Hands Behind Your Back and Face the Wall!" How Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs Produce Carceral Subjects

• In Event: 496 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Race, Education, and Poverty: Micro and Macro Contexts

Abstract

Current research highlights the extension of the state’s punitive arm over marginalized communities. This article examines one way this extension occurs in public education. Based on ethnographic data from a public grade 6-12 Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas, this paper scrutinizes the behavioral rules and disciplinary procedures at the DAEP. This analysis focuses on students’ introductory experience as a “strategic research site” to illuminate the program’s formal objectives, methods to achieve their institutional goals, and their effects on students. The practices and procedures in place at the DAEP constitute “disciplinary technologies” devoted to the transformation of "culturally deficient" students into docile bodies. I find that students are disciplined through punitive and rehabilitative methods premised on the discursive construction of "deficient" students and families. My conclusion suggests that the DAEP works to produce students as self-regulating carceral subjects conditioned for participation in the criminal justice system.

Author

• Jessica Dunning-Lozano, University of Texas-Austin