Policing Schools: The Rise of School Police
and the School-To-Prison Pipeline
Abstract:
This Senior Comprehensive project covers the role of School Resource Officers and school police in the School-to-Prison Pipeline. School Resource Officers have been put into a position inside schools where the criminalization of student behavior is increasing with their inability to properly manage student behavior due to the inadequacy of their training, zero tolerance policies and drug abuse awareness programs, and a lack of proper guidelines to establish their roles and responsibilities. By analyzing the conception of the SRO program and its early goals, then the massive shift in the direction of the program that shifted police in schools to officers policing schools, to the founding of the D.A.R.E program and zero tolerance policies in the 1980s, I am able to develop my argument that the steady growth of the School-to-Prison can be, in part, attributable to the police’s involvement in schools.