More Than a Pipeline: Growing Movements to Dismantle the Carceral State

• In Event: School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Push-Out and Mass Incarceration

Abstract

This presenter troubles the metaphor of the school to prison pipeline, asking teachers, researchers, and teacher educators to consider the kinds of community and research collaboration, which is at the heart of this year’s AERA theme. Over the last decade, the School to Prison Pipeline (STPP) metaphor has gained traction as a digestible explanation for the role of education in shaping our carceral state. While the STPP metaphor continues to be powerful for framing conversations and mobilizing communities, the criminalization of Black and Latinx, LGBTQ+ and/or undocumented young people points to the inadequacies of the STPP. In its simplest form, the metaphor suggests that keeping young folks in school will translate into lower incarceration rates. While as a metaphor the STPP galvanizes audiences, it has not led to the kinds of deeper analysis and discussion that we so desperately need. And worse, the “quick fixes” lauded as solutions to the STPP problem are at best maintaining our carceral state and, at worst, expanding and even creating new pathways or pipelines.
The Prison Neighborhood Arts + Education Project (PNAP) offers college-level courses in a maximum-security prison in Illinois and supports formerly incarcerated students and communities impacted by the PIC in Chicago. Our program conceptualizes access to education as a tool to not only support people’s self-determination, but to create networks that challenge the boundaries between inside and outside: to bring more people inside prison to teach, to learn, to witness, and to bring more voices and analysis (and ideally people) out. Classes taught inside the prison produce projects, writing, and artwork that PNAP shares outside the walls of the prison through exhibits, panels and other events across the city of Chicago that aim to raise the visibility of people serving long term sentences and the urgent need for political and social change.

As Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and/or undocumented young people continue to be targeted by our carceral state within their own communities and beyond, we must identify effective strategies that support decarceration and produce public safety. In part, this means expanding our scope to recognize that the borders of the carceral state do not end in our schools. While a powerful organizing tool, the STPP narrows our definition of the “problem” and the “solution”.
As central to this work is continuing the struggle with communities outside of schools and to tie our work in classrooms and educational spaces to wider movements to end our nation’s reliance on the prison industrial complex. This requires identifying and resisting emergent forms of criminalization in schools, and also in our neighborhoods and families. Finally, we need to collectively imagine and practice and build new forms of accountability and public safety.

Authors

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

• Tess Landon