Your Child’s Criminal Record Starts At School

As schools across the country reopen their doors for the school year, many Black children will return to environments that criminalize ordinary childhood behavior. And while schools promise to prepare children for the future, for many Black students, the classroom can instead become their first point of contact with the justice system.

But the connection between schools and the juvenile justice system goes deeper than unequal discipline. Together, they can form a pipeline that moves children out of classrooms and into courts, built to run at the discretion of adults who decide which behaviors are treated as a phase and which are treated as a crime. The result is a system where the same behavior ends in a conversation for one child and a court date for another.

In July 2026, the Department of Education rescinded the standard that allowed federal investigators to treat racially disproportionate school discipline as discrimination. Schools still have to report their discipline numbers by race to the federal government, but disparities alone can no longer establish a civil rights violation. That means a district can suspend, expel, and refer Black students to police at rates far above their share of enrollment without violating federal civil rights law unless discriminatory intent can be proven.

Schools, law enforcement, and courts do not operate in isolation. Their policies and decisions can work together to increase Black children’s contact with the justice system. Understanding how that pipeline operates, and where those decisions are made, is the first step toward challenging its outcomes.

How The System Functions

The school-to-prison pipeline is a network of school discipline policies, school policing, juvenile courts, and detention systems that criminalize childhood behavior instead of addressing its causes. It runs through school boards and districts, administrators, school resource officers, juvenile courts, prosecutors, and the public and private facilities that hold children in detention. Together they create a cycle of discretion, removal, and escalation.

When a student who is struggling academically, emotionally, or behaviorally acts out, their behavior is treated as a problem requiring disciplinary action, not intervention. The student is suspended, expelled, or often referred to law enforcement. While facing punishment, they miss out on instructional time, which can contribute to disengagement and lower academic performance. Once the student makes contact with the police or juvenile court, continued contact is likely.

The pipeline operates on judgment calls. Things like defiance and disrespect have no fixed definition, so whether a child’s behavior counts as a violation depends on the adult making the judgement. Researchers who compared students whose teachers had rated their classroom behavior the same way found Black students were still significantly more likely to be referred for discipline. That discretion is where the disparity lives, and it is the part of the system that no policy prohibits.

Millions of students attend a school with a law enforcement officer or security guard, but no counselor. The federal enforcement standard, a key tool for assessing school discrimination, was removed in July, making school policies nondiscriminatory without proven intent to discriminate. It was published and took effect immediately without public comment. Black schoolchildren across the country already face harsher discipline and are more likely to receive punishments that remove them from the classroom. Now, no federal agency is required to treat it as a discrimination problem.

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education made school segregation unconstitutional, laying the foundation for equal educational opportunities. Desegregation placed Black students in schools where nearly every adult deciding what counted as misbehavior was white. Suspension rates rose sharply. Author Aaron Kupchik traced the history and found that suspensions weren’t designed as a behavior management tool but as a way to remove unwanted students. They became an unofficial method of pushing Black students out of newly desegregated schools. Districts that fought desegregation the hardest in the 1950s still suspend more Black students today. 

In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled in New Jersey v. T.L.O. that school officials could search students on suspicion alone, without a warrant or probable cause. Around the mid-90s, “zero tolerance” policies in schools expanded in response to fears about rising school violence. Under this policy, students who committed certain infractions were expelled or given out-of-school suspensions regardless of circumstances. The Gun-Free Schools Act required school districts to adopt these zero-tolerance policies to receive federal funds. As a result, disciplinary action became more frequent. 

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the federal crime bill, created new criminal sentences and incentivized states to build more prisons. It perpetuated the “superpredator” myth about Black children and allowed prosecutors to charge 13-year-olds as adults, sending children into adult facilities where they were at risk of sexual assault and suicide. It also expanded the school-to-prison pipeline by increasing funding for school resource officers (SROs), cops who are sometimes armed and, depending on jurisdictions, can make arrests.  Since then, schools across the country have substantially increased their use of SROs.

Black children are 15 percent of public school enrollment, 18 percent of students referred to law enforcement, and 22 percent of students arrested at school. The pattern starts before kindergarten begins. U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights 2023 data shows that during the 2020-21 school year, Black preschool children were disproportionately suspended and expelled. They were 17 percent of enrollment, yet 31 percent of out-of-school suspensions. 

During the 2019–2020 school year, 65 percent of U.S. public schools reported having a security staff member present at least once a week, with the highest concentration in middle schools and high schools. Fourteen million students are in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker. There’s no evidence that police on school campuses make students safer. Their presence means increases in rates of arrest, restraint, and referrals to juvenile courts, and it does so most for Black children. 

Once a child is arrested, the disparity widens. Recent data shows that Black youth were 5.6 times more likely to be placed in juvenile facilities than their white peers. Getting suspended or arrested can be devastating to a young person’s future. Researchers found that students at high-suspension middle schools were more likely to drop out of high school, less likely to attend a four-year college or university, and more likely to be arrested or incarcerated as adults. A child can be removed from a classroom before they can even read, and the pattern follows them into adulthood.

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Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old high school sophomore in the Bronx when police stopped him in May 2010. A man told officers Browder had taken his backpack. Kalief denied it and offered to let police search his pockets. Still, he was charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. 

Kalief was already on probation for taking a delivery truck for a joyride, so the new charge counted as a violation. New York was one of only two states that automatically prosecuted 16-year-olds as adults, so he was sent to Rikers Island. Bail was set at $3,000, which his family couldn’t afford to pay. 

He spent more than 1,000 days at Rikers waiting for a trial that never came. He spent two of those three years in the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, where he was abused by guards and adult detainees. Kalief maintained his innocence the entire time, even turning down plea deals that would’ve sent him home. On June 5, 2013, prosecutors dropped the charges for lack of evidence but by then lasting damage had been done. He never returned to school.

Two years after his release, on June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder died by suicide. He was only 22 years old.

The system held a teenager for three years without ever proving he had committed a crime. In 2017, New York raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18. The governor signed the bill with Browder's older brother, Akeem, standing beside him.

A suspension record can start in preschool and follow a child for their lifetime. Here are three ways we protect Black children. 

Suspension was built to remove children, not to correct behavior. The school-to-prison pipeline is working exactly as designed.