The recent mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School called attention to the prison-to-school pipeline, the policy of giving violent and criminal teenagers chance after chance to return to school. Progressive social reformers have been advocating such a policy for decades, and its implementation has brought uncounted suffering to the innocent.
Mainstreaming
The prison-to-school pipeline is an example of Mainstreaming, the policy of placing students with special challenges into a regular ‘mainstream’ classroom. The policy is bad in itself, since it lowers the educational achievement of regular students, but mainstreaming criminal teenagers is specially galling. Placing a disruptive, disrespectful, and often violent teens back in high school, instead of juvenile prison where they belong, makes the job of the teacher much harder. It lowers the achievement of regular students. All in the futile attempt to ‘save’ ‘disadvantaged boys’.
Philosophical Confusion
The push to mainstream criminals relies of confusing cause and effect. Some researchers noticed that students that were punished more often in school tended to have lower socioeconomic status later in life; the students grew up to have lower paying job or no jobs at all, were more prone to abuse drugs and alcohol, as well as vastly more likely to serve prison time. From these facts, the veritable geniuses at Education Schools concluded the punishment early in life was the cause of their subsequent problems. The proposed solution was to “mainstream” young people caught breaking the rules.
The Education “researchers” have it all wrong: it is not that school punishment leads to antisocial choices later in life, but that antisocial behavior leads both punishment early in life and further antisocial behavior later in life. This is not at all complicated. The vast majority of crimes are committed by habitual criminals who start offending when young. Recycling young criminals back into school gives them more opportunity to commit crime.
Consequences
The consequences of this dreadful policy are vast, and often carried by the most vulnerable sectors of society. Liberals like to complain about lack of social mobility, but imagine you are a young student in high school planning to raise yourself from a background of poverty. Chances are, you are not going to the best high school. Your home life is likely not ideal. And then, by the grace of Holy Progressivism, a criminal teenager is released from juvenile jail straight into your classroom. Your chances just got worse. That ‘student’, who doesn’t want to be there at all, will almost always become disruptive, if not downright criminal. The policy designed to help the young criminal ends up hurting everybody else.
The additional costs, often invisible, are paid by law-abiding taxpayers. Or worse, we get a murder here, a stabbing there, along with theft and vandalism. When the deranged policy doesn’t work, the proposed solution is to… ask for more money. Because of classroom size, or lack of educational resources, evil Capitalism and inequality, or whatever.
Conservatives should make it a priority to stop this madness. Leftist ideologues have conducted a succession of failed experiments in education for at least fifty years, while conservatives keep playing defense in education. Stopping the prison-to-school pipeline would be a good place to start.
