As the largest and fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country, Latinos' educational success is a national priority. In the Los Angeles Unified School district, the country's largest, high school graduating rates for Latinos hover at near 40%. Examining this institutional and societal tragedy through the school-to-prison pipeline…

This article asserts that schools have tremendous positive power over the lives of students--the power to teach them academics; the power to socialize them to be engaged citizens; the power to transform their lives in positive ways--but schools also have negative power: the power to mark a student with a discipline record; the power to force a…

This essay powerfully describes the rise of a neoliberal or "casino capitalism" as a punishing state that has been largely ignored by the mainstream media but is actively resisted by young people around the world. I highlight the pervasive use of violence and the celebration of war-like values that are no longer restricted to a…

Through combining the methodology of portraiture with the epistemological stance of youth participatory action research, this article positions Latino/a youth as experts with their encounters with the school-to-prison pipeline. This article examines what it's like to live within the tight and probational spaces of criminal justice-based…

In this paper, I argue that school-to-prison pipeline (SPP) research on Latina/os shows the existence of an interconnected system of policies and social practices, in and out of schools, punitive and non-punitive in nature, which together work to criminalize Latina/o students and their families. This intersection (Crenshaw, 1991) and multiplicity…

Using data collected from a larger qualitative study that explored the educational trajectories of young women of color with disabilities through the School to Prison Pipeline, this empirical case study focuses on how one student's undocumented status impacted her education in juvenile justice. Research has begun to provide us with statistics…

This essay discusses white innocence as a mechanism that may contribute to perceptions of Mexican Americans as perpetrators. These perceptions are crucial to ways teachers and administrators respond to student actions as the initial steps in the school-to-prison pipeline. Specifically, this work reviews the rhetoric of white innocence in a high…