Education and Incarceration

Erica R. Meiners, Maisha T. Winn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317978282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The United States of America is in possession of the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars. This number is predominantly and disproportionately made up of communities of colour and poverty. Between 1987 and 2007, the U.S. prison population tripled; the direct result of various 'tough on crime' public policies. Organizers and scholars use the term prison industrial complex (PIC) to name the structure that encompasses the expanding economic and political contexts of the detention and corrections industry in the USA. The PIC is a network that sutures capital, communities and the State to a permanent punishment economy. The term 'the PIC' aims to capture the range of material and ideological forces that shape the growth of detention: the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers unions, the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry in the context of deindustrialization, the production and sales of technology and security required to maintain and expand the state of incarceration, and the naturalization of isolation as a logical response to harm.

Education and Incarceration highlights the significance of centering agency and autonomy, and documents scholars who work to be accountable to justice movements and communities, not simply to academic disciplines or to research. Additionally, as emerging scholars committed to challenging the PIC, these authors struggle to build multi-layered analytic and material tools for resistance within and beyond the walls of schools, jails and prisons. This book provides snapshots of practices in motion: activist scholars working to engage, to be accountable to families, communities and larger justice movements, and to build abolition democracies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education.

Introduction

Resisting the school to prison pipeline: the practice to build abolition democracies

In possession of the largest prison population in the world, the United States currently locks up over 2.3 million people (Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project 2008). Disproportionately warehousing communities of color and poor people – one in nine African American males between the ages of 20–34 are behind bars, and one in 100 African American women (Pew Center 2008, 6) – between 1987 and 2007, the U.S. prison population tripled, the direct result of public policies that are often popularly named ‘tough on crime’, including mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes-and-you-are-out laws, and the criminalization of select drugs (Mauer 1999; Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2003; Davis 2003).

Organizers and scholars use the term prison industrial complex (PIC) to name the structure that encompasses the expanding economic and political contexts of the detention and corrections industry in the United States (Davis 2003, 2005). The PIC is a network that sutures capital, communities and the State to a permanent punishment economy. The term the PIC aims to capture the range of material and ideological forces that shape the growth of detention: the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers unions, the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry in the context of deindustrialization, the production and sales of technology and security required to maintain and expand the state of incarceration, the naturalization of isolation as a logical response to harm, and more. The PIC is an expanding economy: between 2000 and 2005, a new prison was built in the United States every 12 days (Stephan 2008) and the term ‘million dollar blocks’ (Gonnerman 2004) was coined to name the massive disinvestment in targeted urban communities of color; so many residents from one urban city block are in prison that the total cost of their incarceration exceeds $1 million.

While this special issue focuses on work from the United States, ‘tough on crime’ law and order policies are not confined within U.S. borders. As questioned in the media (from The Economist to Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail), despite a 30-year low in Canadian crime rates, and little to no evidence of any rise in violence in Canada, in 2010 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government introduced a host of reforms that eerily mirror the failed U.S. criminal justice policies. A full one third of the bills introduced by Harper’s government were ‘tough on crime’: mandatory minimum sentencing, further criminalization of drugs, eliminating pretrial ‘two-for-one’ credit (Economist December 17, 2009). The proposed changes to the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act include Sébastien’s Law, that could make public the identities of youth convicted (even if not convicted as adults), and would also require prosecutors to document why they do not secure adult sentences for youth convicted of violent crimes (Alphonso 2010). Prison expansion also appears to be on the Canadian horizon. The proposed federal budget included a 43 per cent increase in penitentiary capital costs to $329.4 million in 2010–2011, from $230.8 million in 2009–2010 (Tibbetts 2010). The United States is exporting ‘tough on crime’.

The PIC signifies a particular relationship to education in the United States, as heavy investment in a carceral state often parallels disinvestment in social welfare programs, including higher education. In the last two decades, most states increased allocations for corrections exceeding increases for education. According to the Justice Policy Institute, between 1984 and 2000, across all states and the District of Columbia, state spending on prisons was six times the increase of spending on higher education (Justice Policy Institute 2002). According to the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policies, ‘Between 1985 and 2000 the State’s budget for higher education increased by 30 percent, while the State’s budget for corrections increased more than 100 percent’ (Kane-Willis, Janicheck, and Clark 2006, 13). In 2010, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was publically apologetic about the reality that his state spent more on corrections than higher education (Steinhauer 2010). When states build prisons and not public colleges – since 1985 Illinois has built over 20 new prisons, work camps or other detention facilities, and no new institutions of public higher education – the planned pathways for youth are clear.

Researchers use the term civil or social death to refer to the lifetime sentences associated with incarceration. Detention offers few opportunities to earn a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) and, with the denial of access to Pell Grants for those incarcerated in 1994, opportunities to access post-secondary education while incarcerated are seriously limited. Post-incarceration barriers are equally punishing, including limited access to public benefits, and pervasive formal and informal employment and housing discrimination. In some states, a felony conviction means disenfranchisement. According to a 2007 report from the Sentencing Project, ‘5.3 million Americans, or one in forty-one adults, have currently or permanently lost their voting rights as a result of a felony conviction’ (The Sentencing Project 2007, 1). In some southern states a one third of voting-age black men have lost the right to vote.

Immigration is also an integral part of the nation’s expanding prison industrial complex (Rodriguez 2008). With the 2001 merger of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (Bohrman and Murakawa 2005), and the establishment of a network of private and public 400 plus detention centers across the United States, those undocumented are a targeted, and expanding, component of the criminalized class. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (U.S. ICE; the largest enforcement agency in the United States) has a workforce of over 17,000, and in 2008 ICE deported 977 non-citizens every day (U.S. ICE 2008, VIII), a 23.5 per cent increase from 2007 (U.S. ICE 2008, III). With the federal 287(g) program that empowers local and state police across the United States to act as a federal immigration authority, the persistence of deportation raids in cities such as Postville, Iowa in 2008 and in the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois in 2007, and the militarization of border areas to reassemble large prisons, immigration is a growing component of the PIC in the United States (Rodriguez 2008).

Yet, within this rather dismal analysis, writings from inside and outside prisons and universities continue to demonstrate that resistance is ongoing and analysis, testimony and archival documentation matter. Writings by many authors – Laura Whitehorn, Julia Sudbury, Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore – offer analytic and material tools to continue to support justice movements. From frameworks to understand how formerly agricultural land became perceived to be surplus land available for prison construction to careful documentation of how communities resist incarceration and/or prison constructions, organizers and researchers offer tools for engagement. Radical scholarship continues to make visible histories and pathways of resistance.

Researchers and activists working within educational studies contribute to this body of justice-mobilizing scholarship against the PIC. Scholars document the too familiar U.S. experience of the under-education of select populations and how young people are shaped through schools as ‘superfluous’ to education (Duncan 2000), and in need of surveillance and containment. Pipeline metaphors are used to describe the over-representation of youth of color in our nation’s juvenile justice systems and in school-based disciplinary actions as early as pre-school (Gilliam 2005; Skiba et al. 2002; Ayers, Dohrn, and Ayers 2001; Polakow 2000). School suspension and expulsion are moderate to strong predictors of future incarceration that disproportionately impact youth of color (The Advancement Project 2010; Fine and McClelland 2006; Skiba and Knesting 2001). Classification in some special education categories grotesquely and disproportionately targets Latinos and African American students (Harry and Klingner 2005; Losen and Orfield 2002) resulting in under-education, and potential incarceration. These natural educational practices offer concrete examples of how ‘deeply state policies slice into the seemingly private lives of very differently situated youth, most particularly those with no private safety net’ (Fine and McClelland 2006, 326). Continued work on the relationship between education and incarceration is needed to interrupt an ongoing legacy of structural disinvestment.

In conjunction with other recent scholarship on the PIC, this writing and organizing efforts move many people towards asking the question – are prisons obsolete? – and to imagine and build communities without prisons, or to support ‘the creation of genuinely safe, healthy communities that respond to harm without relying on prisons and punishment’ (Critical Resistance n.d.). Prison abolition doesn’t mean that there will be no problems or violence. Rather, it acknowledges that prisons are not a just, efficient, or moral solution to the problems of violence or lack in our communities. Prisons have been used, as Davis writes, as ‘a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent’ (Davis 2005, 41). As we have reduced or eliminated social assistance programs, criminalized the options that poor people possess to cope with untenable situations, and naturalized violence and isolation as the response to harm, the majority of those in prisons and jails are poor people. Directly connected to the histories of white supremacy and oppression in the United States, it should be impossible to understand and refer to the U.S. contemporary prison system in isolation of slavery, immigration policies, compulsory heteronormativity, and sovereignty for indigenous nations and Puerto Rico.

An abolition-democracy, to use the term of W.E.B. DuBois, requires reconstructing the structures and traditions that safeguard power and privilege, just as much as taking down those that visibly punish and oppress. Prisons, Davis states, have grown because too many other institutions lock out segments of our population.

Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population. (Davis 2005, 96–7)

For many, working toward abolition means transforming our communities to create structures that reduce the demand and need for prisons, including viable living wage jobs that are not dehumanizing, and ensuring that our most vulnerable populations, for example those that are mentally ill, under-educated, queer or gender non-conforming, do not get warehoused in our prisons and jails because of the failure of other institutions. Abolition asks us to reframe our material and ideological investments in locking people up. Building abolition futures requires us to dismantle, change and build as the 2008 Critical Resistance conference modeled. This international conference gathered organizers, researchers and/or those most impacted by punishing state structures to ask complex questions about how to address harm in our communities without building more prisons and borders. Building abolition futures, to borrow again from DuBois, is organizing and scholarly labor that shuts down super max prisons and challenges young offender laws that try juveniles as adults, but is also about reconfiguring and dismantling institutions, changing ideologies, and building new democratic structures. This is work.

Recognizing that U.S. practices are always shaped by global forces, this special issue names this political moment of unprecedented U.S. incarceration rates, and seeks to interrupt and dismantle the ‘school to prison pipeline’. Articles in this issue are characterized by desires for, and attempts to push towards radical practice and to imagine something different. As post-colonial scholar Linda Tuhwai Smith notes, when researcher after researcher comes to her Maori community to study – for example – indigenous people and their resistances to poverty, a question is simply ‘Can they fix up our generators? Can they actually do anything?’ (Smith 1999, 10). Contributors to this issue, all ‘new’ to university-based work, offer us examples of researchers within education spaces who are committed to justice work and grapple with practices. Teaching in detention centers, working alongside youth targeted for hyper-surveillance and disposability, organizing acts of arts-based resistance, negotiating the complexities when research is not about someone else’s family – articles in this volume struggle with the messy work of engagement.

Laura’s work poses ethical and methodological questions – what does it mean to do intimate work, when the question of mass incarceration is not a remote research topic but linked to one’s family? Sharma and Winn’s work offers pathways into how young girls (often an under-studied population in literature on youth incarceration) resist pathologizing institutional discourses. Farmer investigates how racialized moral panics and depictions of black adolescents shape collective imaginations about the morality of black youth and policies within public schools. Schnyder’s work demonstrates how schools do not merely replicate components of a prison system, rather schools are part of a prison-base logic that requires the reproduction of enclosure projects that are racialized and gendered. Similarly, Krueger’s participatory action research with young people impacted by punitive state systems offers methodological pathways to participate in accountable community-based research, but also, the findings from her work document some of the long-term effects that the punishment economy has on young people’s educational achievement.

Collectivity is central to the resisting practices. Schnyder, Green and Winn all point to the possibilities and limitations that collective art-making offers for building communities of resistance in spaces of violence and oppression. Green’s work with Blackout Arts Collective and Winn’s work with Girl Time, a playwriting and performance program, demonstrate the ways in which incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth performing writing and literacy can be a tool to talk back to institutions of power. Krueger’s participatory action research is not, as she notes, just a method but a practice for building power and movements.

All of these articles point to the significance of centering agency and autonomy, and document scholars who work to be accountable to justice movements and communities, not simply to academic disciplines or to research. Additionally, as emerging scholars committed to challenging the PIC, these authors struggle to build multi-layered analytic and material tools for resistance within and beyond the walls of schools, jails, and prisons.

With this special issue we do not attempt to reflect the full spectrum of research and activism linked to education and incarceration. Instead we offer articles that provide snapshots of practices in motion. Activist scholars working to engage, to be accountable to families, communities and to larger justice movements, and to build – as DuBois’s work continues to ask for – abolition democracies.

References

Alphonso, C. 2010. Tory bill proposes publicizing names of violent young offenders. Globe and Mail, April 2. http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tory-bill-proposes-publicizing-names-of-violent-young-offenders/article1502155/?service=mobile (accessed May 15, 2010).

Ayers, W., B. Dohrn, and R. Ayers, eds. 2001. Zero tolerance. New York: New Press.

Bohrman, R., and N. Murakawa. 2005. Remaking big government: Immigration and crime control ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Resisting the school to prison pipeline: the practice to build abolition democracies
• 2. Home/work: engaging the methodological dilemmas and possibilities of intimate inquiry
• 3. Our lyrics will not be on lockdown: an arts collective’s response to an incarceration nation
• 4. ‘Our side of the story’: moving incarcerated youth voices from margins to center
• 5. Contesting institutional discourse to create new possibilities for understanding lived experience: life-stories of young women in detention, rehabilitation, and education
• 6. Enclosures abound: Black cultural autonomy, prison regime and public education
• 7. Criminality of Black youth in inner-city schools: ‘moral panic’, moral imagination, and moral formation
• 8. It’s not just a method! The epistemic and political work of young people’s lifeworlds at the school–prison nexus
• Index