Ungovernable Children: Radical Protest, Policing, Punishment, and Surveillance in New York City Schools

• In Event: Youth and Education: Intersections of Identity, Resistance, and Engagement in the 20th Century

Abstract

In the US, school districts spend over a billion dollars annually on exclusionary discipline, policing, and student surveillance. The increased presence of what Carla Shedd describes as “the universal carceral apparatus” in schools has eroded their educational mission, siphoned off valuable human and monetary resources and put students at greater risk for violent police and criminal legal system contact. How did we get here? School-to-prison pipeline literature often points to federal legislation—the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill—to explain the increased spending on school carceral apparatuses. This paper interrogates how school-to-prison pipeline infrastructure was built locally as part of a conservative response to Black and Latinx student activism in the 1960s, three decades before the Clinton Administration.

Author

• Ajua Kouadio, Rutgers University