Whose Compliance Matters? Incarcerated youth identify prison geographies, and possibilities for abolition

• In Event: Building Abolitionist Futures in Education Now: Critical Engagements with Freedom, Belonging, and Police-Free Schools

Abstract

Overview: Education policy requires compliance by institutions and the actors within. Concurrently, those same institutions and actors require young people to follow the rules set by these education institutions. However, when listening to the education trajectories of incarcerated young people, they described that often education institutions, including both public schools and youth prisons, did not follow the policies that were supposed to ensure a quality education. Some examples that incarcerated youth described were that their IEP accommodations and modifications were often not enacted, families were not included as partners, and school discipline procedures were not followed by education institutions. Simultaneously, the incarcerated youth were often expected to comply with policies at all times and were often subjected to corrective action when they were labeled as non-compliant.
Theoretical Framework: Along with abolition, Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) was our conceptual framework as we incorporated our theory into all components of our study by 1)-acknowelding how notions of whiteness and ability as normal are upheld by the mutual constitutive nature of racism and ableism, thus making it more likely disabled Youth of Color are imagined as abnormal and routed into incarceration (setting); 2)-valuing multidimensional identities by focusing on multiply-marginalized Youth of Color despite the federal government not collecting disability or sexual diversity data in youth carceral settings (population sample); 3)-positioning multiply-marginalized youth as knowledge generators (participants), 4)-recognizing how race and disability have historically been used to deny the legal rights of some (interviews examine how education has been denied and accessed).
Methods & Data Sources: In this paper, we visited facilities in 8 states to explore the trajectories of over 100 incarcerated youth across the country through individual interviews and education journey maps. We traced prison geographies across public schools, family policing, mental health hospitals and youth prison facilities.
Results: We sought to better understand how compliance, non-compliance and punishment were described by youth. We contrast that with youth narratives about non-compliance by the schools they attended. Finally, we focus on the ways youth resisted education institutions’ expectations of compliance and non-compliance with savvy and ingenuity.
Significance: The education trajectories of incarcerated youth can reveal the need for abolition because as they identified how institutions across prison geographies inform and sustain each other through narratives of non-compliance of students while ignoring their own non-compliance with students’ rights, as well as their own policies, and procedures. Gilmore argues, “Without a doubt, abolitionist geography is an antagonistic contradiction to prison geography” (p. 66). That is, incarcerated young people’s resistance can chart a path towards abolitionist geographies of education, where freedom is understood to be a place where young people can have the resources they need to learn without containment.

Author

• Subini Ancy Annamma, Stanford University