Staging "Youth Reentry Decorum" for the Formerly Incarcerated: School Reintegration, Carceral Geographies, and Educational Reentry

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Consciousness and Future Possibilities: Rethinking Discipline and Carcerality: (Table 11)

Abstract

This paper interrogates the staging of compulsory school reintegration for formerly incarcerated youth after release from state custody. Specifically, I explore the fraught redemptive articulations that young people engage in when attempting to return to school post-incarceration. This work stems from a broader ethnographic project focused on the reentry efforts of racialized formerly incarcerated youth enrolled in a nonprofit reentry program in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through this interrogation and exploration, I argue that the ‘youth reentry decorum’ of legally compliant school returns become structural arbiters of continued punishment by the state that extends educational confinement by way of community-based contexts and anticipates youths’ reincarceration or school noncompletion.

Author

• Brian Cabral, University of Texas at Austin