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Urban Rev (2011) 43:547565
DOI 10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9
Erica R. Meiners
Published online: 30 September 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Placing prison abolition on the horizon for scholars committed to interrupting the ow of young people toward prisons and jails, this article offers movement analysis, frameworks and associated questions surrounding advocacy and engagement. First, I offer a brief state of the eld of research and advocacy surrounding school-to-prison work. Building from this assessment, I identify four ongoing tensions within this eld that is, by denition, theoretically explicitly linked to advocacy for justice. Our challenges include exceptionality, specically our desires to center children and youth in our analysis and organizing, and concurrently how carceral practices continue to change the face of the state and require us to track how alternatives to incarceration are dened and organized. We also struggle to build sustainable and viable decarceration initiatives and to develop ways to make schools and communities safer, without augmenting a carceral state, and to address state and interpersonal violence, while integrating an intersectional analysis that includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer lives and feminist standpoints. Finally, I close with a push for scholars to continually evaluate professional investments, and invite readers to consider how our scholarly locations augment or constrain our ability to participate in building transformative schools and communities.
Keywords Prison abolition Educational justice Anti-Racism
Gender and sexuality Scholar-activisim
E. R. Meiners
Education and Gender and Womens Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. St. Louis Ave, Chicago, IL 60625, USA
E. R. Meiners (&)
Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (20112012), University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USAe-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building Abolition Futures
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Departures
Years ago, while at Stateville Prison in Illinois as a monitor with a local advocacy organization, a man I was talking with about the quality of his food and his access to educational programs asked me what I did for living. Overseen by a corrections ofcer a few feet away, I said that I worked at a university, and he asked me what I studied. I said something vagueeducation, prisons and our nations ill-conceived commitment to incarcerationand his response still sticks in my brain. So, you make a living...
