An excellent post at the University of Minnesota Press blog, entitled "Schools vs. Prisons: How zero-tolerance and other punitive disciplinary policies are hurting students."
As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. For today's post, UMP has interviewed Kathleen Nolan, author of Police in the Hallways, who explores the impact of punitive disciplinary policies on students and on their educational experiences.
One response in particular caught my eye.
Q. What inspired the study you undertook when you started working on this book?
Before going back to school for my Ph.D., I was a high school teacher in the South Bronx. It was around the late 1990s, at the dawn of the move toward high-stakes testing and zero-tolerance school discipline. I, along with most of my colleagues, was very frustrated. Our school was terribly under-resourced. We needed so much—updated books, basic literacy support, working computers, even windows that opened properly and desks that weren’t 30 years old. It was a disgrace. And I thought, you can’t be serious! These are the reforms you’re giving us—culturally irrelevant, test-driven curriculum and police officers? Why aren’t we trying to provide the real social and educational supports that students need? Circumstances in the school certainly inspired the direction of my research, but there was something else outside the school—the view I had from the broken windows of my classroom on the third floor. Just beyond the vacant lot on the other side of the road there was a large, new, shiny white building. It was impressive and imposing in the midst of urban decay.
It was a youth prison.
I left teaching and entered grad school with the image of that prison ingrained in my mind. I wanted to learn more about how we got to a point where we, as a society, were more willing to invest in policing and jailing poor youth than we were to invest in their education.
Foucault famously ends a chapter in Discipline and Punish with "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" But here the schools don't resemble prisons, because the prisons are involved in some other social machine than that of a "carceral society" in the sense intended in DP.
The point is that we can't simply apply Foucault's analysis in DP to the US prison-industrial complex; we can't take his concepts as ready-made and look for instances of them ("aha, there it is: that's a Panopticon!"); we can only do our own analysis, perhaps using Foucault's methods in our toolkit.
To put it in a quick-and-dirty fashion: warehousing one segment of the population of a de-industrialized system (plus providing jobs for another segment) is not the same as disciplining the population of an industrializing system, even if the de-politicization function might be analogous.
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