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Chapter 5 Diagnosing the schools-to-Prisons Pipeline: Maximum security, Minimum learning Rose Braz and Myesha Williams In the course of 24 hours in May 2007, without holding a single public hearing , much less a public vote, the California state legislature passed the largest prison-expansion plan in U.S. history. The law, AB900, will add 40,000 new prison beds and 13,000 new jail beds and will cost the state $15 billion for construction and debt service; that stunning price tag is deceptive, however, for it does not include future operating costs, which will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars for generations to come. Of this $15 billion, interest payments on the bonds that will be sold to finance the new prison construction will amount to as much as $330 million per year by 2011. Readers may wonder why California purportedly needs to embark on this unprecedented prison expansion, for it already warehouses more people in its prisons than any other state in the Union (with roughly 12 percent of the nation’s population, the state was responsible for 20 percent of the total increase in the number of people imprisoned during the twelve-month period ending June 30, 2006). In fact, the proposed increase of 40,000 prison beds surpasses the number of existing prison beds in 41 states. And so California, a state confronted by annual budget shortfalls, and already locking up the nation’s largest prison population, has embarked on the astronomically expensive construction of 53,000 new beds for prisoners not yet captured, all to be paid for with taxes not yet collected—leading experts such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore to wonder whether the Golden State is becoming a “Golden Gulag.”1 While California and other states shift their resources toward mass incarceration , the nation’s schools face a funding crisis that affects the already curtailed educational opportunities of the poor, and especially poor people of color. For example, Gary Hopkins reports that “one-half million of the 9.5 million students enrolled in school [nationwide] leave without completing a 127 high school program”—that is a dropout rate of roughly 6 percent. Among the nation’s so-called dropouts (a term we will take exception to later), students classified as Hispanic are more likely to leave school than black or white students , and students from low-income families are six times as likely to leave school as students from high-income families. These are alarming trends, for leaving school dramatically escalates the likelihood of incarceration; in fact, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (hereafter BJS) reports that as of 2003, approximately 75 percent of the people incarcerated in state prisons had not received a high school diploma. We are therefore witnesses to a disastrous cycle wherein prison spending rises, educational spending declines, the number of students pushed out of school in at-risk communities rises, and then those students disproportionately end up imprisoned, hence helping to fuel the call for more prison spending, which in turn curtails education spending, which leads to more students pushed out of school, and on and on it goes. California ’s AB900 will turn this self-defeating cycle into an institutionalized funding imperative, for because of that bill’s guidelines, spending on the state’s prison budget is projected to rise by 9 percent annually, while spending on the state’s already beleaguered postsecondary educational system is projected to rise by only 5 percent over the same period. Thus, by fiscal year 2012–13, California is projected to spend $15.4 billion on locking people up and $15.3 billion on higher education. As our title suggests, then, we believe the schools-to-prisons pipeline is fueled by persuasive yet delusional policies by which students are offered maximum security while receiving minimum learning.2 To pursue these charges, this chapter analyzes the connections between the prison-industrial complex and America’s educational crisis. We argue that increases in prison funding are devastating educational opportunities for many students and that the policing technologies of the prison-industrial complex are increasingly migrating into classrooms; as a result, many students report that when they go to school, they are not being challenged, inspired, and treated as future leaders, but placed under surveillance, conditioned to accept second-class lives, and treated as future prisoners. To support these claims, we document how our education system increasingly uses juvenile prisons, detention, policing in schools, metal detectors, surveillance cameras in the classrooms, and zero-tolerance...

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