Preventing the School-to-Prison Pipeline is the first book written to provide school psychologists and other K-12 mental health professionals with knowledge and strategies intended to help them disrupt the criminalization of historically oppressed learners in today’s classrooms. A phenomenon of the United States’ intersecting education and criminal justice systems, the school-to-prison pipeline is the process by which school staff punish already marginalized or at-risk students—primarily Black youth—in ways that enable a lifetime of targeting by police, court, and carceral operations. Exploring the unmet needs of students with mental, emotional, and behavioral health disorders, the effects of implicit and explicit bias, adverse school and court policies, and other biopsychosocial factors, this powerful book offers a preventative, public-health approach to providing clinical care to vulnerable students without compromising school safety. School psychologists, counselors, and social workers will come away with urgent and actionable insights into advocacy, collaboration, preventive interventions, alternative discipline measures in schools, and more.

Charles Bartholomew is a certified school psychologist and a licensed psychologist in the State of Georgia, USA.