This week,
when trying to better understand the idea of criminalizing the poor and the
idea of turning the ghetto into a prison and the prison into a ghetto, I found
the “School to Prison Pipeline” movement very relevant. In today’s society,
students of color are being suspended for first time offenses or smaller
offenses that white students might only get a slap on the hand for. As the
article above states, “…youth of color and low-income youth ‘were stigmatized
by teachers’” (Regan, 2014). This
article was a shocking read and when I looked at the date and saw that this is
from only a week ago, it made me sick. Just as housing projects such as Pruitt
Igoe created a prison like atmosphere that stigmatized and criminalized based
on skin color, schools even today are doing the same thing. As the prison and
ghetto are linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency,
structural homology, and culture fusion, one can argue that school systems have
these three characteristics as well.
Just as
people in the housing projects were treated as less than human, students of
color in the schooling system are treated as second-class citizens. Once students are suspended they are ever
more likely to find crime or become homeless because they don’t have school keeping
them straight. It is a constant worry for these kids that they will be unfairly
suspended for something that should require counseling or detention. One girl in the article talks about how she
was put directly into a truancy intervention program for missing school while
she was very ill. She is being labeled
because of her skin color. It is a rule that if you miss more than seven days
(unexcused) you can be put into juvenile court or put on probation. Just as the
ghetto is being turned into a prison system, so are the schools. How is a
student supposed to get anywhere if they can’t even get through high school? It
is no wonder why African Americans are over represented in the prison system
when they are more frequently kicked out of high school for minor/first time
offenses. If you can’t make a living because you don’t have a high school
diploma, you most likely will make your living through crime.
Glad you were able to engage this topic. Wacquant does align schools as part of the carceral continuum. School-as-prison is interesting in that it arguably precedes the racial incarceration phenomenon. Perhaps a school-to-welfare pipeline before the school-to-prison pipeline?
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