Race in the Prison Classroom

This page illustrates how histories of systemic racial discrimination have influenced, perpetuated and informed U.S. systems of incarceration, and how racism continues to impact incarcerated higher education, today.

Facilities built for mass and long-term incarceration — prisons, jails, internment and concentration camps — facilitate a broad range of racial dynamics. That is, policies encouraging and mandating racial segregation in carceral spaces are promoted as means for maintaining safety for incarcerated people, as well as staff; and such policies are reinforced through narratives that external affiliations and rivalries might be maintained in some manner within the culture and social structure of the incarcerated space. Immediately we should note that racial segregation within incarcerated spaces is not universally/uniformly practiced. Different yards within the same prison can have different protocol, as well as informal norms reinforcing separation in living and/or working and/or recreational and other spaces. Conversely, protocol and norms may at times actually coerce or compel more dynamic interaction within any of these spaces, across racial dynamics and potential divisions.

Social norms form within any society, and because the insulated internal culture of any incarcerated space is unique to the environment and the collection of individuals who populate that space, the social norms dictating and challenging racialized segregation will be unique from place to place. Yards or institutions with “progressive” designations may mandate a contractual agreement not to participate in or promote racial or otherwise related discrimination. Depending on the culture or the various forms of leadership within an institution (wardens, coordinators and supervisorial staff, and social and group leaders among those who are incarcerated), degrees of, and approaches to desegregation can vary significantly.

Nonetheless, educational spaces, wherein freedom of thought and expression ought to be highly revered, cannot operate by erecting or reinforcing barriers within themselves. In other words, our purpose in the pursuit of higher education is to expand and strengthen our collective knowledge, both deepening and broadening our unique understanding of the world and particular settings in which we are consequentially situated. We cannot simply passively approach the subjects of race and racism as they relate to the content of a course without closely, critically, and carefully accounting for the myriad sensitivities carried within carceral spaces; we can, and should, begin by better understanding and recognizing the intersecting histories of racism and incarceration in the United States, and how those histories have contributed to the dynamics of race and education today.

Race, Racism, and the History of Policing in the United States

To understand race in carceral spaces, one first needs to understand race and racism in the history of policing in the U.S. There is no national police force, nor are there national standards for training or professional behavior for police. There is, however, a history within the founding of this nation connected diametrically with political and civic disobedience against professional law enforcement agents, as articulated and codified through the Third and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution Links to an external site. Links to an external site..

At that founding, most of the nation involved citizens self-policing in various ways. Although, in the South, there were so-called "slave patrols" formed to control the movements of enslaved people and groups. The Charleston City Watch and Guard, formed in the 1790s, is usually identified as the first police-like force in the U.S. Their primary purpose was to control the movement of the enslaved population — to prevent or respond with force to escapes and revolts — which they accomplished through violence, and (often coordinated) threats of violence. The Texas Rangers regularly pursued and returned escapees seeking freedom in Mexico. The Rangers were unofficially founded in 1823 with the explicit purpose to punish and exterminate indigenous tribes in the area that white settlers were expanding into. And after they fought for the expansion of the US into Mexico, the Rangers — as just one example of similar behaviors elsewhere — engaged in acts of violence against Mexican Americans as well.

It wasn’t until the 1830s that any modern police force existed — modern in the sense that they are funded by the public and employ full-time officers, administrators, and other staff together operating their respective systems for public policing. The first such force was established in Boston in the 1830s, and major metropolitan cities followed their lead until, by the 1890s, every major city in the United States was funding a police force.

In the South, after the Civil War, the former "slave patrols" quickly became the enforcers of Black Codes and eventual Jim Crow laws Links to an external site., continuing in the same approximate work to control the movements of Black people despite now being recognized as equal citizens under the law (as legal definitions for equality continued to undergo change, largely through the courts, even the legal status of "equal" did not often translate into materially equivalent experiences). When significant numbers of Black people were incarcerated in the South, people, including sociologists and criminologists (relying problematically on perceived academic credibility), saw this as “evidence” of “inherent” Black criminality. Police in the North increased law enforcement in Black communities and against Black people, furthering the cycle of disparate incarceration rates being used as support for an ongoing narrative of Black criminality, reinforcing further the idea that the police are meant primarily to protect everyone else.

Repeatedly in the 20th Century, beginning with Chicago’s 1922 report on the causes of a race riot, commissions concluded, “When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them.” Quite similar findings came from similar commissions following race riots, notably in Harlem in 1935 and Detroit in 1968. Over and over reports find that the police engaged in abjectly racist, often violent actions attempting more to enforce the status quo than to uphold the principle of equal protection under the law. Police responded, often with unprovoked violence, against citizens resisting and protesting the social, political, and economic structures of the United States. And the recommendations of the commissions are/were repeatedly ignored.

Even the Texas Rangers chose to help Texas resist federal orders to desegregate schools in the 1950s. By the 1960s President Johnson’s war on crime — which followed with Nixon’s war on drugs, and then Reagan’s war on poverty — generated the impetus and funding to create new training systems and standards for police forces; training that has become increasingly militarized in the decades since. The ostensible need for security and protection against terrorism after the attacks of September 11, 2001 only furthered this militarization, all without having sufficiently rejected the assumption of Black criminality, and without substantively or systematically responding to ever-growing evidence of targeted, anti-Black police brutality.

Across the nation, police departments are increasingly equipped with weapons designed for battlefields, for fighting enemies of war. Yet, these resources designed for warfare are often being used against peaceful civilian protestors, frequently as well within the same communities in which the officers themselves reside, but in the name of a mission to serve and protect all citizens within those communities.

There has been resistance to such forms of violently racialized policing from its earliest inception — from the enslaved who escaped and revolted, to the development of the NAACP, and now to the Black Lives Matter Movement. Recent years of protests and activism working toward an end to police brutality, and possibly an end to policing as we currently know it, and a return to communities who police themselves and apply their own publicly-supported means for maintaining public safety, are only among the latest developments in today's upsurge of resistance.

The following short documentary/informational video from PBS Origins shares a broader historical overview of the origins of race as a concept used for division and enforced hierarchies of social power and access to material resources; reviews the history of European and American powers forcibly applying pseudo-scientific "theories" of race to the colonization and enslavement of non-white people and populations; and discusses ways that race has evolved and been applied in more recent history.

Dynamics of Race and Education

To understand how race, racism, and the history of policing in the U.S. impact the experiences of our carceral-impacted students, we also need to understand the dynamics of race and education in the U.S. Education has been understood as a path to freedom since the beginnings of this nation. At the same time, in turn, the denial of education or the imposition of a racist/racially-selective/stereotype-informed and -driven education has been a tool used for oppression.

During times of chattel slavery, it was a crime for an enslaved person to learn to read. Enslaved people who were caught reading or writing were not only severely punished, but so were their teachers. Yet, many persisted despite the danger, recognizing the value of literacy for seeking, communicating about, and advocating and fighting for freedom. After the Civil War people weren’t as openly punished for seeking an education, but barriers to a fair and good quality education remained. And when wealthy white people aimed to ostensibly improve the situation, they were motivated by a skewed vision of “civilizing” perceptibly “backwards” cultures and preparing non-white children for seemingly little more than skilled labor.

One such institution was the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a government-run boarding school opening in 1879 with the explicit mission to force-assimilate Native children into white American society under the expressed belief: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Children were forcibly taken from reservations, forced to speak English and groom themselves in Anglo styles and fashions, forced to labor as much as they studied, and forced to learn a selective history of the U.S. reinforcing their own cultures' erasure. Similar schools in Pacific Islands controlled by the U.S. assimilated or destroyed Native populations there, too.

Education in much of the U.S. remained racially segregated until the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case recognized that separate educations weren’t ever equal, as exemplified by the no-longer-legal but regularly-protected-by-the-law acts of violence and uneven enforcement of the law against Black and other People of Color persistent through educational and other social settings since the abolition of chattel slavery. Still, it took re-litigating the case to get processes of desegregation underway, and even then, violent resistance to desegregation occurred and persisted in many cities and states.

Many found other ways to resist integrated education for their children anyhow: by substantially expanding private education and moving within or across cities to maintain same-race neighborhoods. Only weeks after the Brown decision, Congress passed the Housing Act of 1954, aiming to support urban renewal. The program not only openly condoned segregation, it fostered it. The economic impacts of the program included educational funding disparities across school districts, further inhibiting the possibilities for fair and equal education for all children; further inhibiting upward economic, social, and political mobility for generations of Black, Brown, Indigenous, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and other People of Color, both citizens and immigrants, with impacts and outcomes still measurable today.

Scholars revisiting the Brown decision decades later often note that the strategic decisions of the NAACP legal team — hampered by their need to distance themselves from any perceived connections to communism — effectively leave the structural enforcements of white supremacy in place. The NAACP didn’t argue that segregated education is bad for students; they argued that it is bad for Black students.

The belief was that Black students received an inferior education not only due to unequal funding and resources, but from segregation itself. Conversely, no one made the concomitant/aligned argument that white students were missing out on anything when they were in white-only schools. Systemic racism does not require any current, legislatively enacted law specifying the explicit enforcement of white supremacy in U.S. institutions, specifically and clearly because the perceived-but-fabricated supremacy of whiteness has been presumed as the default standard by which the public and their institutions should be judged across contexts.

We observe the ongoing effects of this today in a panic over the teaching of so-called Critical Race Theory in public schools. Just since 2019, dozens of states, counties, and cities have enacted legislation banning the discussion, training, and/or orientation that the U.S. is inherently, structurally racist — that the U.S. systematically and institutionally upholds racially-selective and -oppressive policies and practices put in place by decades- and centuries-old white-supremacist actors, citizens, and powerful leaders of government and industry. Also recently banned in key places are discussions about conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression as related both to our collective and individual experiences with race. Such perspectives and restrictive teachings on U.S. history do not valorize white people, but more accurately, reflect distinctly the United States' exhaustively-documented and still-felt structurally racist origins.

The 1960s war on crime was fought also inside of newly desegregating public schools. Policies aiming to "get tough on crime," especially drug-related crimes, treated school children, especially Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students, as dangers to others, and as well to themselves. Schools instituted zero-tolerance policies for violations of rules, and used police officers and/or other security personal modeled on policing operations and appearance permanently assigned to serve inside schools in order to enforce those rules.

Increasingly, schools used the logic and strategies used by systems of criminal punishment, including mandatory minimum sentencing and three-strikes rules, rather than using educational/educationally appropriate or empirically supported strategies for supporting and working with children and teens. This is what has been called the “school-to-prison pipeline,” for the inversely proportionate effect it has had on graduation rates and incarceration rates for young, especially young Black males, in the United States.

Harsh punishments, including suspensions and expulsions, means students’ education is interrupted not only during the suspension but in the aftermath wherein they suffer from an overall worse educational outlook and attitude, and a climate that further lowers their academic performance, which further risks their likelihood of dropping out of school, further risking the likelihood of criminal behavior leading to a prison or jail sentence.

More police officers in schools have not had the effect of making schools safer at large, but it has, with a problematic irony, had the effect of making students themselves less safe. Students, in particular Black students, are more likely to be arrested, even for minor conduct; and they are more likely to be assaulted by the very officers assigned to protect them, working within the same departments that still have not responded, certainly not systematically, to the reports throughout the 20th century that found police engaged in explicitly racist and racially-motivated behaviors presuming and provoking the criminality of Black people.

Intentional Insights: Racism and Racial Dynamics Across Educational Experiences

An incarcerated student's perspective. . . .I’ve been in prison for 5 years. There was a huge wait to get into the AA program at CDCR but by the time I got in I was so excited to have the opportunity to learn something new and work towards a degree, something I could make my family proud of.

I was also very nervous about being back in the classroom. As a black man, race has played a significant role in my own life, not just in my own incarceration, but in school where I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood. It was not a good experience for me growing up. I was constantly reminded how I wasn’t smart enough, didn’t have the right clothes to fit in, and was told that “you will never amount to anything.” They put me in classes that were not AP classes, and when I asked, "Why," they did not give me a good answer, there was not any type of test that I took, or my peers took, but they segregated us into AP or non-AP classes, which seemed to be related to our parents’ income level. I wanted to be in class with my friends, but they were in the accelerated classes. I ended up dropping out of school and was incarcerated a few short years later.

On the first day of class I walked into the classroom, the same one that I was in while obtaining my GED, but this time I immediately felt out of place. Most of the class was on a different yard than me, and more educated than I was so I sat in the back of the room and tried to blend in after class started. I really was struggling to get into the class, and the book was written from a perspective that seemed completely foreign to me. I struggled to relate to the examples in the case studies, and even the professor.

I noticed that the teacher seems to favor towards the two white students at the front of the classroom. The professor constantly praised them and that was a bit discouraging for me who wanted to be heard. One day during class, we were talking about the history of the criminal justice system [and] I spoke up because the experiences being shared in class really were not my own experiences. My classmates’ experiences seemed to be different than mine. I explain how I had been targeted by police and unfairly treated by the legal system. I could feel everybody staring at me, some with disbelief, some with distrust, and others with discomfort. After class ended, the well-spoken student at the front-- the student that the teacher particularly likes, came up to me and thanked me for sharing my experiences. He said that he had never thought about the ways that race or being black, could impact somebody’s experience not just in the legal system, but in the classroom. We continued to talk after that, and now I consider him one of my friends. He has tutored me, and I have shared some things I have learned in other classes with him. Even though we have completely different experiences, live on a different yard, and have different friends, we have something in common. We are both college students. That was my first semester of taking a college class. I continue to share my experiences because I was encouraged by my peers, and I continued to speak up in class. I have learned a great deal from my classmates, and even my professors. Everybody has their own experiences and perspectives to offer, by the end of that semester I had a new sense of confidence about me, I was proud of who I was. I was proud of my identity of being a black man and being a survivor, I realize that race will always be relevant in my life, even in a classroom, but it does provide me with an opportunity to learn from other people and share my experiences to help make the world a better place. People can listen to others and change their mind about their false stereotypes regarding the black man.

A Philosophy faculty's perspective. Knowing some of the basics about race and racism in the history of the nation, in the history of our systems of criminal justice and education, does not itself offer guidance for what we should do and not do in our classrooms. But it does offer important context and helps us develop some understanding for how we got where we are today and what needs to inform our decisions about the present and future of our pedagogies. Additionally, students who don’t know this history might nonetheless suffer from the trauma, and the generational trauma, of narratives of innate criminality and forced assimilation in education. Faculty and counselors who aren’t aware of this history might unconsciously reinforce these narratives and biases. There are many things we can do, and things we should not do, given the realities of race in the prison classroom.

While many of us encounter – sometimes to our benefit and other times to our detriment – racialized structures at work and in public, we get to end our days in our private homes with only those we choose to live with. Incarcerated students generally have no reprieve from racialized structures. One very practical example of something we might need to do differently in classrooms inside prisons than on regular college campuses, because of the way race impacts the daily lives of incarcerated students, pertains to group work: let students choose their groups. Creating groups, even with the good pedagogical goals of helping students connect across differences, can cause violence outside the classroom.

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