Juvenile Justice System: A Literature Review

Improved Essays
Review of Literature
Research has confirmed that youth offenders experience a significantly higher rate of diagnosable mental and behavioral health disorders in relation to the general youth population. More specifically, Schubert and Mulvey (2014) reported that, “roughly 50 to 70 percent of juvenile offenders experience a diagnosable mental or behavioral health disorder, whereas only 9 to 13 percent of youth in the general population experience a diagnosable disorder” (p.3). Scholars have also established that youth offenders with such disorders face greater risks at falling victim to the juvenile justice system. Youth with emotional, mental and behavioral health disabilities are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated when compared to
…show more content…
This growing phenomenon refers to policies and practices that are being used to push students out of the classroom and into the juvenile justice system (ACLU, 2008). This is important to address when discussing police encounters with such juveniles because the pipeline reflects the prioritization of incarceration over education. Sadly, “twenty percent of youth offenders with emotional or behavioral health problems reported that they were arrested while in secondary schools” (Holmquist, 2013, p.3). This highlights the relationship between juveniles with mental and behavioral health issues, and the effects of impractical policies and a failed educational system that fuel the school-to-prison …show more content…
Majority of the negative outcomes related to the school-to-prison pipeline are a product of the heightened use of zero tolerance policies that automatically impose severe punishments on students, regardless of any circumstances surrounding an offense (ACLU, 2008). With increased support of zero tolerance policies, youth are constantly at risk of being victimized by the school-to-prison pipeline (ACLU, 2008). Such policies have had a detrimental affect on rates of detention, suspension, expulsion, and even arrests that youth, particularly those with mental and behavioral health disabilities, are experiencing as a response to minor offenses that could be resolved by school administration (Amurao, 2013). Suspension rates have increased from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000, being the most dramatic for “minority students, those with a history of abuse, neglect, poverty and disabilities” (Amurao, 2013, p.1). The Civil Rights Data Collection (2014) actually reported that, “students with disabilities, both mental and behavioral, are more than twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension (13%) than students without disabilities (6%)” (p.1). Even more unsettling, reports provided that 92,000 youth were arrested or referred to law enforcement during the 2011-2012 school year, of these youth, those with mental and behavioral health disorders represented a quarter of the population, while they are only 12% of the overall student body” (ACLU, 2008,

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    The article I have chosen for this reflection paper is “Look Out Kid, It’s Something You Did,” written by Bernadine Dohrn in 2013. This article details the criminalization of children as it has progressed over the past few decades. It opens with examples of school shootings and how they have shifted the public perspective of violence perpetrated by adolescents. With the proliferation of handguns in the homes of adolescents within the United States, the rates of children murdered by other children have skyrocketed. I feel there is a strong aspect of shock value when it comes to instances like these, which draws a disproportionate amount of media attention, but this does not account for the staggering results of cases of this nature.…

    • 1258 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    As a social worker, I will encounter many situations regarding adolescents having difficulties staying in school. The alarming factor of the school to prison pipeline is the disparity between racial groups, specifically black students. Wilson article discusses many issues with the school to prison pipeline and solutions. Research suggests that community interventions are the best solution to the school to prison pipeline (Wilson, 2014). For example, training teachers on different cultures and backgrounds,…

    • 1672 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The School to Prison Pipeline is something I was previously unaware of. Crystal T. Laura ’s Book, Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School to Prison Pipeline (2014) was eye opening and disturbing. To learn that students of color, particularly male students, are being described at eleven years old as unsalvageable because of subjective behaviors is heartbreaking and infuriating. Most of all this book, the personal essay describing the story of Laura’s brother Chris, left me wondering why people, who chose the field of education as their profession, cannot commit to the vision of love, justice and joy in education that Laura describes in her book.…

    • 822 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Researcher Price (2009) emphasizes that overall juvenile crime rates have been declining over the years, however SROs are increasing the numbers of juveniles passing through the criminal justice system, disproportionately impacting poor and minority communities. He points to the “get tough” perspectives on crime and media attention to crimes such as school shootings which gave the popular public perception that schools needed SROs. However, by the time that zero-tolerance policies reached schools, violence was subsiding within schools, demonstrating the disparity between perception and reality of crime. The increase of police in schools when school violence has dropped so dramatically has led to many negative outcomes. The most important of which has been the increase of criminalization of student’s behaviors, making minor infractions being dealt with by the police instead of school officials.…

    • 1161 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In recent years, the criminal justice system has seeped its way into our educational system with zero tolerance policies such as the school-to-prison pipeline. Zero-tolerance refers to punitive approaches that mandate a harsh punishment for all kinds of misbehaviors by a student regardless of the circumstances. On the other hand, the school-to-prison pipeline refers to policies that push our nation 's schoolchildren out of the classrooms and into the justice system. The initial purpose of these actions was to keep schools safe, however, in recent years, it has become a contributing factor to student underperformance. Further, these harsh disciplinary actions are disproportionately targeting minority youth, they’re being excluded and kept out…

    • 1119 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The School to Prison Pipeline is a systemic process usually put into racial and class contexts due to how it disproportionately affects poor students of color. Poor students of color are systematically marginalized and dehumanized, often finding themselves pushed towards deviancy and a criminal lifestyle within the school system. However, the policies and practices that lead to such a pipeline are not exclusive to just poor students of color, but marginalized groups in general. Shannon D. Snapp discusses in "Messy, Butch, and Queer: LGBTQ Youth and the School-to-Prison Pipeline" how lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers, and questioning (LGBTQ) and gender non-conforming youth are pushed out of school and into the criminal justice…

    • 1096 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Weeping in the Playtime of Others In reading Weeping in the Playtime of Others: America’s Incarcerated Children by Kenneth Wooden, I learned about the devastating, heartbreaking truths about how corrupt our juvenile legal system is. I knew there was probably some violence within the facilities, but I didn’t realize the extent of the torture and physical abuse the youth experienced within in the juvenile correctional facilities across America. I was shocked by the amount of youth that weren’t actually what we would consider criminals. These children were incarcerated because they were emotionally disturbed, mentally handicapped or because they ran away from home to escape a bad situation.…

    • 713 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The school-to-pipeline term according to Lia Epperson is, “One of the most disturbing factors presently limiting educational advancement is the significant racial disparity in the apportionment of school discipline. Due to a series of state-enacted policies throughout the last two decades, school districts across the nation have adopted so-called “zero tolerance policies” that apportion the harshest of criminal punishments for minor, nonviolent offenses. Through such state policies, students of color— and particularly African American children—are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer suspension, expulsion, and arrest, often for nonviolent infractions. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Today’s school-to-prison…

    • 1063 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Introduction The school-to prison pipeline is an epidemic slowly crippling minority youth all over the country. This unspoken system teaches these children that the only path for them is jail. Jail has become the narrative of the black life in America: Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.…

    • 1570 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The school-to-prison pipeline effects schools and youth across the country, particularly minority and disabled students in urban areas. Due to changes in the school policy schools across the United States is more likely to push our students from the school system into the criminal justice system. Majority of the schools have law enforcement officers inside the buildings and a strong zero-tolerance policy that treats all behavior the same no matter what the offense is. The school systems are starting to depend on suspensions/expulsions and outside law enforcement to take care of issues in the classroom which is causing physical and emotional risks to youth.…

    • 1157 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There has always been some level of student’s misconduct in school; however school recently changed the methods and polices to deal with delinquent behavior. Schools implemented zero tolerance policies which are punitive and based on deterrence theory. Therefore, many juveniles receive harsh punishments such as expulsion, suspension, and entrance to the juvenile justice system; creating the school-to-prison pipeline. The school-to-prison pipeline has damaging effects on an individual as the student is pushed out of schools; many students then find it difficult to gain an education and become stigmatized within society, thus pushing them to further delinquency. This pipeline tends to contribute to the racial and learning capability disparity…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout my research on the school to prison pipeline, I was able to identify where the main issues began and how it effects children as they grow up. There are certain policies and procedures that can be done to eliminate these issues that continue in the school systems. By setting up different recourses, this can eliminate the disparities among the students, and eliminate the harsh punishments that are set for these young adolescents. Within many schools, the use of harsh disciplinaries are set in place to control the minor infractions that the young adolescents create, but are these disciplinaries too harsh?…

    • 463 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The fifth article, outlines the internal school structure and how the school-to-prison pipeline is created. In the article; Building, Staffing, and Insulting: An Architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline the authors Schept, Wall and Brisman focused their attention on how the school-to-prison pipeline is linked between education, police power, and incarceration. The idea of “zero-tolerance” is measured based off discipline in schoolgrounds, police in schools, and criminalization of school discipline. Through this article, it offers an understanding to the involvement of the criminology/criminal justice discipline and its academic departments. These three authors did some prior research that conceptualized…

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A number of the juveniles who enter adolescent justice with outrage issues, learning inabilities, and scholarly difficulties get practically no help for those issues, and thus fall behind in school. “Way too many kids enter juvenile-justice systems, they don’t do particularly well from an education standpoint while they’re there, and way too few kids make successful transitions out” (McGuire, 2014). Racial disparities has also been a challenge for the juvenile justice system. An unbalanced number of the understudies are male and individuals from minority groups. In 2010, 66% of the youngsters in authority in the United States were adolescents of color: 41 percent African-American and 22 percent Hispanic.…

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The New York Law School Law Review, “Juvenile Justice Reform in New York,” discusses detention for mentally unstable youth. The author Nancy Fishman uses case studies to show the effects of detention and the possibilities of mentally ill youths who are breaking the law. More specifically, this notion applies to the 15-year-old New York native, Anna. In Anna’s case, her problematic attitude disrupted her time in the classroom as well as her personal life. A spot in detention prevented her from causing any risk to both herself and those around her, as well as providing aid for her learning and studies.…

    • 1230 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays