Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2026

Document Type

Research Paper

Department

Whittier Scholars Program

First Advisor

Margo Kaatz

Second Advisor

Scott Creley

Abstract

This quantitative research report examines how school discipline, attendance patterns, school policing, juvenile justice involvement, and reentry barriers reflect the broader school-to-prison pipeline affecting Latinx youth in Los Angeles. Using publicly available secondary data from the California Department of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles School Police Department, California Department of Justice, Los Angeles County Probation Oversight Commission, and Homeboy Industries, this project analyzes the pipeline as a system rather than as one single event. The findings show that Latinx youth experience educational progress in some areas, such as graduation, but they continue to face higher chronic absenteeism, vulnerability to exclusionary discipline, heavy exposure to school policing, and overrepresentation in juvenile justice spaces. LAUSD has reduced suspensions and instructional days lost, but the data also show that discipline reform alone does not fully address the broader web of inequality that pushes students out of school and into contact with surveillance, probation, detention, and reentry barriers. Grounded in Latino Critical Race Theory and Victor Rios’s youth control complex, this report argues that the school-to-prison pipeline should be understood as a criminological process shaped by race, institutional punishment, school safety policies, and unequal access to support.

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