From Migration Pathways to Highly Securitized Schools: Wrap-around Carcerality and Racialization

• In Event: 2166 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 22: Criminalizing Race

Abstract

The “carceral continuum” framework shows how systems of punishment follow young people across different settings by examining the neighborhoods and schools of urban Black and Latinx youth. In this paper, I extend that frame to one that also includes young people’s migration experiences and examining the suburban high school context. Drawing on data from a school ethnography and student interviews in upstate New York, this study shows added layers of exposure to punishment systems in different settings for Latinx youth with vulnerable immigration statuses. In this school case study, the majority of the Latinx students were undocumented and some were applying for asylum. Nearly all these students migrated into the United States as unaccompanied minors. Experiences with school discipline were an extension of already painful migration pathways that included police harassment and incarceration. The school was highly securitized with its many security guards, uniformed police, cameras, metal detectors as well as other security tools and used punitive “zero-tolerance” discipline practices such as suspending students for being tardy to class. Like their peers, these students felt harassed, but they also felt unsafe and unfairly disciplined, attributing this to the school disliking Latinxs and framing them as undesirable “illegals.” Placing the migration experiences of youth alongside neighborhood, school experiences illustrates added layers and intensity of the carceral continuum in the lives of many Latinx youth.

Author

• Erin Michaels, University of North Carolina Wilmington