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The Introduction opens with the stories of a Black parent and a Black student who were victims of the school-to-prison pipeline and their journeys to racial justice organizing. These experiences and these stories ground the emergence of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The Introduction then recounts the author’s own journey to awareness of the school-to-prison pipeline and describes the development of the community engaged research project upon which the book is based. It recounts the author’s traumatic experiences in the field witnessing the abusive treatment of students and parents of color, and it discusses the challenges faced addressing the author’s privileges and positionality as a white, male professor partnering with and studying organizers and leaders of color based in low-income communities. It ends with an overview of the book and its chapters.

The concluding chapter documents the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline movement on reducing suspensions and challenging policing practices in schools. It then highlights the features that help explain the growth and success of the movement and its emerging intersectional nature—like centering the participation of people most impacted by injustice. It draws lessons from this study for reconceptualizing social justice movements as ones that “nationalize local struggles.” It considers the enduring challenges facing the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, including the persistence of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline, tensions between local and national organizing, and the difficulties of implementing restorative alternatives that serve to transform deep-seated racialized processes. It ends with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities to building racial and educational justice movements powerful enough to fully transform entrenched systems of racial inequity and educational injustice, particularly in an era that has witnessed the rise of white nationalism.

Chapter 1 offers an analysis of the school-to-prison pipeline as the modern incarnation of a system of white supremacy based upon the mass criminalization of Black and Brown communities. It documents the rise of the school-to-prison pipeline in zero-tolerance school discipline policies and the increasing presence of police and security measures in schools. The school-to-prison pipeline is more than a set of well-intentioned but misguided school discipline policies that require reform. Rather, it represents an interlocking system of racial domination and control that keeps communities of color poor and lacking in power. It signifies the current version of the historic effort to maintain white supremacy by denying education to African Americans and criminalizing generations of young people of color and their families. This larger analytical framework of systemic racism is important because it establishes the need for a racial and educational justice movement to dismantle it.

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.

Chapter 7 discusses the spread of the movement across the country. It shows how small, under-resourced groups like Racial Justice NOW! in Dayton, Ohio, won significant victories by combining strong parent organizing with critical support from the national Dignity in Schools Campaign. It charts the efforts of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children to combat the school-to-prison pipeline in a privatized district dominated by charter schools. It examines the work of the Gwinnett Parent Coalition to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline outside of Atlanta. It shows how students of color face sharply inequitable discipline despite attending higher performing schools and the challenges of confronting the school-to-prison pipeline in white-dominated districts used to serving majority white populations. The chapter ends in the suburbs surrounding Richmond, Virginia, where local organizers confront a system that has systematically denied educational opportunities to students of color with special needs.

Chapter 8 examines the expansion of the movement to new issues and newly forceful constituents. It charts the rise of the police-free schools movement and discusses the influence of the Movement for Black Lives. It documents the assertion of voice and leadership by Black girls; girls of color; and gender nonconforming students in the movement, highlighting the intersectional ways that they experience the school-to-prison pipeline. Finally, it examines the role of teachers as allies to the movement and highlights efforts to implement restorative justice as an alternative to zero tolerance. It emphasizes the need to connect restorative justice to school-site organizing that connects teachers with students and parents in ways that transform relationships and create liberatory education.

Chapter 6 examines the campaign by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) to pass SB100, the strongest state law at the time designed to combat the school-to-prison pipeline. It highlights the role of high school students in leading a struggle for their own liberation. It identifies key elements of VOYCE’s organizing strategy—elements that groups used across the country: personal storytelling to bring a human face and moral force to policy campaigns; participatory action research to demonstrate the systemic nature of racial inequities; and alliance building to provide greater resources to organizing efforts led by those most impacted. It also shows how the SB100 campaign emerged through an interaction between authentic, bottom-up concerns of VOYCE youth of color and national-level learning from the experiences of organizing groups across the country.

This chapter argues that while the history of professionalized of teaching and administration during the twentieth century moderated punishment in some ways, it also subordinated public accountability to the judgment of self-proclaimed experts. Professional educators pioneered a new language of therapy and self-regulation and replaced painful or degrading punishments with more neutral forms of physical separation, including suspensions. In the process, however, they reduced punishment to a management technique, stripped of its moral overtones. The new approaches did nothing to challenge traditional notions of classroom order, nor did they mitigate the entrenched prejudices of students, teachers, and administrators. These issues became clear as immigration and desegregation brought more students of color into contact with racist teachers and police officers. Although inequalities in suspension and corporal punishment provoked legal challenges such as Goss v. Lopez (1975) and Ingraham v. Wright (1977), courts largely deferred to local administrators, overlooking the ways in which schools were increasingly immune from democratic authority. The chapter concludes that bureaucratic procedures, under the guise of professionalism, have actually encouraged inflexibility, lack of judgment, and a breakdown between schools and the communities they serve, leading to the current injustices of the school-to-prison pipeline.

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.

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 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.

As a transnational system, the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline enables US disciplining institutions and regimes to operate across borders and extended time-spaces. This chapter examines the central place of such institutions and their afterlife in the production of transnational structures of (im)mobility affecting the lives of deportees and their families and communities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Peruvians who were deported to Lima and Callao from the United States between 2009 and 2017, and operating at the intersection of Latinx and Latin American Studies, the chapter reveals how the post-deportation lives of ex-US residents continue to be deeply entangled with and imperiled by the very institutional structures and disciplinary regimes that produced their precarity and led to their banishment from the United States.

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.

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.