Building, Staffing, and Insulating:

An Architecture of Criminological
Complicity in the School-to-Prison
Pipeline
Judah Schept, Tyler Wall & Avi Brisman*
A man working in a munitions factory explains that he is not killing;
hes just trying to get out a product. The same goes for the man who
crates bombs in that factory. Hes just packaging a product. Hes not
trying to kill anyone. So it goes until we come to the pilot who flies
the plane that drops the bomb. Killing anyone? Certainly not, hes just
pushing a button.... [Lastly] there is a Vietnamese peasant, dead, but not
killed, you might say. The consequence is there, but born of a process so
fragmented as not to register in the consciousness of those involved in it.
Charles Payne, quoted in Smith (2009)

h e c o n c e pt o f t h e s c h o o l - t o - pr is o n pipe l in e

( t h e pipe l in e )

has dr awn

important attention to the linkages between education, police power, and

incarceration. Academic scholarship,grassroots andnational activism,criti
cal and mainstream journalism, and a wide range of policy work have identified
key areas that have produced and continue to sustain the pipelinea fundamental
* J u d a h S c h e pt (email: Judah.Schept@eku.edu) is an Associate Professor in the School of Justice
Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. His book, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth,
and the Neoliberal Logic ofCarceral Expansion, is forthcoming from New York University Press in
2015. His writing appears in academic journals such as Radical Criminology, Theoretical Criminology,
Crime, Media, Culture, and Social Justice, as well as in blog form for Social Justice, Tennessee Students
and Educators for Social Justice, Uprooting Criminology, and the Reclaiming Justice Network. His
research considers the political economy, historical geography, and cultural politics of the carceral
state, with a current focus on the relationship between extractive and carceral economies in central
Appalachia. T y l e r W a l l (email: Tyler.Wall@eku.edu) is an Associate Professor in the School of
Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He has published his work in academic journals such
as Radical Philosophy, Socialist Studies/Etudes socialistes, Theoretical Criminology, Social Justice:
A Journal of Crime, Conflict, & World Order, Crime, Media, Culture, and Identities: Global Studies in
Culture and Power, among others. Tylers research and writing revolves around the politics of police
power and its violence. Avi B r is m a n (email: avi.brisman@eku.edu) is an Associate Professor in the
School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky. He is coeditor,
with Nigel South, of the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology (2013); coeditor,
with Nigel South and Rob White, of Environmental Crime and Social Conflict: Contemporary and
Emerging Issues (Ashgate, 2015); and coauthor, with Nigel South, of Green Cultural Criminology:
Constructions o f Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide (Routledge, 2014).

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feature of the prison-industrial complex (the PIC).These include the implementa

tion of zero tolerance measures for disciplinary infractions on school grounds,
the growing presence of police in schools, and the concomitant criminalization and
juridification of school discipline (see e.g., Ayers, Dohrn, and Ayers 2001; Giroux
2004,2012; Monahan and Torres 2010). Such measures and policies arose, in part,
as a response to the infamous and racialized prediction by criminologists James
Q. Wilson and John J. Dilulio, Jr., about the rise of the youth superpredator,
which they envisioned would hit the streets of the United States in the mid-1990s
(see Barrett 2013; Chura 2011). The youth superpredator never arrived, but the
policies substantiating and perpetuating the pipeline remain. Moreover, the direct
complicity of two of the most notorious late-twentieth-century right-wing scholars
belies the larger epistemic, ideological, and practical ways in which the disciplines
of criminology and criminal justice structure the pipeline.1Indeed, criminology has
offered alibis and bodies for the capitalist state to securitize schools and criminalize
youth. It is the purpose of this article, then, to begin to sketch these structural com
plicities. Specifically, we examine the role of the university criminology/criminal
justice department in creating, staffing, and legitimating the pipeline. This article
offers a preliminary and provisional conceptual scaffold for understanding the com
plicity of the criminology/criminal justice discipline and its academic departments.
In addition, this article argues that when criminology does call critical attention to
the pipeline, its gaze remains decidedly reformist. We contend that scholars must
commit to the abolitionist project of dismantling the pipeline and redistributing
the state resources that sustain it (Fraser 1997,2000; Meiners 2011). Future articles
will flesh out the ideas offered here and we hope our colleagues will take up the
project of holding the discipline(s) accountable.
We believe we are uniquely positioned to offer this reflexive analysis of the
disciplines (or disciplines) complicity in the carceral continuum. As associate
professors in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU)
previously, the Department of Criminal Justice and Police Studieswe are housed
in a school and larger college (the College of Justice and Safety) that exist in a
somewhat bizarre tension. All three authors and many of our colleagues identify
as committed leftists, who are critical of the conservative and liberal/reformist
initiatives in criminal justice and for years have been involved to varying degrees in
a wide range of social movements and political causes. Meanwhile, our livelihoods
as teachers depend upon educating students seeking positions in the very systems,
with their related practices and knowledge bases, that we actively struggle to upend.
We first review some of the literature demarcating the school-based trends
that perpetuate the pipeline. These works demonstrate the various factors that
have propelled so many youth out of schools and into jail and prison cells, yet we
contend that the role of higher education in the pipeline remains underdeveloped.
Finally, the article sketches the critical role of the criminology/criminal justice
discipline and its academic departments in staffing, sustaining, and continuing to
legitimate the continuum.

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Conceptualizing the Pipeline: Prior Research

Scholars, activists, and journalists have consistently identified how students are
tunneled from classrooms to courtrooms and cages. These mechanisms are schoolspecific and constitute threads of much larger projects of neoliberal capitalism,
police power and security, and the growth of the PIC.
As various commentators have demonstrated (e.g., Clear 1994; Clear and Frost
2014; Garland 2001; Western 2006), punitive sentencing and policing policy in
the 1970s and 1980s, including federal and state mandatory minimum sentencing
laws, Three Strikes and Youre Out laws, and broken windows policing, led to
the dramatic rise in the prison population that christened the United States as the
world leader in incarceration in sheer numbers and per capita rates. These policies
and practices channeled urban bodies of color into rural prisons (thereby creating a
justification for prison growth in rural America), and were reflected in and worked
in conjunction with get tough approaches in schools. Indeed, as the Advancement
Project (2010: 10) has noted, school districts have adapted these criminal justice
approaches in spirit and specific practices. Specifically, scholars of the pipeline
frequently identify its origins in the adaptation of zero tolerance policies and
rhetoric with respect to disciplinary infractions on school grounds that originated
in Reagan-era approaches to the War on Drugs (Advancement Project 2003,2010;
Aull, 2012; Ayers et al. 2001; Price 2009; Skiba 2000; Skiba and Peterson 1999).2
In the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, federal legislation was passed that targeted
drugs, gangs, and guns in schools and erected strict accountability measures for
failing students and schools. However, measures such as the Drug-Free Schools
and Communities Act (1989), the Gun-Free Schools Act (1994), and the No Child
Left Behind Act (2001) frequently distributed racialized punishment in public
schools across the country (Boyd 2009; Cobb 2009; Giroux 2003; NicholsonCrotty, Birchmeier,and Valentine 2009; Noguera 2003).This included preventative
detention measures that amounted to profiling (Wald and Losen 2003) and the
overrepresentation of African-American children in special education programs
for behavioral reasons (Togut 2011). Ample documentation exists of the racialized
nature of these practices, yet some suggest that such policies and practices are so
commonplace and accepted that they now appear in white, suburban middle-class
schools as well (see, e.g., Kupchik 2009). Simon (2007,210,218) notes that these
changes occurred as part of a larger shift to govern through crime. Following the
Safe Schools Act in 1994, for example, public schools had to demonstrate several key
items to qualify for federal funds, including close cooperation between the school
and the police and juvenile justice agencies (to say nothing of internal punitive
disciplinary measures that schools had to implement pursuant to this legislation).
The No Child Left Behind Act (2001) extended zero tolerance policies beyond
disciplinary infractions into the realm of actual educational performance. Indeed,
the construction of an at risk and criminalized population is sutured to the narrow

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epistemology that promotes accountability through standardized testing via the

neoliberal capitalist logics of accountability and individual responsibility.3 Due to
pressure from the No Child Left Behind Act, schools inevitably push out problem
students who distract others or whose scores would drive down a given schools
aggregate scores (Fuentes 2003). Once a child drops out, he or she is eight times
more likely to be incarcerated than youth who finish high school (Fight Crime,
Invest in Kids 2008).
Perhaps the greatest indicator of the success of zero tolerance in helping to
construct the pipeline is the increasing prevalence of police in schools, often
referred to as School Resource Officers (or SROs) (Hirschfield 2008; Kupchik
and Monahan 2006). In this article, we closely examine the SRO, using the position
as a heuristic device for our larger commentary on the pipeline. Hirschfield (2008)
has noted that school policing is the fastest segment of growth in law enforcement
(see also the National Association of School Resource Officers, www.nasro.org).
The New York City Police Department School Safety Division is larger than the
entire police forces of several large cities, including Boston, Detroit, the District
of Columbia, and Las Vegas (Advancement Project 2010; Gonzalez 2012). Though
the growth of police in schools in the form of SROs has led to increasing numbers
of arrests and criminal charges, there have not been any significant changes in
safety (Eckholm 2013; Hirschfield 2008; Justice Policy Institute 2011; Kupchik
and Monahan 2006). Indeed, renowned University of Maryland criminologist
Denise C. Gottfredson stated in an article in The New York Times that there is no
evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety. And it increases the
number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids
into the criminal system (quoted in Eckholm 2013).
School shootings, such as the tragic Newtown, Connecticut, massacre in
December 2012, have bolstered right-wing calls for police expansion. The New
York Times reported that a National Rifle Association (NRA) task force proposed
armed police or security in every school in the country (Eckholm 2013; see also
Editorial 2013). South Dakota became the first state to pass a law allowing teachers
to be armed in schools and classrooms (in addition to armed security guards, other
school employees, and even volunteers). Over 80 similar proposals are in various
stages of consideration in state legislatures (http.-//reporting.sunlightfoundation.
com/2013/guns-in-schools/). Indeed, by the mid-1970s, police patrolled about one
percent of schools; by 2008, the figure had jumped to 40 percent (Editorial 2013).
The pipeline concept implies a flow between two seemingly distinct institutions:
the school and prison, as well as the various appendages of the criminal justice
system, to mix metaphors. Sometimes, however, the fagade of their distinctiveness
crumbles and the coordinated institutions (Simmons 2009) become completely
imbricated. Simmons (2009; this volume) examines one such sitea prison school
in New Orleans where the sheriff has created a school for non-delinquent, but
educationally at risk, youth at the parish prison. Although framed as a preemp-

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tion of the pipeline, the initiative collapses it. Comprised almost exclusively of
African-American youth, it is run by the sheriff and housed in a prison. This school
clearly signifies a racialized interlocking of the school and the carceral apparatus.
Numerous other institutions more closely resemble jails or prisons than the
schools they are supposed to be. Every day in one high school in post-Katrina
New Orleans, there were 31 to 40 security guards, two to four New Orleans Police
Department Officers, and only 21 to 30 educators present at a given time, with class
size rarely surpassing 40 to 50 students (Tuzzolo and Hewitt 2007). The authors
go on to note:
When students enter John Mac, after standing in long lines to enter the
building, they pass through metal detectors staffed by seven security
guards and one officer from the New Orleans Police Department. Students
are scanned with a hand-held metal detector while the contents of their
book sacks are searched. Cell phones, oversized jewelry and belts with
certain buckles are confiscated. Students who set off the metal detectors
three times with no item found are sometimes sent away at the door. On
various days, students who are not in their classrooms by 9:00 a.m. are
locked out of their classrooms while the 3140 security guards on staff
perform a sweep. Students rounded up in the sweep are brought to the
auditorium and suspended. According to the principal, 52 students were
suspended in one day for tardiness. (Tuzzolo and Hewitt 2007, 66)
These coercive, increasingly normalized security measures exemplify the
pipeline and are often bolstered by criminology as an academic discipline and
by the workings of criminology and criminal justice departments. In this sense,
the university and criminology are complicit in building, staffing, and insulating
the pipeline. We know that academics in a criminology/criminal justice-oriented
department such as ours help to create the pipeline, provide crucial infrastructure
(bodies), and insulate it through justifying knowledge. We now briefly explore
the architectural and intellectual conjunctures between the criminology/criminal
justice department and the state.
Building the Pipeline
Deeply structured forces catalyze the criminalization and collection of school-aged
youth and usher them toward incarceration. Substantial opposition to this process
also exists.Where do the officers in schools, prosecutors Juvenile probation officers,
truancy court workers, and other personnel that comprise the shrinking continuum
between school and prison originate? How are these functionaries prepared for jobs
and careers staffing the pipeline? How does a university degree in criminology or
criminal justice legitimate the pipeline? What discourses justify and support the
pipelines existence within the critical academic literature and related journalistic

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and policy writings? Until now, we believe, academic criminology and criminal
justice have escaped scrutiny for their roles.
The complicity of university criminology and criminal justice departments can
be subtle or explicit. Job fairs that feature only representatives of criminal justice
agencies and the high numbers of students who express interest in such careers are
a clear indicator. Meiners (2011) contends that she has yet to meet,
the person who is for the school-to-prison pipeline, or is advocating for
an increase in school suspensions, or is conducting research to document
why education should not be offered in prisons, or is collecting data to
demonstrate that black female youth really are inherently more violent
or dangerous than white female youth, or is writing about why we should
provide school security guards tasers.
Though few people express approval for the pipeline as such, manyincluding
our students argue for increased law enforcement presence in schools and greater
use of police power to discipline students. This is probably true in other departments
of criminology or criminal justice across the United States. But an investigation
into complicity should not stop at the level of responses and dispositions. Attitudes
critical of the pipeline from faculty and students must contend with a deeply
structured, historical, and intimate relationship between our segment of the academy
and the armed apparatus of the state. Critically inclined students are no match for a
discipline with institutional homes that are so heavily committed toand depend
on ensuring the pipelines existence.
University criminology and criminal justice departments have their own
historical and political-economic context. Historically, many of the better-known
departments were products of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA)
funding. Following grotesque exercises of police power during antiwar (Vietnam),
civil rights, and black power movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal
government moved to professionalize police forces. This plan also established
Centers of Excellence that were geared toward providing higher education to
police. Professionalized higher education, however, has failed to alleviate the racist
and classist nature of police power.
LEAA and the history of these departments remain relevant for understanding
the genesis of and logic behind professionalized training for practitioners in higher
education. Even the research, writing, teaching, and activism of scholars in programs
such as EKUs School of Justice Studies, which boasts Marxist, feminist, critical
race, and postmodern and post-structural viewpoints, cannot erase the schools
historical contingency on the original and ongoing material support from the
security-carceral-state. Despite the radical content that they may encounter in their
courses, in reality most students believe in the necessity of the state to the extent
that they enroll in our institution to pursue a degree that improves their chances
of working for the state.4

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Our own home in a College of Justice and Safety reflects this history. The college
was the brainchild of a director of the Kentucky State Police in the 1960s and was
officially founded as the Department of Law Enforcement in 1965, a decade before
massive federal funding flooded universities with startup funds to create or expand
criminal justice (McClanahan and Smith n.d., 5). Indeed, when Eastern Kentucky
Universitys newly minted Department of Law Enforcement secured $36,844 from
the US Department of Justices Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, it became
the first program in higher education in the country to receive such funding.
Though LEAA and federal support for university-based law enforcement
education departments was not the beginning of higher educations intimacy with
police, it did signal a critical point in the complicity of higher education in the
school-to-prison pipeline. The neoliberalization of the university further structures
this orientation within departments that otherwise might reject it (Mills 2012). First,
shrinking state investment in education led to a growing reliance on alternative
revenue sources for public institutions of higher education. In large criminology
or criminal justice departments, this can mean soliciting and/or receiving larger
numbers of already minted law enforcement officers whose tuition they pay.
Second, neoliberalism features a weakened welfare state (due, in part, to the
privatization of public services) and an emboldened security state (Giroux 2004,
2012; Hallsworth and Lea 2011; see also Brisman 2013). Despite the once popular
notion that "the state is dwindling due to the natural processes of globalization
and privatization, the liberal democratic state with its security fetish has brought
about its own transformation.
Broadly, the rise of thecarceral state has steadily shifted state budgetary priorities,
including the transfer of tax dollars from schools to prisons. A well-known Justice
Policy Institute study (2002), for example, found that between 1985 and 2000,
spending on corrections across the United States grew at six times the rate of
spending on higher education. Beyond revealing the social and fiscal priorities of
state legislators, such a focus on carceral growth can be interpreted as signifying
a labor market investment as well.
In tandem with the rise of the federally funded and practitioner-oriented
academic department of criminology and criminal justice is the well-documented
emergence of a criminal j ustice industrial complex that includes mass incarceration,
growing and increasingly authoritarian police forces, and surveillance creep into
everyday life. The connection is not incidental. Indeed, as Foucault (1980, 48)
noted, criminological discourse is necessary to justify judges judging. That is,
neoliberal state-manufactured crises and their socio-spatial fix in the prison
and other formations of the criminal justice industrial complex (Gilmore 2007)
require a legitimating discourse, which the disciplines of criminology and criminal
justice supply. Although criminology is a permeable category (Garland and
Sparks 2000; see generally South, Brisman, and Beirne 2013), as are all academic
disciplines, much of what constitutes the study or field(s) of criminology and

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criminal justice is decidedly administrative. This does not reflect some grand
conspiracy, since broader changes in governance and political economy structure
changes in all institutions, including the university and the prison. In the context
of the neoliberal withdrawal of the welfare state, governance and policy operate in
and through institutional assemblages of the carceral state and police power and,
crucially, through logics that securitize areas of sociality previously unattached to
criminal justice. Thus, policy approaches to welfare and education filter through
discourses and logics that subject their institutional formations and their everyday
activities to carceral influences (Gilmore 2007; Hirschfield 2008; Schept 2013;
Simon 2007; Wacquant 2001,2009).
Neoliberal reliance on police and penal power to manage urban and rural crises
has effects beyond the individuals and groups targeted directly for imprisonment
and the places and spaces identified specifically for locating prisons. Of course,
governing through prison is partly to blame for the pipeline in that communities
targeted for incarceration tend to be those selected for greater police presence in
schools and, as a result, more school-based arrests of youth. Yet, there is another
dimension to building and sustaining the pipelinea population of young people
entering the labor market and dependent upon the criminal justice industrial
complex for employment. Working- and middle-class university-age youth have
grown up in an era in which their parents have lost jobs and local factories, mines,
and plants have been closed. Such youth are increasingly bombarded with images
and indicia of bleak job prospects. That is, of course, except for the bright future
of one industry: criminal justice.5
Staffing the Pipeline
Although the DOCJT (Department of Criminal Justice Training) is not
an EKU program, it has become, in the minds of many Kentuckians,
inextricably joined. Many of the DOCJT graduates boast they attended
EKU. This familiarity with the University breaks the ice for many trainees,
encouraging them to begin a part-time college career. (At www.justice,
eku .edu!sites!justice .eku.edulfileslfileslJShistory.pdf)
A job fair at our college revealed the deeply structured logic of what jobs are
appropriate for and available to graduates from the School of Justice Studies. In
September 2013, a fair held downstairs from our offices included the following
agencies: American Medical Response; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives; Cincinnati Fire Department; Cleveland (TN) Police Department; Drug
Enforcement Agency; Evansville Police Department; Federal Bureau of Prisons;
Florence (KY) Police Department; Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice;
Lexington Community Corrections; Lexington Division of Police; Lexington Fire
Department; Louisville Metro Police Department; Memphis Police Department;
Metro Nashville Police Department; and the United States Marine Coips. Despite

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the potential draw of nonprofit, community organizing, advocacy, and legal defense
organizations to a job fair for a School of Justice Studies and a College of Justice
and Safety, the above list confirms the career orientations of our students. That is,
the agencies attending and others like it illuminate the employment opportunities
structured into the workforce narrative of our students and demonstrate which
jobs are available.
Based on informal conversations and in-class polling, around 75 percent of our
undergraduate students attend the School of Justice Studies to secure employment
in law enforcement or corrections. Even a conservative estimate of 50 percent
would mean that every year 150 graduates are seeking work in these areas. One
of the authors (Schept) is the new coordinator for the School of Justice Studies
internship program. The internship provides credit hours for a semesters worth of
work. Historically, this has meant interning with a criminal justice agency acounty
sheriffs office, the Kentucky State Police, or federal law enforcement agencies,
such as the US Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Schept, the
coauthors of this article, and a select group of other School of Justice Studies faculty
members are dedicated to broadening the range of internship possibilities and moving
the school in the direction of social justice. The reality, however, is that the School
of Justice Studies has cultivated institutional relationships with various agencies
of criminal justice and our students wish to take advantage of these connections.6
The neoliberal university that creates the higher educational context within
which the criminal justice department reproduces its history as a training ground
for state agents has an important partner in the public school district. As the state
withdraws from paying for teachers and counselors, guns and guards emerge as a
glaring area of growth. Bryant (2013) notes that at a time when most states are
cutting education budgets, and depressed property taxes are reducing local revenues
for schools, lawmakers are having no problem finding cash to spend on guns and
guards in schools.
According to The Center for Public Integrity, in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, a
state legislative delegation in Florida approved a proposal to increase property taxes
to pay for more school police, at an annual cost of up to $130,000 per officer. A
bill in Mississippi set up a $7.5 million school-security fund. Alabama legislators
proposed a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every
school. And Indiana lawmakers weighed a measure to set aside $10 million to
offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools. The White River
Valley School Board in rural southern Indiana recently voted to hire an SRO for the
White River Valley High School from grants provided by the Indiana Department of
Homeland Security. The school superintendent has said: Its all about providing our
kids and our staff a safe and secure learning environment. The SRO will be armed
and have an assortment of duties, as explained by a local journalist (Squires 2013):

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The officer will be expected to provide educational programs; provide a

wide variety of professional and technical police work in investigation
including the enforcement of local ordinances, state and federal statutes;
provide security with visibility and presence in school buildings; assist in
the prevention of crime or delinquency on corporation campuses; act as an
advisor to the administrators for the crisis response teams and coordinate
with the Greene County Sheriffs D epartm ent. The officer will be expected
to be armed while on campus.
This trend is not limited to states. Indeed, President Barack Obama has promised
1,000 new SROs as part of a W hite House plan to reduce gun violence, ignoring
the painful irony of placing 1,000 more armed police officers in schools as part of
a violence reduction project. The logic enacted here presupposes that state violence
is a feasible route to pacifying, or making civil citizens. Good guys with guns,
as Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the NR A , has called them , are often
the ones who enact violence on communities of color and other poor populations.
A central enforcing agent of the pipeline is the SRO a member of law
enforcement working directly in the geographies of education. SROs may perform
a range of duties, but the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968
describes the position as a career law enforcement officer, with sworn authority,
deployed in community-oriented policing, and assigned by the employing police
department or agency to work in collaboration with school and community-based
organizations (Girouard 2001). A Justice Policy Institute report (2011) revealed
a 38 percent increase in the number of SROs between 1997 and 2007 as more
youth became increasingly subjected to juridification of school-based disciplinary
problems. As the law enforcement presence in schools heightened, arrests of youth
climbed, with more of them being processed in and moving through various courts
(adult and juvenile) and juvenile detention systems.
SROs perform duties other than arresting students on school grounds. According
to a National Institute of Justice report, SROs reported that their workweek was
evenly split between law enforcement duties and advising, mentoring, and teaching
(Finn and McDevitt 2005). However, would (or should) a student concerned about
drugs, peer pressure, parental issues, family income, sex, or violence seek out a
police officer for support? Furthermore, what does it signify to students that the
school, and presumably the state, believes that police officers are the most appropriate
actors to deal with situations that are not, on their face, issues of police power?
Finally, how is a young person supposed to know what he/she can or cannot say to
someone who may be, at once, a mentor and a cop? There is substantial room for
coercion, secrecy, shame, and deployment of state punishment in an area where
students should have freedom to work through issues without the threat of sanction.
The concept of pacification is a potentially useful way to think about SROs.
Often associated with US counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, recent calls have been

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issued for radical theory to reappropriate the concept from its colonialist, imperial
trappings (Neocleous 2011). As a doctrine of capitalist state power, pacification
includes the combination of outright coercion and violence and softer power
that aims for consent: winning hearts and minds. Pacification is conceived as the
project of securing the capitalist social order and its peculiar social relations wage
labor, private property, and accumulation. As such, it offers a useful way of thinking
through the iron fist and velvet glove aspects of police power (Platt et al. 1982),
as well as the ways that police power has long aimed to fabricate a particular social
order around a particular regime of accumulation (Neocleous 2000).
As Herbert (1997) shows in his ethnography of the LAPD, pacify ing a particular
space is a central mandate of patrol officers and they deploy various techniques to
accomplish this goal. SROs thus serve as agents of pacification; they pacify the space
of the school and its population of students by getting to know them, becoming
their friend or mentor, and providing a role model, while resorting to more
direct means of discipline and arrest when softer forms of security are ineffective.
A strength of pacification as a critical concept is its implication that populations
are not passive and often resist pacification efforts. In terms of enforcing particular
social relations and political economies, the SRO is a mediating agent between
surplus populations and the larger political economies of neoliberal education,
policing, and prisons.
Departments of criminology and criminal justice staff the pipeline by producing
state law enforcement agents, such as SROs, whose business is pacification. By
educating civilians in the episteme that is criminal justice and then transforming
their bodies into marketable security commodities, criminology and criminal
justice departments produce agents/commodities of pacification. They, in turn,
increasingly find themselves assigned to jobs that involve policing the hallways of
public education. Since pacification presupposes resistance and contestation, these
projects must be justified and legitimated as the most democratic way to secure
the insecurities of capitalist late modernity (see Rigakos 2011). Departments of
criminology and criminal justice exist to provide such justification.

Legitimating the Pipeline

The history of our discipline reveals an intimate, interdependent relationship with
the state and today, in quotidian ways, criminal justice students are prepared for
careers in the law enforcement apparatuses that maintain and enforce the pipeline.
Moreover, the discipline is complicit in the production of knowledge and the
epistemological legitimacy we give to the school-to-prison pipeline. In this realm,
there is the greatest space for resistance. We cannot reverse the disciplines historical
legacy or easily change the course of the larger institutional context of a department
or school; more room to maneuver exists to intervene in the knowledge production
practices and orientation that legitimate the practice and our role in it.

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Our college houses the Kentucky Centerfor School Safety (the center), which
conducts research into and training on, among other things, SROs. The presence of
this center in our college clarifies the relationship we are attempting to examine,
for it is a gateway between school jurisdictions and the federal funds that support
those jurisdictions in the area of school safety. As budgets shrink, the availability
of millions of dollars in funding for schools becomes increasingly attractive.
The centers location at a respected college staffed by researchers legitimates its
existence and gives its products credibility. Auniversity setting establishes the center
as a location of specialized scholarship, which can translate research into policy
analysis and implementation. Thus, scholars researching the ongoing existence of
phenomena such as the pipeline should seriously examine statements and positions
such as the one on SROs found on the centers webpage:
Maintaining safe schools requires the involvement of many agencies outside
of the educational community, particularly law enforcement, social service,
juvenile justice agencies and the court system. Partnerships across these
agencies improve school safety and serve the needs of youth at risk. For
example, law enforcement agencies assist schools in development of safety
and emergency plans, provide classroom instructions with programs such
as DARE and crime prevention, investigate crimes in schools, and often
assign officers to schools through an Adopt a School or School Resource
Officer program. (At www.kycss.org/law.php)
The academic literature generally concludes that SROs in schools do not enhance
student safety, and yet the center promotes expanding their use. Its SRO webpage
even features a quotation from the US Department of Justice (DOJ): Communities
throughout the nation recognize that trained, sworn law enforcement officers
assigned to schools make a difference." Research on the pipeline shows that SROs
do make a difference, but not in the ways the quoted statement misleadingly
implies. Beyond defining, advocating for, and noting the numbers of SROs in the
state (approximately 230 in more than half of Kentuckys counties), the webpage
displays a student-made poster for a reading week that features a sheriffs car
and caution tape, proudly noting that SROs [sic] are so much a part of the school
that somethings [sic] they are used in academic campaigns ... such as this READ
poster (at www.kycss.org/schoolresource.php).
Such narratives operate on multiple planes. Concretely, they promote the
belief that the police, courts, and juvenile justice systems are essential to keeping
schools safe. Indeed, safety requires their active involvement. Two programs they
endorse SROs and the infamous Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.)
program have been roundly dismissed by empirical studies as ineffective (see
Hagan 2011). Thus, the centers expertise subjugates empirical and evidence
based knowledge to an ideological agenda of securitization. Ultimately, it argues
that cops, courts, and corrections are indispensable to safety, but never defines

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what makes a school safeD isregarding data proving otherwise, criminology and
the state advance armed actors as solutions to problems that are deeply structured
by the neoliberal withdrawal of the welfare state and the resultant problems of
classroom size, poverty, under-resourced schools, and disaffected students. Youth
point out that police in schools may protect the school, but not students (McClellan
2011). Who, then, is being served and protected by SROs and other technologies
of the pipeline? What interests are being secured by the assemblage of schools,
police, and prisons?
The centers endorsement of the DOJ position on SROs is instructive as a
meta-narrative of criminology. The discourse and the center as a place and space
of ideological perpetuation make them indispensable to the project of school safety.
The work of juridifying, policing, and carceralizing the school and of subjecting
students to increasing numbers of hearings, arrests, and detentions requires
constant justification, or at least the appearance of it. In the absence of evidence
or expertise that a district can use to justify the activity, how could parents accept
such gross encroachment into educational space? In this way, criminologydue
to centers like this, DOJ grants, and departments in need of studentsbecomes
essential to the operation.
Some compelling work within criminology (and substantial work outside it)
does critique the carceral state and the pipeline. Yet in its literature and anecdotally
from our professional lives, the disciplines critical variant often remains decidedly
reformist and thus does notand cannotoffer the more radical critique of the
state and capital needed for material disruption. Rarely are the political and cultural
assumptions constituting the foundations of the discipline thoroughly scrutinized.
Under the pretense of being radical, those in the critical subfields of criminology
and criminal justice, along with reformist criminal justice system administrators,
often speak the language of progressivism, modernization, reform, and a fetish for
the rule of law as a solution to modern ills. In everyday practice, professors of
criminal justice say, we need to reach those students who are going to be officers
and teach them how to be better (e.g., professional, empathic, civilized) officers.
We are making a difference, even if it is in minimal ways. Police professionals and
administrators proclaim similar things: I want my officers to have high academic
qualifications, the best training, and work with the community in helpful, smart,
and empathic ways. This approach has some utility, but generally its pervasive,
insidious ideological framing precludes serious consideration of questions regarding
state power and violence, political economy, and the genealogy of racism and
classism that underpins the liberal project of the penal state.
Meiners (2011) has examined the role of youth in the prison-industrial complex.
In her view, children have been and remain the lifeblood of prison expansion due
to racialized constructs of innocence and safety. By extension, we submit that the
department of criminology and criminal justice is a central location where the
false promises of safety and employment, particularly for our most innocent

Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

109

(children) are repeatedly used to expand a prison nation (ibid., 555). Meiners also
argues that approaches to the pipeline problem often rest on recognition rather than
redistribution. Departments, individual scholars, and even students angling for careers
in law enforcement recognize the problem and, within proscribed and decidedly
liberal frameworks, see solutions in working as good cops or social service
workers to improve or help. In the name of reform and benevolence, concerned
and even leftist criminologists reinscribe the common sense of criminal justice,
now further instantiated through liberal logics and discourses that purport to offer
alternate approaches to punitive business as usual.
This highlights the fluidity with which the neoliberal state structures the
political-economic reality of labor markets and higher education, while configuring
the terrain of discourse on which criminal justice academics operate. In our rueful,
guilt-ridden teaching of studentswishing to fashion better SROs, police,
probation, or corrections officersthe states logic of security flows in and
through us. We seek imagined social security for certain youth, job security for our
students, school security for teachers and students, public security for imagined
communities, and even state and homeland security (since secure hometowns
make secure homelands in the Department of Homeland Securitys neocolonial
logic). This fetishistic logic of security must be refused, as it primarily enhances
accumulation and state power, against alternative forms of human solidarity.7
Against this pervasive logic, we reject such reformist changes and demand that
criminology take seriously an abolitionist and anti-security project of redistribution
(see Neocleous and Rigakos 2011). Such an approach requires that scholarship
move beyond recognition of the problem. Instead, scholarship must respond to and
generate alternatives to the school-to-prison pipeline that result in transformative
changes within and outside the school that challenge systems of power, oppression
and privilege (Meiners 2011,556). This calls for two complementary actions: (1)
the removal (rather than reformation) of the material support that the state provides
to the pipeline; and (2) its subsequent redistribution in communities targeted by
policing and incarceration. Thus, removing material support for the school-toprison pipeline the SROs, the justifying discourses, and the financial investment
in other forms of securitization must be accompanied by a process of currency
exchange, whereby the money previously assigned to the pipeline is reallocated
to assist and empower communities, rather than police and imprison them.

Conclusion
Millions of young people experience the school-to-prison pipeline. Compelling
scholarship, journalism, and activism have illuminated its racialized and class
nature, traced its origins, and demand that it be dismantled. Our contribution to
this vibrant collection of work seeks to better formulate the complicity of academic
criminology and criminal justice in its construction, operations, and justification.
Understanding the problem of the pipeline and working toward its abolition require

110

J u d a h Sc h

e pt

,Tyl

er

al l

& Avi

Br

is m a n

an appreciation of the extent to which the discipline provides it with material

funding, physical bodies, and intellectual legitimacy.
We specifically address the reformist and apologist tendencies within criminology
and criminal justice. These well-intentioned efforts simply produce slightly more
compassionate or informed SROs and enable ongoing juridification, policing, and
incarceration of a racialized and classed youth. We urge colleagues in our field to
commit to abolition of the pipeline and of the structural conditions that make it
possible.

NOTES
1. We refer to criminology and criminal justice in tandem as interchangeable disciplines
throughout this article. These fields are sometimes regarded as separate subjects, with criminology
connoting the nature, characteristics, and etiology of crime and criminal justice as the study of the
system(s) of police, courts, and corrections. That divide is not of interest here. Instead, we consider
how criminology and criminal justice are involved in preparing and producing college graduates for
work in the field of criminal justice.
2. Although the hyper-fluidity between school and prison is a recent phenomenon and reflects
the rise of the carceral state, capitalism in the United States has always produced surplus populations
of racialized students, including those labeled as white trash, that education systems have pushed
toward non-living wage labor, underground economies, or the military (Meiners 2011; Wall 2010; see
generally Brisman 2012).
3. Others have also made this argument. The Advancement Projects 2010 report notes that the
ideology driving high-stakes testing and zero tolerance stems from the corporate playbook, as it is based
on the notion that problems are solved and productivity is improved through rigorous competition,
uncompromising discipline, constant assessment, performance-inducing incentives, and the elimination
of low performers.
4. More accurately, our students tend to believe in the state when it comes to law enforcement
and the military. Their perspectives change drastically when the issue of taxing for social services (e.g.,
education, environmental protection, health care, and housing) arises.
5. One need only consult the literature on prison growth to gauge the extent to which criminal
justice is marketed as a form of stable and growing rural economic development, often following
departures of industrial and agricultural capital. See, for example: Bonds (2009,2012), Gilmore (1999,
2007), Huling (2002). King et al. (2003), and Schept (2014). For analyses of why the data contradict
the politics of prison building as economic strategy, see Hooks, Mosher, Rotolo, and Loboa (2004) and
Hooks, Mosher, Genter, Rotolo, and Loboa (2010).
6. Students in the other school within the collegethe School of Safety, Security and Emergency
Managementpursue Bachelor of Science degrees in areas such as Homeland Security. Institutional
encouragement reinforces the desires of students in both schools to secure internships in the security
apparatus of the state or private corporations.
7. Security. as Neocleous and Rigakos (2011, 15) argue polemically, is a:
blockage on politics: the more we succumb to the discourse of security, the less we can say
about exploitation and alienation; the more we talk about security, the less we talk about the
material foundations of emancipation; the more we come to share in the fetish of security,
the more we become alienated from one another and the more we become complicit in the
exercise of police powers.

Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

111

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