“They’re the Worst Students!”: Constructions of Criminality, Racialized Safety, and Punishment in Texas Public Schools
Abstract
Public schools in the U.S. continue to define and manage student discipline through a paradigm of crime and punishment. Although zero-tolerance policies have been widely implemented since the early 1990s under the guise of protecting the safety of students and staff, these harsh disciplinary policies mark Black and Latinx students as dangerous and delinquent, subsequently leading them into the criminal justice system. As such, Black and Latix continue to face disproportionate discipline experiences within schools.
This dissertation is an ethnographic case study of school-based policing practices in public schools in Bryan, TX. Using a triangulated methodological approach, I interrogate Bryan Independent School District’s (BISD) 20-plus-year-old practice of issuing Class C misdemeanor tickets to students for in-school conduct such as disruptive behavior in class, using profanity, or being too loud in the classroom – behaviors that are not a violation of criminal law. By issuing criminal tickets, particularly tickets for non-criminal behavior, BISD’s policy has funneled Black and Latinx students through the criminal justice system as opposed to utilizing non-punitive punishments. I build on various areas of literature to develop of a more critical understanding of how zero-tolerance policies, courts, and schools racialize and unequally distribute safety. In order to do this, I build a Critical Race Theory (CRT) of fear and safety to demonstrate how in-school disciplinary policies create and reinforce racialized notions of safety and in doing so, reproduce unequal access to safety.
My field work reveals two major findings. On the one hand, I demonstrate that zero-tolerance policies not only function to legitimize surveillance, policing, and criminalization of Black and Latinx students within public schools and within U.S. courts but also play a pivotal role in facilitating the tendency to link danger and violence to Black and Latinx youth. As such, racialized notions safety create consensus on the appropriateness of punitive disciplinary policies and promote and legitimize greater punishment of Black and Latinx. On the other hand, however, I demonstrate the hypocrisy that underwrites zero-tolerance policies, as my findings reveal that the very same policies that are framed as essential to ensure safety thwart the ability of Black and Latinx students to feel safe from criminal justice persecution within school and in their lives outside of school.
Subject
Race and EthnicitySafety
Public Schools
Critical Race Theory
Criminology
Sociology of Punishment
Citation
Varela, Kay S (2020). “They’re the Worst Students!”: Constructions of Criminality, Racialized Safety, and Punishment in Texas Public Schools. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /192900.