Advancing Racial Equity in Education in the Carceral State

No other country in the world incarcerates more of its population than the United States. Indeed, there are roughly 2.3 million people behind bars—a 500% increase over the past 40 years (Nellis, 2021). This amounts to a staggering rate of about 698 per 100,000 residents (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). Moreover, there are about 8 million people under state supervision, including house arrest, parole, and/or probation (Gottschalk, 2015). What is most striking about the rapid expansion of penal incarceration and supervision is its disproportionate impact on Black, Latinx, and others from socially and economically disenfranchised backgrounds. The commonly applied term, “mass incarceration,” is thus a misnomer, as it implies that confinement equally impacts the broader citizenry, when in fact, it is quite concentrated by race, place, and class (Blankenship et al., 2018; Wacquant, 2010).

Hyper-incarceration and criminal supervision animate just one arm of what scholars have termed “the carceral state,” referring to the multiple and intersecting state agencies and institutions that have acquired the capacity to punish, surveil, and control mostly racially and ethnically minoritized people (Meiners, 2015). In other words, carcerality, as an organizing logic, “operates through spaces and mechanisms of social control that are outside the physical prison” (Castro & Magana, 2020, p. 816). Child and family services (e.g., Johnson, 2021), immigration (e.g., Buenavista, 2018), health and human services (e.g., Steele, 2017), and certainly the United States’ educational system (e.g., Meiners, 2007; Castro & Magana, 2020), are all complicit in the expansion of carceral state power. For instance, scholars, for over two decades now, have documented how carceral imperatives have infiltrated our nation’s school systems, resulting in what was originally popularly titled the “school to prison pipeline” (STPP; Dancy, 2014; Skiba et al., 2014; Wald & Losen, 2003).

Generally, the STPP refers to a process by which students are funneled out of schools and into juvenile and adult criminal justice institutions (Dancy, 2014; Heitzeg, 2009), primarily through “zero-tolerance” policies that impose severe and excessive punishment for otherwise minor infractions by students. Zero-tolerance policies, some scholars argue, are a result of “tough of crime” policies that emerged in the late 1980s and led to the massive expansion of our nation’s incarcerated population (Giroux, 2003). Carceral logics are also reflected in the increased school reliance on police, rather than teachers or administrators, and the usage of school resource officers, who often have little to no training working with youth, to maintain discipline. These policies and practices have resulted in an increased number of school-based arrests and have the most adverse impact on youth of color, especially Black students, who are suspended and expelled at the highest rates (Riddle & Sinclair, 2019; Johnson, 2015). To be sure, the STPP metaphor is limited in that it emphasizes the social practices of schools, while missing “how the commitment to punishment of Black and Brown bodies occurs spatially” (Annamma, 2017, p. 5). As such, the “school-prison nexus” has been offered as an alternative (Meiners, 2007).

Interestingly, postsecondary institutions have been largely absolved of their complicity in the expansion of carceral state power, as research in this area is sorely underdeveloped. Recent scholarship by Castro and Magana (2020), however, offers insight into the ways in which the practice of screening criminal history in the college admissions process operates as a form of racial exclusion that enhances carceral state power. Higher education, they argue, is a key site in which surveillance is practiced and normalized. Work by Buenavista (2018) has also illustrated how carcerality affects the postsecondary education experiences of undocumented Asian American students. Much more work is needed that considers how carceral imperatives are implicated in the practices, policies, and organizing logics of colleges and universities.

Critical examinations of schooling organizations as extensions of the carceral state are necessary to grasp the complexity and depth of racial inequality in education. Such a (re)conceptualization is necessary for formulating policy and shaping practice that improves the material conditions of racially/ethnically minoritized and other institutionally marginalized groups. Therein lies the purpose of this timely issue. This special themed issue, “Advancing Racial Equity in Education in the Carceral State,” extends existing insights about the intricate, and mutually reinforcing, relationship between the educational and carceral systems in the United States. Indeed, we bring together an outstanding intergenerational group of scholars and practitioners to interrogate and offer strategies for addressing the various ways in which carceral logics and imperatives have shaped educational institutions at the K-12 and postsecondary education levels, thus creating and exacerbating racial equities for minoritized groups.

The first article, by Irby and Coney, traces the ways in which the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 legislated racial violence against Black and Brown children and youth via punitive discipline in schools. It closes with timely considerations for policy that are transformational.

Next, Johnson and Dizon offer a conceptualization of the college-prison nexus, which encapsules the symbiotic relationship between penal and postsecondary education institutions, that is, the way in which college and university policies and practices coalesce in the surveillance, control, and punishment of minoritized groups on campus. Their work is poised to serve as a firm foundation for future examinations of carcerality in higher education.

Winn extends her four pedagogical stances—History Matters, Race Matters, Justice Matters, and Language Matters—to include Future Matters, which offer a useful framework to guide the work of educators in fostering justice-based norms in the classroom and in school communities.

Weathers and colleagues direct attention to an often overlooked factor in the criminalization of racially/ethnically minoritized students: truancy. Specifically, the authors conduct a comprehensive review of the literature, synthesizing what is known from research on school truancy, and offer compelling recommendations for future research.

Finally, Ward broadens the aperture beyond students to consider how carceral logics are reflected in Black women’s educational and employment experiences. Specifically, she examines six lawsuits to shed light on various forms of institutionally sanctioned violence.

The final set of articles are different in nature from those preceding them. We invited several folks to offer expert commentary via scholarly essays that wrestle with the complexities of advancing racial equity in education in the carceral state. The result: three provocative scholarly essays.

Harper offers a fictitious court proceeding that identifies eight culprits responsible for the criminalization of Black people. This chilling account raises awareness about the ecology of actors and institutions that conspire in the dispossession and regulation of Black people.

Taylor and colleagues direct attention to a curiously overlooked issue in higher education in prison programs: race. The authors expertly detail how race shapes faculty diversity, pedagogy, and other areas that exacerbate racial inequities among incarcerated students. They close with poignant recommendations for ensuring high-quality, equitable opportunities for participation in prison education programs.

Finally, Strayhorn employs the “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” metaphor as a heuristic for explicating three carceral logics in K-12 and higher education: extraction, captivity, and surveillance. In this provocative essay, he offers ideas for future research that moves away from punitive approaches to abolitionist ones that dismantle the school-prison nexus and advance racially just outcomes.

In closing, we hope this special issue is a catalyst for the educational community as we collectively envision more racially equitable and just outcomes for minoritized populations by taking steps to dismantle the stronghold of the carceral state.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).