Back in on the Outside: Racialized Exclusion at Chicago's School/Prison Nexus and the Promise of Student Voice

Abstract

Most students released from detention never return to school. This study uses youth participatory action research and Social Justice Youth Development Theory to explore the experiences of those who do. Findings demonstrate that formerly incarcerated students want to return to school but face institutionalized resistance that amounts to racialized exclusion, violence, and state-sanctioned neglect at Chicago's school/prison nexus. We offer recommendations on how to “reverse” the school-to-prison pipeline by shifting educational and youth policies from surveillance and control to care, harm reduction, and greater youth and community oversight; shifts already arising out of student and educator activism, including through YPAR.

Keywords

school-to-prison pipeline school/prison nexus school reentry juvenile justice youth participatory action research dropout prevention student resistance institutional resistance social justice youth development theory

Into this wild beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars. —Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 2005 (originally published 1906), p. 160

Background: Race, Mass-Incarceration, Diminishing Support, and Punitive Accountability in Urban Education—Chicago's Back of The Yards Neighborhood 100 + Years After The Jungle

Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle presents perhaps the best known and most infamous depiction of Chicago's Back of the Yards (BOTY) neighborhood. Sinclair describes poverty, desperation, and exploitation under the excesses of early 20th-century robber-baron industrialism—barely human living and working conditions, violence, and, as hinted in the epigraph above, vast inequality of opportunity and fundamental corruption of institutions of law.

In some respects, notably for Black and Brown youth who have not completed high school, it could be argued that conditions in BOTY have worsened since Sinclair's time. Many factories and meatpacking plants—once reliable sources of jobs—have closed (Vasilogambros, 2019; Wilson, 1996). Youth unemployment, arrest, and homicide rates all stand at or near historic highs in Chicago, with employment lowest and violence and arrest highest among Black and Latino young men (Chicago Police Department, 2012; Chicago Tribune, 2020; Fogg et al., 2015; Papachristos et al., 2018). Local schools, crucial ladders to opportunity, are under assault (Rooks, 2017). The city closed or reconstituted five schools in the BOTY since 2001 (Lutton & Vevea, 2013; Vevea et al., 2013), assaults on education and community almost entirely absent from Whiter, wealthier neighborhoods across town (Gordon et al., 2018).

In what follows, we report on youth participatory action research (YPAR) conducted in BOTY with students attempting to return to school after incarceration. We argue that education and youth development policies of the last few decades have exacerbated historical and systemic oppressions that have long plagued communities of color. Unlike their White peers, Black and Brown students have been explicitly targeted by decades of harsh surveillance, policing, and mass incarceration (Hinton, 2016; Meiners, 2007; Miller, 1996). At the same time, they have been subjected to diminishing support for education and other youth development and social welfare opportunities (Anyon, 2014; Hill, 2016; Lipman, 2011). We characterize this situation as racialized institutional exclusion, racialized institutional neglect, and racialized institutional violence by the very institutions explicitly charged with ensuring their education, protection, and well-being—schools, juvenile courts, police, and the city, state, and national governments overseeing these. This violence, exclusion, and neglect tracks closely with Chicago and national educational reform policies of the early 2010s (notably Chicago's Renaissance 2010 and the Obama administration's Race to the Top initiatives) and with continued abusive policing of Black and Brown students, tragically exemplified by the 2013 Chicago Police Department (CPD) murder of Laquan McDonald, then recently released from detention and enrolled at Sullivan House Alternative High School—a murder that occurred just as this research was getting underway and just a few miles from where it was conducted (Gutowski & Gorner, 2015). In combination, these factors have resulted in what Marc Lamont Hill calls “America's war on the vulnerable” (Hill, 2016), a war whose existence and hard reality is further underscored by continued failures to comply with consent decrees brought against Chicago's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) (Doe v. Cook County, 2010), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) (Karp, 2009), and the CPD (Police Accountability Task Force, 2016)—consent decrees explicitly intended to remedy the kinds of violence, neglect, and exclusion that students describe below. These circumstances are neither inevitable nor immutable.

Overview

To make our case, we first review research exploring the school-to-prison pipeline or STPP. We highlight calls to critically historicize the STPP (Meiners, 2007; Rios, 2017; Sojoyner, 2016; Winn & Behizadeh, 2011) and describe what some call a crucial gap in understanding—limited knowledge of students’ attempts to reenroll in school after detention (Kubek et al., 2020; Mears & Travis, 2004; Morrison, 2020; Snodgrass Rangel et al., 2020). We draw on Social Justice Youth Development Theory (SJYDT) for its attention to young people's and educators’ agency to resist the hardening school/prison nexus, including via YPAR. Next, we describe methods used to conduct this study, including describing our sample, approaches to data collection and analysis, and how our identities and positionality impacted the study. We then present findings, foregrounding students’ voices and experiences and triangulating these with education and criminal legal system policies unfolding in Chicago. We conclude by offering recommendations for improving school return after detention that draw directly on the insights of students who, despite tremendous odds, succeeded in doing so.

A note on terms: We use “urban” and “urban education” intentionally due to the racialized nature of school-to-prison dynamics (Laura, 2014; Rios, 2017) and their hugely disproportionate impact on Black and Brown students. “Urban”—particularly “urban youth”—often codes for Black and Brown students and schools labeled “academically underperforming,” “struggling,” “failing,” or just “bad” (Ewing, 2018; Milner, 2012; Payne, 2008). This language persists despite robust evidence of schools serving primarily or exclusively Black and Brown students who achieve at the highest levels (Howard, 2013; Perry et al., 2003). “Euphemisms” like urban youth and inner-city schools shroud intentionally segregated racialized educational and policy landscapes (Rothstein, 2017, p., xvii) in which “failing” urban schools persist in the same districts, just a few miles from some of the highest performing schools in the nation (Shedd, 2015).

Reviewing Research

Historicizing School-to-Prison Pipelines: Sociocritical Approaches

A growing body of research describes a “school-to-prison pipeline”—a metaphor for the relationships between punitive school policies, notably discipline policies, and inappropriate arrest and incarceration of Black and Brown students (Hall, 2020; Heitzeg, 2016; Kim et al., 2012; Laura, 2014; Mallett, 2016a; Mallett, 2016b; Meiners, 2007; Nocella et al., 2018). Despite attention to the STPP, researchers describe insufficient understanding of the complex historical, political, ideological, and institutional processes hardening the school/prison “nexus” (Meiners, 2007, p. 6; Sojoyner, 2016) and call for (1) critically historicizing research on the STPP (e.g., Sojoyner, 2016; Winn and Behizadeh, 2011) and (2) expanding “what counts” (Anyon, 2014; Meiners, 2007, p. 3) when studying the STPP to include political, economic, and institutional policies that are expanding “carceral apparatus[es]” (Shedd, 2015, p. 80) and a “culture of control” in schools (Rios, 2017, p. 155).

For example, Winn and Behizadeh’s 2011 review argues that the field as a whole needs to adopt a “sociocritical approach” to “historicizing” the STPP (p. 149, 158) in the context of (1) deficit-based schooling for marginalized students, (2) discourses of “colorblindness” that obscure long-term racialized educational injustices (p. 153), (3) social constructions of raced youth as public enemies, and (4) metaphors of youth in high poverty urban schools as “educational prisoners” (p. 156). They conclude by arguing for the utility of Ladson-Billings’ (2013) concept of “educational debt”—longstanding historical, economic, and moral inequities in schooling—in studying hardening school / carceral convergences (pp. 158–9).

Similarly, Novak’s 2018 review concludes that the field has insufficient understanding of the complex “mediating and moderating factors” that characterize school/prison nexuses (Novak, 2018, p. 73) and Mallett (2016a, 2016b) argues that the field needs to attend more closely to larger “punitive paradigm shift[s]” in the last several decades that have come to characterize policies in “adolescent caring systems” (Mallett, 2016b, p. 15).

Critical Gaps: Prison-to-School and Student Voices

Others studying the STPP (Cusick et al., 2009; Kubek et al., 2020; Mears & Travis, 2004; Morrison, 2020; Snodgrass Rangel et al., 2020) note a major gap in the field: The need to better understand what could be considered the “other end” or “other direction” of STPPs—what happens when formerly detained students attempt to return to school. As Mears and Travis (2004) write, this gap constitutes a “critical justice policy issue”:

The transition of young people ages 24 and younger from juvenile and adult correctional settings back into schools […] is one of the critical justice policy issues currently confronting the United States, yet research addressing this topic is limited. We therefore know little about the unique challenges, including the role of youth development, involved in youth reentry or how best to effectively assist this population (p. 3; emphasis added).

Snodgrass Rangel et al.'s 2020 review draws similar conclusions. Of the few studies examining young people's attempts to return to school after detention, “most… focus[] on students” (p. 216), a unit of analysis that, we argue below, can devolve blame to students for failed reenrollment in what the authors stress is a profoundly “institutional[ly] embedded[]” (p. 215) process occurring across multiple systems (education, justice, social welfare). Snodgrass Rangel et al., also call for the direct involvement of students in research into school return post-detention in ways that “incorporat[es] students’ voices” (p. 215) as well as for research that is conducted in collaboration with school, district, and justice system “practitioners” (p. 216).

Kubek et al. (2020) note “an overall dearth of literature on how to support youth reentering schools [after detention]” (p. 2) and conclude that “more focused attention is needed to […] support[] school reentry among youth who are engaged in the juvenile justice system” (p. 8). Similarly, Morrison (2020) notes that while “one of the greatest challenges [youth detainees] face is reentry into school,” more research “needs to focus on understanding […] the transition process” and that “research has not uncovered specific youth needs, barriers, and facilitators for the transition” (pp. 32–33). And Cusick et al. (2009), framing an extensive cross-systems study of youth in Illinois, state simply that, “the field [i.e., research on juvenile reentry] would benefit from [more] research” (p. 61).

Student Resistance and Racialized Institutional Resistance at the School/Prison Nexus

Research on historically excluded students’ educational experiences rests on a long tradition of examining youth resistance as a way to highlight students’ agency opposing schools that fail them. Willis’ (1981) “lads,” MacLeod’s (2018) “hallway hangers,” Flores-Gonzalez’s (2002) “street kids,” Eckert's “burnouts” (1989), Foley’s (1990) “vatos,” and many of Fordham and Ogbu’s (1986) Black-identified youth reject or devalue school but do so in ways that often prove to be self-defeating (Tuck & Yang, 2014). In essence, these researchers argue that young people forsake schools that have forsaken them, they misbehave and act out, some engage in petty crime, get arrested and, in so doing, foreclose opportunities that education presents (Noguera, 2009).

Recent studies (Meiners, 2007; Hill, 2016; Rios, 2017; Shedd, 2015; Sojoyner, 2016) argue for more attention to the ways schools and other youth-serving institutions resist and exclude young people, as focusing on individual student resistance can ironically, or “tautologically” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 7), reinscribe student struggles that researchers seek to ameliorate. Instead, a more complete account should attend to what are arguably the most consequential forms of resistance driving outcomes for school returners: Institutionalized resistance and institutional violence, as focusing on individual student resistance obscures historical and ongoing systemic resistance and exclusions (Fine, 2016). Attending to institutionalized resistance can refocus energies on state policies that fundamentally shape opportunities for huge numbers of students—including those returning from detention.

The YPAR we report below foregrounds student voice and experiences to offer answers about how to help youth return to, stay in, and graduate from high school. Our answers are directly and intentionally rooted in the experiences of young people seeking to get “back in on the outside”—that is, seeking to return to school after detention.

Theoretical Framework: Social Justice Youth Development Theory

We draw on SJYDT (Allen-Handy et al., 2020; Cammarota, 2011; Coleman, 2021; Ginwright et al., 2005; Ginwright et al., 2006) to frame our study. SJYDT offers several advantages pertinent to our work, most significantly its attention to the positive consequences of educators and students working together to critically research policies like those that uphold the STPP. In this way, research informed by SJYDT can help reveal how educational and youth policies enhance or impede outcomes—including, for example, the effects of stop and frisk policies (Fox & Fine, 2013), bans on Raza studies (Cammarota & Romero, 2009), and racialized school closings (Kirshner, 2015; Stovall, 2016).

Part of the utility of SJYDT is that it both foregrounds structural and institutional constraints facing youth (what we describe as racialized institutional resistance and institutionalized violence) and it highlights youth agency—the idea that young people are not just trapped by oppressive conditions, but that they can act, individually and collectively, to push back against, resist, and otherwise open possibilities in schools and other institutions. As Ginwright and Cammarota (2006) put it, SJYDT helps address a tension or challenge for youth development and educational researchers, “how to highlight […] without romance […] [both] the struggles [and] victories […] in young people's lives” and schooling (p. xv, emphasis added). In other words, SJYDT can shed light on ways young people are not just “products” of schools and environments or “objects” of policy and research, but are agents struggling for opportunities in their own lives and communities (Ginwright et al., 2006).

SJYDT's attention to agency is particularly useful in the context of participatory research methods like YPAR that engage students in investigating and confronting injustice. SJYDT offers a counterpoint to deficit-based and pathologizing framings of education and youth development, something of great utility for research involving youth who have been institutionally marked as “dropouts” and “delinquents” (Butts et al., 2010). Instead, SJYDT “reframe[s] the enterprise” of youth development and education to focus on “the cultivation of strengths and purpose” rather than simply “the avoidance of risk or delinquency” (Kirshner, 2015, p. 13).

In what follows, we draw on SJYDT to frame YPAR with school returners. We do so to answer two research questions:

What do young people experience when they attempt to return to school after detention?

What do these experiences reveal about the effects of educational, criminal/legal, and youth development policies, in particular the effects of policies underway in Chicago?

Our findings suggest ways that urban schools and other state institutions charged with protecting, serving, and ensuring the well-being of minor children can avoid the “collateral […] damage” (Kirk & Sampson, 2013, p. 36) that accompanies youth detention and failure to reenroll in school.

Method: YPAR with School Returners

Sample

Our sample included 90 students—all of whom were attending an alternative school enrolling school returners (including young people returning from detention), and 17 adults—teachers, parents, probation officers, school administrators, and formerly incarcerated citizens.

Our student sample was heavily male—71 boys (78.8%) and 19 girls (21.1%)—with 40 students identifying as Black (65.6%) and 21 identifying as Latino/a (34.4%). Our sample has higher representations of Latinx and female youth than the population of young people detained at Chicago's JTDC (Circuit Court of Cook County, 2021b).¹ This skewing of our sample (compared to those detained at the Juvenile Detention Center) likely reflects both that the percentage of Latinos living in BOTY (61.5%) is roughly double the percentage of Latinos in Chicago as a whole (28.8%; Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, 2021a, 2021b) and that there are fewer young women than young men aged 16–19 who are out of school in Chicago (Córdova & Wilson, 2017).

To recruit participants, we presented our interest in school return after-detention at weekly all-school staff meetings. We solicited input, welcomed collaborators, and requested permission to visit classes to invite participants. In the study's second year, student researchers took the lead presenting the research, including our research questions and preliminary findings, at staff meetings as well as soliciting student participants during subsequent classroom visits.

Design

Data collection

Our team conducted 54 interviews over the course of two school years (2013–2014 & 2014–2015). Interviews were in person, in one-on-one and focus group formats, averaging 40 minutes, and were semi-structured around an interview protocol with questions focused on student experiences when attempting to return to school after detention such as, “Did you want to go back to school after you got out? Why/why not? What happened when you tried to go back?” All interviews were conducted at school during lunch or study hall periods by student researchers and co-authors. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Data analysis

Our initial coding and analysis used grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). We identified major themes emerging out of the data as focal codes and used these to identify instances when participants discussed these themes. Our coding began with broad parent codes: “obstacles to school return” and “supports for school return,” and branched into more specific sub-codes, some of the most generative of which we use below as a basis for reporting findings. After most interviews, research team members discussed emergent themes as well as how to analyze interview segments embodying multiple themes. We also held multi-day research retreats at the end of each school year with breakfast and lunch from local takeout spots, meetings with community leaders, and extended time to code data, discuss findings, and consider how to present our research. In the study's second year, adult researchers entered interview transcripts into NVivo software to index, further analyze, and more easily access interview data.

To member-check findings (Lincoln & Guba, 1986), we asked the group as a whole and some key participants to consider accuracy: Did our findings present accurate depictions of what study participants told us about their experiences? We also asked the group to consider real-world relevance or “relevance to practice” (Gutiérrez & Penuel, 2014, p. 19), that is, to consider if our findings (1) would help others understand key issues impacting school return and if (2) they could help more young people succeed after detention.

YPAR, positionality, and researcher outsiders: “school return after detention” v. “getting back in on the outside”

One advantage of YPAR is that it brings the insights of those closest to a problem to bear in articulating solutions (Fine, 2008, 2016). None of us who began this research—a social worker with a decade and a half of experience teaching in juvenile detention, an associate professor in a college of education who had run a CPS alternative school and taught for six years in juvenile detention centers, and a senior researcher with nearly two decades’ experience with YPAR—were unfamiliar with urban alternative schools or juvenile detention. Despite our experiences, we were outsiders in the community and school. Two of us are White and one Latina, two university-affiliated and one ran the CPS reentry support program for youth emerging from detention or prison during the study's first year. Our identities—racial, institutional, geographic, etc.—impacted how students responded to adult outsiders, students’ willingness to engage in the study, and even how different groups talked about the study. For example, adult researchers often described the study using policy language—“school return after detention,” while student researchers were more likely to talk about their own or their friends’ experiences getting “caught up” in the criminal legal system and struggling to get “back in on the outside.” Student researchers also advocated for expanding our interview pool beyond students, teachers, school leaders, and probation officers. They wanted to interview “OGs” (“original gangsters”), police officers, and parents. They felt it was crucial to speak with people whose day-to-day experiences were rooted in the neighborhood and not circumscribed by school. These differences were not merely semantic or cosmetic: they suggest different ideas about the significance and import of the work—who it was for and what it might accomplish.

Perhaps most profoundly, youth leadership in the research helped bridge the cultural and institutional barriers posed by adult researchers’ identities as outsiders. This study would not have happened without the collaboration, assistance, and grace of many—including school staff, parents, community leaders, police and probation officers, etc. But it was young people's embrace of the project that ultimately sustained it and ensured its credibility and success. Without youth leadership, those of us who begun the study would have remained only outsiders, and the research would likely have remained a diversion or distraction—“those [university/CPS] people” doing “their thing”—rather than, as it eventually became for some student participants, “our project.”

Findings: Hope, Institutional Resistance, and Survival at Chicago's School/Prison Nexus

Here we present three findings. Each represents an idea we encountered repeatedly from the beginning of our work to the last interviews.

Formerly incarcerated students want to return to school, recognizing the value of a high school diploma for future employment.

Schools resist enrolling them. And,

These students face violence and neglect when trying to reenroll.

Below, we describe each finding.

“You Gotta Go to School to Get What You Want, and What You Want is to Succeed”: Pragmatic Optimism, Racialized Economic Exclusion, and the Desire to Return to School After Detention

Formerly incarcerated young people told us they wanted to return to school. Many spoke of the importance of a diploma to future employment. For example, Isaac² told us that he wanted to get his diploma “‘cause a lot of [jobs] don't accept GEDs [test of General Educational Development, a high school equivalency certificate]. And a lot of places don't even accept a high school diploma, [you need] a college diploma” (2/6/15). Similarly, Paul told us, “you not gonna go far without it [a diploma].” Collectively, these young people's words offer a sobering (and accurate) assessment of the dim employment prospects and educational opportunities for Black and Brown youth returning from detention.

Paul continued,

I know people who had jobs and they work all their life without a high school diploma and they still end up coming up from the bottom. I don't wanna have to come up from the bottom. I’d rather get a high school diploma then, hopefully, go to college (3/13/14).

Henry also described his desire to return to school after being locked up. Getting a diploma was necessary for employment:

Without my high school diploma I can't get nothing. I’m in the system. I got felonies. I can't even get a job. That's my whole purpose of coming [to school]—to get my high school diploma. I’m trying to get me a job, I’m trying to have money, I’m trying to do something with my life (1/31/14).

And James described his desire to return to school as a way to “get me a nice job,” and “get legit”:

I really need the school so I can get me a nice job and stuff. I don't wanna be out there, you know what I’m sayin’? I don't wanna sell drugs. I wanna get legit money, like I wanna, have my own. So that's why I come to school. I mean to tell you the truth, I wanna work. I wanna have a job to go to. School and me going to work, that would be a decent day (1/13/14).

Without a diploma, Isaac, Paul, Henry, James and students like them face incredibly dim employment prospects. At the time we were conducting this research, the unemployment rate for Black 20–24 year-olds was greater than 60% in BOTY and surrounding communities (Córdova & Wilson, 2016) and is likely significantly higher almost ten years later, post-pandemic (Inanc, 2021). Compared to Whiter and wealthier communities (the Loop, Northside, Near Westside), few jobs are accessible from BOTY via 30 min of public transit (Córdova & Wilson, 2017). This last fact is particularly significant and demonstrates one profound effect of long historical and structural exclusion and intentional segregation of Black and Latinx residents from jobs (Rothstein, 2017; Wilson, 1996), educational opportunities (Ewing, 2018; Shedd, 2015), and other necessities like safe and affordable housing (Klinenberg, 2015; Rothstein, 2017). These realities mean that school return after detention must at times compete with basic survival, something we discuss below.

Working with young people in Berkeley, Oakland, and across the San Francisco Bay area, Pedro Noguera described a “pragmatic optimism” (Noguera, 2003, p. 8) in the way young Black and Brown students talked about education as a pathway to opportunity and better jobs. Isaac, Paul, Henry, James, and others also spoke about school return in pragmatic terms, but their pragmatism was tempered with urgency. In their words, getting back in school after being incarcerated could spell the difference between “work[ing] all [their] life […] and still end[ing] up [on] the bottom” versus “get[ting] legit” and “doing something with my life.”

The idea that graduating from high school was necessary for “success” was so universally stated by young people that perhaps it would be more accurate to say, given the quizzical looks when we asked directly about it, it was simply assumed—a given. This universality lends it importance—it is a high leverage finding. Indeed, part of its significance lies in the idea that researchers, educators, and policymakers need to “establish a wide-angle view” (O’Connor, 2020, p. 470) beyond the field's long-term focus on student resistance to more thoroughly investigate institutional resistance, including racialized educational exclusion and economic immiseration, if we wish for a more adequate understanding of young people's experiences when seeking to reenroll after detention.

“When I Tried Going Back, They Told Me I Couldn't”: Institutional Exclusion and High-Stakes Accountability

Young people described being pushed off or discouraged by schools when they attempted to enroll. In Nolani's words, seeking to reenroll after detention left her feeling, “judge[d] because of my background” (10/16/13; young people often used “background” to refer specifically to a criminal record, as in, “I got cases on my background”). To be arrested or incarcerated was, as Brenda put it, to “catch a reputation” (10/15/13)—encapsulated in an arrest record and interrupted transcript—that could make it difficult to reenroll. As these stories were repeated, our team began to think about young people attempting to return to school after detention in the context of high-stakes accountability pressures that focused on test scores and other metrics like attendance. As Brenda put it, “how you gonna say ‘No Child Left Behind’ and you ain't tryna help me out? You in this thing called No Child Left Behind but you ain't tryna help me get back in school” (10/15/13).

Aaron told us that after his release from juvenile detention, “they wouldn't take me in”:

When I tried going back, they told me I couldn't go in ‘cause it was too late for me to reenroll. I tried about three times and all three times I got denied, so then I stopped going to school for a while. Then, I went to another school at the beginning of the quarter and they said they couldn't take me in ‘cause I wasn't gonna earn any credits, I wasn't gonna be able to catch up to what they had done already, so they wouldn't take me in. When I tried to tell like a principal or dean, they was just telling me, “well, you shouldn't never put yourself in jail like that” (10/16/13).

Henry told us he got “dropped” by his neighborhood high school while he was incarcerated:

Like, my old school, I ain't trying to go there. ‘Cause in the midst of me being locked up, they dropped me. They called my parents and sent a letter saying I was dropped. So when I tried to go there, they said naw. ‘Cause I missed like 2, 3 months and they dropped me out the system. So I was out of school for like a year (1/31/14).

Charmaine gave a similar account:

Before I got locked up [school] was good. And then I got locked up for a couple weeks and when I went back, they was like, they didn't want me to be in the school anymore. They thought different, they was, like they attitudes was totally different. So I just went to a different school. And then, after they had found out that I had been locked up, they ain't want me in their school either. So I was outta school for like 8 months (1/31/14).

Paul told us that he was “not welcomed back” to his neighborhood school and that his difficulty reenrolling drew the attention of his probation officer (P.O.). [Author]:

Did you ever get expelled?

Paul:

Naw, I just got not welcomed back.

[Author]:

Not… Say that again.

Paul:

Not welcomed back. They ain't welcome me back. They told me they don't want me here no more. I can't come back.

[Author]:

And so since then, you were out of school for how long?

Paul:

When they first told me, I was out of school for like 6, 7 months. And then, my P.O. told me to get back in school, ‘cause he already knew my situation. And so he told me, “man, you got a court date coming up.” “Boy, you better find somebody's school to get in real quick.” So that's what I did. Found this school (12/4/13).

Young people's accounts were echoed by parents (in interview on 1/17/14), probation officers (in two interviews on 12/19/13), and school leaders (in interviews on 4/1/14 and 4/4/14), all of whom told us that incarceration could present trouble when students sought to reenroll. “Catching a case” could make it difficult to return to school.

In 2012, the year before we began this study, the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) held its first strike in a quarter century. The strike has been described as an attempt to push back against high-stakes punitive testing pressures and accountability schemes coming out of the No Child Left Behind Act and Chicago's own Renaissance 2010 plan (Ashby & Bruno, 2016; Lipman, 2011). The upshot is that Chicago schools, particularly those on probationary status, were under intense pressure to, in the words of the CTU, “push out troubled low-performing students” (CTU, 2012, p. 16). Accounts by the CTU, as well as by Anyon (2014); Ashby and Bruno (2016), and Lipman (2011), all reveal how educational reform policies, notably those unfolding in Chicago before and during this study, serve to punish rather than incentivize schools reenrolling students after detention. The CTU's and researchers’ concerns about high stakes accountability pressures arising out of Chicago school reforms in the early 2010s triangulate and support students’ accounts of being turned away. Schools’ institutionalized resistance to formerly incarcerated students contributes to and compounds what we describe below as state-sanctioned neglect and violence, along with the heightened vulnerability these produce during a highly consequential period of students’ lives—the transition to adulthood.

“When You on Your Own [You Got] Nobody to Count on”: Violence, Vulnerability, and State-Sanctioned Neglect in School Return After Detention

For many formerly incarcerated students, school return could mean trying to balance their desire to return to school with concerns about safety and struggles to meet basic survival needs. For example, Isaac told us that at his old school, “It was nothing but gang fights. It was either every day you fight or you get suspended.” Isaac framed his struggle to return to school directly in terms of safety: “I gotta find a school where I’m gonna feel safe and I ain't gotta fight” he told us, a school “where I could focus on my work” (2/6/14). Like Isaac, Darrius told us that he chose his current school to avoid violence:

I don't really know a lot of people [at this school] so [they] can't say that they’re my ops [“opposition,” from another neighborhood or gang] or try to fight me ‘cause they don't know me. [This school] made me feel like a better student and improved my attitude. And I ain't fighting no more. So it was a good change (2/6/14).

Paul told us that he felt safe at his new school:

I knew most of the people in here already. I was okay here. It wasn't like [neighborhood high school he attended before being incarcerated]. Everybody [here] got a little love for me, that's why I don't be going off on people in here or trying to start trouble. I’m not no trouble person in this school (3/13/14).

While Isaac, Darrius, and Paul talked about violence and safety, others spoke about struggling to balance their desire to return to school with concerns about basic survival—“house problems,” struggling to take care of themselves, struggling to take care of children, being on their own.

Charmaine described trying to get to school despite “house problems” and “family problems.” While she didn't elaborate, Charmaine laid out what seemed an impossible forced choice—trying to finish school while “handl[ing] everything that you got going on”:

Trying to get to school is not that easy, considering different circumstances [people] got, probably they got a lot going on and then still trying to go to school and handle everything that you got going on. People's house problems, they got family problems they dealing with, and then you trying to still go to school. And sometimes you may not be able to get to school but then you end up, you know, you still get there. Sometimes you don't be wanting to go because you have too much on your mind (1/31/14).

Paul described feeling caught between providing for his soon-to-arrive child and staying in school. “I know for a fact [school] will help me in the long run” Paul told us, “but now I got responsibilities to take care of”:

Like I got a kid on the way. I gotta think about how to provide for that kid because I’m still in school. Kids can't eat books. Kids can't wear homework, you feel me? They not gonna live in the school. I ain't gonna say I’m gonna put school on the side but sometimes school just gonna have to wait until I get right (3/13/14).

Others described trying to balance school return with being “on your own” with “nobody to count on”. James told us:

When you on your own [you got] nobody to count on, especially if you ain't got no job. I don't got no job yet so it's like every little thing I want I gotta wait ‘til I get a certain amount [of money] to go get it. I can't just ask my parents like, “I need help buying this” or something like that. I can't just do that (1/13/14).

For Charmaine, Paul, and James, returning to school after detention had to compete with urgent responsibilities: “house problems,” “family problems,” “responsibilities to take care of,” being “on your own.” Their experiences, we argue, are evidence of profound neglect and systemic failure by schools, police, juvenile and criminal courts, and the city, state, and national governments funding and overseeing them—all state institutions charged with ensuring the education, protection, safety, and enactment of justice in young people's lives.

Pedro Noguera (1995) poses an important question about school safety and schools’ efforts to, in a somewhat oxymoronic phrase, “fight violence” (p. 192) using harsh discipline policies and metal detectors, zero tolerance, police in schools, and treating disciplinary incidents as criminal offenses handled by law enforcement. Noguera asks whether these efforts prevent or, ironically, “produce” violence (1995, p. 189). Based on students’ accounts, we offer similar questions about the production of and responsibility for violence and vulnerability, questions that are rendered particularly acute in the context of long-term struggles in Chicago (and elsewhere) over racialized police violence and disparities in discipline, juvenile and criminal justice, educational outcomes, etc. What can be difficult to discern is what is cause and what is consequence the denial of educational opportunities, police violence, systemic racism in the criminal legal system, and youth vulnerability and violence—including in schools. In fact, both the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and the CPD were or would soon be under federal consent decrees related to racialized abuse of Chicago youth while this research was being conducted (Chicago Police Accountability Taskforce, 2016; Doe v. Cook County, 2010). As with segregated geographies of employment and research describing exclusionary effects of Chicago's school reform policies, these consent decrees support and triangulate student accounts presented here. Ultimately, these accounts are, as Hill (2016) argues, indicative of the “disposability” of Black lives and Black youth lives in particular (p xxi).

Discussion: “Reversing” the Pipeline—Institutional Violence, Harm Reduction, and Urban School Policy

Based on these findings, it is simply wrong to say that formerly incarcerated young people don't want to return to school or that their resistance is responsible for failures to complete high school. Doing so focuses primary blame on young people for what is, from the outset, (1) a complex “institutional[ly] embedded[]” process (Snodgrass Rangel et al., 2020, p. 215) (2) unfolding in the context of historic and racialized “punitive shift[s]” in “adolescent caring systems” (Mallett, 2016b, p. 15) that skew educational and developmental outcomes by race and neighborhood.

“Reversing” the Pipeline: Recommendations

Instead, our findings suggest the need for urban education and youth development policy to move (1) from a culture of surveillance and control to one of harm-reduction (e.g., Leslie and Canadian Paediatric Society, 2008) focused on restorative justice (González, 2012), healing (Ginwright, 2016) and care (Rios, 2017), and (2) from top-down monitoring and punishment toward more youth and community involvement in oversight of education and youth policy. We offer suggestions for schools, juvenile courts, and police, as well as for the city, state, and federal governments charged with their funding and oversight. Our recommendations arise in part from advocacy, organizing, and public pressure, including as a result of YPAR and other SJYDT-informed approaches to education and youth development.

To “reverse” the STPP, institutions charged with the education and well-being of youth should recognize and build on young people's strong desire to return to school by investing in preventative and restorative approaches, including those described in the Cook County Juvenile Court's Detention Alternatives Initiatives (JDAI—see Circuit Court of Cook County, 2021a), as well as by ensuring the transfer of academic records between schools (so credits earned before and during detention “count” towards graduation), beginning school reenrollment as soon as a young person is detained, supervised visits to and meetings with receiving schools, fully funding and strictly enforcing federal civil rights law governing special and supplementary educational services (including for detained students), and restoring Pell Grant eligibility for detainees.

Given that formerly incarcerated students are often excluded from both schools and labor markets, students, youth advocates, and political leaders can aggressively pursue living wage and anti-discrimination hiring ordinances (including so called “ban-the-box” provisions) and governments and districts can invest more in empirically-supported school-to-work and post-secondary programs such as some already in place in Chicago—career academies, dual enrollment, community-college and public apprenticeship programs, Job Corps, etc. (Symonds et al., 2011).

To immediately assist school-returners struggling to meet basic survival needs, as well as their peers, families, and the communities they return to, CPS, along with the state and federal government, can commit to funding community schools (sometimes referred to as full-service community schools) where buildings are open year-round beyond normal hours and serve as hubs to house a wide array of social service providers and community organizations (CPS, 2021a). Community schools have repeatedly been shown to improve achievement and attainment, including among vulnerable student populations (Oakes et al., 2017).

The encouraging news is that rather than being utopian or unrealistic, Chicago has witnessed some progress in these areas. These include increased civilian oversight of the CPD and JTDC in accordance with consent decrees, as well as CPS's Community Schools and Work-Based Learning initiatives (CPS, 2021a, 2021b). This progress reflects student, community, and educator advocacy, youth organizing, and enhanced youth voice in Chicago policy making, all of which underscore the potential of YPAR and SJYDT-informed approaches to promote positive outcomes for Chicago's youth.

Conclusion: Collateral Damage—Racialized Youth Disposability in The Jungle and the Promise of Youth Voice

Nearly three-quarters of CPS students leaving detention never complete high school (Chicago Public Schools, 2013; Kirk & Sampson, 2013). This “collateral educational damage” (Kirk & Sampson, 2013, p. 36) in urban education has grave moral, human, and economic costs.

Back at the turn of the 20th century, when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, the U.S. was building what has been called “the one best system” of urban public education (Tyack, 1974). At the same time, Chicago was leading the world in what would become a great experiment in the ministration of justice for children, establishing the first juvenile court to serve as a “kind and just parent” to orphaned, neglected, delinquent, and “wayward” youth (Ayers, 1997). Our findings suggest that while much has changed since Sinclair's time, conditions for Black and Latinx students have not markedly improved. Urban public education and youth crime have been racialized, as CPS came to be marked as a last resort, “the worst in the nation” in former Secretary of Education William Bennett's thinly veiled and racially charged language (Associated Press, 1987), and Chicago's “wayward” youth were labeled “super predators” (Gilliam & Iyengar, 1998) or simply “other people's children” (Pickett & Chiricos, 2012, p. 673).

The schools and criminal legal systems the U.S. built are not “one best system” but two, separate and urgently unequal. In this great American city, some of the highest achieving schools in the nation operate just a few miles from heavily-policed, underfunded schools staffed by too many inexperienced teachers and too few counselors (Haycock & Crawford, 2008; Whitaker et al., 2019). Rather than address root causes of students’ struggles to complete school, our society has spent massively on police and prison systems that bypass wealthy communities while reaching deep into schools populated by Black and Brown students, meeting our most vulnerable students with institutionalized violence (Hill, 2016). More than a century into Chicago's and this nation's experiment in mass public education, students like those in BOTY still navigate tangled “jungles” of neglect, fear, misunderstandings, and misplaced blame (Gardner, 2011).

Despite these grim realities, research reported here demonstrates that educators and students can work together to highlight and resist institutional and racialized violence and, in so doing, can promote hope, healing, and agency in urban schools. As the nation moves to finally recognize and undo structural injustices that have defined our institutions since their inception, we urge leaders to heed the insights of formerly incarcerated students.

Footnotes

Author Note

With sincere gratitude to: Peace and Education Coalition Alternative High School; Brian Wittenwyler, Kelsey Tarr, Stormie McNeal, Brigitte Swenson, and Jennifer Vidis, Chicago Public Schools; Riza Falk, Erie Neighborhood House

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Joby Gardner

Notes

Author Biographies

Joseph Gardner (Joby) began his career in the Mississippi Delta, teaching third grade in Assumption Parish, Louisiana. He taught in juvenile detention facilities in San Mateo County, California while pursuing his PhD and then taught and worked as an Education Director at Howard Area Leadership Academy, a school for youth aged 16–21 years who returned to school after leaving other Chicago Public Schools. Joby is currently an associate professor in DePaul University's College of Education and Director of the Program in Curriculum Studies. His research interests include the institutional experiences of court-involved citizens and school returners, the preparation and support of anti-racist and justice-oriented teachers, and the intersection of education and youth development, especially in minoritized communities. His work has appeared in journals and books including Urban Education, The Urban Review, Youth & Society, and The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States, and Pedagogies: An International Journal.

Amanda Klonsky worked for more than a decade as a teacher and then as a social worker inside of Chicago's Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. In her years of teaching, she saw students return again and again in a revolving door between the detention center and their home communities. She saw students grow up inside of the detention center and knew hundreds of students who have spent more time enrolled in the public school inside of the “temporary” detention center than they did at any other school on the outside. Klonsky became interested in untangling the web of obstacles that seem to get in the way when her students sought to return to school upon release and went on to lead a district initiative to support school return for youth leaving the detention center. This research project is, in part, rooted in that effort. Klonsky now serves as a Research and Policy Fellow at the UCLA COVID Behind the Bars Data Project and as a lecturer at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago.

Ishujon Clemens graduated from a high school in Chicago's Back of the Yards community, where he was a leader of the Youth Participatory Action (YPAR) research team. Clemens helped to lead interviews with stakeholders including formerly incarcerated students, school leaders, educators, and police, and to analyze the data.

Selena Gallardo graduated from the Second Chance High School in June 2015. Gallardo Studied at Daley College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. Gallardo was interested in majoring in early childhood education to be able to work at a daycare and also interested in joining the soccer team at Daley in my free time. Gallardo was interested in joining and being part of this project because it was interesting. Gallardo was very interested in listening to other students' experiences of how they got incarcerated and how it was difficult for them to get back to school. Gallardo hopes that this project can help other students who are struggling in the criminal justice system or who are struggling in school.

Rakeisha Harris, aged 19 years, is studying at Peace and Education Coalition High School. Harris is interested in fine art such as dance and drawing. Harris was not always interested in research. One day Harris stopped by the research room to get some donuts but started listening to what the researchers were doing and felt it was an important work. Now the project means a lot and is very passionate about what is going on in Chicago's juvenile justice system because Harris was one of the kids who were forced to be removed from a public school because Harris “did not meet the school's expectations.”

Natali Rosario graduated from a high school in Chicago's Back of the Yards community, where she was a leader of the Youth Participatory Action (YPAR) research team. Rosario helped to lead interviews with stakeholders including formerly incarcerated students, school leaders, educators, and police, and to analyze the data.

Ashley Suarez, aged 17 years old, has an interest to major in criminal justice and would like to be a detective or a DEA agent. Suarez's work would make people realize that teenagers should not be treated in such a way that makes them not like the law. This project is important because Saurez has been through some rough situations with the law. Also, another reason is that as a detective, Saurez can learn things about how other teens feel about police and the justice system. As a researcher, Saurez learned new things, think more, and also realize things. And gets to know what people have been through.

Bridget Torres, aged 18-year-old, is a junior at Peace and Education Coalition High School. Torres is interested in many things—research is one of them. Torres really enjoys learning and doing research that can help make a change in this world. After high school, Torres plans to major in forensic science. One thing that Torres does in my free time is play sport—any kind of sport except soccer. Torres also likes to tag and write poems but has not written a poem in almost a year. Research is important because Torres likes to learn and figure other ways to make a change.

María Elena Torre is the founding director of The Public Science Project at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she is on the faculty of the doctoral programs in Critical Social Psychology and Urban Education. A queer mama of a very cool teenager, she has written about and been engaged in critical participatory action research nationally and internationally for over 20 years. She collaborates with communities in neighborhoods, schools, prisons, and community-based organizations designing research to fuel social transformation and structural change. With the Public Science Project, María leads annual summer CPAR Institutes that bring graduate students, faculty, and community workers together, to learn alongside each other, about the history, theory, methods, and ethics of critical participatory action research. Her recent book, The Essentials of Critical Participatory Action Research was published by APA Press.

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