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. 53 . . CHAPTER 3 . Instituting the Culture of Control Disciplinary Practices and Order Maintenance Although a variety of policies and practices were part of the culture of control inside UPHS, the most central was the systematic use of order-maintenance-style policing. This included law-enforcement officials’ patrolling of the hallways, the use of criminal-procedural -level strategies,1 and the pervasive threats of summonses and arrest, which together led to three essential consequences. First, the heavy policing of students on a daily basis and an official policy of police intervention for minor school infractions led to the criminalization of misbehavior . In fact, frequently the police intervention itself triggered the behavior that was ultimately considered criminal. Second, disciplinary incidents that could have been considered violations of the law but had once been handled internally by educators, such as fighting, came to be defined as serious crimes and were often handled through police intervention, summonses , and the arrests of students. Third, as school discipline merged with an ideology of street policing, the boundaries between once-separate domains—the school, the street, and institutions of the criminal-justice system—became blurred. As David Garland suggests, as crime-control responsibilities move beyond the boundaries of the criminal-justice system, institutions of civil society, such as the urban public school, assume explicit roles in the larger societal project of the penal management of marginalized , low-income youth of color.2 What Does “Disorderly” Mean, Anyway? The Policing of Misbehavior and the Criminalization of Disrespect How did the new disciplinary plan work in actual practice? One way to find out was to look carefully at the kinds of acts that became defined in everyday practice as the appropriate domain for police action. With this 54 INSTITUTING THE CULTURE OF CONTROL question in mind, I undertook a systematic examination of the school occurrence reports for the 2004–2005 school year, during which time at least 113 summonses and 58 youth referrals were meted out and more than 50 arrests were recorded, 221 occurrences in total.3 My careful examination of the reports led to one striking finding: 52 percent of the offenses were for “disorderly conduct.” Given that so many students were charged with this offense, it was important to examine the actual behaviors that led to it. My experiences at UPHS shed light on the definitional process, from the initial interaction between police and students that led to the charge of disorderly conduct, to the hours students spent in court. It was late September. I was standing in the office of the assistant principal of school safety, Juarez. I was there to pick up an ID card that had been made for me. Only the secretary, the aide, and I were present. The quiet morning lull of office work was broken suddenly when three police officers escorted two handcuffed boys into the office. For me, the experience was still new. I had not yet grown accustomed to the scene, and it seemed jarringly out of place in a school. The boys were forcibly pushed down into two chairs. Two more police officers entered the room, which suddenly felt much smaller. Their anger was palpable. The secretary and the aide did not seem fazed. The aide began to print out information on the two students. One was nineteen years old. “He needs to go to the precinct ,” one of the officers said. The five officers stepped to one side of the room near the door to confer . This strange moment of waiting and conferring I would see again and again over time. They appeared to be making decisions on the fly. The secretary continued to work. The aide quietly said to me, “Your card won’t be ready until tomorrow,” cuing me to leave. “I’m watching this,” I said. “I don’t think you have permission.” “I have the principal’s,” I assured her. The two young men were talking to each other. The older one whispered , “They’re beasts,” referring to the officers. Their chairs were about three feet apart. They leaned close to each other with their cuffed wrists behind their backs and continued to complain in low voices about the treatment they had received. I later learned that they were brothers—Terrell and James. The older one claimed that he had come to the defense of his younger sibling. The occurrence report, which I obtained later, described the incident like this: [18.116.13.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 17:16 GMT...

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