The Prison School

This chapter investigates the New Orleans Prison School—a public school in a prison—where African American male students were sent as punishment for nonviolent status offenses. Through the voices of local residents, including students and their families, teachers, local activists, and law enforcement officials, it explains what the push-pull factors of punitive schooling mean for their lives and their community. The chapter situates this examination in the historical context of urban school failure, youth criminalization, and mass correctionalization from the post-civil rights era of New Orleans forward. The work is theoretically framed by scholarship in the sociology of punishment, which articulates mass incarceration as a disappearing act playing out on the stage of the postindustrial and neoliberal state. The chapter ends by returning to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While the city's schools were physically demolished by the tremendous floodwaters, the punitive ideologies of the city's criminal justice system remained intact. These ideologies resurged and were made manifest as the school system was rebuilt.

Public Schools in a Punitive Era

This chapter first charts the complex dynamics that have pushed students from school and pulled them toward the criminal justice system, setting up the terms of a black prison diaspora that are maintained throughout the book. It then argues that harsh school disciplinary policies, emerging from the punishing culture of the War on Crime era, curtail youth academic achievement and accelerate incarceration risk in the African American community. It describes how the concentrated effect of punishment has a destabilizing effect on the African American community and the American democratic project as a whole, while benefiting larger social, political, and economic strategies in a neoliberal and postindustrial context.

Introduction

This introductory chapter begins with a description of the new public school at the Orleans Parish Prison, opened by the criminal sheriff in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2002. Dubbed by locals as “the Prison School”, the school enrolled a group of African American boys who had previously been removed from regular public schools, most for nonviolent disciplinary offenses. The students were taught by inexperienced and uncredentialed teachers, and were surveilled and disciplined by the sheriff's deputies. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the educational and correctional experiences of locals who protested the establishment of the school, as well as the experiences of two Prison School students. At the core of this book is an overarching concern about the ways in which urban youths are burdened by the long arm of the criminal justice system.

Undereducated and Overcriminalized in New Orleans

This chapter looks closely at New Orleans to show how punitive school disciplinary measures endorse the War on Crime, compounding the academic problems of African American students within the city's historically dysfunctional school system. It draws a picture of the dismal educational and disciplinary conditions in the public schools of New Orleans across two generations of African American men and shows their role in extending correctional vulnerability. The educational experiences of these men help explain how Louisiana gained the highest incarceration rate in the world. In Louisiana and nationally, the correctional system is filled with individuals who have dropped out of school. In 1997, almost 75 percent of state inmates lacked a high school diploma. Extreme school disciplinary policies have added to that group students who have been pushed out of school.

The “At-Risk Youth Industry”

This chapter explains how and why public schools and prisons have collaborated in the War on Crime era. It shows that the punitive shift in education catalyzes youth correctional vulnerability while serving larger social and political needs. Specifically, it documents the powerful influences of market forces in shaping school security expansion and what has been called the “at-risk youth industry.” As public schools have employed a correctional approach to education, they have established students' initial approach to correctional custody. In demonstrating how youths experience punitive schooling within the correctional spectrum of the at-risk youth industry, nationally and in New Orleans, the chapter revisits and revises current theories of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter revisits the push-pull factors of punitive schools and reviews their role in expanding dependency and correctional vulnerability. It first discusses the politics of dependency, a theory that governments, lacking in their ability to govern and to provide stability to a population by way of opportunity, manage those populations instead through dependency. It is argued that we have no other promising choice but to divest from punitive policies—to cease practices of suspension and expulsion. We can defund the dependency model while shoring up resources for public education by refusing to suspend, expel, or push students out of schools because of disciplinary infractions, and insisting instead on inclusion and equality. This approach is centered on a politics of care and an insistence that humans are at every moment humanized.