“When You Carry a Lot”: The Forgotten Spaces of Youth Prison Schooling for Incarcerated Disabled Girls of Color

Abstract

Context: The Crouse decision from 1838 laid precedent to the positioning of prisons as sites where education takes place. With a massive expansion of youth carceral facilities since then, alongside the prison-schools within them, we continually rely on prison-school spaces as places where youth are brought to experience education and punishment. While the wider population of youth who are incarcerated in the United States has significantly reduced since the year 2000, the reduction of incarcerated Girls of Color has not. Many incarcerated Girls of Color are also disabled. Thus, it is within this context that we explore the prison-school space as a site that is intended to provide robust educational opportunities. Focus of Study: In this article, we repositioned disabled incarcerated Girls of Color as knowledge generators and as experts well positioned to describe existing prison-school practices and alternatives to prison-school. Through the conceptual frames of forgotten places and the destructive practices within, we focused on the lived experiences of disabled incarcerated Girls of Color in SYRAD, a Midwestern maximum-security youth prison, to address our main research question: What are the education experiences of disabled Girls of Color in prison-schools? Research Design: Our qualitative study is part of a larger project that included 14 disabled incarcerated Girls of Color. Throughout the year, the girls were enrolled in a credit-bearing course with the principal investigator and research team. Our full corpus of data included interviews with the girls (23) and adults in the youth prison (6); classroom observations (25); education journey maps (10); focus groups (4); field notes (20); and classroom artifacts (21). For this study, we mainly focused on the initial interviews with the girls in which they discussed topics related to their experiences in a prison and prison-school. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analyses showcased that prison-schools do not offer robust educational opportunities as claimed by the Crouse decision. Instead, the collective experiences of disabled incarcerated Girls of Color in our study were saturated with destructive prison-school practices. Three main findings emerged in our analysis that framed prison-school educational spaces as “concentrated sinks” of destructive practices: (1) curricular reduction, (2) remedial pedagogy, and (3) relational antagonism. Further, the girls offered robust explications on why naming and describing destructive practices is important, especially “when you carry a lot” as an incarcerated disabled Girl of Color in a forgotten place of prison-school. These findings led us to the need for an eventual abolition of prisons and prison-school spaces that can be anchored in a DisCrit abolitionist imaginary in the meantime.