Adding Insult to Injury: Arrests Reduce Attendance through Institutional Mechanisms

Abstract

Students across the United States experience high levels of contact with the police. To clarify the causal relationships of this contact with educational outcomes and the mechanisms by which such relationships arise, we estimate the effects of arrest on student engagement with school using daily attendance data. Recently arrested students missed significantly more school than did students who would be arrested later in the school year. The effects of arrest on attendance can be attributed to suspensions and court appearances; we found little evidence of changes in absences due to health or skipping school. These results suggest that institutional, not student centric, mechanisms drive the relationship between arrest and educational outcomes. Were it not for institutional channels, particularly exclusionary discipline, arrested students would likely remain more engaged in school. Estimates are similar for white and black students, but black students are differentially affected because they are arrested at higher rates.

Student absenteeism and the role of police encounters

“…One policy that might have benefits on multiple fronts would be the recognition of absences due to police contact as an excused absence. Some school districts will excuse absences due to court appearances (Mark, Geller & Engberg, 2022), due, presumably, to the scheduling conflict created by involvement with another public institution. While police contact outside of school only creates a scheduling conflict if the encounter occurs on the student's way to school, associated health challenges are well documented, and may lead a student to miss school but not rise to the level of requiring a doctor's visit (Khan, 2019), another avenue for an excused absence.…”

“…Put simply, if young people are formally processed and made to spend time in family court, juvenile detention, or meetings with a probation officer, these commitments may limit their ability to attend school. In addition, to the extent that police contact stems from in‐school behavior, students may be punished with suspension as well as justice system involvement (Mark et al., 2022), disconnecting them further. However, police contact, including the vast majority of police encounters that do not lead to formal processing (Davis, Whyde et al., 2018; Geller, 2021) may also limit young people's ability to attend school in other ways.…”

“…They therefore hypothesized that institutional responses and punitive “zero tolerance” policies resulted in increased risk of dropout. Mark, Geller and Engberg (2022) find some evidence for institutional mechanisms: using daily administrative data from a mid‐sized city, they identify effects of arrest on subsequent attendance, driven largely by in‐school arrests and ensuing suspensions, potentially for related behavior. Gottlieb and Wilson (2019) identified reductions in GPA associated with both personal and vicarious contact with the police.…”

“…The current study builds on this research in several ways. Conceptually, the literature on the school to prison pipeline is largely siloed: research examines in‐school practices that contribute to the children's involvement in the justice system (Henning, 2021; Owens, 2017; Weisburst, 2019), or focuses on how actors in the juvenile and criminal justice systems affect children's educational outcomes (Bacher‐Hicks & de la Campa, 2020; Kirk & Sampson, 2013; Legewie & Fagan, 2019), but leaves the role of schools in mitigating these effects for future research (though see Gottlieb & Wilson, 2019; Mark et al., 2022). Our work links these two literatures by seeking to disentangle the mechanisms that might lead to increases in absenteeism, decomposing student reports of absenteeism into health‐related and truancy‐related absences, and separately examining chronic absenteeism.…”

“…We also extend existing research on police contact and educational outcomes through our empirical approach. Most research in this area has measured police exposure using arrest as the contact of interest (Kirk & Sampson, 2013; Mark et al., 2022), or uses environmental markers such as changes to precinct leadership (Bacher‐Hicks & de la Campa, 2020), spatially proximate police violence (Ang, 2020), designation as an impact zone (Legewie & Fagan, 2019), or local increases in immigration enforcement (Sattin‐Bajaj & Kirksey, 2019). By contrast, we used data that surveyed young people directly about their experiences with the police.…”