Essay: The Importance Of School-To-Prison Discipline

With the most read news story this week being the video of a white sheriff deputy throwing a black high school girl to the floor earlier this week it is not wonder that the latest national discussion about race has to do with discipline and punishment. Several videos of the occurrence have spread like wildfire, a video that supposedly shows Deputy Ben Fields forcibly dragging a female African American student from her desk and slamming her into the floor after she supposedly ignored the teacher when he told her to leave and was being disruptive.

Now I have never heard of anyone being arrested and treated with such violence for “disrupting a class” or “disobeying a teacher;” generally students are at most given detention or suspended from school but never responded to with violence. I personally believe that there is no given “context” or situation that justifies a police officer slamming a child around like in this case, especially in a classroom setting.

What is causing much of the uproar about this particular incident is
because the police officer is a white male and the female student is black. On the one hand, black and other non-white parents have brought up complaints that school discipline, across the scale, is arbitrary and disproportionately affects students of color. Students are viewed and treated more as criminals or potential criminals rather than students. They generally receive poorer education and treatment from their teachers than their white counterparts. On the other hand, the police department is claiming this was an incident of inappropriate behaviour on the student’s part, and in fact, that the police officer under investigation is actually in a committed, happy relationship with a black woman. Interesting deflection of the controversy at hand on the department’s part I must say.

As we shall examine next week, sadly many of these students are funneled into what is known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” as system that essentially turns schools into a disciplinary structure.
Students in large public schools are increasingly searched, tested, and observed by school administrators. Teachers are becoming more concerned with policing students and punishing their every move rather than educating them and preparing for the real world. These changes in the public education system have resulted in a growing potential for students to drop out and be incarcerated instead of guaranteeing them decent healthcare, the opportunity and access to jobs, and shelter. This system categorizes students by their class and race and simply fuel the flow of people into the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, these failures in the education system results in lower educational quality and higher interest in driving more school drop
outs.

While race does inherently play certain roles in the way in which our society is structured and how we interact with one another, I believe that in this specific event, the greater issue that is being brought to light once again is the use of excessive force and the exertion of unnecessary power by police officers. The female student was not only a minor, but she was also described as non-combative and was not in possession of a weapon of any sort. If this were any other professional, they would be immediately taken down and locked up for fighting, abusing, and possibly even hurting a minor but lucky for Deputy Fields, he has simply been put on administrative leave for the time being.

Too often we hear of incidents involving police brutality. While many of these cases are intrinsically and historically tied to race, they are also many the encompasses gender, class, sexual orientation, and disabilities, among other things. The police force is becoming less about “protecting and serving” and more about “enforcing and oppressing.”