Over the last few years, the number of students who have been incarcerated has continuously grown. A key contributor to this trend is the school-to-prison pipeline. The school-to-prison pipeline refers to the idea that schools push students of color and students with disabilities into the juvenile and adult justice system. These educational institutions do this primarily through their use of “zero tolerance” policies as a form of discipline. Zero tolerance is used as a way to discipline students in the same way no matter how small or large the indiscretion is. These policies have shown to have no positive effect on students’ safety and have significantly hurt minority communities. The negative impact is shown through increased dropout rates, as well as outstanding numbers of expulsions and suspensions in schools where the community is mostly minority students. Because of these negative outcomes, many people have called for the reform of policies like “zero tolerance” and offered alternative disciplinary procedures. In this paper, I will explain in detail the key disciplinary contributors to the school to prison pipeline and assess alternative solutions that educational institutions may use to help keep students who misbehave from being introduced to the juvenile justice system early on in life and help keep them from being incarcerated in the future.

Mental Illness and Crime People with mental illness have been mishandled for many years and have been treated like lab rats. Prisons are overly crowded with mentally ill persons and they have now become a threat to society (Vogel, 2014). One’s Mental illness cannot determine whether someone will break the law, but it is one of many criminogenic, causing or likely to cause criminal behavior, risk factors that interact in complex ways influencing individual behavior (Vogel, 2014). This statement represents the stereotypical barriers that researchers have been fighting. In the public eye the mentally ill are often viewed as ,”Dangerous” and or “Incompetent” (Phelan, 2013). The problem is that people with mental illness are often labeled and associated with negative stigmas. These negative labels have become embedded in the community, causing numerouc misconceptions surrounding people with mental illness. Another prominent concern is that theyl are not receiving proper care while being incarcerated (Vogel, 2014). Inmates with mental illness are physically victimized 1.6 more times than inmates who do not suffer from mental illness. Their conditions are also likely to become worse depending on the correctional facility. To prevent this from happening researchers have been trying to collect a wider range of data in order to connect specific mental disorders to criminogenic behaviors. Researchers are also continue to search for intervention methods to decrease the incarceration rates of those with mental illness. People who experience mental illness are overrepresented in prisons and that is because they simply don’t belong there.

While the documentation, publication, and circulation of acts of police brutality against Black people can be helpful, it is important to critically examine why this explicit content is published and consumed at a viral rate by the American public. By situating and analyzing the consumption of police brutality videos involving a Black victim within the historical context of legacies of violence during slavery, spectacle lynching, and the production of lynching postcards, this research attempts to complicate the dominant cultural idea that the circulation of these videos is overwhelmingly positive. Spectacles of violence during slavery, public spectacle lynchings from 1882-1968, and the circulation of lynching postcards have informed the modern U.S. political climate in which graphic videos documenting police violence against Black people are shared on social media, aired on news stations, consumed at high rates by Americans, and exploited by the American public for monetary gain. This research will identify the progression of public spectacles of violence performed during U.S. chattel slavery to public spectacle lynchings carried out during the Nadir era. Furthermore, this research aims to establish clear and nameable connections between the circulation of lynching photography from 1882-1968 and the circulation of videos that document police brutality from 2010-2021. Additionally, this research aims to explore how systems of oppression such as white supremacy, capitalism, and anti-Blackness allow and encourage violent videos documenting the murder of Black people to circulate on social media sites and news channels despite their horrific and explicit content.