Community Organizing

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Nationally, there is a growing coalition of community organizations advocating for juvenile justice reform. Specifically, these organizations fight for the dismantling of the school-to-prison pipeline, the end of minority youth criminalization and the revision of zero tolerance and other harsh school disciplinary policies.

Some community organizations have been founded in the wake of tragedies such as the Trayvon Martin death, while others have endured a long withstanding fight against the local injustices with which their members have been inflicted by. The community activists range from those directly inflicted by the educational injustice: the marginalized, the minority, the low-income and the urban (parents, teachers and formerly incarcerated individuals) to local members who simply believe in the disruption of oppressive community structures. Many of the organizations contest against a broad range of racial, social and economic injustices that are beyond the scope of the school-to-prison pipeline, but are important and have equally detrimental effects.

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Community members that organize around this issue are unified under the shared mission to replace zero tolerance policies with restorative justice policies and less punitive discipline practices that keep youth within the classroom and out of the racialized judicial system. The organizations are attempting to elicit change and disrupt the systematic inequality within their communities. Therefore, it is the mission of these organizations to educate and raise awareness about how the school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately inflicts black youth and limits their educational and life chances.

Initiatives to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline have taken on many different forms: sit-ins, workshops, protests and forums. The majority of initiatives have focused on the petitioning of restorative justice reform in front of local school boards, the publication of demographic data and personal student stories about the pipeline, the protesting of jail openings and the empowering of youth leadership both inside and outside the classroom. The successes have been the reduction of harsh disciplinary policies, suspensions and expulsions, the implementation of restorative justice practices and the improvement of minority youth well-being and life chances. However, there are also distinct challenges. More generally, the community organizations that surround this issue are minorities and have historically been systematically marginalized by the educational, social and economic systems they wish to disrupt. Therefore, the organizations have often been met with resistance from policy-makers and school administrators that want to maintain the status quo.

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Explore this website for more specific information about the collective power of activism and the community organizations that are building alternative systems to disrupt the oppressive school-to-prison pipeline.