Thank you for participating in the 2017 CUMU Annual Conference: The Urban Advantage. Take some time to explore the program and create a customized schedule. Use the search and filter functions to view presentations by date, presentation type, keyword, presenter, and home institution. You can also save a seat for yourself in limited-occupancy sessions.
In possession of the largest prison population in the world, the United States currently locks up 2.3 million people. Disproportionately warehousing communities of color and poor people, research support that one in nine African American males between ages of 20-34 are behind bars. These numbers for these young Black men are as a direct result of public policy that is often popularly named “tough on crime” where minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of “tough on crime” polices such as mandatory sentencing, three strikes laws and the death penalty. For example, while Black males and Latinos each account for seventeen percent of U.S. K-12 schools enrollment, they respectively comprise thirty percent and twenty percent of all twelfth grade suspensions and expulsions. What is important and the purpose of this presentation is that focusing on punishing youth minority has blurred the pedagogical distinctions between Americans education and the criminal justice systems. In this presentation, I explore the increasingly symbiotic relationship between U.S. public schools and the nation’s criminal justice system and more specifically, I examine the space between public schools and the U.S. penal system and both identify and analyze ways that institutional factors such as the school curriculum, discipline policies, and testing practices are consistently enacted in public schools to push groups of students out of classrooms and toward prisons in a type of school-to-prison pipeline despite the good intentions of educators and others.
