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& Lange, 1997; Hazen, 2012). Theriot (2009) conducted a study of 28 middle and high schools (13

with officers and 15 without) over three consecutive years to examine the impact of school

resource officers (SROs) on the criminalization of student behavior and found that schools with

SROs had arrest rates for disorderly conduct that were 5 times the rate of schools without an SRO.

He concludes by suggesting that, “As police and school security become more and more

omnipresent at schools, school resource officers, teachers, principals, and all school staff need to be

mindful of the negative consequences associated with punitive disciplinary strategies and criminal

arrests” (Theriot, 2009, p. 286).

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline is a contemporary term used to describe the route between the

education and juvenile justice systems (McCarter, 2017; Rocque & Snellings, 2017; Wald &

Losen, 2003; Wilson, 2014). Though the juvenile crime rate has been declining in the U.S.

(Hockenberry & Puzzanchera, 2017), the rates of school-based offenses, suspensions, and referrals

to law enforcement continue to increase (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2012). The U.S. Department of

Education reports that during the 2013/14 school year, out of the nearly 50 million students

enrolled in public schools, 2.7 million students experienced at least one in-school suspension (ISS),

1.56 million students were suspended for at least 1 day, over a million students were suspended

more than one time, 111,144 students were expelled, 195,219 students were referred to law

enforcement, and 60,170 were arrested for school-based offenses (U.S. Department of Education,

2016). School suspension and expulsion increase a student’s likelihood of falling behind

academically (Losen & Martinez, 2013), achieving a lower grade point average (Morrison,

Anthony, Storino, & Dillon, 2001), and dropping out (Balfanz, Byrnes, & Fox, 2015). A Council

of State Governments’ study of almost a million youth concluded that after controlling for

individual and school-level variables, students who were suspended or expelled were three times

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