Collateral consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline: Adolescent substance use and developmental risk

The adolescent health consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline remain underexplored. We test whether initiating components of the school-to-prison pipeline-suspensions, expulsions, and school policing-are associated with higher school-average levels of student substance use, depressed feelings, and developmental risk in the following year.

We linked 2003-2014 data from the California Healthy Kids Survey and the Civil Rights Data Collection from over 4,800 schools and 4,950,000 students. With lagged multi-level models, we estimated relationships between the school prevalence of total discipline, out-of-school discipline, and police-involved discipline, and standardized school-average levels of 6 substance use measures and 8 measures of developmental risk, respectively.

The prevalence of school discipline predicted subsequent school-mean substance use and developmental risk. A one-unit higher prevalence of total discipline predicted higher school levels (in standard deviations) of binge drinking alcohol (0.14, 95% CI: 0.11, 0.17), drinking alcohol (0.15, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.18), smoking tobacco (0.09, 95% CI: 0.06, 0.12), using cannabis (0.16, 95% CI: 0.14, 0.19), using other drugs (0.17, 95% CI: 0.14, 0.21), and violence/harassment (0.16, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.2). Total discipline predicted lower levels of reported community support (-0.07, 95% CI: -0.1, -0.05), feeling safe in school (-0.12, 95% CI: -0.16, -0.09), and school support (-0.16, 95% CI: -0.19, -0.12). Associations were greater in magnitude for more severe out-of-school discipline. Findings were inconsistent for police-involved discipline.

Exclusionary school discipline and school policing-core elements of the school-to-prison pipeline-are previously unidentified population predictors of adolescent substance use and developmental risk.