PITTSBURGH – Using education and activism to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline is an ongoing battle that is as fierce as ever, according to speakers on the opening day of the 2019 Summer Educator Forum presented by the Center for Education at the University of Pittsburgh.
In panel discussions and breakout sessions Thursday, scholars and other experts in education, criminal justice and restorative justice talked about strategies in line with this year’s theme, “Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Re-Imagining Policies, Practices, and Politics in Education Systems.”
Although the phrase school-to-prison pipeline is now a common term in government and education circles after initially being coined at a local level, many academics have come to understand the phenomenon as more like an intricate web or network of factors that work together as a system to sideline Black and Brown youth – and increasingly, girls – at early ages.
Speakers challenged attendees of the three-day event to be leaders in collaborating on ways to imagine and create healthy alternatives to suspending, expelling and incarcerating young people – and to be champions of restorative justice approaches that honor the worth, dignity and potential of all.
In the nine years since Michelle Alexander released The New Jim Crow, her seminal best-selling book about race and mass incarceration, “everything has changed and everything has remained the same” in terms of criminal justice, she said during a lunchtime panel.
“I’ve seen extraordinary activism and movement-building, and yet in so many ways, things have remained the same,” said Alexander, a visiting professor of social justice at Union Theological Seminary.
The system “has been able to co-opt many reform efforts” in new ways, she said, including immigrants being detained, mass deportation and “expansion of digital imprisonment” with increased electronic monitoring of offenders across the nation.
