School Suspension and Routine Police Interactions Among Youth

Background and Purpose:

Researchers and advocates have long been concerned about the school-to-prison pipeline, which describes the connection between (exclusionary) school discipline policies and involvement in the criminal legal system. This process is shaped by complex historical, political, ideological, and institutional policies and practices with disproportionate disadvantages accruing to students of color. This paper examines the relationship between school suspension and the number and nature of police stops experienced by students. While there is evidence that school suspension impacts the likelihood of arrest, existing scholarship has yet to examine the more routine interactions that young people have with law enforcement officials. We also extend the literature by attending to variation by students’ race/ethnicity and gender.

Methods:

The data from this study come from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a longitudinal study of nearly 5,000 youth born in 20 large cities around the year 2000. We examine the association between youth suspension by age 9 and two outcomes: The number of future police stops experienced through age 15, as well as the number of intrusive acts experienced by youth during their most impactful police encounter. To examine these associations, we relied on multivariate negative binomial regression models in which we control for a wide range of variables at the youth, maternal, paternal, school, and neighborhood level.

Results:

Results from negative binomial regression models show that, after accounting for individual, parental, school, and neighborhood covariates, youth who have been suspended experience 55 percent more stops on average by age 15 than youth who have not been suspended. In addition, with the full set of covariates accounted for, youth who have been suspended report experiencing 108 percent more intrusive actions at the hands of police than youth who have not been suspended. Further, in the case of both outcomes, our results do not provide any evidence that the association between suspension and the number of police stops or intrusive police contact differs by race/ethnicity. However, the results do suggest that suspension exacerbates the number and intrusiveness of police encounters for girls to a greater extent than for boys. Specifically, being suspended is associated with an increase in the number of stops that is 40 percent less for boys than it is for girls and with an increase in intrusive police contact that is 57 percent less for boys than it is for girls.

Conclusions and Implications:

The findings from this study have important implications. Study after study has documented that criminal legal contact has negative implications for youth. Given that, our findings are particularly problematic. Our results suggest that a key state institution, the school, is creating and exacerbating much of this harm. As such, our findings suggest that schools should use alternatives to exclusionary discipline whenever possible, such as restorative approaches, that repair harm without pushing youth into a downward spiral that has long-lasting implications.