What is the school-to-prison pipeline? As the name suggests, this term refers to the disturbing trend in which at-risk youth are pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system. This trend desperately needs reversing, as many students pushed into the pipeline are never able to escape it.

Are we in danger of losing a generation of children from the opioid crisis

Our family lives on a picturesque island off the coast of Maine. Yet, painkillers prescribed by physicians resulting in opioid addiction and the ready availability of heroin have damaged the lives of many families in our extended social network – children of our friends, friends of our friends, work colleagues of our friends, families of our children’s friends, and acquaintances in our community.

This commentary originally appeared as an op-ed in the Mount Desert Islander. 

Historically, research has repeatedly shown that juvenile justice interventions often result in outcomes that are the opposite of what was expected or intended. For example, most people would agree that youth who commit crimes need more structure and self-discipline in their lives. This perspective led to the proliferation of military style boot camps in the 1990s designed to reduce delinquent behavior. While this intervention would seem, at face value, to be harmless and well suited for teaching teens to be more responsible, subsequent evaluations showed strikingly different results. That is, boot camp interventions actually increased youth antisocial behavior problems and did so at considerable financial cost.  

This is a true story. The name has been changed.

Little T had minor scrapes with authorities throughout his adolescence—some alcohol and drug-related, others more aggressive in nature. Toward the end of his junior year, Little T and two of his classmates broke into their high school in the middle of the night. The damage they racked was so extensive that school administrators were forced to broadcast a 5 am emergency cancellation of school to all students and personnel. The school was closed for 2 days for cleanup, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars, disrupting the education of hundreds of students, and inconveniencing hundreds of families.