Ideological Erasure: Black Girls and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: Students and Schools: Race, Class, and Gender Issues

Abstract

Current school disciplinary practices and the punitive policies that undergird them have the damaging effect of criminalizing youth and pushing them toward incarceration; this phenomena is known as the school to prison pipeline. The discourse on the school to prison pipeline focuses on Black and Latino boys; however, this focus has the unintended effect of erasing Black and Latina girls’ experiences with school disciplinary practices and subsequent contact with the juvenile legal system. In this paper, I explore the girls’ stories and experiences with the school to prison pipeline, youth incarceration, and their effects on the girls’ lives.

Author

• Deana Lewis, University of Illinois at Chicago