Preparing for prison?: The criminalization of school discipline in the USA
Abstract
American schools increasingly define and manage the problem of student discipline through a prism of crime control. Most theoretical explanations fail to situate school criminalization in a broader structural context, to fully explain its spatio-temporal variations, and to specify the processes and subjectivities that mediate between structural and legal forces and the behavior of school actors. A multilevel structural model of school criminalization is developed which posits that a troubled domestic economy, the mass unemployment and incarceration of disadvantaged minorities, and resulting fiscal crises in urban public education have shifted school disciplinary policies and practices and staff perceptions of poor students of color in a manner that promotes greater punishment and exclusion of students perceived to be on a criminal justice `track'.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Schools have evolved from relatively open sites for learning to settings that replicate the features of control and surveillance common to the criminal legal system.
“the evolution of schools from relatively open sites for learning to settings that replicate the features of control and surveillance common to the criminal legal system (Hirschfield 2008;Kupchik and Monahan 2006;Rios 2017).”
From The Rise of the Carceral State: Foundations and Contours of a Rapidly Changing Criminal Legal System (2025) · cites this paper as Hirschfield 2008
Carceral logics and practices are imported to seemingly unrelated institutions such as schools, the child welfare system, health care facilities, and the immigration system.
“carceral logics and practices are imported to seemingly unrelated institutions such as schools (Hirschfield 2008; Rios 2017), the child welfare system (Edwards 2016;Roberts 2022), health care facilities (Lara-Millán 2014), and the immigration system (Fassin 2011).”
From The Rise of the Carceral State: Foundations and Contours of a Rapidly Changing Criminal Legal System (2025) · cites this paper as Hirschfield 2008
Schools have become 'prison-like' through investments in surveillance, the arrival of police officers on campus, and zero tolerance policies that mirror the punitive shift of the criminal legal system.
“a large body of scholarship during the prison boom describes how schools have become “prison-like” through investments in surveillance, the arrival of police officers on campus, and zero tolerance policies that mirror the punitive shift of the criminal legal system (Hirschfield 2008;Rios 2017;Hirschfield and Celinska 2011;Wolf and Kupchik 2017).”
From The Rise of the Carceral State: Foundations and Contours of a Rapidly Changing Criminal Legal System (2025) · cites this paper as Hirschfield 2008
Cites
Mass imprisonment and the life course: Race and class inequality in U.S. incarceration
Pettit, B., & Western, B. (2004) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/000312240406900201 · Cited by 1,499 · see citing works
The New American School: preparation for post‐industrial discipline
Kupchik, A., & Monahan, T. (2006) · British Journal of Sociology of Education · doi:10.1080/01425690600958816 · Cited by 255 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Braveman, P. A., Arkin, E., Proctor, D., Kauh, T., & Holm, N. (2022) · Health Affairs · doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01394 · Cited by 858 · see citing works
Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline
Welch, K., & Payne, A. A. (2010) · Social Problems · doi:10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.25 · Cited by 445 · see citing works
Perry (2014) · doi:10.1177/0003122414556308 · Cited by 254 · see citing works
Effects of school resource officers on school crime and responses to school crime
Gottfredson, D. C., Crosse, S., Tang, Z., Bauer, E. L., Harmon, M. A., Hagen, C. A., & Greene, A. D. (2020) · Criminology & Public Policy · doi:10.1111/1745-9133.12512 · Cited by 131 · see citing works
Public Support for Policies to Reduce School Shootings: A Moral-Altruistic Model
Burton, A. L., Pickett, J. T., Jonson, C. L., Cullen, F. T., & Burton, V. S. (2021) · Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency · doi:10.1177/0022427820953202 · Cited by 86 · see citing works
Clark, V. A. (2015) · Journal of Experimental Criminology · doi:10.1007/s11292-014-9216-5 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
School Punishment, Deterrence, and Race: A Partial Test of Defiance Theory
Pesta, R. (2022) · Crime & Delinquency · doi:10.1177/00111287211005396 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
Lea, C. H., Salazar, M. E., Huerta, A. H., Sardesai, T., & Edwards, K. T. (2025) · Theory Into Practice · doi:10.1080/00405841.2025.2503301 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
The Rise of the Carceral State: Foundations and Contours of a Rapidly Changing Criminal Legal System
Wakefield, S., & Turney, K. (2025) · RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · doi:10.7758/rsf.2025.11.3.04 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Hirschfield, P. J.
- Affiliations
- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
- Corresponding author
- Hirschfield, Paul J.
- Venue
- Theoretical Criminology
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2008-02
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 79-101
- ISSN
- 1362-4806 (ISSN-L)
- 1461-7439
- OpenAlex
- W2033220942
- Cited by
- 590
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 43 · 2021: 50 · 2020: 80 · 2019: 46 · 2018: 50 · 2017: 37 · 2016: 36 · 2015: 34 · 2014: 35 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 52.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Theoretical Criminology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Education Discipline and Inequality
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
- Social Sciences › Law › Criminal Justice and Penology
- Keywords
- student discipline, school discipline policy, crime control, incarceration, mass unemployment, fiscal crisis, students of color, punishment in schools, school exclusion
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
