Schools and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in a Post-Brown World

• In Event: Studying the Multidimensionality of Education Policy in Historical Perspective

Abstract

What role have schools played in the rise of mass incarceration? This proposed paper argues that schools were critical institutions in spurring mass incarceration because they weaponized their own carceral capacities - the state-sanctioned criminalizing, discipling, surveilling, and punishing powers specific to schools - to criminalize, and thereby target, an already racialized labor surplus for incarceration in the postwar era. Schools’ issuance of suspension to students with greater frequency and with greater disproportionality for ambiguous offenses predicated upon educator discretion following court orders for desegregation throughout the country made schools key sites of criminalization. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s history of the “prison fix” in California, this paper demonstrates how policymakers mobilized rising suspension rates and the disparities within them to rationalize punitive school disciplinary policies, expansion of policing in and out of school, and corrections construction programs.

​​Most educational researchers situate the punitive turn in school discipline within the early 1990s following the passage of “zero tolerance” policies which automated suspensions for criminal offenses on school grounds, such as the possession or use of weapons or drugs. Although, as Judith Kafka has shown, urban school districts had implemented such policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Educational researchers’ emphasis on “zero tolerance” policies, however, obscures how and for what offenses schools most commonly issue suspensions. As in the past, most suspensions today are issued “to discipline students for minor acts of misconduct, such as non-attendance, disobedience, or classroom disruption.” These suspensions are not the outgrowth of a punitive turn inaugurated by the automation of suspension for certain offenses; they are the product of a concerted effort to preserve educator discretion in disciplinary policy. Schools, particularly those serving low-income and students of color, have wielded their criminalizing power to turn “disruption” into crime and thereby provided new raw material from which policymakers at the local, state, and federal level have used to push for carceral expansion, in and beyond schools.

This paper draws upon archival materials related to school desegregation cases (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education; Morgan v. Hennigan; and Milliken v. Bradley) in Charlotte, North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan to demonstrate the rise in suspensions (and the rationale for that rise) during this period. It also uses historical newspapers and various government reports to illustrate how educators and politicians’ narratives of school disordered based upon growing suspension numbers furthered punitive school disciplinary policy, led to the expansion of local forces, and rationalized the growing number of jails and prisons. This paper thus clearly illustrates the historical formation and operation of the contemporary school-prison nexus. In doing so, it provides fertile ground to reimagine the possibilities of public schooling by querying the (il)legitimacy of the interdependent relationships between schools, police, and prisons.

Author

• Matt Kautz, Eastern Michigan University
  Presenting Author