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This chapter examines the school-to-prison pipeline, arguing for juvenile justice system that do not receive youth from schools. Much like the foster youth and kids with mental health issues, kids who misbehave in school need interventions to solve their problems, not suspension, expulsion, or referral to the juvenile justice system. This means that when kids misbehave, schools should not refer them to the juvenile system, and that school discipline must function differently. Moreover, reform requires not only in-school change but also that systems of support for youth be strongly funded and well-functioning so that misbehavior tied to underlying issues can be addressed.

This chapter outlines the implications of the book and makes recommendations for future research and policy considerations. I argue that relying on identifying and separating gang members not only fails to prevent violence in carceral institutions but also has serious consequences for those who are processed through these facilities. Namely, this practice positions individuals into rivalries between criminalized affiliations—exposing them to confrontation and violence and ultimately ascribing them with criminal labels that keep them cycling through the justice system. This chapter also explores alternative models, discussing instances both in this research and in previous studies in which criminal justice facilities desegregated their institutions. Finally, I argue that establishing a more just and effective criminal justice system requires reducing the emphasis institutions place on identifying and controlling gang membership.

The epilogue explains how the development of students’ rights between the 1960s and the 1980s shaped understandings of children’s rights more broadly. The epilogue discusses the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a United Nations treaty that the United States has refused to ratify, and argues that the Convention conflicts with understandings of children’s rights as expressed by American constitutional law. The epilogue then shows how a current students’ rights case from Detroit, Gary B. v. Snyder, which claims a right to literacy, shows how difficult it has become for students to make claims in relation to racial disparities. The epilogue then discusses what scholars call the “school-to-prison pipeline,” which supports the theory that the development of students’ rights has reinforced rather than challenged existing racial disparities. Finally, the epilogue briefly discusses the ideas about rights and schooling embodied by a new student movement against gun violence.

This chapter explores the development of entitlement in individuals. What entities surrounding the newborn, the child, and young adult facilitate the sense of deservingness that some people have relative to others? This chapter begins with the role that parents play in producing a child with a social dominance orientation or authoritarian tendencies: two ideologies that are associated with entitlement. Parents’ ideas about race and gender are also significant in how their child will think about their place in the world. Globally, boys are the preferred gender, and this preference is due to the fact that in most cultures, men have more status and power than do women. Chapter 3 explores the gendered treatment of children by caregivers, beginning with parents’ attitudes toward their newborn daughters and sons. Adult heterosexual men tend to have a sense of domestic entitlement, meaning they feel justified doing less domestic labor than their spouse. This sense of entitlement begins with the toys and then chores parents assign to their daughters and sons. Chapter 3 next examines teachers’ role in facilitating entitlement. Teachers’ expectations and treatment of students unintentionally influences entitlement in boys relative to girls, and in White students relative to students of color. If teachers’ expectations (and biases) can have a measurable impact over the course of one school year, imagine the consequences over a student’s entire academic career. Being the normative racial category allows one to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to school discipline. Unlike students of color, for White kids, the school experience allows them to feel entitled to impartial or even preferential treatment by law enforcement and the criminal legal system.

The conclusion revisits the major themes of book. It also highlights the larger implications of these findings for young people in the United States. New partnerships between education and penal facilities and wraparound services as a whole do not help young people stay away from the criminal justice system. Despite the positive intentions of these new services, law enforcement and education administrators inadvertently undermine their goal of helping youth by exposing them to further criminalization. Instead these new services break down social bonds between adults, institutional actors, and other young people that would help the girls in my study begin a more positive life-course. This is reflected in their failed attempts to finish probation, return to traditional school and leave the criminal justice system altogether. I revisit this clear disconnect between the well-intentioned goals of education and corrections administrators with negative outcomes young women must negotiate as they try, and often fail, to stay out of secure detention. I also remind the reader how this process has a set of challenges that are unique to Latinas’ intersecting identities.

Viewing the military as a major state-sanctioned violence mechanism brings challenges, and not because of the absence of scholarly material or varied perspectives to craft an analysis. Rather, the challenge is how to narrow the scope and still do justice to the broadness of this subject. This chapter may well be the first time that readers have been exposed to the military in state-sanctioned violence, particularly when focused on people of color. Historical material gives context to state violence manifestation in the military–industrial complex and veterans, and a natural follow-up to the chapter on law enforcement and criminal justice. It may seem odd to include the military alongside subjects typically found within a state-sanctioned violence paradigm focused on cities and youth of color; although the military–industrial complex may have escaped attention in social work education, there are increasing numbers of veterans entering our profession. At first glance, it simply does not fit, but upon closer examination when viewing the military as (1) a prime source for recruiting police officers, (2) providing equipment meant for wars that find their way to the nation’s streets, (3) a system that relies on the young, (4) having a role in foreign conflicts causing population displacements, and (5) increasingly a source for recruits of color, it becomes worthy of attention. It is easy to view the military as its own separate category of state-sponsored violence with minimal interactions with other forms of state violence due to the enormity of its influence.

The chapter begins with an overview of the growth of the prison population from the end of the civil war to the Obama administration. The authors describe all of the structural inequalities African Americans faced that stymied their growth economically and socially as a people, and subsequently led to the mass incarceration of Black men. The authors discuss the historical underpinnings of the factors that lead to mass incarceration and how these factors ultimately fueled the prison-industrial complex. The chapter also discusses the ways in which the Black Church contributes to the rehabilitation of former incarcerated persons, and, lastly, the authors discuss the implications for social work education.

The book opens with a description of the two key sites in my study: El Valle Juvenile Detention and Legacy community school. I describe the focus of the project and the questions I address. Here, I emphasize how these two institutions and wraparound services shape the pathways of my participants and how these young women navigate these interlocking entities. I then discuss why understanding these new educational and penal connections is important, especially the role they play in the lives of the Latina girls in my study. In this chapter I introduce the term wraparound incarceration, which I coin in the book. I draw on previous research on intersectionality, the school-to-prison pipeline, life course theory and work on gender and crime to situate my own intellectual contributions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the major components of the book, providing readers a “map” of what to expect in the text. Finally, I introduce my primary respondents who will lead off and end every chapter in this manuscript. This introduction as a whole reminds the readers of the importance of studying the processes that lead this growing group of girls into the juvenile justice system.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the treatment girls received at their “regular” schools puts them in situations that landed them back in detention. The challenges of attending school were exacerbated by the lack of positive support girls received from wraparound services once they left Legacy Community School. In fact, the little wraparound support they did receive, like probation supervision and electronic monitoring, actually made them targets for mistreatment at the hands of their peers and educational staff alike. Along with this, the girls were also stigmatized because of the time they spent at Legacy Community School and in El Valle Juvenile Detention Center. In Sandra’s case, those challenges proved too great, and she eventually ended up back in El Valle. Like at home, in detention, and at Legacy, the girls in my study continued to experience interpersonal violence at the hands of their peers, and they received little protection from school or criminal justice officials. Instead, they experienced institutional harassment and targeting shaped by administrators’ gendered and racialized perceptions of these young Latinas as gang members and criminals.

This chapter analyzes Interaction Order expectations that center on talk about health and masculinity. Health is an important part of “friend” talk among Whites. But in the Black community talk about health, like talk about status categories, work, and private life, is considered “personal” and therefore taboo. Based on audio and video recordings of focus group interactions, interviews, and workshop discussions, we trace the implications of clashing expectations about masculinity and health talk in two directions. The first is the effect on being “friendly” with Whites. The second is the effect within the Black community on shared knowledge about health and how this impacts a number of issues, including the perception and achievement of Black masculinity, and health interventions more generally. While we argue throughout that the Black Interaction Order does a good job of creating equality among people who otherwise would have little experience of it, we suggest that more talk about health and the criminal justice system would not threaten this equality. While it is still necessary to protect such information from outsiders, with half of some Black male populations having experienced prison, talking about masculinity and health within the community might increase feelings of equality and solidarity.

Legacy is California’s newest version of “continuation” or alternative education. This school is housed in a World War II army barrack. Here, kids are searched, made to walk through metal detectors, placed on formal or informal probation, and subjected to perpetual contact with criminal justice agents. In this school we find the Recuperation Class. This class is a self-contained program for youth with “drug dependence and other behavioral issues.” Unlike the rest of the school, the local probation department directly funds this classroom. In this unique setting, the teacher provides instruction as the probation agent walks around, conducts random drug tests on students, questions youth about their behavior outside of school, and/or takes them directly to detention. Legacy school officials have granted this criminal justice agency unfettered access to their students in return for financial support. While the probation department refers to this well-intentioned process as providing wraparound services to students, I argue that this process resembles “wraparound incarceration” where students cannot escape the formal surveillance of institutions of confinement. In this institution, young women move back and forth between this school and secure detention.