Exploring the School-to-Prison Pipeline: How School Suspensions Influence Incarceration During Young Adulthood

• DOI: 10.1177/1541204019880945
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
2020, Vol. 18(3) 235-255
Exploring the School-to-Prison
ª The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1541204019880945
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Suspensions Influence
Incarceration During
Young Adulthood
Paul Hemez1 , John J. Brent2, and Thomas J. Mowen1
Abstract
A growing body of research has evoked the life-course perspective to understand how experiences
in school relate to a wide range of longer term life outcomes. This is perhaps best typified by the
notion of the school-to-prison pipeline which refers to a process by which youth who experience
punitive punishment in schools are increasingly enmeshed within the criminal justice system. While
this metaphor is commonly accepted, few studies have examined the extent to which exclusionary
school discipline significantly alters pathways toward incarceration as youth transition into young
adulthood. Applying a life-course perspective and leveraging 15 waves of data from the National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study examines how school suspensions influence the odds
of imprisonment during young adulthood. Mixed-effects longitudinal models demonstrate that
receiving a suspension serves as a key turning point toward increased odds of incarceration, even
after accounting for key covariates including levels of criminal offending. However, results show that
repeated suspensions do not appear to confer additional risk of incarceration. Results carry
implications for the ways in which school punishment impacts youths’ life-course.
Keywords
suspension, incarceration, life-course, youth, school-to-prison
Although mounting scrutiny over school discipline has led to various reform initiatives (see Gre-
gory, Clawson, Davis, & Gerewitz, 2016; Hirschfield, 2018a), the use of punitive and exclusionary
punishment practices persists across the United States (Kupchik, 2016; Musu-Gillette, Zhang,
Wang, Zhang, & Oudekerk, 2018). Recent reports from the Department of Education’s (2018)
Office of Civil Rights reveal that approximately 2.7 million students experienced at least one
out-of-school suspension during the 2015–2016 academic year. In fact, estimates suggest that about
1 Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, OH, USA
2 School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Paul Hemez, Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA.
Email: hemezp@bgsu.edu

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Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 18(3)
one third of all students in the United States will receive at least one suspension by the time they
graduate from high school (Shollenberger, 2015). These trends, which have largely increased over
the last few decades (Department of Education, 2018), become more salient when considering there
have been significant decreases in offending and violence within schools since the late 1980s (Musu-
Gillette et al., 2018). Furthermore, research has tied exclusionary practices to a host of negative
outcomes including lower levels of attendance, self-esteem, academic performance, and graduation
as well as higher levels of anxiety, dropout, delinquency, victimization, and arrest (for a thorough
overview, see Welsh & Little, 2018).
To compound matters, the current landscape of school discipline extends beyond suspensions to
include a variety of practices to prevent and punish delinquent behaviors (Hirschfield, 2008). The
spread of security mechanisms in the form of surveillance systems, drug-sniffing dogs, metal
detectors, and school resource officers, for example, have increased over the past few decades
(Casella, 2006; Musu-Gillette et al., 2018). Furthermore, punitive policies have become increasingly
procedural and standardized, preventing school officials from using their discretion when adminis-
tering disciplinary sanctions (for an overview, see Kupchik, 2016). As such, the growing use of zero
tolerance policies throughout the 1990s contributed to a significant increase in suspensions and
expulsions across schools in the United States (Hirschfield, 2008). When taken in sum, this assem-
blage of punishment practices has been indicted with establishing a school-to-prison pipeline (Skiba,
Arredondo, & Williams, 2014; Wald & Losen, 2003; for a thorough overview of the metaphor, see
Crawley & Hirschfield, 2018). This pipeline refers to a process whereby youth who are punished
under criminalized disciplinary practices find themselves in contact with the criminal justice system
(Hirschfield, 2008; Wald & Losen, 2003; see also Simmons, 2017, p. 4, concept of the prison
school).
Cast against research applying the life-course perspective, scholars have recently highlighted that
school discipline can serve as a turning point that negatively affects individuals’ future outcomes
(Mowen & Brent, 2016). The life-course perspective recognizes that pivotal life events such as
criminal justice contact are aligned with life-course trajectories associated with other adverse out-
comes including incarceration, arrest, and future offending (for an overview, see Sampson and Laub,
2005). Recent studies have demonstrated that school discipline can serve as a turning point both
toward increased risk of arrest (Mowen & Brent, 2016) and increased levels of offending (Mowen,
Brent, & Boman, 2019) as youth progress through school. Moreover, school discipline can contrib-
ute to increased turmoil within the family (e.g., Kupchik, 2016), sever student bonds to their family
and school (Mowen et al., 2019), and place youth at greater risk of dropping out of school (Crawley
& Hirschfield, 2018). Despite the understanding that school discipline can function as a turning
point (e.g., Mowen & Brent, 2016) and that school suspensions are tied to a number of negative
short-term outcomes (see Crawley & Hirschfield, 2018, for an overview), understanding the longer
term outcomes and specific pathways through which suspensions promote the school-to-prison
pipeline remains theoretically and empirically clouded.
Overall, despite the knowledge that school discipline contributes to deleterious outcomes for
youth and young adults, few studies have examined how school discipline functions as a turning
point across time that may function to promote incarceration as youth move into adulthood. Con-
sequently, while the pipeline between school discipline and prison is a commonly accepted meta-
phor, few studies have directly examined this relationship. This oversight is particularly notable in
light of the widespread use of exclusionary school sanctions, their association with well-established
negative outcomes, and their potential to significantly alter life-course outcomes (e.g., Mowen &
Brent, 2016). To address this gap in the literature, the current study adopts a life-course framework
and leverages 15 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to
examine the extent to which school suspensions experienced during adolescence are associated with
the odds of incarceration in young adulthood.

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Hemez et al.
237
Life Course and the Continuity of Negative Events
Starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, an intellectual resurgence took place within criminology
focusing on understanding the longitudinal development of antisocial behavior, juvenile delin-
quency, and adult crime (Blumstein, Cohen, & Farrington, 1988; Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher,
1986; Caspi, 1987; Elder, 1975; Loeber, 1982). During this time, scholars began developing theo-
retical frameworks to explain the onset, persistence, and desistence of criminal conduct as youth
moved into—and through—adulthood (Elder, 1975; Loeber, 1982; Moffitt, 1993; Sampson & Laub,
1993, 1997). As a result, research began focusing on criminogenic and prosocial events influencing
criminal pathways over time (Elder, 1985; Laub & Sampson, 2003; Sampson & Laub, 1993). These
pivotal life events would later be conceptualized as turning points by Sampson and Laub (1993),
which marked events in one’s life that disconnected their past from their present. Serving as catalysts
for social and behavioral transitions, turning points can be either prosocial or antisocial. Prosocial
turning points, or life events promoting criminal desistance, often include a stable marriage, engaged
parenthood, gainful employment, academic achievements, and successful military service. Antiso-
cial turning points, or those events encouraging criminal persistence, frequently include divorce,
family instability, unemployment, educational failure, and criminal justice involvement (for an
overview, see Sampson & Laub, 2005).
To further explain criminal pathways across time, the life-course perspective borrows Caspi’s
(1987) concepts of cumulative continuity and interactional continuity. Cumulative continuity refers
to the accumulation of life consequences, while interactional continuity denotes repeatedly provok-
ing reactions from others (Caspi, 1987). Within the realm of life-course criminology, these concepts
suggest that negative turning points and maladaptive behaviors can evoke a durable sequence of
reinforcing conditions that increasingly build onto one another as they hinder future outcomes
(Sampson & Laub, 1997; see also Elder, 1998; Moffitt, 1993). For Sampson and Laub (1997), this
represents a process of cumulative disadvantage in which the sustained consequences of criminal
justice contact limit opportunities in conventional domains. Further, Sampson and Laub...