Criminal Justice

We are committed to generate and synthesize research on key civil rights and equal opportunity policies that have been neglected or overlooked.

The Civil Rights Project is launching a three-year initiative, the School to Prision Pipeline, focusing on the "pipeline" that is tracking certain high-risk, minority children directly from school into the criminal justice system. This pipeline includes both in-school practices--such as high stakes testing, inadequate special education placements, resource and curriculum inequities, and harsh disciplinary codes--and recent law enforcement trends that treat juveniles, particularly minorities, with increasing harshness for both major and minor offenses.

All communities, regardless of color or class, should enjoy both low rates of juvenile crime and high rates of student achivement. With that goal in mind, we will work in concert with advocates, educators, and policy analysts to redirect the flow of this pipeline away from increasingly punitive regimes of social control. We hope, instead, to help chart a path of prevention, intervention and support that leads toward greater opportunity and succes for at-risk juveniles.

Officials at the district level often set policies regarding school discipline ("zero tolerance"), special education, and voluntary desegregation efforts, not the federal government in Washington, DC. State legislators, state school boards and state attorneys generally influence such policies as testing and accountability for failing schools, sentencing and parole practices, and juvenile justice procedures. Federal programs such as the recently reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act have widespread impacts at the state and local level, but in education and most other arenas there is a pattern of "cooperative federalism" which leaves countless important policy choices in the hands of state and local decisionmakers.