Schoolhouse interrogations and confessions: Perspectives from principals and students

The school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) shows how overly punitive responses (e.g., suspension, referral to police) to student misconduct in schools can lead to many adverse outcomes for students, including increased risk of justice system involvement, especially for students of color. However, research has yet to examine the first step in this pipeline: how school principals investigate misconduct by questioning students to determine guilt or innocence before discipline or police involvement. It is imperative to examine this process because principals nationwide are being trained in the same accusatorial, confession-driven interrogation method used by police with adult criminal suspects: the Reid Technique. Concerningly, these guilt-presumptive, accusatorial methods increase the risk of false confession from the innocent. The risk of false confession is heightened among youth and may be exacerbated when questioned at school by principals, where many legal safeguards do not apply. Confessions gathered at school are often shared with police and used as evidence for legal charges. In court, confession evidence overwhelmingly leads to convictions, even for innocent youth, and especially for innocent youth of color. The goal of the proposed dissertation is to examine the practices and potential consequences of principal-led interrogations of guilty and innocent high school students from multiple diverse perspectives, which will provide new theoretical and practical knowledge relevant to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Partnering with the National Association of Secondary School Principals and diverse high schools in Virginia, the proposed dissertation will use a multi-study approach to examine principals’ interrogation practices (Study 1) and students’ confession decisions in principal-led interrogations (Study 2). Specifically, Study 1 is a survey with an embedded experiment of high school principal participants reporting on their interrogation-related practices, developmental knowledge, and training, in addition to their perceptions of student confessions. Study 2 will be a vignette experiment with high school students to determine how the use of coercive interrogation tactics, in conjunction with guilt status, influences students’ decisions to confess when (hypothetically) questioned about misconduct by their principal in the school setting. Combined, this research will address ways to protect guilty students from involuntary (coerced) confessions and innocent students from unreliable (false) confessions that could lead to wrongful discipline or wrongful conviction. Results will be disseminated to both academic and non-academic audiences, including partnering organizations and schools. CA/NCF