Why They Wouldn't Stop Suspending Kids: The Logics of Carcerality and Student Discipline

• In Event: Uncovering Carcerality in the Educational Pipeline

Abstract

Objectives. Despite evidence of racial and gender disproportionality, access to “alternative means of correction”, and acknowledgment of its ineffectiveness, the principals at Californiatown High School (CHS) regularly suspended Latino students. This paper explores the carceral logics that governed the discipline practices of seven school adults and illustrates how deeply imbedded the logics of carcerality are within schooling.

Theoretical framework. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA) are both theory and method. CRSA (Velez and Solorzano, 2017) was used to analyze and explain the norms governing spatial arrangements or relationships between students, principals, staff while CDA (Fairclough, 1998) did the work of “de-mystifying ideologies and power through the systematic and retroductable investigation of semiotic data (written, spoken or visual),” including transcripts of observations and written documents (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p.3).

Methods. This ethnographic case study includes six high school administrators and one school resource officer who I shadowed during discipline conversations for three school years. I observed, took field notes, and audio recorded the participants in conversations with and about student discipline. I conducted semi-structured interviews with them each year. The data were analyzed using CDA and CRSA to identify the logics, ideologies, and beliefs governing student discipline practices.

Data sources. The data comes from participant interviews, observational field notes and discipline artifacts, including teacher referrals, police contact logs, student handbooks, district discipline matrices, photographs, maps of disciplinary and campus spaces, and de-identified detention, suspension, and expulsion data.

Findings. The data reveal similarities between the carceral practices and beliefs common to penal institutions and school adults’ beliefs about discipline. CHS was governed by a belief that punishment was a prerequisite for learning desired behavior and unlearning unwanted misbehavior. In addition to carceral beliefs, carceral practices similar to penal institutions organized the student discipline process. Like prisoners, students were punished by social separation from their peers and removal from social opportunities (the classroom, breaks with their peers). As Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish, the students’ punishments were visible--banishment to the principal’s office, the student’s physical absence from class after a removal, expulsion from the school’s premises--and served to warn others against misbehavior (1977). However, some participants resisted engaging in carceral practices. This paper also describes their struggle, agency and response to carceral ideologies.

Scholarly significance. This study, its findings and recommendations raise important questions for educators, educational leaders, and the faculty who prepare them about discourse, ideologies and the psychic violence governing the discipline of minoritized students.

Author

• Mariama Gray, California State University - East Bay