Jeremy Epstein & Lillian Liang Project for UCLA UP206A - Intro to GIS & Spatial Data Science
Oil pipelines cut through Southern California’s landscape, materializing our economy’s reliance on ecological extraction and its attendant social costs. The“school-to-prison pipeline” (STPP) is a system of educational policies, social attitudes, and investment in policing that systematically pushes Black and brown students out of schools and into the criminal justice system (Skiba, Arredondo, Williams, 2014, pp547-548). Students who do not finish high school are more than eight times more likely to be incarcerated than students who graduate (Skiba et al., 2014, 554).
The metaphor of the pipeline evokes the disruptive history of policing in schools, a practice that can be traced from the late 1940s in LA county, when the LAPD created a security unit “under the pretense of protecting school property after integration” (We Came to Learn: A Call to Action for Police-Free Schools, p17), through the rise of "zero tolerance" policies in the 1990s (Heitzeg, 2009, pp1, 8) and the growing number of school-based arrests in the present day (Skiba, et. al. 2014, p547). Just as the sprawling industrial infrastructure dedicated to moving oil causes environmental destruction in the areas that host it, so too does the social infrastructure of surveillance and discipline cause diffuse damages to the social and economic wellbeing of communities disproportionately affected by mass incarceration.
Mass incarceration in the United States is extractive. Former students finding themselves in prison often work in myriad jobs and industries for slavery wages, benefiting private and state actors at the expense of their communities, which are deprived of the economic and social benefits of their labor (Sawyer, Prison Policy Iniative, 2017).
In mapping school expulsions and oil spills in LA County, we hope to explore how extraction occurs across different geographies of Los Angeles, on both an environmental and social level. Such spatial understandings will be crucial to "reversing the flow" of extraction that causes so much pain (Wald and Losen, 2003, p 14).
Our expulsion data is taken from California’s Department of Education and currently covers 2019-2020, and our oil spill data is from the federal Department of Transportation, covering 2010-present. We hope to incorporate other STTP and oil infrastructure data including LAPD arrest data, school school police budgets, active and improperly capped wells, as well as the paths of literal pipelines.
