Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Implications of Removing Police from Schools for Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System, United States, 2003-2018 (ICPSR 39189)
Version Date: Nov 20, 2024 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Benjamin W. Fisher, University of Wisconsin-Madison
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR39189.v1
Version V1
Summary View help for Summary
Momentum toward removing school-based law enforcement (SBLE) has increased since the summer of 2020. This change has occurred due to issues of equity with the hope that removing SBLE will reduce existing racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system. SBLE refers to sworn law enforcement stationed in schools on either a part- or full-time basis. Some SBLE are known as school resource officers, who often receive special training in juvenile law and interacting with students in schools, although this varies from state to state. Other SBLE do not receive any special training in working with young people.
Although the move toward removing SBLE may have intuitive appeal to some school districts, no empirical evidence exists regarding what happens to students' frequency of contact with the criminal justice system after schools remove SBLE. Similarly, current research has not examined the impacts on the attendant racial and ethnic disparities.
All the data used in this study are secondary data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), including both the publicly available Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and the restricted-use School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS). All data cleaning, manipulation, and analysis will be done using syntax files in Stata. This study is a collection of these three Stata .do syntax files.
This study compared changes in three measures of criminal justice contact (i.e., arrests, referrals to law enforcement, and crimes reported to police) in schools that removed SBLE relative to the changes in schools that did not remove SBLE. The study examined within-school racial and ethnic differences in rates of arrest and referrals to law enforcement, and between-school differences in all three measures of criminal justice system contact by school racial composition.
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Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes
- A license to access the restricted-use School Survey on Crime and Safety can be obtained by following the steps outlined via the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) web site.
Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose
The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of removing school-based law enforcement (SBLE) on racial and ethnic disparities in criminal justice system contact. This study sought to address the following research questions.
- How does removing SBLE relate to changes in school-based arrest rates, referrals to law enforcement, and reporting crimes to police?
- How do these relationships differ by school racial and ethnic composition?
- How do these relationships differ by student race and ethnicity?
Study Design View help for Study Design
Each of the two data sources (Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS)) were used to construct a two-wave longitudinal dataset that would identify schools that removed or did not remove school-based law enforcement (SBLE). It was not feasible and potentially unethical to do a true experimental design, the current study used a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design. A difference-in-differences design compares the difference between pre- and post-intervention measures (difference one) between treatment and comparison units (difference two). In this study, the treatment units were schools that removed SBLE. The comparison units were schools that had SBLE at both waves.
One of the methodological shortcomings of difference-in-differences designs, including the study proposed here, is the threat of selection bias--that schools that removed SBLE are fundamentally different from the comparison schools. To address this issue, this study balanced treatment and comparison groups using entropy balancing, ensuring that the treatment and counterfactual groups are as similar as possible on a set of baseline characteristics. This approach was used with both source studies mentioned above.
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Data Source View help for Data Source
School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS): A biennial nationally representative survey of public school administrators designed to provide national-level estimates about school crime, security, discipline, crime prevention programming, and a variety of related constructs. Data comes from the following years: 2003-2004, 2005-2006, 2007-2008, 2009-2010, 2015-2016, and 2017-2018.
Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC): A a federally mandated biennial school-level data collection program of the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. In its most recent iterations, the CRDC includes data from all local education agencies and public schools nationwide on a variety of topics pertaining to students' civil rights, with a focus on differences by race/ethnicity, sex, and ability. Data comes from 2013-2014 and 2017-2018.
Notes
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
ICPSR usually offers files in multiple formats for researchers to be able to access data and documentation in formats that work well within their needs. If you have questions about the accessibility of materials distributed by ICPSR or require further assistance, please visit ICPSR’s Accessibility Center.
This dataset is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), the criminal justice archive within ICPSR. NACJD is primarily sponsored by three agencies within the U.S. Department of Justice: the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.