Keywords
Civil Rights and Discrimination, Education Law, Juvenile Law
Abstract
This Article charts the deeply entrenched traditions of policing, containing, and surveilling blackness throughout this Nation’s history, with particular focus on Black students and schools. It provides school discipline data demonstrating the perpetual racial, gender, and ability disparities that Black students face decade after decade. It employs Black Geography as a theoretical framework to analyze school as a spatial and racial experience for all youth. This reading of carceral schools as Black geographic terrains of struggle expands the notion of school policing beyond dominant ideations which are largely limited to law enforcement officers in schools. It highlights the extent to which America’s penchant for repression through punishment has always been centered around blackness, not actual crime. In this New Jim Crow era of mass incarceration, policymakers, parents, educators, and officers alike are tasked with navigating a society that has systematically internalized blackness as inherently deserving of punishment, especially Black youthfulness. This timely discussion of race and schooling highlights how law, policy, and practice in education have shaped schools into carceral—prisonlike—spaces disproportionately harming Black schoolchildren, thereby creating carceral schools. It plots American society’s reproduction of Black geographic space as a causal effect in entangling education with systems of oppression through carceral means. In highlighting anti-blackness as the source of continual discipline disparities, it challenges school leaders to address how racism interacts with space, place, and power at a time where many cities and school districts across the country consider around whether police will remain in schools.
Recommended Citation
Michael Evans, Carceral Schools: Black Geographies of Confinement, Surveillance, And Policing, 21 FIU L. Rev. 129 (2026), https://doi.org/10.25148/lawrev.21.1.7.
