Abstract
In The Prison School, Lizbet Simmons deconstructs the entwined processes of under-education and over-criminalization that shape the lives of young black men in US public schools. To illustrate and explain such complexities, Simmons draws on ethnographic data from both the past and present. The stories provided by Chui—a community activist, former prisoner, and long-time resident of New Orleans—combined with archival data and community memory expose the historical conditions of education and criminalization in New Orleans. This history then enables an understanding of the present, as articulated by Jamal and Spider, two students of the Prison School—a public alternative school situated on the grounds of the Orleans Parish Prison. While the Prison School is central, Simmons does not limit her theorizing to New Orleans. Instead, she creates the space for the reader to think through ideas that pervade our social imaginary and to interrogate how they manifest in our public schools. In doing so, Simmons highlights the vulnerability and liminality of young black men and the role the education system takes in maintaining this. Importantly, Simmons situates under-education and over-criminalization within the current neoliberal era, while also illustrating how these processes reinforce and build on historical conditions of black oppression. Stated simply, The Prison School should be required reading for anyone concerned with the plight of young people.
The Prison School puts forth four major contributions: it 1) offers a conceptualization of the black prison diaspora in relation to schools and punishment, 2) provides a comprehensive analysis of school failure and mass incarceration in historical context, 3) destabilizes existing conceptions of the relationship between education and the criminal justice system, and 4) makes the experience of youth criminalization visible for critique.
In Chapter 1, Simmons details punitive ideologies and policies in their neoliberal and post-industrial context, then illustrates how these ideologies trickled into the schools through exclusionary punishment policies and security technologies, resulting in the “push-out” of predominantly poor boys of color. While these “push” factors are important, Simmons makes it clear that they do not work alone. Using the construct of the black prison diaspora (Gregory, 2012; Lee, 1966), Simmons illustrates the coordinated roles of the education and criminal justice systems in facilitating the massive migration of young black bodies to prison. As she shows, young black men function within these diasporic conditions, their lives characterized both by forces that push them out of school and by those that pull them towards correctional control. In doing so, Simmons exposes the complexities that the simplistic “school-to-prison pipeline” metaphor does not allow for. As she states, “schools and prisons are coordinated institutions operating in a correctional spectrum” (p. 30). Framing the connection between schools and prisons in an integrated way forces a recognition that school discipline, like mass incarceration, functions as a population management strategy. This strategy addresses large-scale social problems as anything but—framing them as individual issues and “solving” them through strategies that target the individual and result in their exclusion and confinement. The coordination between schools and prisons is important not only because it negatively impacts the students who are caught in this tangled web, but also because it “casts doubt on the strength of the larger democratic project of the public school system” (p. 43). Witnessing such inequality in places of advancement, then, signals a failure of democracy itself.
Continuing the interrogation of school punitiveness, Chapter 2 situates school discipline in relation to the War on Crime and the at-risk youth industry. Both were manifestations of a punitive and neoliberal ethos that pervaded all realms of social life—the school especially. As Simmons explains it, crime control has become a pre-emptive strike, the goal being to manage the risk before it manifests in crime. The fear of “risky” youth and the neoliberal strategies proposed to manage them created space for a new market in securitizing schools—security manufacturers peddling metal detectors, cameras, and bulletproof backpacks to schools across the country. To acquire these risk management technologies, schools can apply for grants through public funding agencies. However, these grants are often used to fund private, for-profit correctional services. This pre-emptive strike is most evident perhaps in Simmons’s point that many private juvenile correctional facilities contain “high-needs but law-abiding” (p. 64) youth, who would likely benefit from social services but are instead managed by the penal arm. The presence of this new security market then reinforces the fear of youth, despite violent crime rates having decreased in schools. As such, Simmons explains this punitive shift in schools more adequately as the result of the “social substrates of fear and the political economy of punishment” (p. 50).
New Orleans public schools exude this fear, mirroring the trend of being “tough on crime,” especially when it comes to youth of color, who are disproportionately suspended and expelled even for minor, non-violent offenses. This failure of schools to uphold the democratic mission of public schooling is explained as the product of multiple social, historical, and economic factors. Post-Civil Rights white flight and the concentration of people of color in impoverished areas due to discrimination, combined with “tough on crime mentalities,” functioned to strangle already under-resourced schools. At the same time, these factors were also supporting vast correctional growth, bolstered by a local control scheme that incentivized the constant filling of jails with bodies.
In Chapter 3, Simmons traces this history of racialized oppression in New Orleans through the stories of two generations of black men. As Chui, Jamal, and Spider recount their experiences, we begin to see how deeply processes of under-education and over-criminalization run through New Orleans. Chui attended segregated schools, lived in segregated housing, and felt the wrath of Jim Crow policing, thus coming to understand his path to imprisonment as paved, as least in part, by extreme conditions of social, economic, and educational inequality. Jamal and Spider struggled under the conditions of failing schools—large class sizes, uncertified teachers, and a lack of accountability—both arriving at the Prison School for disciplinary infractions, their misbehavior understood as individualized failure and indicative of future criminality.
This construction of minor misbehavior as the precursor to a life of crime is best exemplified through the creation of the Prison School. In Chapter 4, Simmons details how the Prison School, framed as a preemptive strike against criminality, actually functioned to pull students towards correctional control. In justifying the need for the Prison School, the sheriff responsible for its creation and operation (Sheriff Foti) called on a sort of benevolent carcerality. Foti explained the role of the school as bringing lost sheep like Jamal and Spider back to the flock. The first group of lost sheep comprised 14 black boys, none of whom had committed more than status offenses. Despite lacking formal marks of criminality, these boys were understood as (pre)criminals, “the fear of black male crime preexist[ing] crime itself” (p. 122), thus the mechanisms used to bring these lost sheep back mirrored those of the criminal justice system. In this mimicry, the Prison School operated as a pull factor, pulling these students towards correctional control as the disciplinary schemes and processes of under-education in mainstream schools pushed them out.
Through this pulling, the Prison School continues the legacy of racialized control, confinement, and oppression of youth in New Orleans. Engaging especially with the works of Beckett (1997), Wacquant (2009), and Garland (2001), Simmons illustrates the context in which the Prison School operated—a community situated within a nation at war with the poor and marginalized, using tactics of containment and neglect to govern this risky population, all the while turning a profit. However, the Prison School was understood by many as a protective wall between these kids and the real thing to fear: prison. Located in a state with a massive incarcerated juvenile population, most which was black, the fear of prison coursed through the community so intensely that the infiltration of carceral logics into the education system became justified as a preemptive strike against the looming signs of criminality.
After effectively establishing the presence of a black prison diaspora through the case study of the Prison School, Simmons concludes by suturing it to the neoliberal context in which it operates. The push-pull factors of the black prison diaspora also reflect the politics of dependency. Rather than provide stability to the population through opportunity, governments manage through dependency. Those pushed out of school are often the lowest performing, and while their low performance could be remedied through opportunity, dependency can stimulate economic growth quickly while also ensuring more dependency in the future, as dependency breeds dependency. By constructing this failure in opportunity as individualized failure, surveillance, discipline, and exclusion become legitimate management techniques. Thus, pushing students out of school and into the criminal justice system ensures a steady stream of dependent bodies. As such, Simmons illustrates how the dependency model operates through the push-pull factors of the black prison diaspora, simultaneously supporting and being supported by the neoliberal agenda.
In closing, The Prison School disrupts what have become common sense understandings of the connection between schools and the criminal justice system by exposing both the push and pull factors that shape the daily experiences of many students of color. A recognition of the structural factors that create and maintain such a diasporic condition is fundamental if we ever wish for schools to be spaces of democratic opportunity. As detailed in the final pages, some schools have taken steps to weaken the power of these forces, particularly in limiting the types of offenses for which students can be removed. And while this is most certainly a step in the right direction, only divesting from punitive practices like suspensions and expulsions may serve to mask deeper issues through notions of reform and progress. As Simmons states:
If school disciplinary practices are reformed such that black youths continue to be harshly treated and even harshly disciplined—but no longer punished with the threat or deployment of suspension, expulsion, and arrest—the problem … is resolved, and yet racialized educational inequality remains and is sponsored by reformed disciplinary practices. (p. 29)
Thus, limiting the use of exclusionary punishment may simply not be enough to address the social, economic, and historical factors that undergird this black prison diaspora (Sojoyner, 2013). The refusal to exclude students must occur alongside a fervent attack on the logics that deem punishment and exclusion as the best, indeed the only, responses to “misbehavior.” Such an attack, then, must be waged on the carceral state itself, necessitating a widespread and long-term commitment to anti-carcerality. The Prison School pushes the reader to confront and question the state of our schools, creating necessary space in which to imagine a world otherwise. While such confrontation is at times uncomfortable, I echo Simmons’s declaration that, “… as educators and as a society, we really have no other ethical choice” (p. 153).