The Dangers of Pipeline Thinking: How the School‐To‐Prison Pipeline Metaphor Squeezes Out Complexity
Abstract
In this essay Ken McGrew critically examines the school‐to‐prison pipeline metaphor and associated literature. The origins and influence of the metaphor are compared with the origins and influence of the competing prison industrial complex concept. Specific weaknesses in the pipeline literature are examined. These problems are described as resulting, in part, from the influence that the pipeline metaphor has on the thinking of those who follow it. McGrew argues that addressing the weaknesses in the literature, abandoning the metaphor, and adopting a more complex theoretical orientation grounded in critical scholarship, will 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.
Number of times cited: 4
- Racheal Pesta, Labeling and the Differential Impact of School Discipline on Negative Life Outcomes: Assessing Ethno-Racial Variation in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, Crime & Delinquency, (001112871774922), (2018).
- Mark Alden Morgan and John Paul Wright, Beyond Black and White, Criminal Justice Review, 10.1177/0734016817721293, 43, 4, (377-398), (2017).
- Michael Rocque, The Prison School: Educational Inequality and School Discipline in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, (1), (2017).
- Nancy Acevedo-Gil, New Juan Crow Education as a Context for Institutional Microaggressions: Latina/o/x Students Maintaining College Aspirations, Urban Education, 10.1177/0042085918805152, (004208591880515), (2018).
