Abstract

Excerpted From: John Marinelli, Three Common-sense Measures to Limit the School-to-Prison Pipeline in Maryland, 2022 Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal 125 (2022) (150 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In 2016, a Salisbury, Maryland eighth grader left class without permission and ran through the halls of his middle school. As punishment for his adolescent defiance, the boy was not sent home or suspended but rather pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, and criminally prosecuted.

This episode exhibits the harsh realities of a school-to-prison pipeline that annually funnels thousands of Maryland students into the criminal justice system as a consequence of in-school misbehavior. Criminal interaction of this sort negatively affects children in numerous well-documented, often disastrous ways. To improve these circumstances in Maryland, three contributing factors stand out as ripe for change: the state's disturbing school law, the practice of suspending or expelling students for nonviolent disruptions, and the statewide requirement of school policing.

Each year, several hundred Maryland students experience arrest or referral to law enforcement for the crime of disturbing school vague offense that prosecutors have applied to criminalize conduct including a cafeteria scuffle and the episode of defiance described above. The state's public schools also suspend or expel several thousand students for nonviolent disruptions each year. Exclusionary punishments of this sort increase the likelihood that affected students will eventually collide with the criminal justice system. Both these factors--disturbing school arrests and exclusionary discipline--disproportionately affect Maryland's Black students. State law further requires that police regularly patrol all public-school districts, and this practice increases the likelihood that students will be arrested or referred to law enforcement for in-school misconduct. It is not clear whether any of these practices meaningfully improve school safety. However, all of them contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.

To reduce the effects of these factors, this comment proposes three state-level policy changes. Part I of this piece reviews empirical evidence to describe how the criminalization of classroom disruptions, exclusionary discipline, and school policing contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. Part II analyzes the prevalence and racially discriminatory impact of these practices in Maryland, and Part III describes recent efforts made at reform. Part IV incorporates examples from around the country to propose three policy changes that may begin to curb Maryland's school-to-prison pipeline and its disproportionate impact on Black students.

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Disturbing-school prosecutions, exclusionary discipline, and school policing all contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline in Maryland. Moreover, the state's disturbing-school law and educators' reliance on exclusionary discipline both disproportionately affect Black students. There are no easy solutions to this problem. But, the three policy proposals outlined above provide state legislators with incremental options to improve circumstances for Maryland students. By amending the state's disturbing-school statute, lawmakers can reduce school arrests and target a law with a racially disparate impact. By prohibiting exclusionary punishments for “Disruption” offenses, legislators can reduce racially discriminatory school removals by perhaps as much as 40%. And, by repealing the Safe to Learn Act, legislators can empower school districts to weigh for themselves the costs and benefits of school policing. All these policies have been enacted elsewhere. Often, they work quite well. So, while these measures would not end the school-to-prison pipeline, they might help to limit the impact of arrest and incarceration on Maryland students, and on the state's Black students in particular.