools may help to integrate one silo, the juvenile justice system, with another silo, the school system. The integration of these silos may lead to a range of outcomes, not all of which are beneficial for students. For example, does the on-campus presence of the juvenile justice system create additional opportunities for students to be cited or arrested? We seek to inform scholarship aimed at understanding the school-to-prison pipeline and, more specifically, to highlight the potential impacts of these partnerships. To this end, we draw on interviews with staff at schools that have on-campus police and probation officers to develop a conceptual framework that explores the potential outcomes that may occur when these officers are placed on school campuses.

Authors

• Samantha Brown, Florida State University

• Nicole L. Collier, Florida State University

• Daniel P. Mears, Florida State University

• Andrea N. Montes, Arizona State University

• George Pesta, Florida State University

• Sonja E. Siennick, Florida State University