On Tha Outside Looking In: Formerly Incarcerated Black Male School-Leavers and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: Grown Folks’ Talk: Black Men and Women on Education, Incarceration, and Testing

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives

This paper examines the life experiences of Black males who left school before graduating and who, later in life, found themselves incarcerated for drug-related offenses. With this focus, the objectives of this paper are to explore the schooling and socio-political context that led to these men’s incarcerations. Importantly, with this life history approach, the paper seeks to humanize and validate the experiences of these men rather than construct them according to deficit or pathology models.

This paper is informed by frameworks that explore school non-completion as a complex process of push and pull experiences (Bradley & Renzuli, L, 2011). By “push,” we refer to unstable home environment, traumatic events, and other environmental toxins. By “pull” experiences, we refer to the demands to work and earn money during global economic change. Related, this paper frames this issue within literature on school dropout/pushout, Black political-economy, and prison industrial complex as related to Black males (e.g., Stearns & Glennie, 2006).

Methods and Data Sources

Data collection took place through qualitative life history interviews (Goodman & Sikes, 2001) in 2010 as part of a larger study that retrospectively examined the life experiences of school non-completers and engaged them in a process of developing dropout prevention strategies. The research participants were nine adult men, all of whom came of age in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the interviews, which ranged from 1 – 2 ½ hours, each participant recounted their home lives, educational experiences, and the issues and situations that led to their leaving school.

Results and Significance

Key themes that emerged include family instability, gang involvement, and the need to survive. The participants candidly discussed the role that street life, the crack-cocaine epidemic of the late 1970s and 1980s, addictive habits, and other events played in their decision to leave school and how these same events eventually led to their incarceration. Through these narratives, the paper theorizes early connections between school non-completion and incarceration. Attending to the stories of the nine men, the paper pursues critical questions related to what opportunities were and were not available throughout their respective dropout/pushout processes. The study found that, as boys, many of the men were socially and economically dispossessed. Their dispossession was exacerbated by the 1980s "culture wars" that framed Black inner-city men as “super-predators” and by the ongoing “war on drugs.” Collectively, de-industrialization, cultural marginalization, and New Right penal policies rendered these Black men as disposable and unsalvageable (Waldinger & Lichter, 2003).

The significance of these retrospective narratives is that they explore the link between school-leaving and incarceration in a pre and emergent school-to-prison pipeline U.S. urban society. In this way, the paper critically examines not the current functioning but the prior creation of the school-to-prison pipeline as a signal of the disposability of Black males. The school-to-prison pipeline, the paper argues, extends this notion of disposability to Black boys, further compounding the myriad of educational and other challenges that impede Black boys’ life prospects in the U.S.

Author

• Decoteau J. Irby, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee