Laura Vernikoff is assistant professor of special education at Touro College Graduate School of Education.

• 1 – Students Whom Schools Do Not Fit: The Brief History of Common Schooling in the United States2 – The School-to-Prison Pipeline and Dis/ability Today3 – Special Education and the School-to-Prison Pipeline in New York City: An Overview4 – Young People Talk About and Around Special Educators and Peers with IEPs5 – Moving From the General to the Particular and Back: Generalizability and Variability in the School-to-Prison Pipeline6 – Diverting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The so-called school-to-prison pipeline has been the focus of numerous articles, books, and opinion papers for the last several decades. Most previous discussions of this phenomenon have concentrated on the question of why so many minority students eventually wind up being incarcerated at much greater levels than majority (white) students. Vernikoff builds on this body of research by looking at the incarceration likelihood of students with disabilities who eventually become entangled with the American judicial system. She posits that there might be risky school practices that increase the probability that students wind up in prisons or jails and that students’ actions and behaviors are insufficient to explain the outcomes many special education students experience… Vernikoff uses student interviews and substantial data on multiple school variables to explain what might contribute to the probability that any given student will come into contact with the criminal justice system. The study yields some very surprising results. Recommended. General readers, graduate students, faculty, and professionals.