The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools administrative records linked to adult arrest and incarceration records

North Carolina, US; middle-school students subsequently followed into adulthood.

Two identification strategies for the same question. The primary one exploits a large and sudden school-attendance-boundary change that reassigned students to schools with different disciplinary regimes, so which school a child attended is driven by where a line was drawn rather than by the child's behaviour. The secondary design uses principal switches, which change a school's discipline strictness while holding the student body fixed. Outcomes are administrative arrest and incarceration records, not self-report. Published in American Economic Journal Economic Policy after circulating as NBER working paper 26257.

Attending a school with higher suspension rates has significant negative long-term effects. Students at strict-discipline schools are 15-20 percent more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults. Negative impacts on educational attainment are particularly pronounced for males and for students of colour. The authors conclude that early censure of school misbehaviour causally increases adult crime.

Low. The variation comes from a boundary redraw and from principal turnover, neither of which is chosen by families; this is exactly the kind of design the archive's premise demands before accepting a claim about a school practice.

The most credibly identified estimate of the cost of strict exclusionary discipline to the excluded student. Consistent in direction with Lacoe & Steinberg's student-fixed-effects and IV estimates in Philadelphia and with Craig & Martin's New York City reform study, but no direct replication of the boundary design exists.