Youth who have served time in the juvenile justice system face a double punishment: not only do they serve their sentence, but they are also less likely to graduate from high school or go to college because of that sentence. Each year in the US, approximately 100,000 young people are released from private, state, and locally-run juvenile correctional facilities, group homes, or, in some cases, adult prisons and jails. This population faces numerous obstacles when trying to reenroll in school, despite the fact that reenrolling in school is critical for helping them get back on track. In order to provide an equal opportunity for formerly incarcerated youth to succeed, schools and the juvenile justice system should work together to ease a student’s transition back into school; specifically, a student’s home school should not be permitted to deny them the opportunity to reenroll.
Two-thirds of youth don’t attend school after being released from the justice system. Many have been suspended or expelled from school because of their crime, while others have already dropped out. Formerly incarcerated young people face many barriers to education, which include receiving a substandard education while incarcerated, delays in transferring education records from the detention center, and difficulties with the reenrollment process. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that many of these young people also live in poverty, have been victims of child abuse or neglect, may already be behind in school, and/or live in bad neighborhoods. Furthermore, one-third of youth who have experience with the juvenile justice system need or already receive special education, yet the obstacles they face compromise their legal right to a “free and appropriate public education.”
Perhaps the biggest push-out factor is that the student’s original school may simply refuse to reenroll them. A school cannot legally refuse to enroll a student (unless the student has been expelled from that school), but many students are pushed out in a phenomenon that the Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute calls “Kept Out.” Hypothetically, a student’s arrest record is confidential and shouldn’t be a factor in reenrollment, but many arrests occur on school property, and a glance at a student’s transcript will reveal that the student has received education in a juvenile facility, as will any interaction with an assigned probation officer. The Institute documented multiple instances of a group of Los Angeles students being kept out of their home school—not for public safety concerns, but for a more insidious reason: fear that the students will lower the school’s test scores (which are tied to school funding mechanisms and teacher salaries).
Students and their families often don’t know their rights regarding reenrollment and there are few resources to help with their transition back into public schools. According to a 2015 Survey from the Council of State Governments, nearly half of states have not tasked a single agency with overseeing a youth’s transition out of the juvenile justice system and into school, meaning that the student must find the resources on his/her own to do so. One-third of states automatically enroll students in an alternative school instead, depriving students of consistency and their social network. More importantly, many alternative schools don’t meet the same accountability or curricular standards as traditional public schools and are often located in less safe neighborhoods. The exact educational outcomes for formerly incarcerated youth are unclear; less than half of states have tracked these outcomes so far.
Student Outcome Data Tracking
What is clear is that incarceration has a lasting negative impact on youth, even after they have been released. Research from Chicago, a representative urban city, finds that the high school dropout rate for arrested youth is 73 percent, versus 51 percent for peers who are from similar socioeconomic backgrounds but have never been incarcerated. The research also finds a college enrollment gap for four-year colleges between the two groups. Incarceration has many lingering effects that increase a student’s chance of dropping out, including stigma from teachers and peers as well as lowered expectations. When a student cannot reenroll in his/her home school, this creates a barrier to which the easiest response from a troubled child may be to just drop out.
To be sure, school districts may refuse to reenroll a student out of concern for the safety of other students. However, research shows that “reenrolling in school and academic achievement are associated with lower rates of recidivism and better adult outcomes,” meaning that allowing a student to reenroll actually reduces that student’s chances of being arrested again.
In the modern US economy, a high school diploma is the bare minimum for achieving success in the market, yet the juvenile justice system and public schools create many barriers for formerly incarcerated youth to graduate from high school. A first step to easing a student’s transition out of the juvenile justice system and back into the community is to ensure that public schools do not refuse to reenroll a student who has already served his/her time. In the long term, public schools and the juvenile justice system ought to work together to provide wraparound services so that formerly incarcerated youth can easily transition back into their school and community. Young people deserve a second chance and an equal opportunity to succeed in high school and beyond.
Krista O’Connell is a Master of Public Policy candidate and research assistant at Georgetown University where she focuses on education and social policy. She previously worked with immigrant youth and on the GradNation campaign to increase the national high school graduation rate.
I appreciate the research that went into this article and the excellent points made therein. I agree that public schools and the justice system need to work closely together and form a liaison service to help these kids to not get further educationally disadvantaged. From points made in your article, I imagine the recidivism rates for these kids, as they move into adulthood, could also be reduced by such a service. Thank you for shedding light on an important issue.