School suspensions can trigger lifetime drug abuse for minority students

The lesson, they said, was that “schools should also view exclusionary discipline as only a last resort.”

If an expelled student is left to fend on his own in “unstructured routine activities such as hanging out in arenas like street corners or malls without adult supervision, the likelihood that [such youths] will engage in inappropriate behaviors increases,“ the study said.

“Our results revealed that school intervention appears to be an important predictor of adolescent drug use among female and minority subjects, and police arrest leads to drug use among females only.”

The study was co-authored by Beidi Dong, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University; and Marvin D. Krohn, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida.

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