A Racial Capitalism Perspective on School Safety: Illuminating the School-Prison Nexus and Possibilities for Transformation

• In Event: What Is School Safety, and Who Gets to Have It? An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Abstract

Objectives. Researchers have documented pervasive racial inequalities related to school safety policy and practice. This is a crucial contribution to our understanding of school safety, but the existing knowledge base is largely focused on immediate problems, discrete issues, and individual actors. Thus, though many people are familiar with the concept of a “school-to-prison pipeline,” we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the actors, discourses, structures, and politics maintaining it. Building on our previous work, we describe a racial capitalism framework for examining the school-to-prison pipeline, highlighting key insights and implications for addressing disparities in school safety and possibilities for transformation.

Theoretical Framework. We employ the concept of a school-prison nexus (Meiners, 2007, p. 4; see also Annamma, 2018; Kaba & Meiners, 2014). Like the “school-to-prison pipeline” metaphor, the nexus emphasizes the multiple currents shaping the relationship between school policy and students’ life trajectories. These are non-linear and not inevitable. We employ racial capitalism to identify and analyze the systems of White supremacy and capitalism—such as the profitability of surveillance—that provide fertile ground for the school-prison nexus. Through Omi and Winant’s (2015) concept of racial projects, we attend to the material, institutional, and discursive elements of racial capitalism in and beyond schools and how these are contested and sometimes transformed.

Methods and Data. This paper draws on a critical review of the research (Hempel, 2020) through the lens of racial capitalism. We searched ERIC, EBSCO, and Education Research Complete using the key terms safety, education, school, discipline, and punishment and identified additional articles based on our knowledge of this interdisciplinary field. From this collection, we selected peer-reviewed articles, chapters or books published since Meiners (2007) first coined the term “school-prison nexus” and that included a connection to broader racialized contexts of school safety. We synthesized prominent themes from this literature to inform our analysis.

Findings. Overall, we show how the nexus is shaped by US racial capitalism that privileges corporate profit and people who are well-resourced and White while multiply marginalized students of color, especially Black students, are offered surveillance and punishment more often than quality education. While there has been attention to racially disproportionate outcomes related to school safety policy and practice, this paper reveals the multiple actors and organizations (e.g., law enforcement and school security businesses) and discourses, structures, and politics that maintain, reproduce, and extend the school-prison nexus.. We find that substantial elements of this political and economic context are likely to maintain the school-prison nexus and contribute to its continued expansion, while pointing to places where challenges to the school-prison nexus have the potential to be nourished.

Significance. This paper contributes a racial capitalism approach to understanding school safety. It illuminates the material, institutional, and discursive elements that have played a part in the development and continuation of the school-prison nexus and the racial inequalities it generates and provides new insights into how we might disrupt these inequalities.

Authors

• Erica O. Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Abigail J. Beneke, University of Wisconsin - Madison