Derailed: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track
November 7, 2003
On May 14, 2003, Advancement Project released, Derailed: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track is a first-of-its-kind report that looks at how zero-tolerance policies are derailing students from an academic track in schools to a future in the juvenile justice system.
According to the report, in the mid 1980s, a spike in juvenile crime rates gave birth to the "superpredator" theory which held that America was under assault by a generation of brutally amoral young people, and that only the abandonment of "soft" educational and rehabilitative approaches, in favor of strict and unrelenting discipline--a zero tolerance approach-- could end the plague.
In school district after school district, an inflexible and unthinking zero tolerance approach to an exaggerated juvenile crime problem is derailing the educational process," said Judith Browne, Advancement Project senior attorney. "The educational system is starting to look more like the criminal justice system. Acts once handled by a principal or a parent are now being handled by prosecutors and the police.
Attached files
- Derailed: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track (16.05MB PDF)
Filed under Opportunity to Learn, Schoolhouse to Jailhouse
