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. 73 . . CHAPTER 4 . Against the Law Student Noncompliance and Contestation Routinely, students at UPHS were summoned to criminal court or got arrested as an outcome of a series of interactions beginning with the breaking of a school rule. At times, the pivotal moment occurred when an officer grabbed a student’s arm or pulled a hat off a student’s head. At other times, the inciting moment happened when a student was approached by a law-enforcement official and asked for identification. This process was a defining characteristic of the culture of control inside the school and a key element in the linking of the school to street policing and institutions of the criminal-justice system. But culture is not a top-down process; it is dynamic and dialectical. This chapter explains how students at UPHS participated in the production of a culture of control (and of themselves as a criminalized class) through their noncompliance during interactions with law enforcement. When students refused to hand over their ID cards to officers or responded to agents’ demands with defiance, they reinforced the institutional perspective that “these kids have to learn,” and, to some extent, they provided legitimacy for current policies. Just as the deans and administrators lamented, it sometimes seemed to me that students could have avoided getting a summons if only they had cooperated with the police when confronted. Indeed, there seemed to be some truth to the institutional discourse regarding the process of getting summoned to criminal court as a matter of personal choice—the student ’s choice. Why couldn’t students just hand over their IDs, or answer the officers’ questions, or head to class, or take off their hats, or go willingly to B-40? Couldn’t they just comply and avoid getting a summons? The answers to these questions were a lot more complicated than simple compliance. Despite the trouble it caused students, there was an important ideological dimension to their refusal to comply with law enforcement. Their 74 AGAINST THE LAW contestations during interactions with police and agents contained within them a decisive critique of disciplinary practices. Policing practices, especially the demand to see ID, conflicted with students’ sense of justice and fairness and their imagined ideal of schooling. That is, students’ statements often revealed their ideas of what school ought to be but could not be within the prevailing framework. They desired to feel respected, to be listened to, and to be provided with meaningful, relevant learning experiences . In the context of control, these seemed to be things that happened only in “other kids’ schools.” During my fieldwork, I identified five factors that were related to and appeared to influence the ways students responded during confrontations with law enforcement. These were (1) students’ frustration with classroom experiences and disciplinary practices (and dysfunction); (2) student perceptions of police in their neighborhoods and popular local histories of police abuse and community relations; (3) the development of an intimacy between students and officers and agents due to daily contact; (4) some students’ compulsion to maintain a tough posture in front of their peers; and (5) students’ sense of indignation, brought about by their sense of injustice and their desire for a different kind of school experience. These five reasons for noncompliance were not separate; they worked together and, at times, were too entwined to analyze separately. The last one, indignation, encompassed all of the others. When I talked with students about noncompliance, almost all of their responses reflected this attitude ; although they rarely articulated informed legal arguments or elegant analyses of social injustice, they expressed a sense of injustice and unfairness . Even when students suggested other reasons for noncompliance, they inevitably brought up “unfair” policing practices, poor treatment at the hands of law-enforcement officials, and feelings that they were disrespected . This is, in a sense, what Alison Jagger has called outlaw anger: a reasonable emotional response of a marginalized person1 —not necessarily a response to the immediate situation in which the student finds himor herself but a response to the overall symbolic and structural violence done to the student. Thus, noncompliance during an interaction with law enforcement represented several things at once: it provided personal benefits , such as a sense of dignity or social status, and it represented a contest over respect. In fact, the student–law-enforcement confrontation became a crucial “site” of contestation where students refused to legitimize the practices that violated so greatly their imagined ideal of schooling. [3.144.48.135] Project...

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