Abstract
Through a critical institutional ethnographic study of the Lincoln Treatment Center and its school, Sabina Vaught, in Compulsory: Education and the Dispossession of Youth in a Prison School, takes her readers on a ghost hunt to map the haunting specters of prison schools and “how they are mechanized, how they interact, and how they assemble and reproduce power” (p. 3). To undertake this analysis, Vaught conducted an eighteen-month ethnographic exploration of Lincoln Treatment Center, a highest-security juvenile male prison that contained what the state considered to be its “worst offenders” (p.25). Through this study of the prison’s institutional, ideological, and symbolic power, Vaught registers the pernicious processes of state captivity, child removal, and coercive schooling that stalk U.S. communities of color.
Attentive to the fraught relationships she developed inside, Vaught challenges conventional understandings of the carceral state and its ever-extending tentacles in and through schools. Rupturing liberal fantasies, Vaught asserts that white state schooling has never produced equitable or positive educational outcomes for black students and callsfor the “abolition of school as we know it” (p. 37). Through Compulsory, Vaught demands a public rethinking of schooling, the state, and freedom.
Vaught first explores the racial hierarchies that sustain and are sustained by the carceral state. To do so, she contests the commonsense conclusion that financial profit drives the prison-industrial complex (p. 29). Centering the “carceral cash cow” misses “why a nation incarcerates and why it incarcerates in severely disproportionate and brutal ways across race, gender, and class, among other categories of power” (p. 29). Rather than point to the prison system as evidence of a racist, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist economy, Vaught accounts for how “white supremacy’s investments do not always yield obvious revenue”—evident in the mass expense to incarcerate youth—as “dividends are produced across the interplay of multiple systems” (p. 33).
The criminal-legal system cannot be reduced to financial profit, as incarceration accrues other material benefits aimed at maintaining the “exclusive value of White property: exclusive civic humanity” (p. 32). The criminal-legal system, by design, reproduces racial hierarchies that reaffirm white supremacy, regardless of monetary profit. In fact, prisons sometimes generate significant financial losses, indicating other forms of material benefit that propel the caging of racialized youth. This intervention importantly supplants prevailing understandings of the capitalist drivers of the prison-industrial complex, pointing to a more pernicious white supremacist logic underwriting the carceral state.
Given the white supremacist carceral state and the punitive functions of the U.S. public school system, Vaught both recognizes the utility in the term “school-to-prison pipeline” to describe the processes through which schools push non-dominant students out of school and into the criminal-legal system and argues that this explanatory framework dangerously “cement[s] school as the site of remedy and possibility” (p. 36). Rather than assume that schools are “inherently good,” Vaught encourages her readers to view schools as key mechanisms in reproducing inequality across axes of difference (p. 37). State sites, schools, juvenile prisons, and prison schools work together to remove children from their homes and cage them, depriving them of kinship ties, education, and freedom.
In addition to this function of schooling, the “attachment of education to juvenile prison outwardly softens the punitive function of the state and advances a meritocratic mirage of state beneficence” (p. 68). The prison school not only reproduces inequality; it also actively softens the image of the punitive functions of the state, most notably in its punishing institutions like the prison. By affirming the myth of meritocracy, the prison school masks both the disciplining mission of the state school system and the punishing functions of the prison. At Lincoln, state workers also advanced these benevolent narratives, suggesting that the juvenile detention center could serve as a form of “protective custody” from the dangers posed by the street, by the family, and by the child himself (p. 133). These narratives included prison protagonists who helped “orphaned Black children” escape the “degeneracy of their racialized homes in favor of the family of the White state” (p. 133).
Despite these performances of beneficence, the state hides its processes of child removal, evident in Lincoln’s disappearance from Internet mapping websites, unpublished address, and concealment of its daily operations from public oversight (pp. 75–77). These concealments contribute to the abstraction of youth incarceration, making it impossible for the U.S. public to register such state violence. Moreover, by framing youth prison schools as a type of “treatment” for “morally errant youth,” the state preserves its image of the rehabilitative prison and obfuscates the “actual operations of its prisons” that reproduce white supremacy, fracture kinship ties, and tether criminality to racialized bodies (p. 78).
In addition to these corrosive conditions imposed by the state, the “treatment” clinicians at Lincoln made efforts to “individualize and pathologize” criminality such that youth blamed themselves for their incarceration, ignoring larger structures of power that organized their life chances (p. 96). In this context, “treatment was coercive through medication” as “young Black men live[d] in a state context of fault” (p. 96). These logics justify the removal of children from their parents and families, “whom the state deems not only unfit for the task of child development but moreover not fit for the task of possession” (p. 101).
As public institutions, schools regularly intrude into private spheres by providing a “state superhighway into the homes of families of Color” (p. 113). The state, for example, “mandates that children attend school and then uses their attendance not simply to monitor but to intrude into the lives of families and communities in multiple disruptive ways” (p. 113). Despite these educational mandates, through a series of bureaucratic failures and broken commitments, Lincoln denied youth the educational credentials useful to the purported “reentry” process by refusing to administer the General Education Development (GED) exam and by providing redundant curricula through unqualified teachers.
Inside the Lincoln school, youth experienced abject precarity, noted in the continual marking of black inmate intellectualism as threatening. The “demonstration of intelligence” by black youth threatened white superiority and was therefore punishable by teachers and clinicians who could extend prison sentences on a whim (p. 168). Given the authority to assess young men behaviorally, prison teachers located criminality within black cultural pathologies to justify the necessity of incarceration (p. 170). These predatory logics authorized teachers’ decisions to extend the prison sentences of youth, sometimes doubling the formal legal sentence. Despite these conditions, youth found ways to resist, contest, and negotiate the punitive conditions they faced daily.
Through her critical institutional ethnography, Vaught offers an incisive analysis of the role of the prison school while showing how prison protagonists worked within bureaucratic conditions not always of their own making. Although she is attentive to the resistance strategies deployed by youth, Vaught leaves rather unexamined the pathways toward prison- and school-abolition. Still, her work invites the reader to (re)imagine a world without state-sanctioned prisons and schools and to radically remake both the state and the public. With an impressive analysis of state captivity, Vaught leaves the reader questioning the liberal logics that support, rather than reform or dismantle, state violence. These ruptures are ripe with political possibility.