Carceral Cartographies: Black Foster Youth and the Paradox of Schooling in Los Angeles

• In Event: Imagining the Future of Black and Brown Youth in (Carceral) Los Angeles

Abstract

Rooted in the spatial and political realities of Los Angeles, this paper centers the educational journeys of Black foster youth as they navigate overlapping systems of surveillance, containment, and dispossession. I employ the use of carceral cartographies to describe the mapped and material ways institutional power is organized across space to constrain and shape the lives of Black foster youth. These cartographies reflect the spatial logics of the carceral state, made up of systems thatseek to regulate, and control Black life and limit the possibilities of freedom. While this paper specifically focuses on the intersections of public education and the foster system, carceral cartographies extend beyond these sites, encompassing housing, policing, immigration, mental health services, and the broader juvenile and criminal legal systems. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2008) argues, these systems collectively participate in a form of organized abandonment, wherein state power withdraws essential resources while simultaneously intensifying surveillance and control.

In Los Angeles, a city with a deeply entrenched history of racialized carceral governance (Gilmore, 2022; Sojoyner, 2017), Black families are vastly overrepresented in what is commonly referred to as the child “welfare,” foster “care,” or child “protection” system. Yet for Black families, this institution has never provided care, welfare, or protection. Instead, it functions as a mechanism of state punishment and kinship disruption. Similarly, schools actively participate in the spatial mapping of carceral control, enacting punitive ideologies and disciplinary practices while maintaining a collusive partnership with the foster system. This multi-system collusion (Harvey et al., 2024) ensures that carceral logics are reproduced through school discipline policies, mandated reporting, and deficit-based labeling. The result is a landscape in which Black foster youth are rendered hyper-visible, pathologized, and disposable.

Even within these deeply mapped terrains of control, Black foster youth resist. As Damien Sojoyner (2017) argues, refusal and disengagement function as critical modes of contestation and Black fugitivity, as strategies through which Black youth reject systems that seek to contain and erase them. These everyday acts of disruption unsettle institutional authority and carve out space for alternative ways of being and imagining beyond the carceral state. This paper foregrounds how Black foster youth reconfigure the terms of their participation in schooling and state systems byhighlighting how youth engage in practices of refusal and disengagement and counterinstitutional pathologization. In doing so, this paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship that centers not only the harms of the carceral state but the visions of liberation that emerge from the complex and intentional acts used by Black foster youth to challenge their disposability.

Author

• Brianna Marche' Harvey, California State University - Fullerton