Examining the Relation Between Critical Pedagogy and Youth Incarceration

• In Event: Holding Kids Captive and Imprisoning Education: Abolitionist Research on Youth Incarceration and Carceral Schooling

Abstract

Context

Though research points to the idea that “rehabilitation happens in the context of relationships” (Bernstein, 2014), the design of the juvenile justice system obstructs the flourishing of relationships by separating adolescents from family, community, and friends. Broader research points to an instrumental web of actors and systems in the support and development of youth (Bronfenbrenner, 1973; Bernstein, 2014).

This paper considers students’ educational experiences in LA County’s juvenile probation camps. Data was collected by researchers through classroom observations and individual interviews with students, staff, and educators involved in curriculum creation. Multiple actors involved in the creation of camp curriculum highlighted their intention to create a culturally relevant curriculum and to instill a critical pedagogy. Through that lens, and considering more broadly the implications of education within incarceration, this paper interrogates the effect of carceral structures on incarcerated youth and considers the implications for abolition.

Framework and Findings

This paper posits incarceration as inherently violent, as the forceful separation from home community (i.e. the context of social existence) and as restriction of freedom. Though camps were designed as rehabilitative spaces that are less restrictive than juvenile halls, they retain the essence of incarceration. The subject-child-student-prisoner is imprisoned in a disorienting, de-temporalized state (Freire, 1974), simultaneously fleeting and seemingly permanent—trapped in amber. The structures of incarceration, including the ephemeral “camp sentence,” create conditions adverse to dialogical relationships, inhibiting relational and dialogical critical education (Freire, 1970). As liberatory education is intended to offer the oppressed the opportunity to understand their antagonistic contradiction to the oppressor (Freire, 1970), it is counter-intuitive for camps to support a truly critical pedagogy. This contradiction also presents an obstacle for student-staff relationships.

Still, students “do resilience” (Nicolazzo, 2016). They performed what was described as a ‘vacation mentality,’ a productive orientation towards the distressing reality of incarceration and the seeming impossibility of liberation. This paper also samples Marx’s theory of the worker’s alienation from their labor (Marx, 1844) to explore the way carceral structures dispossess students from learning, relationships, and communities.

Significance

Liberatory education must happen between comrades, co-learners in the search to name the world around them (Freire, 1970), where the teacher also gains a heightened awareness of "the contrast between the culture and society he represents and the culture and society represented by his pupils, and conscious of his obligation to accelerate and regulate the child’s formation in conformity with the former and in conflict with the latter” (Gramsci, 1972). Logically, carceral structures inhibit dialogic and allied relationship building, as these contain the seeds of subversion. This is evident in how relationships emerge in the camp context.

The critical subject will regard any agent or institution infringing on freedom as antagonistic. This paper thus rejects critical pedagogy as a coherent part of jail school curriculum, as the interests of the carceral institution (i.e. to imprison) are incompatible with those of liberatory education (i.e. to free). When conditions have changed —and the student identifies the material source of their oppression — abolition is necessary.

Author

• Conor Sasner, First Focus on Children