THE GEOGRAPHY OF OPPORTUNITY: A COUNTY-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF SCHOOL DISCIPLINARY POLICIES AND CARCERAL EXPANSION IN NORTH CAROLINA

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The concept of the school-to-prison pipeline captures how exclusionary and punitive school disciplinary policies, such as zero-tolerance rules, suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests, can increase the likelihood that students become entangled in the criminal justice system. While existing scholarship has documented broad patterns of exclusionary discipline and racial disproportionality in schools, most studies examine individual-level outcomes and cannot establish whether the structure of local disciplinary environments produces measurable differences in criminal justice involvement at the population level. This study addresses this gap by examining variation in school disciplinary policy and criminal justice outcomes across North Carolina's 100 counties. Using a county-level dataset integrating school disciplinary records, demographic information, incarceration, and arrest data drawn from the CRDC, CCD, and North Carolina administrative sources, I employ Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models to assess whether counties with more punitive disciplinary environments exhibit higher rates of adult incarceration and arrest. I hypothesized that counties with higher rates of zero tolerance adoption and SRO presence would show higher rates of both arrests and incarceration, and that counties with larger Black and Hispanic student populations would show higher rates of zero-tolerance policies and SRO deployments. The analysis reveals that widespread zero-tolerance adoption significantly predicts higher county incarceration rates, though this relationship attenuates when Black and Brown student population is accounted for. However, zero tolerance showed no relationship with arrest rates, SRO presence showed no significant association with either outcome, and racial composition did not predict zero tolerance adoption, SRO presence, or criminal justice outcomes at the county level. These findings provide jurisdictional evidence for the school-to-prison pipeline while suggesting that punitive disciplinary policies operate through long-term cumulative mechanisms rather than immediate criminalization, and that race shapes disciplinary outcomes through within-school implementation rather than county-level policy adoption.</span> <strong>Keywords: </strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">school-to-prison pipeline, zero-tolerance policies, school resource officers, school punitiveness, incarceration, racialized policing</span> <br /><br />