Jacob Israel Chilton

Jacob Israel Chilton currently works as a Curriculum and Training Specialist at the Close Up Foundation. He attended the University of California, Davis, near where he grew up in Northern California, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English. He studied political theory and received a Master of Arts in English Language and Literature from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he lives currently. Before joining Close Up in 2019, Jacob worked as a teacher in Baltimore public schools, a legislative aide in Annapolis, and has been a field director for five campaigns.

Posts by Jacob Israel Chilton:

Criminal Justice

Reversing the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”? Part 3: Examining the Impact of Prison Education

July 01, 2023

In Part 1 of this series, we saw that more severe approaches to school discipline—including “zero-tolerance” policies—have been statistically linked to higher rates of incarceration, especially among Black boys. This is seen as a key contributor to mass incarceration, which Part 2 showed has grown substantially since the final decades of the 20th century. In […]

Criminal Justice

Reversing the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”? Part 2: The Debate Over Mass Incarceration

June 22, 2023

Should We Decarcerate? Since the start of the War on Drugs, the United States has adopted and enforced policies that have led to mass incarceration, with nearly half of all incarcerations due to drug crimes.1 According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the rate of incarceration in the United States outpaces every other nation on earth, […]

Criminal Justice

Reversing the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”? Part 1: Defining the School-to-Prison Pipeline

June 14, 2023

What Do People Mean When They Talk About the School-to-Prison Pipeline? For decades, many researchers who study the public education system have discussed the impact of the “school-to-prison pipeline”: escalating punishments, primarily in “high-poverty, high-minority schools,” intended to deter unwanted student behaviors leading to missed class time, a lost sense of belonging within the school, […]

Criminal Justice

What Do “Defund the Police” and “Police Abolition” Mean? And What Do They Not Mean?

February 22, 2023

Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a call by activists to “defund the police” achieved national attention. Supporters of defunding the police have argued that—at least some of—the billions of dollars spent on policing each year could be better used by investing in educational, recreational, and mental health […]

Current Issues Blog