Racial Bias in School Discipline and Police Contact: Evidence from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Social Development (ABCD-SD) Study

Objective: Black youth are disproportionately exposed to school exclusionary discipline. We examined the impact of race on age at the onset of school disciplinary actions and police contact, and the rate of receiving increasingly severe disciplinary actions. Method: Youth ages 10 to 15 years old (N = 2,042) and their caregivers participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Social Development (ABCD-SD) study reported on the occurrence and timing of disciplinary events, the youth’s demographics, delinquency, and their neighborhood conditions. Experiences of exclusionary discipline were analyzed using Cox proportional hazard models. Results: Black youth reported significantly higher rates of almost all disciplinary events compared to White youth. In Cox models, Black youth experienced a higher risk of exclusionary discipline and police contact (hazard ratios ranged from 2.37 [school detention] to 5.28 [expelled]), even after adjusting for sex, delinquency, neighborhood conditions, and the interaction between race and sex. Black youth who received detention and suspension were at higher risk for additional, more severe school discipline than White youth. Conclusion: Consistent with a racial bias in exclusionary discipline practices and policing, Black youth, particularly Black males, were at a higher risk for experiencing almost all disciplinary outcomes and at younger ages than White youth, after controlling for self-reported delinquency, sex, and neighborhood factors. Compared to White students, school detention and suspension status predicted increasingly severe school discipline outcomes for Black students, suggesting racial disparities in how the severity of school discipline escalates over time.