Co-creating the "School to Liberation Pipeline": How young people envision successful re-entry

• In Event: Prison to Empowerment Pipeline: Critical Perspectives on Re-Framing Re-Entry

Abstract

Over the past two decades academic, policy, and advocacy-oriented work has mapped out the school-to-prison pipeline. Extensive research has been conducted to illustrate the pathways that push young people out of school and into the juvenile injustice system. Little work though, has provided insight in how to create a counter pipeline – a map of how to support young people coming home from facilities and their pipeline into school, employment, and empowerment. Based on work with system-involved youth in a transitional high school, this paper will discuss what youth participants have labeled “The School-to-Liberation Pipeline.” The ethnographic work of this paper focuses on young people who are returning from detention facilities and probation camps and their visions for their re-entry into their communities. Ultimately, this paper takes a critical perspective to traditional approaches to juvenile re-entry and looks to see how successful re-entry for system-impacted youth should involve direct anti-oppression frameworks and re-imaginings for young people’s role in community transformation.

Author

• Whitney Richards-Calathes, CUNY Graduate Center