Restoring Harm: A Critical Examination of Punishment and Care

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: The Politics of Punishment and Care

Abstract

Alternatives to school discipline, like Restorative Justice (RJ), help mitigate the overrepresentation of black children in discipline and bring about a holistic culture to punishment in schools. I examine school security officers (SSOs) and RJ workers’ perceptions of discipline at an urban high school. SSOs claim that RJ represents an outsider model of discipline, while RJ workers perceive discipline as a cultural mismatch between white teachers and black children. How do these workers make sense of their contradictory positions? What do they reveal about schooling? This paper argues that framing discipline as a liberal project of restoration obscures the ways American schools reproduce dehumanization and foreclose the possibility of black children escaping the violence of a police state.

Author

• Rekia Gina Jibrin, University of California - Berkeley