Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School

2 Signs of the Times: Place, Culture, and Control at Urban Public High School

. 39 . . CHAPTER 2 . Signs of the Times Place, Culture, and Control at Urban Public High School Urban public high school is a large public high school that has served the surrounding communities for nearly one hundred years. It is located on a rather typical thoroughfare—part commercial, part residential . Along the street, there are several take-out restaurants selling Chinese and Jamaican food, a few bodegas that cater to the vast numbers of local English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean immigrants, a Subway sandwich shop, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and other small storefronts, most with dingy exteriors, that occupy the ground floors of residential dwellings. Despite the variety of shops near the school, there is little in the way of a thriving local business community. For me, a person who spends considerable time in the bustling commercial districts of Manhattan, the neighborhood surrounding the school seems quiet, almost remote (except in the early morning and mid-afternoon , when hundreds of students fill the sidewalks). There are no skyscrapers or famous cultural institutions in sight, just a landscape made up of six-story apartment buildings, some marked with colorful graffiti and murals in honor of the young dead. There is an elevated subway line that cuts through the sky as far as the eye can see, heading toward the city center , which appears through the haze at a seemingly insurmountable distance . Some residents make the hour-plus trek to midtown and beyond for work; others rarely, if ever, visit “the city.” When I first visited UPHS, I noticed that it had taken on police-precinct , in some ways even prisonlike, characteristics as criminal-justiceoriented disciplinary practices and high-tech security apparatus permeated the building. To an extent, I had a sense of familiarity at UPHS, given my years in a similar high school, but there was a different “feel” to both physical structures and the daily social exchanges inspired by those structures . In many ways, the interactions that I observed were typical of any 40 SIGNS OF THE TIMES school—joking, teasing, and paternal and maternal admonitions—but the nature and kinds of interactions appeared to have changed as new security technologies were installed and police officers became fixtures in the hallway. Handcuffs, body searches, backpack searches, standing on line to walk through metal detectors, confrontations with law enforcement , “hallway sweeps,” and confinement in the detention room had become common experiences for students. This contrasted significantly from my experience as a teacher, when the atmosphere was generally more welcoming and interactions did not remind me of the alienating and anxiety-provoking experience of walking through airport security, as they often did at UPHS. The school was still a school, but its prevailing culture had shifted from the period when I had taught. This phenomenon has been noted in the New York City–based research of Jennifer McCormick, who observes that as schoolchildren are subjected to these new security technologies, there is a loss of what Erving Goffman might call “identity equipment” that makes previous conceptions of self impossible: “The loss is achieved, in part, when an ‘inmate’ is forced to assume [criminal] postures that conflict with societal notions of propriety.”1 At UPHS, the high-tech security apparatus, police presence, and disciplinary practices influenced how students made sense of their school and themselves. Penal management had become an overarching theme, and students had grown accustomed to daily interactions with law enforcement. In this chapter, I examine the intersections of place and culture by highlighting the spatial dimensions of control and the quotidian experience of daily life that occurred within those spaces. Welcome to UPHS The front of the school building extended about the length of two football fields, and its sides stretched back about the same distance, forming an immense square. The school was built in the early years of the twentieth century, the era of rapid expansion of public secondary education, to serve about five thousand students. For decades after its opening, the school was known as a fine institution of learning. But, over the years, its reputation diminished as academic performance and graduation rates went down and disorder and incidents of violence increased. It was about 9:30 on a mid-September morning in 2004. I arrived at the school for one of my first visits. It was a quiet time, which allowed me SIGNS OF THE TIMES 41 to stand momentarily on the wide landing of the steps...