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Lawmaker Pushes Reforms Aimed at Disabling Michigan's School to Prison Pipeline

By Christopher Zoukis

A Michigan lawmaker is set on hobbling the school-to-prison pipeline in his state.

The forum was titled “How to Create a School-to-Success Continuum: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” Zemke has long been a strong supporter of education as a way to keep youth out of the prison system. He sponsored legislation signed into law last year that gives local schools more autonomy over harsh punitive decisions for students when it comes to things like suspension and expulsion. He asserts that schools should move away from the strict, zero-tolerance policies that he feels feed the school-to-prison pipeline.

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Justice System Throws Poor Kids Into Debtors' Prison

By Christopher Zoukis It is becoming increasingly obvious that zero-tolerance policies contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, often unfairly punishing youth for offenses that should not be dealt with in the criminal justice system. Involvement in the criminal justice system often kicks off a domino effect toward further interaction with the criminal system. For non-violent offenses

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Shifting to restorative justice in Los Angeles schools

As the school-to-prison pipeline system continues to be under scrutiny, schools in the Los Angeles area are working to reduce this, armed with mounting evidence that harsh punishment for small offenses at an early age does not reduce crime rates, but makes it more likely that offenders to go to prison than to college. Realizing

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“Each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built.”

Those are the words of young Brooklynite, Vidal Chastanet, describing on Humans of New York (HONY) how his teacher, Nadia Lopez, explains the importance of education for individual and social well-being.  While we generally focus on prison education initiatives on this blog, we would be remiss not to mention the continuation of a story that

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Book Review: The Globalization of Supermax Prisons

The Globalization of Supermax PrisonsEdited by Jeffrey Ian Ross(Rutgers University Press, 2013)240 pages, $28.95 paperback Book review by Gary Hunter “Zero tolerance” is a phrase that has found its way into many facets of our society. But nowhere is it more prevalent than in the vocabulary used by lawmakers when waging our nation’s relentless, ongoing

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