Abstract
Education in America is glorified as the ultimate equalizer, but is falling devastatingly short of this ideal. Rather than helping students exercise social mobility, the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration have molded schools into institutions of confinement that thwart such vertical movement. Racial and socioeconomic disparities lie at the heart of the problem: low-income students of color are less likely to experience schools as institutions of social mobility and are more likely to experience them as systems of confinement. Moreover, the school-to-prison pipeline increases the likelihood that vulnerable American youth–particularly low-income students of color–will forfeit certain civil rights and a sense of personal security once they reach adulthood.