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increasing racial diversity but diminished so...
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The race- and color-based sorting that takes place in schools allows us to see the strictures of racial identification made manifest in social situations (who hangs out with whom), but it also allows for an analysis of transgressions across these same boundaries.
Contemporary urban youth are exposed to police contact more frequently and at earlier ages than their predecessors.
Schools—and for those who live in public housing, even some homes—have begun to resemble correctional facilities.
this book explores how pervasive prisonlike practices have become in our educational system and—just as importantly—how students interpret their daily encounters with metal detectors, pat-downs, and police.
As more and more aspects of “youthfulness” have been criminalized, students’ beliefs about whom the police “serve and protect” changes.
Although police officers and judges are generally cited as the “two key points of public contact in our legal system,” I argue that we should look at the legal authority that is manifest in the schools that serve our children and the law enforcers embedded within that space.2
“school disciplinary superstructure,”
schools are sites of socialization that set students’ expectations for their behavior and their perceptions of how others treat and receive them.
This chapter demonstrates that the prisonlike conditions created when schools implement a universal carceral apparatus in the name of safety have unintended consequences for youths’ attitudes toward criminal injustice.
the specific numbers regarding adolescents’ police encounters need to be put in the context of a justice system that disproportionately arrests, detains, convicts, and imprisons people of color.
Place weighs heavily on these statistics. The number of arrests made on public school grounds in Chicago increased significantly between 1999 and 2004.
The fact that private, parochial, and charter high schools are not required by the Chicago Board of Education to have police officers present almost certainly explains why 98 percent of those arrests were in public schools.
A landmark report by the Advancement Project, Education on Lockdown: The
Zero-tolerance policies were originally used as a drug enforcement tactic, but in the early 1990s, after a few highly publicized incidents of violent “rampages” in schools, these policies were widely adopted in schools across the nation.
The zero-tolerance approach is generally defined as the use of severe penalties, primarily suspension and expulsion, for both major and minor violations of a school’s code of conduct.16 These changes in both policies and practices began to reflect what I term a “universal carceral apparatus” that undermines the educational functions of these institutions.
strict zero-tolerance policies and a highly visible police presence have not translated into safer learning environments or less disruptive student behavior.18
Blocks Together,
many students “complain about overzealous security guards who escalate conflicts” rather than making them feel safer.19
The current CPS
school code of conduct identifies simple battery as an offense for which the school may use its discretion in notifying police about the incident.28 After police are notified of the offense, the officers on the scene have considerable discretion as to whether to proceed with an actual arrest. These numbers quite likely, then, substantially underestimate the number of fights taking place on school grounds.
differences in disciplinary action between traditional public schools and ...
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There are indications that frequent police contact, even of a minor nature, has a great impact on the perceptions of minority youth.
2001 CCSR survey
data reveal that adolescent contact with the police—ranging from the low-visibility, relatively minor experience of being “told off” or “told to move on” through the official and therefore more statistically visible contact of being arrested—is quite substantial.
The majority of the African American students I surveyed and interviewed had experienced “severe” contact with police in the past year.
Police harassment of suspects, moreover, produces a vicarious effect that differs by race. Even if a young man has not personally experienced harassment, witnessing others being harassed affects his feelings about the police.37
being considered a suspect is its own form of punishment. This effect is especially problematic when a young man believes that those who are supposed to be legitimate representatives and enforcers of the law have wronged him.
Students should not only be safe but feel safe at school.43 Urban schools have a bad reputation for student safety, but no one wants safe schools more than the students who actually attend them.44 Unfortunately, politicians and school administrators often implement “get tough” policies, such as increasing surveillance and policing in schools, instead of developing solutions that could address the roots of “inappropriate” and “disruptive” behavior. It is becoming increasingly clear that these policies, with their resulting suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, have negative repercussions for
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restorative justice.
The three main goals of restorative justice are accountability, community safety, and competency development.51 More specifically, these programs (1) provide opportunities for “wrongdoers to be accountable to those they harmed” and enable students to attempt to repair the harm they caused; (2) implement strategies to build relationships and empower the community to take responsibility for the safety and well-being of its members; and (3) offer opportunities to increase the “prosocial skills” of those
who have caused harm to others.
But perhaps the most important change relates to the relationship between in-school disciplinary
infractions and the carceral apparatus: policy notification is no longer mandatory for all infractions, only for certain violations of criminal law.
My experience in studying Chicago’s schools leads me to agree with Devine’s contention that schools’ reliance on guards, police, and sophisticated equipment conveys an impression that these spaces are out of control. In this “new panopticon” of urban education, the gaze of supervision is no longer omnipotent.62 Instead, teachers’ preoccupation with students’ minds is counterbalanced by the use of security forces to police the bodies of inner-city students via physical pat-downs, metal detector scans, and more.63 But perhaps more to the point, most of these interventions do not leave the
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My discussions with students suggested that the presence of police is not making them feel safer. Instead, it makes them feel imprisoned.
The extensive presence of and reliance on “school safety officers” is moving students’ significant interactions with adults from teaching staff to security guards—especially since teachers are increasingly under orders to avoid any disciplinary actions with students.64 In contrast, security guards have the leeway to both perform their assigned duties and potentially cultivate emotional ties to students, for better or worse.
Security guards relied heavily on surveillance cameras to monitor students both inside and outside the school. The students deem this unnecessary, as there is no visible disorder in their school, which none of them perceive as unsafe.
Payton students are not the usual “captive audience” (like those who attend neighborhood schools or schools of last resort), having instead chosen to attend the school. The universal carceral apparatus does not need to be “activated” in this space, since the threat of violence is almost nil. Instead, its passive presence conveys the even stronger message to students that the “disciplinary superstructure” is necessary even though students are not in physical danger.
comments by Max and Jackson demonstrate that the aims of the school disciplinary superstructure have been achieved: these two students are participating in their own surveillance by suggesting refinements or improvements in the school’s surveillance processes.
Adolescents’ attendance at urban schools,
which forces them to navigate and reconcile a school’s carceral apparatus on a daily basis, accustoms them to being viewed from a “criminal gaze” that operates not by force, but through three nonphysical practices: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination.
the carceral apparatus is structured in a way that presumes, not that youth are compliant by default, but rather that they are criminally inclined and deviant.
In contrast, the normative approach to procedural injustice posits that people
is proper to do so.70 They do not act primarily out of self-interest. Instead, there is a “connection between normative commitment to legal authorities and law-abiding behavior.”71
Amicable informal relations between police and youth can increase rule compliance, decrease disciplinary action, and change students’ assessments of police officers, even if they do not extend their more positive
students with low perceptions of injustice and experiences with police searches are African American and attend either Tilden or Harper
students who have had no personal police contacts but who do have high perceptions of injustice sometimes have had strong vicarious experiences. Their perceptions of injustice have been shaped by their experiences, both personal and vicarious, with police and security guards in their school environments.
A universal carceral apparatus in which all schools have police officers, legions of security guards, metal detectors, and so on, is not the best use of the scarce economic resources allocated to public schools.
Students perceive social control to be supplanting what should be a school’s main focus: education.
