From Retribution to Restoration: An Analysis of Restorative Justice as a Policy Reform Effort to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline in New York City Public Schools

This Independent Study explores and examines restorative justice as a policy reform effort made by schools, specifically in New York City, to address a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline. While it has been found that zero tolerance policies fuel this pipeline through the criminalization of minor infractions, this study argues that using restorative justice policies to manage disciplinary matters within schools creates an avenue to dismantle this pipeline. This occurs through establishing a more inclusive school climate, thus leading to lower levels of punitive discipline and school push out, which ultimately lessens the rate at which youth come into contact with the juvenile/criminal justice system. Utilizing a case study methodology that combines a historical narrative with semi-structured interviews done with providers of restorative justice policies and practices in New York City public schools, this study seeks to understand the impacts of both zero tolerance policies and restorative justice policies on this criminalization of students. When examining the interpretive causal impacts of both sets of policies, this study found support for the theoretical argument in that in New York City, utilizing restorative justice policies and practices to manage disciplinary matters can trigger a series of events that builds a more inclusive school climate, decreases the level of punitive discipline, lessens the rate at which students experience school push out, and ultimately decreases contact with the juvenile/criminal justice system. This study also uncovers several components and impacts of restorative justice policies not found in the literature, as well as evidence of zero tolerance and restorative justice policies being used in conjunction with each other to address conflicts within schools

Flashing a smile: Startle eyeblink modulation by masked affective faces

Affective faces are important stimuli with relevance to healthy and abnormal social and affective information processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of brief presentations of affective faces on attention and emotional state across the time course of stimulus processing, as indexed by startle eyeblink response modulation. Healthy adults were presented with happy, neutral, and disgusted male and female faces that were backward masked by neutral faces. Startle responses were elicited at 300, 800, and 3,500 ms following stimulus presentation to probe early and late startle eyeblink modulation, indicative of attention allocation and emotional state, respectively. Results revealed that, at 300 ms, both face expression and face gender modulated startle eyeblink response, suggesting that more attention was allocated to masked happy compared to disgusted female faces, and masked disgusted compared to neutral male faces. There were no effects of either face expression or face gender on startle modulation at 800 ms. At 3,500 ms, target face expression did not modulate startle, but male faces elicited larger startle responses than female faces, indicative of a more negative emotional state. These findings provide a systematic investigation of attention and emotion modulation by brief affective faces across the time course of stimulus processing.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142906/1/psyp13012_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142906/2/psyp13012.pd