Unchilding & Purposeful Remembering: Education in the Carceral State

• In Event: Anti-Racist Critical Perspectives Diversifying Special Education Research: Challenging Traditional Narratives of Objectivity, Neutrality, and Science

Abstract

Objectives

The school-prison nexus, in which punishment is central to systems across education, is used to push multiply-marginalized youth out of schooling and into the carceral system (Erevelles, 2014; Meiners, 2007). In particular, disabled Youth of Color are removed from general education through segregated special education settings, which are often imbued with hyper-surveillance, labeling, and punishment (Author 2, 2015). By locating them outside of general education spaces, this intentionally erases disabled Youth of Color from public memory (Mills, 2007). In this mixed methods study, we center incarcerated Youth of Color to “purposefully remember” their experiences within the school-prison nexus, as their stories are necessary to (re)imagine a more just schooling system.

Theoretical Framing

We draw on Disability Critical Race Theory (Author 2 et al., 2013) to (1) consider how racism and ableism are interdependent, situating Youth of Color as less than (Waitoller, 2020); (2) explore the material realities of being labeled as “undesirable” and subsequently banished into spaces less public (Mingus, 2018); (3) identify how ableism and racism are used to dispose of “undesirables” in prisons without accounting for resulting damage; and (4) support multiple modes of resistance, highlighting the voices of those who have been forgotten to purposefully move against erasure.

Methods

Our study’s conceptualization, data collection, and analyses is driven by our axiological commitment to honor the lived experiences of incarcerated Youth of Color. We partnered with formerly incarcerated Youth of Color to design a survey and interview guide to examine the educational journeys of currently incarcerated youth. Our analysis of quantitative survey results drew on Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit) (Gillborn et al., 2018) and the qualitative interviews relied on a counter-cartographic spatial analysis (Velez & Solorzano, 2018).

Data Source

We collected survey data (N = 500) and conducted interviews and education journey maps (N = 101) with currently incarcerated youth in a nationally representative sample across 8 states to elucidate who are the young people in juvenile carceral facilities and what are their educational trajectories to and through incarceration.

Results

Using the analytical frame of unchilding, defined as a spatiotemporal process “designed to create, direct, transform, and construct children as dangerous, nonchild-like Others” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), we found that unchilding was enacted through three specific technologies of dispossession to evict incarcerated Youth of Color from childhood: (1) imposing barriers to education, (2) weaponizing the lack of safety through threats of impending violence, and (3) perpetuating the slow erosion of a stable identity.

Significance

Our work reveals how practices in public education and carceral facilities work in concert to drive “unchilding” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), in which disabled Youth of Color are denied their childhoods and futures. Yet, these youth refuse to be erased, insisting on their full humanity be recognized and valued in education spaces. Ultimately, this work offers critical insight into the under-researched impact of processes within special education that undergird the school-prison nexus. Only by unveiling these processes can we work towards a liberatory future in which these injustices, perpetuated through special education, are disrupted.

Authors

• Candice Jeehae Kim, Stanford University

• Subini Ancy Annamma, Stanford University

• Michael O'Key, Stanford University

• Anmol Gupta, Stanford University

• Greg Prieto, University of San Diego