#BlackLivesMatter: Rethinking Urban Education in the Age of Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Social Justice Comes to Secondary English Teacher Preparation: Historicizing, Understanding, Implementing, and Assessing Standard VI

Abstract

Objectives
In the last decades, the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by rapid growth in the prison and jail populations. By 2001, one in six Black men had been incarcerated and, by the close of 2013, Black and Latino inmates comprised almost 60% of the nation’s prison population—almost equivalent to school suspension rates.

This paper inquires into the ways in which U.S. schools—particularly in the conceptual and ideological space of the Black Lives Matter Movement—have kept pace with U.S. prisons and jails in producing a new social group of outcast citizens who are joined by their shared experience of incarceration/detention, crime/rule violation, poverty, racial minority status, and school failure. The paper asks: what is the relationship between men and women trapped in our penal institutions and the boys and girls pushed out of our schools? How does limited access to the social mobility available to the mainstream influence lifelong trajectories that might interrupt learning and life? How are social and economic disadvantages, crystallizing in penal confinement, sustained and transmitted from the classroom to the jail cell?

Theoretical Framework
Alexander’s (2010) understanding of mass incarceration as a system of social control governed by radicalized stratification—a redesigned racial caste system reminiscent of chattel slavery and Jim Crow—frames this paper. Mass incarceration "refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control” less valued bodies (p. 13). Racial prejudice and its lingering effects pervade the institutional apparatuses that drive sociality and also facilitate the outcomes of caste induction and status assignments “as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization” (p. 12). This system locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind figurative bars that gain complex and enduring meanings in educational settings such as schools.

Methods and Data Sources
Using archival research approaches and drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data, this paper seeks to shed new light on a system of profound institutionalized inequality that too easily substitutes education for incarceration. It seeks to broaden conversation on urban education in ways that extend social justice and social equity work past topics of race and class disadvantage in schools. By examining urban education in the age of mass incarceration, this paper points to a broader view of schools framed around questions of systemic intersectionalities—the complex institutionalized webbings interacting simultaneously at multiple levels, contributing to systemic injustice and social inequality.

Results and Significance
This paper calls for new types of analyses/methodologies that reframe topics of social justice in urban schooling as critical inquiry designed to peer into transinstitutional sites of discovery, like the space between schools and prisons. The session will include discussions of collaborative methodologies targeted at topical/systemic intersectional analyses, and topics on cross-disciplinarity, ways to research schools by researching prisons (and vice versa), and how educational research aimed at ending mass incarceration might also interrupt other forms of educational inequity.

Author

• David E. Kirkland, New York University