In his peer-reviewed article published in June 2016 entitled “The Dangers of Pipeline Thinking: How the School-to-Prison Pipeline Metaphor Squeezes out Complexity,” Ken McGrew addresses how the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor impacts real change in the educational sphere. McGrew “argues that addressing the weaknesses in the literature, abandoning the metaphor, and adopting a more complex theoretical orientation grounded in critical scholarship” has the ability to “enable educational scholars to better capture the relational nature of the social phenomena being described while simultaneously making their work more useful to emerging movements for social justice.”⁵

In their peer-reviewed article published in 2015 entitled “Building, Staffing, and Insulating: An Architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” Judah Schept, Tyler Wall, and Avi Brisman, examine “ the university criminology/criminal justice department in creating, staffing, and legitimating the pipeline. This article offers a preliminary and provisional conceptual scaffold for understanding the complicity of the criminology/criminal justice discipline and its academic departments.”⁹

In both articles, the authors address how the academic conversation about the school-to-prison pipeline impacts its execution and the development of policy around it. Throughout his piece, McGrew relies on the following definition of school-to-prison pipeline metaphor (SPPM):

“The pipeline literature attempts to establish a casual relationship between educational and disciplinary practices in school settings, particularly those that disproportionately target youth of color, and incarceration rates.”⁵ He emphasizes the casual and frequent nature of the metaphor and notes that, “among the several terms and phrases that populate the educational literature, both lay and professional, the phrase school-to-prison is without doubt the dominant, with few challengers in site.”⁵

Schept, Wall, and Brisman build upon this definition adding the idea of a “prison school.” They write, “The pipeline concept implies a flow between two seemingly distinct institutions: the ‘school’ and ‘prison,’ as well as the various appendages of the criminal justice system, to mix metaphors. Sometimes, however, the facade of their distinctiveness crumbles and the ‘coordinated institutions’ become completely imbricated.”

Schept, Wall, and Brisman criticize academic conversation specifically in criminology and criminal justice departments, writing:

“University criminology and criminal justice departments have their own historical and political-economic context. Historically, many of the better-known departments were products of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funding…The plan established ‘Centers for Excellence’ that were geared toward providing higher education to police. Professionalized higher education, however, has failed to alleviate the racist and classist nature of police power…Despite the radical content that they may encounter in their courses, in reality most students believe in the necessity of the state to the extent that they enroll in [the university] to pursue a degree that improves their chances of working for the state.”⁹

McGrew heavily sites scholar Israel Scheffler, who points to the tendency to use slogans in the field of education as “rallying symbols of the key ideas and attitudes of education movements.”⁵ Scheffler emphasizes the danger of doing so, writing that the symbols “are often taken more and more as literal doctrines or arguments, rather than merely as rallying symbols.”⁵

Scheffler provides an example of this using another phrase: “we teach children not subjects,” showing how this slogan “became an operational doctrine in its own right distinct from the theory that it was originally meant to represent…[and] models criticizing it independent of the movements and doctrines from which it came.” In doing so, Sheffler “demonstrates that the slogan cannot be literally correct as all teaching does require content instruction.”⁵

Because of the phrase’s simplicity, scholars also do not feel they need to prove the SPPM’s existence. McGrew argues that this lack of historical analysis leads to things like using SPPM to cite incarceration of Black men at large rather than focusing specifically on its occurrence in and through the educational sphere.

He also argues that the pipeline literature is “narrowly focused on policy,”⁵ arguing at large for the replacement of pipeline thinking with “complex thinking.”⁵ He writes, “What is needed is an approach that better captures the relational nature of social phenomena and holds onto complexity in analysis and theory.”⁵

Schept, Wall and Brisman critique the role of scholarship about the school-to-prison pipeline, writing:

“Such an approach requires that scholarship move beyond recognition of the problem. Instead, scholarship must respond to and generate alternatives to the school-to-prison pipeline that result in transformative changes within and outside the school that challenge ‘systems of power, oppression and privilege.’ This calls for two complementary actions: (1) the removal (rather than reformation) of the material support that the state provides to the pipeline; and (2) its subsequent redistribution in communities targeted by policing and incarceration.”⁹ 

McGrew’s article challenges scholars to revisit the reasons for their use of the SPPM and what it means in practice, because the implications of not doing so are complacency. Schept, Wall, and Brisman challenge scholars of criminology’s complicity, calling for a restructuring of academic spheres that study the topic.