Lorena Wright

February 1, 2016
Composition II
Brian Ray

Rhetorical Analysis School to Prison Pipeline Ted Talk

The United States is well known for having a high incarceration rate especially of
POC, or people of color. So much so that education has a very heavy divide between
communities of high and low income. Alice Goffman in the Ted Talk How we're
priming some kids for college and others for prison through the institutionalized
racist judicial system put into place. Goffman talks about how POC, low income
communities are set up from the time the adolescences starts school. Goffman also talks
about how, from a young age, POC children are taught how to react to different situations
regarding law authorities. There is a school to prison pipeline system in which
incarceration is high and that there is a very low morality of pursuing a higher education
vs. a very high surviving to live state of mind.
Goffman talks about her time spent living in a POC dominated, low-income
community and how she sees elementary school aged children playing a game called
chase in which one child acts as an officer and the other is to run. She goes further into
detail on how the child playing the cop would act with excessive aggressive force to the
other child, even when that other child is lying on the ground pretending to be
handcuffed. Children, from elementary age are already self aware of the judicial and

authoritative system. They go so far as to make a game out of it. Children, going to
school, are already aware of the reality that so many of their people in their situations are
targets for incarceration. Goffman also goes into how she counted how many times a
police officer came to her neighborhood, interacted aggressively, or used excess force in
arresting one individual.
Goffman, living on 18 months, encountered at least one of those every single day
witnessing POC from different ages being dragged, beaten, and detained by police
officers. The youngest being an 11 year old, he was detained because he pushed another
child during recess at school. The child was detained and charged with assault battery.
Goffman describes that if it were in the neighborhood that she grew up in, where it was
mainly white and high income that the small altercation would have been labeled just a
mere schoolyard fight and would have immediately ended there as that. Goffmans
story is a prime example of the school-to-prison pipeline system, showing that the
policies and practices of the authoritative push of the United States schoolchildren,
especially low income, POCs, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice
systems.
Schools usually enforcing this rule use the excuse of zero tolerance. It is a
schools excuse way of not taking bad behavior but also an excuse to get rid of
problematic children. Goffman rhetorically asks in her video why are [they] offering
only handcuffs and jail time? to children for only minor infractions. She goes on to
explain the school-to-prison system and how it is funneling POC children down a path to
prison or jail time by removing any possibility to further education or even a small job.
Further in detail she explains that these people of color have obstacles purposely placed

in order to attempt to keep them from succeeding and pursuing high education or job
opportunities while also attempting to keeping them in a permanent place of low-income,
less privileged communities. The system puts in place a low moral of wanting to even
pursue better opportunities, ingraining a mindset in which it is better to survive than
waste time on an unfair system with almost impossible obstacles. Other communities
however, mainly majority white communities, are full of more privileges and a higher
moral in pursuing high opportunities. The criminal justice system is almost compared to
a modern day Jim Crow system for young people of color.The criminal justice system is
put in place in people of color communities were not put in place for the publics safety,
but to make arrest counts.
Alice Goffman, a privileged white, sociologist woman, makes this speech and
makes these issues aware to other white privileged people for only one reason, because
she knows she will be listened to. Most people would call it white rescue, or in other
words, a white person speaking on POC issues. While she is being a white rescuer, she
makes this aware in her speech that she knows what she is doing. Knowing that if she
speaks on the issues of young people of color being sent to prison, delaying their
education, that she will be heard. That people will stop and think about what she
addressing. She goes so far as to even make aware to other white people their complaints
on POC addressing those very same issues but being seen as just complaining or
talking about the same things an same problems over and over again.