Disruptive children: desegregation, student resistance, and the carceral turn in New York city schools

This thesis seeks to understand the origins, development, and consequences of the carceral turn in American public education. Specifically, it considers how and why New York City came to deploy a vast force of police officers and security personnel, install sophisticated surveillance equipment, and put into place a set of highly punitive disciplinary policies that govern student behavior. Drawing from more than 40 different archives as well as 20 original oral histories, it maintains that school policing and student discipline have historically served as tools of social control and racial dominance, emerging with the very founding of organized education in America, and expanding most rapidly and dramatically as a direct response to the prospect of desegregated schooling and the attendant rupture in American life. In the wake of this conflict, the carceral apparatus was not only linked with, but institutionalized into, the public education system. Opposition to school desegregation, panic over the issue of juvenile delinquency, and white fears of Black criminality were mutually constitutive and jointly reinforcing – coming to a head in the mid-twentieth century and continuing to build upon each other throughout the ensuing decades towards a comprehensive system in the schools of exclusion, punishment, and arrest. On the level of both individual institutions and the education system as a whole, as more Black students enrolled in schools and flipped the demographics from predominantly white to predominantly Black, city and school officials increasingly met even ordinary student problems with carceral responses. City schools instituted sweeping disciplinary policies, forged partnerships with the municipal police department, and created security forces of their own as part of a larger system of student criminalization that both reflected and exacerbated existing social and racial hierarchies, stifled student organizing, and expanded the reach and power of the carceral state.