School suspension and the school-to-prison pipeline

Alison Evans Cuellar and Sara Markowitz

International Review of Law and Economics, 2015, vol. 43, issue C, 98-106

Abstract: Schools have many available strategies to address problem behavior among students. One option increasingly used by schools is to suspend problem youth and remove them for defined periods. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this type of disciplinary policy has unintended consequences by giving problem youth greater opportunity to commit crimes outside of school. Previous studies have looked at the “incapacitation” effect of school holidays and teacher strike days, but these studies do not directly address the relevant school policy decisions. The current study relies on administrative data from a school district and a juvenile justice system. The results indicate that out-of-school suspension may increase criminal offending behavior by problem youth, more than doubling the probability of arrest. The effect is particularly large among African American youth, relative to Whites.

Keywords: School discipline; Crime; Juveniles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014481881500040X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:43:y:2015:i:c:p:98-106

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2015.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Law and Economics is currently edited by C. Ott, A. W. Katz and H-B. Schäfer

More articles in International Review of Law and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().