Youth Voices from the Front
Pepi Leistyna
As a member of a community leadership and social justice team in Boston, I was recently allowed to “tour” the Suffolk County House of Corrections. The visit began with a video that celebrated the philosophy and practice of “rehabilitation” of the prison, followed by a presentation from a controversial county sheriff who dismissed any critique of the United States’ penitentiary system and his work therein, even when asked about the correlation between draconian cutbacks on programs to help inmates reacclimate on the outside and astronomical recidivism rates. This introductory section of the program day closed with two inmate panels, one with three women and the second with three men. These participants, who were obviously rigorously screened, color coordinated, and polished for our consumption, nervously spoke about how the local concept of “corrections” was helping them get back on their feet.
Our group did manage a bit of a coup when we were allowed to visit the male inmates in the “violence ward.” Once we had entered this separate locked chamber, it was unexpected by the prison guards that were guiding us through this nightmare (with smiles on their faces and jokes to share) that we as individuals would begin to mix with the inmates while they walked about out of their cells as part of a brief respite from the other twenty-three long and useless hours of lock-down in predominantly three-bed, one-toilet cells no larger than an average walkin closet.
What was immediately apparent about this depressing scene, though I had fully anticipated it, was that the overwhelming majority of inmates were racially subordinated—mostly African Americans and Latinos. Those who were white were marked as working poor by their teeth, tattoos, and speech, let alone their stories. I had heard in the news of epidemic levels of illegal strip searches of women who are incarcerated in this prison, and even stories of rape of both sexes. Now I was actually hearing from inmates themselves about the frequent beatings that they endure from the predominantly white security staff.
When a member of our social justice team asked the sheriff about the actual racial makeup of prisoners and staff, he said that he was not sure of the exact numbers. He added (only after it had been pointed out) that he hadn’t realized that the entire staff in the promotional materials we had been shown as part of our introduction to the prison was white—“I was not aware of this…. I’ve never seen this video before.” Such disavowal is hard to swallow given that he is one of the main spokespersons throughout the footage.
Over 70 percent of prisoners in the United States are from non-European racial and ethnic backgrounds, and Suffolk County House of Corrections is no exception. African Americans make up the largest number of those entering prisons each year in the United States. As Loïc Wacquant points out:
The rate of incarceration for African Americans has soared to levels unknown in any other society and is higher now than the total incarceration rate in the Soviet Union at the zenith of the Gulag and in South Africa at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. As of mid-1999, close to 800,000 black men were in custody in federal penitentiaries, state prisons, and county jails…. On any given day, upwards of one third of African-American men in their twenties find themselves behind bars, on probation, or on parole. And, at the core of the formerly industrial cities of the North, this proportion often exceeds two-thirds.1
What was equally upsetting about the Suffolk scene was that almost everyone in this stark environment was young. At thirty-eight, I felt like an old man in a sea of youth. But the concept of youth didn’t connote a free-spirited, open-ended quest for future aspirations. On the contrary, the room was threadbare with despair, gloom, anger, silence, and pain. As one African American young man stated to me after I moved away from the prison guards and into the crowd:
This isn’t rehabilitation … just look around. These are young people locked up all day and night long, for what, for smoking a joint, or getting in a fistfight in the street! There’s no education here, there’s no preparation for a future, there’s no room here for healing—there’s just time, a waste of time. This place breeds anger and hostility. Just look around, this is an entire generation that’s being thrown away like the day’s garbage, only this “garbage” is profitable!
Prisons have been strategically used within the feudalism of today’s capitalist social relations to lock up what’s seen as superfluous populations that the powers that be have no immediate use for.2 As Wacquant states, “the astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades results from the obsolescence of the ghetto as a device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled) African Americans in a subordinate and confined position—physically, socially, and symbolically.”3
In addition to containment, where there’s profit in what’s increasingly turning into a privatized business endeavor, there’s demand, and the prison population in the United States has consequently skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980.4 There are now over two million people in jail in the United States, and although we have only 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of its prisoners.5 The United States surpassed Russia in the year 2000 and now has the world’s highest incarceration rate. It’s five to seventeen times higher than all other Western nations. By the close of the millennium, 6.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole in this country.
While the validity of these statistics is not in question in national discussions, there is great contestation as to why they exist. Conservatives endlessly wield racist and class-specific representations of violent groups that need to be contained. When young people are represented (as opposed to self-described) in the media, especially the poor and racially subordinated, they are overwhelmingly depicted as dangerous and untrustworthy. However, as Henry Giroux (1996) rebuts:
Of course, what the dominant media do not talk about are the social conditions that are producing a new generation of youth steeped in despair, violence, crime, poverty, and apathy. For instance, to talk about Black crime without mentioning that the unemployment rate for Black youth exceeds 40 percent in many urban cities serves primarily to conceal a major cause of youth unrest. Or to talk about apathy among White youth without analyzing the junk culture, poverty, social disenfranchisement, drugs, lack of educational opportunity, and commodification that shape daily life removes responsibility from the social system that often sees youth as simply another market niche.6
Critical cultural workers and educators have been concerned with discrimination in employment and the judicial system and have provided important analyses of the high levels of incarceration and the correlation with unjust economic conditions, the dismantling of welfare, the driving down of wages, and the pursuit of neoliberalism and deregulation in the incessant search for cheaper labor outside the United States. It is axiomatic that poverty produces crime, and the United States continues to have the highest child poverty rate among major industrialized countries, along with huge levels of working poor who are relegated to living below the poverty line regardless of their employment.7 In fact, one-in-five children, and one-in-four racially subordinated children, grows up in poverty in the United States.8
While all of these progressive arguments, which cogently connect incarceration with corporate class warfare and white supremacy, should be at the forefront of national attention, I emphasize in this chapter how institutions of public education in the United States are, in part, complicit in this corporate and hegemonic process—that there is an inextricable link between the astronomical numbers of racially subordinated and working-poor youth in prisons today and our system of schooling. The economic and political forces that shape public education—institutions that reflect the larger social order—do not make an effort to create culturally responsive, humanizing, and thus inviting public spaces where youth can achieve academically and come to voice about the historical, social, and economic forces that shape their lives. As Ken Saltman observes:
Urban, largely nonwhite institutions do not even feign to prepare students for entrée into the professional class, the class that carries out the orders of the ruling corporate-state elite. These schools contain students who have been deemed hopeless and have been consigned to institutional containment. Many urban schools function as the first level of containment while the second level, America’s largest growing industry, the prison system, awaits them.9
Education is thus not concerned with infusing civic responsibility in preparation for public life; rather, it is about ensuring the dissemination of a particular market logic within which labor stratification is embraced and confirmed.10 For those throw-away masses, a callous social infrastructure, constant exposure to harsh material and symbolic conditions both inside and outside of school, exclusionary and distorted curricula, and apathetic and abusive educator attitudes and pedagogies work to virtually ensure the self-fulfilling prophecy of youth deviance.
Youth, especially the poor and racially subordinated, are far too often left out of drafting history, describing social realities, and debating educational policies and practices. In fact, conservatives have relentlessly worked to control public opinion and cut funds to dismantle participatory democratic spaces that nurture the possibility for coming to voice. Pertaining to public schools, Noam Chomsky elaborates:
It starts in kindergarten: The school system tries to repress independence; it tries to teach obedience. Kids and other people are not induced to challenge and question, but the contrary. If you start questioning, you’re a behavior problem or something like that; you’ve got to be disciplined. You’re supposed to repeat, obey, follow orders.11
The newest waves of educational standardization across the nation, as being witnessed in the current federal government’s No Child Left Behind policies and the English-only movements that are vigorously working nationally to dismantle bilingual education programs, are clearly intended to maintain this type of knowledge conformity.
Even in the apparently well-intentioned liberal calls to “empower” and “give voice” to students, young people are mostly heard about and rarely from. What many educators fail to realize is that even the most progressive and concerned pedagogue can’t empower kids. On the contrary, it is both objectifying and patronizing to assume that cultural workers can simply tap any given child on the shoulder with a magical epistemological wand, abstracted from the critical process of active engagement and meaning making.
This critique also applies to the notion of “giving voice.” It is presumptuous to claim to possess the ability to bequeath the power of expression. Since all people already have voices, often critical ones at that, the real challenge is for educators to be willing to create dialogical spaces where all of these lived experiences and worldviews can be heard. In other words, will teachers be able and willing to create the necessary self-empowering conditions that allow kids of all walks of life to explore, theorize, reveal, and act upon the truths behind the worlds that they inhabit? And, will teachers as ethnographers attempt to gather, so as to teach in a culturally responsive manner, information about the cultural capital—the literacies, sense of language, knowledge, learning and cognitive styles, and values and beliefs—that emerges out of the very violent material and symbolic conditions that many students are compelled to navigate on a daily basis?
This chapter makes use of the living personal narratives of a group of young people to expose what it is like to live in the city of Changeton for the most disenfranchised (as promised, all of the names of people and places in this study are pseudonyms).12 The research sets out to capture testimonies that could reveal a great deal about the survivors and the sources of a historically based and ideologically produced set of social problems.
At the time this research was initiated, the city of Changeton’s estimated population was: 74,449 white; 12,028 black; 1,589 Asian/Pacific Islander; 5,860 Latino/a; 269 Native American; and 4,453 designated “Other.” In addition, there were more women than men, over 13,000 people living in poverty, and the annual crimes committed in the city totaled 6,895 with 1,156 acts of violence.
Of a total school enrollment of 14,015 students, 13.6 percent were Latino/a, 29.7 percent African American, 3.0 percent Asian American, and 53.2 percent white. One in every fourteen students in Changeton was limited-English proficient. Up to 53 percent of the elementary students enrolled in Changeton schools were receiving free or reduced-cost lunch.
Adding to the system’s status of probation with the state because of its inability to effectively desegregate the schools, Changeton had high annual dropout rates, especially among racially subordinated and low-income youth. The high school lost nearly a tenth of its population the year that the interviews and research began, and the dropout rate for ninth graders was estimated at 12–14 percent. The retention rate (those held back) in high school was 11.5 percent. In addition, 13.5 percent of the students throughout the school system, overwhelmingly poor and racially subordinated boys and linguistic minorities, were in special education.
According to a desegregation report submitted to the school system’s superintendent by an outside consulting group, the schools that are in the worst condition in the city are also the most racially imbalanced. It is in these schools that the bilingual education programs are predominantly housed and thus where the majority of linguistic-minority children reside. This is how the schools were described by the desegregation planning team: “Most of the windows are in extremely poor condition—opaque … students have had to move to other classes or wear coats and gloves,” they have “a very small book collection,” “there is constant infiltration of water into corner classrooms and no ventilation system,” “lighting in the classroom is extremely poor and needs to be completely replaced,” “there are staff concerns regarding slightly elevated radon levels,” “the playground is unsafe,” “the faculty and students are unable to take full advantage of basic audiovisual instruction equipment because each classroom has just one duplex outlet near the classroom clock which leads to unsafe use of extension cords,” “the library also serves for music instruction,” “it lacks a gymnasium and functional office space,” “students eat their lunch in the basement within fifty feet of the lavatories and boiler room.”
The assessment team concluded that, in large part, Changeton school officials are “out of touch,” and that the “Central Office is not perceived as providing the leadership the system needs, but rather, as creating barriers and protecting turf.” According to the researchers, “We received multiple disturbing reports that there are teachers in the system who believe some children can’t learn, who behave in ways that encourage truancy, and who discriminate against children of other different races or socioeconomic class.” They noted that, “In the process of creating system-wide values, some schools could not agree on a value which embraced, honored, and respected diversity.” As one teacher I personally interviewed exclaimed:
The more that I think about this the angrier I get. You begin to understand why some of these kids, especially the black kids, get up and are violent: it’s like water torture and they incessantly drip on you. At a certain point you’ve got to let it go—explode!13
Within such an antagonistic environment, it should come as no surprise that, in droves, students have been expelled from Changeton schools on a daily basis. It was the high school principal’s general attitude that with students “causing too many disruptions to stay in the regular day program” he had “little choice other than to put them in the streets.” Experiencing firsthand the high rates of suspension and the permanent removal of some students from school, the outside research/desegregation team added in their report, “We were distressed that people identified the expulsion process as something that was working well in the system.” Two progressive educators in the trenches in Changeton describe this very problem of suspension and expulsion that they face in their buildings:
In a two-month period he [the principal] placed about thirty black students, and only two whites, in the In School Suspension Room. Most white students, especially those of the middle to upper middle class, are given a little lecture and returned to their rooms, while black students are kept in a closet for weeks for the same behaviors. Not only must the system subject those without sustainable power to an education that silences, but it must also recommend the use of sedatives [Ritalin] to render students of subordinated backgrounds totally without voice.
They create progressive reforms that are never intended to succeed. The Haitian Bilingual Program was placed in an all-white school in an attempt to appear on paper as though the school system was complying with the desegregation laws. They put this Haitian program in this all-White racist school. Imagine what it has been like for the Haitian kids and teachers—I mean, these black kids in a sea of white. There are no other minority people in the school except for this one health teacher. These kids are isolated, and the other students readily pick on them. Naturally, as anyone would, they react to such unwarranted abuse. Well guess what, the Haitian students are getting suspended from school all the time by an assistant principal who is a real S.O.B.
Instead of confronting such injustices, the powers that be in Changeton have maintained the system’s education as enforcement agenda. Acting on such oppressive logic, according to a recent state audit, Changeton had used $300,000 in educational reform money for school police—three marked cars and eight male officers with powers of arrest who, during school emergencies, wear bulletproof vests and carry Glock pistols that shoot hollow bullets.
The type of critical pedagogy being proposed here is fundamentally concerned with student experience; it takes the problems and needs of the students themselves as the starting point. This suggests both confirming and legitimating the knowledge and experience through which students give meaning to their lives. Most obviously, this means replacing the authoritative discourse of imposition and recitation with a voice capable of speaking in one’s own terms, a voice capable of listening, retelling, and challenging the very grounds of knowledge and power.14
After a number of conversations about my research with a friend who was at the time a team leader for a national organization’s campaign in Changeton to help “at-risk” youth, I was invited to go to work with her on a regular basis and hang out with the young people that she had been supervising. Before my first visit, Liz told the group a bit about me and asked if it were okay with them that I be around. She said that they had voted and that the team members were “psyched” that I was coming, and that one in particular exclaimed, “We finally have a chance to speak out, and I’ve got a lot on my mind!”
Early in the morning, we all met in front of the Changeton Courthouse where the teams from the youth organization regularly hook up, exercise, and leave in two vans to do various projects around town. The group was predominantly black, Latino/a, and Cape Verdean. There were also a few whites, including a person with a disability, a young overweight woman, and a Gay young man. These were young people who had dropped out/been pushed out of school and, for many, were given the “choice” from the courts of working with the organization, going to boot camp, or getting locked up.
What these youth would eventually expose (as captured in the following dialogue) is a world full of crucial knowledge, a world that cannot be ignored if educators truly hope to engage in cultural politics and understand educational failure in Changeton and beyond. And yet, these are the very kids that people rarely, if ever, listen to. Rather than explore such subject positions as a source of vital knowledge, these urban poor in the United States are treated as a criminalized underclass that must be watched and contained.
One morning, we drove through the center of Changeton in the van and the group pointed out Main Street, where they said “the action goes down.” The heart of the city has a very eerie feeling to it: there are literally dozens of boarded-up homes that people have been forced to abandon because of financial difficulties. Many of the buildings have become crack dens or refuges for the homeless.
Passing the high school, there was a sudden burst of laughter that rang throughout the van when a local teacher was spotted in the street. After mocking him through the vehicle’s windows, the group cynically reminisced about faculty that they had had. As I commented on the immense size of the building, Rhonda, a young black woman, turned to me and said, “The big school, you mean the prison. … Changeton high the big white lie!”
Continuing on our way, we drove through some of the housing projects. The team wanted me to see where many of them had grown up. In the first project, the nicest of the bunch, there were bits and pieces of garbage and ransacked rusty bicycles strewn all over the place. The long-since faded paint of the project was peeling off the walls and collecting in random piles in the bars that caged in the first-floor windows. As omnipresent shards of broken glass glittered on the pavement, much of the group talked about ways that they had escaped from the police (which they referred to as “five-0”) in this neighborhood.
While checking out another project, I asked the crew, “What’s there to do around here?” There was an overwhelming chorus response, “Nothing!!” Rhonda elaborated:
There are so many kids from eighteen down, and they have nothing to do but get in trouble … drugs, guns, and reputations, that’s all we got! … Nothing to do but screw! … And school, well that’s boring.
We returned to work in the park and after some long hours of painting in the hot spring sun I offered to take the team out to lunch. We ate, played some hoop, and then sat under a tree and began to talk. When I placed the tape recorder on the park bench, in the middle of the circle, one-by-one, each person pulled it intimately close to their mouths, to be sure that they would be heard.
Present on that day were: Roberto, an eighteen-year-old from Puerto Rico; Carlos, a twenty-year-old who described himself as Puerto Rican and half black; Dion, a twenty-year-old African American; Roland, an eighteen-year-old African American; Stevie, a twenty-year-old mix of white and Cape Verdean; Paul, a white seventeen-year-old; and Olavo, an eighteen-year-old Cape Verdean.
Pepi: How do you get out of the difficult situations that you’re all in?
Roberto: Move if your parents got the money, if you’ve got parents.
Dion: You gotta wanna help yourself if you want to get out of it!
Stevie: You gotta have money!
Dion: No man, it’s not about money!
Stevie: I’m sorry, you gotta have money. If you don’t have money, how are you gonna get outta here?
Olavo: There’s no jobs out there!
Carlos: The ghetto is everywhere, the hood ain’t no joke and there’s no way out.
Pepi: What about selling junk [drugs], a lot of people must sell junk to make money?
Dion: Everybody been through that phase. We all pumped [sold] at one time, you know what I’m sayin. Either you fell into it or you were broke. I was both and got into it when I was fifteen.
Pepi: How old are most people when they get mixed up in this? (There are a few responses: “That age.” “Twelve.” …)
Pepi: How many of you have been busted, and for what? (The entire group responds that they have been. Some of them, three or four times—for car theft, drugs, robbery, assault, etc. As one person from among the group answered, “For everything!”)
Paul: Vandalism. I didn’t do it, but I was there so I got arrested.
Pepi: All this stuff—robbing, violence, junking, having kids, leaving school—does that get you respect with the people that you’re hanging with?
Dion: You know what it is man, you wanna get a reputation. That’s what it is. It’s all about rep—give me the money and all that shit. They see you walkin out and they say “He’s crazy y’all, I seen him the other day man, he went in the store and did dis and did dat!” You know what I’m sayin. That’s all about rep, it’s all about reputation!
Pepi: What’s the rep for, making people afraid of you?
Dion: Yeah, exactly!
Stevie: I had my own mother’s boyfriend afraid of me. He was a heroin addict, he used to shoot up heroin and stuff, right. He knew that if I sold him a twenty, or a bundle or something, and he didn’t pay me when he got the money that I would kick his ass.
Pepi: He’s living with your mom?
Stevie: He was. It was kinda tuff on my mother cause one day I went down to see her and she was sleepin in the bed. There in the other room, he was dead on the ground. He shot up a bundle and shit and died. He had juss got out of detox and he shot up a whole bundle.
Pepi: Was he doing it to get high or did he just want out?
Stevie: He did it cause he wanted to get high, but he wasn’t sniffin, he was shootin—he was mainlinein. He shot up…. I went in there. I never seen a dead body until I went in there. He was all like blue. His whole body was blue. I woke up my mother and she was like, “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?” I said, “Stan is dead.” She’s like, “What!” She went in there and he was on the ground dead. He didn’t have a pulse or nuttin. I checked his neck and his wrist, he didn’t have a pulse or nuttin man, so I just called the ambulance and the police came. I’ll never forget that man—that was shhhhhh! I still think about that to, cause in a way I kinda think that I contributed to it. I mean, I didn’t like him … he was ok man, he used to give me money and stuff, you know. But, I just didn’t like him in a way because he was doin that around my mother and shit.
Pepi: What about the cops, what are they like? (Responses include: “Pretty fucked!,” “They suck man!,” “Definitely suck!,” “Pigs!” …)
Dion: Prejudice!! The system, it sucks man. You walkin on mainstreet right, I see you and you walkin and you stop to talk. You stand there for like five minutes and the drug gang, the police, come around and they arrest you—they charge you with trespassin.
Pepi: What if I came through, being white and all?
Olavo: You white so they let you go, they ask you to move on. But if you black, we black and we talkin … (Dion jumps in).
Dion: They’d search you down man.
Stevie: You [talking to me] look like a clean-cut, you know, clean-cut type of guy. At worst they’ll think of you like someone that’s buyin, so they just be like, get outta here, take a hike, or somethin. But someone like him (points out Roland who is the darkest), or even you dog (pointing to Dion who is lighter skinned)…. They’d yell, “Open your mouth!” They’d make you take your shoes and socks off…. They’ll lay trespassin charges on you.
Carlos: Two cops took those kids from around here, one was thirteen and one was fifteen. They took em into an ally a little down from here and beat em down. They juss put them in the car, went down North Main Street, they brung em down to that ally, and they beat em up.
Pepi: Did the kids do anything about it—press charges?
Carlos: Can’t do anything about it.
Stevie: Look at that dude that died in [names a city near by], that Puerto Rican dude. The cops threw him down the stairs. They had him in a choke hold and he went into a coma. Now he’s dead!
Olavo: There’s another guy here who got killed Rodney King style.
Stevie: I’ve got hit with a telephone book at the police station. They do that so it wouldn’t leave no bruises. They put a telephone book up to my head and they hit me…. I got maced three times in one night. I wasn’t resistin arrest, I was just layin there like that on the grass. He hit me three times and maced me. My friend too, who has asthma. He was in the back seat of the car and he couldn’t breath because of the smell of the mace. I said to the cops, “My friend needs medical treatment!” I yelled, “My friend needs medical help, he can’t breathe!” I kinda started goin off, I was like kickin the window and stuff so I would get their attention. Instead, they stopped the car, opened the door, and sprayed us again!
Pepi: Are most of the police white, or is the force pretty mixed? (The group says that the majority are white.) What do you do with the money that you make on the streets? Is it to stay alive? Is it power? What is it?
Stevie: I called it dirty money and I just blew it.
Dion: Sneakers yo! You want sneakers, you want some gear, you know what I’m sayin.
Olavo: Buy cars, buy clothes …
Dion: All the money I made, I smoked it all up! Yo cause when I was dealin I was like damn man what does this do man, they be comin back every ten minutes, you know what I’m sayin. It started from an oulee [a quantity of the drug]. I smoked a oulee, then two oulees went by, and then nigga, about three months later, I was like dis (acts out a bony, deathly ill person). (The group laughs and one can hear, “Exactly yo!”) I was juss dried out yo. Dat shit ain’t funny.
Stevie: I never smoked coke!
Pepi: Ok, you’re twelve to fifteen, where’s the door out of all this?
Stevie: You gotta change your environment, you gotta change your environment.
Dion: I know, take it from me man, I was there yo. Before yo, if you woulda seen before, you ask everybody in outreach—I went there a few times man. All messed up man, real skinny, couldn’t do, you know what I’m sayin. I wanted to help myself. I’ve been off it for a year now, since lass summer. I haven’t touched it and I’m not gonna either yo! Cause I know where it’ll take me yo! It won’t take you nowhere—either six feet under or in jail. And you do a lotta shit, a lotta shit that you don’t mean. I did a lotta stuff to a lotta people yo, and it hurts when I begin to think about it.
Stevie: Tell me you don’t have to change your environment!
Dion: Of course, who you hang around with, who your boys are, who they really are! You gotta know who your boys are man. A friend isn’t a person who comes up to you and says “Yo man, you lookin good, you look diesel man. Yo, I got this rock [chunk of coke/crack], you wanna go get high?” That’s notta friend … after he juss said you look diesel and all dat—you lookin good so let’s go get high.
Pepi: Who has family here, parents or whatever?
Paul: I’ve got my mom, but my father doesn’t live with us.
Olavo: I live in [names a city in a bordering state].
Pepi: You drive all the way here for this program?
Olavo: I made a deal with the judge, like I’ve gotta stay with the program until it ends. If not, I have to spend four months in boot camp.
Carlos: Once you get outta there you’d be twice as worse.
Pepi: Where do you go to talk about these complications and problems? Is there anybody who listens?
Carlos: My step-father. I wouldn’t even bother my mother with my problems. She never understands. I go to my step-father who is more of a brother.
Olavo: I’ve got my grandma.
Dion: I can’t talk to my mother. You can’t talk to my mother yo! She be rippen ya know, she yells a lot. So I go there and take a shower and get some clean clothes. She be mad, and always say, “When you get to twenty years old, what you gonna do with yourself, I’m not gonna be here forever!” Which is true, you know, but after a while you get sick of it man, and you wanna be like, “I get sick a hearin you bitch all the time.” But you can’t say nothin—she put you in this world and she can take you out.
Carlos: As soon as you go they want you back, as soon as you go …
Stevie: My mother is still happy I left. I left when I was sixteen and she’s still
happy. Home was just a place you sleep at, if there’s any food, which isn’t often, you might have a sandwich or somethin, you know.
Pepi: At what age did most of you leave home? (Most in their early to mid teens, but all have returned except for Stevie and Olavo.)
Carlos: I’m in and out all the time.
Pepi: How would you describe home, what is or was it?
Dion: At that time, there was no home. You hang out on the block all night and pump, you know.
Stevie: When you live with your mother, that’s what I think of.
Carlos: Right now, I live with my mother. Home is a place to eat and sleep. That’s the only way I look at it. You can’t even have a decent conversation without somebody startin a problem with you or somethin.
Dion: You always get into a little beef wit your mother.
Pepi: But what are you yelling about? Is there yelling because you are in trouble a lot?
Carlos: Cause you’re tryin to say somethin and they don’t wanna understand. They try to ignore it and think about it as when they were growin up—“Well when we were growing up we weren’t doing those kinds of things…. You shouldn’t be doing that!” That’s not the point. The point is we’re doin it now and we’re tryin to get rid of it. How can we do that? They don’t wanna understand that. That’s why I moved out in the first place. I started livin on my own when I was fourteen. I just came back about lass year.
Dion: I’ve got a single parent, my mother. We’ve gotten far being out here, you know what I’m sayin. Grew up in the projects on the east side. From there she got a section eight. Now we live in our own home. I mean, it ain’t her house, but it’s somethin man—it’s better than being in the projects. The projects ain’t as bad as it was man. Where you live now dog (points out Carlos), it ain’t so bad as it was when I was livin there, it ain’t nothin!
Carlos: When I moved in there were shoot-outs every single night.
Dion: That shit ain’t nothin compared to when I lived there yo!
Pepi: Who’s shooting who?
Carlos: Different projects, different people (the group begins to point out the turf and the gangs).
Roberto: People mix in my project, but if you’re from the outside, you’re not welcome and you’ll be in trouble. This town didn’t use to be like this, it wasn’t until the movies and shit. I mean I remember after the movie Colors [a Hollywood film that romanticizes gang warfare] that this dividin of the city began. Now the east side fights the west … it’s endless. You’ll beat up one of their boys and they go after you with their boys, then it’s guns, and the cops come three hours later to pick up anyone who is dead or hurt. Man, the playground we call the dead ground. Two sides lined up.
Dion: That’s cause a territory yo, survival of the fittest …
Pepi: If someone like myself comes into town and I don’t know the territory, I don’t know the boundaries …?
Paul: You’d get beat up.
Carlos: You’d get fucked up!!
Dion: I recently got beat up and they took my hat.
Olavo: You couldn’t walk with Nikes … they’d take them off your feet.
Dion: That ain’t nothin yo. Remember when eightball jackets come out. I got beat down for mine. I was walkin down Main Street and four motherfuckas jumped out of a car. They just took my jacket and all that yo.
Pepi: They want it cause it’s quality goods?
Dion: It’s theirs, you know what I’m sayin. If they want it they gonna take it, they gonna take it from you. And it’s not really that they wanna do it, it’s the reputation that they wanna get when they jump out the car and beat you down. Then people be talkin, “Yo, nigga did that shit the other night, dude beat up homeboy the other night and took his shit dog.” It’s messed up ain’t it (laughs).
Pepi: Anybody in a gang?
Olavo: No, I was never in a gang.
Dion: I was close.
Carlos: I used to hang with a gang, but that’s about it.
Stevie: When we were young and shit, me and my friend Joe had a little clique. It wasn’t like a gang, it was just a little clique. We had jackets and hats and shit. Now, most gangs follow teams, college teams like Duke and the Kings. But, I’ve never been a follower, I’ve never followed anybody. I’m not gonna be with a bunch a you know what. I mean, I got friends, but I’m not gonna like try to like hang out in a gang. To me that’s kinda corny yo.
Olavo: Yeah, now that you see.
Carlos: When I used to pump, I used to juss hang on the corner with my boys. They weren’t makin no money, they juss watchin my back, helpin me waste the money.
Stevie: Yeah, that money is gonna be rollin in but, sooner or later, you’re either gonna get … (Dion jumps in).
Dion: Foggy, you’re gonna fall, or you’re gonna be six feet under. There’s only three doors that you gotta watch out for: you gotta look out for the cop door, you gotta look out for the coffin door which closes and never opens …
Pepi: What about the rich people in Changeton? This city has some affluent sections. Do those people try to help the community at all?
Stevie: Naw!! Especially not the mayor man. The mayor is a jerk and he’s an asshole—you can quote me on that too because I think he is. He doesn’t want to help. They wanted to have a free health clinic in the downtown, like for low-income people, and the mayor opposed it.
Dion: He also didn’t meet with the local religious leaders who were concerned about all the police violence and the racism.
Stevie: Because he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s racist yo, he’s racist! He’s a basehead too (they all laugh). I sold him a joint the other day— I’m just teasin. He’s a jerk though man, you know what I mean. He tries to act like a nice guy and everythin, but he ain’t, he’s racist. I mean, I never had to deal really with racism and shit, but I can tell he’s racist!!
Pepi: If you’re poor, even if you’re white, are you in the same bind?
Stevie: If you’re white and you’re poor, yeah man.
Roland: As long as there’s niggas, there’s always gonna be poor white trash. (The group has Roland repeat this statement.)
Dion: It’s true.
Stevie: It is man. That’s true. You know, cause I was a ghetto bastard.
Paul: I was a ghetto bastard myself.
Stevie: Runnin through the projects wit Fernandes kickers. Swear to god yo, my mom used to buy two for three dollar sneakers at Fernandes—I didn’t care! You know, as long as I had a brand new pair of sneakers.
Pepi: Stevie and Paul are white, are they outcasts among other racial groups on the street?
Dion: If you down then you down, you know what I’m sayin. It’s not about white or black or nothin like dat. It’s juss if you down wit da gang you down wit it. You gotta show them that yo, it’s our gang and we’re gonna go all out. If anybody try anything we beatin em down.
Pepi: How many of you have carried a piece? (Three of them said that they have. Two say that they’ve been busted with one. From the back of the group comes, “Ahh, the guns and the knives.” From beyond the park there is the haunting sound of a baby happily playing on the project grass.)
Carlos: At one point, I juss started sellin guns for a livin. Went to jail a couple times; moved to [names a city in the next state]; had a kid; got tired of sellin drugs out there; came back over here; went to jail again.
Pepi: Carlos, how old are you now?
Carlos: Twenty. The only record that I’m proud to say I got was when I chased this dude with a hammer. He deserved it!
Paul: I carry a knife.
Stevie: I carried a piece, a piece of bubble gum. I never carried a gun, I never did.
Dion: I like guns yo. I do, I like guns, ya know, shootin em. I don’t like shootin at people. I’ve shot at people, but I didn’t really wanna get em. It’s juss like to sting em, you know what I mean.
Pepi: You hear about violence all the time around here …
Stevie: I think that it’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous!
Pepi: How many of you have been shot? (A few speak up telling stories: one took a hit from a twenty-two, one got stabbed twice, and another talks about a bee-bee that is still stuck in his neck. Curious, the group touches the metal under his skin.)
Dion: Carlos, you got shot?
Carlos: I still got the marks (shows the group his scar).
Pepi: How or why did you get shot?
Carlos: No reason at all, juss at the wrong place at the wrong time. I didn’t grow up in Changeton like everybody else here. I grew up in New York. And in New York if you’re passin by and there’s a shoot-out, there ain’t no way you’re gonna get outta there cause usually there’s like at least five people shootin at the same time. That’s life!
Stevie: My ex-girlfriend stabbed me. I threw a bowl of potato salad on her head (group laughs). Swear to god I did, it was on one of my son’s birthdays. I threw a bowl of potato salad on her head and she went crazy. She broke a bottle and stabbed me with it in my side—never forget it, it was a horrifyin experience (group still laughing).
Dion: Never been shot, never been stabbed, knock on wood, but I have been hit with bottles. I got scars right here (he begins to go over his bare body like a museum, pointing them out). I got a scar here … I was hit wit a brick twice. I had seven stitches here, I got hit wit a bottle right here.
Pepi: If you walk on the street at night is somebody gonna fuck with you?
Stevie: To be honest with you Pepi, to be honest with you, I don’t like to go into the night man—I’m afraid man. I swear, I’m not jokin, I’m scared to walk out.
Dion: Everybody wants to be somebody yo!
Stevie: It juss seems like this is like a rough generation man.
Pepi: How many of you have dead friends from street violence? (As I begin to count I realize that it’s the entire group. They begin to talk about mutual friends that are dead.)
Dion: I’ve seen a lotta my friends die yo, not actually seen em die, but …
Carlos: A lotta my friends were killed in drive-bys.
Pepi: Basically what you’ve got is poor kids killing poor kids. Does that make any sense? (“No!” comes from among the group.)
Stevie: It’s juss different now man. Like when I was a teenager, when I was fourteen, this shit first started happenin. Now man, damn! I can imagine what it’s going to be like when my kids get older!
Pepi: You think that it’s going to get worse before it gets better?
Stevie: Hell yeah!
Dion: It’s gonna get worse yo!
Olavo: The amount of people not gettin an education is getting worse.
Dion: There’s another friend (names him). I grew up with him in the east side, you know what I’m sayin, literally grew up with him. We was little kids growin up together you know. He was doin good. The only thing was that he was in a mix, you know, he was dealin drugs and all dat. They ended up killin him. I think it was jealousy yo.
Stevie: He had a record contract.
Carlos: That’s the one who got shot in front of my house.
Dion: He did talk a lot of shit yo. He used to show off a lot.
Carlos: They got him.
Dion: He used to live in the project yo.
Carlos: He got shot right in front of my house.
Dion: He got shot in his Benz yo, they shot him up.
Carlos: That was like three o’clock in the mornin, somethin like that when I woke up to the blast.
Dion: Drugs is a big problem with all this, but you cannot put a stop to the drugs that are comin into this country cause you know who’s bringin the drugs in—the same people that claim they are tryin to get them out, they’re the ones bringin it in.
Stevie: The government’s makin big money off of all of this.
Dion: They’re the ones bringin it in, all that CIA and all that shit. They’re about makin money. The don’t care. They only care about themselves. (The group mentions a few local “reputable” people who have been known to be involved in drugs, including the Chief of Police who was eventually busted—“He was sniffin!”) You know what, one of my cases got dropped in court because of that … because the evidence was tampered with.
Olavo: So you don’t know who’s sellin drugs and who’s dealin drugs in Changeton no more.
Carlos: The way I look at it the cops are actually helpin. Like every single year there are more drug dealers, every year more and more dealers. Why, cause there’s more and more crackheads. There’s more people gettin into crack and other drugs so there’s gonna be more dealers. If the police can’t stop it, all they can do is profit from it.
Dion: Every corner you got a liquor store.
Stevie: And what do they sell, malt liquor—Saint Ives, Private Stock, OE [Old English] …
Paul: You don’t even need an I.D. to buy.
Dion: It’s true what he says. I’m not even twenty-one and I can buy, nobody gets carded.
Carlos: I look like a little kid, but no problem.
Olavo: Most of the liquor stores in Changeton, you just walk right in. (The group begins to point out booze stores that sell to underage kids.)
Pepi: Are the drugs and booze in schools? (There is an enthusiastic group response: “Oh yeah!” “Everywhere!” “They’re all over the place!” “Shit yeah!”) We were driving by the high school this morning and I said to Rhonda, “There’s Changeton High.” She responded, “You mean the prison … Changeton High the big white lie!” What is she talking about?
Carlos: It’s a joke cause that ain’t no high school. The whole time I was there I got one book.
Olavo: They dictate all the rules in the high school man.
Stevie: It is a prison.
Olavo: If you do something in the cafeteria, like you supposed to sit four on the table, and you sit five on the table, they’ll grab you and give you three days suspension.
Dion: Because you can’t be sittin in a crowd like dat.
Olavo: Like a prison man. That’s why a lot of kids do stuff like that and they get suspended and then never go back to school. They changed all the rules in the high school man. I’m serious. I went there one day, there’s one-ways everywhere man. You know how you walk around and there’s like different marked buildings. It’s all one way. You gotta go all the way around even if you just want to go straight ahead of you.
Pepi: Carlos just said a moment ago that while he was at the high school he only got one book …
Stevie: Damn, teachers don’t even care man, you know, teachers don’t care! They juss makin their money, that’s how they are. (Among the group, there is expressed anger about the overall apathy.)
Carlos: They just let you hang with a paper and a pencil.
Stevie: They care about their money man, and you always see em strikin for more and more money, but they aren’t even doing shit for kids. It’s obvious! Look it (he looks around the group), look at the drop out rate man. It’s obvious! (With a great deal of anger he shouts) What the fuck man!!
Dion: Big drop out rate yo, big drop out rate.
Pepi: Are the guidance counselors at school helpful? (The group laughs and they hand out cigarettes to each other.) So basically what you’re saying is that you have no place to go, that you’ve got no one but yourself for the most part? (There’s a group “Yup!”)
Stevie: I’m serious man. I hate that school, I hate the Changeton Public School System! Somebody oughta blow it up! They’re a bunch of jerks man, I swear to god! You know what I notice Pepi, I noticed when I used to go to school, if the teachers knew you came from a nice like middle-class neighborhood, they’d treat you good. They give you special attention. But if they knew you came from the projects or somethin … (Roland jumps in).
Roland: If you black, the attitude is, “You dumb.”
Carlos: If you come from a bad neighborhood they make sure you never make it.
Stevie: They think that you are a trouble maker.
Dion: Automatically, automatically!
Roland: I was accused of a bomb scare that I didn’t do. I was waiting in the principal’s office for my advocate to show. I was juss sittin there waitin. After a while, I was like, I gotta go and I’m gonna go whether you say yes or no. Then she was like, “No wonder you have a funken tracker!” Well, she was like fat and ugly and everything, right, so I said, “It’s no wonder you don’t have a husband.” She got pissed off and so I got suspended like my first week at Changeton High.
Pepi: When you say you’re black and you get different treatment, what do you mean?
Carlos: I had teachers that were so prejudice against Puerto Ricans and blacks, and I am both.
Roberto: I once threw a chair at a teacher who was racist against me and I made the front page—we’ve all made the papers.
Olavo: They treat you different man. I had like three classes where I was the only nigga in the room. The teacher used to teach everybody in the class but me. I used to call her, “Can you explain this to me?” She used to like ignore me.
Dion: You know, like explain it but not solidly. They just rush through it.
Carlos: Because they think that we won’t be able to make it anyway.
Pepi: They think that you won’t be able to make it just by the way you look, they’ve had you before, they know something about you, or they just look at you with the attitude that you must be from the projects and come from a poor family?
Dion: All of the above. Or, sometimes they read about you in the paper, you know what I’m sayin, for gettin arrested for somethin stupit. One time I got arrested for somethin stupit y’all, what was that shit, disturbin the peace I think it was. Man, half of Changeton knew dat shit. Everybody was like “Oh, you got arrested last night.” Then I go to school and all the teachers are lookin at me like I murdered somebody or somethin. They make a big thang out of the littlest thangs.
Pepi: Do the teachers ever really try to talk with you and see what’s up in your life—what’s up in the street? (There is a group chorus of “No,” Hell no!,” “Nope.”)
Stevie: To be honest wit ya, I never had a cool teacher in my life. I grew up in Changeton and they’ve always been like kinda ignorant, or assholes.
Dion: There was one teacher that I liked a lot (he names him). He’d be yellin at you yo, but he’d be teachin you no matter what you are.
Pepi: In the Changeton school system, how many of you had a black or Latino/a teacher? (Only one person responds that they had a black teacher.)
Carlos: The only Latino was Mr. (names him).
Olavo: I had two Cape Verdean teachers like when I first came from my country, cause I didn’t know how to speak. I had a bilingual program.
Pepi: Outside of these classes, when you were in the hallway speaking Creole, did people give you shit?
Olavo: Yeah, like students, they be like, “Why don’t you speak English!” If I don’t know how to say something in English, I gotta say it in Creole. If I’m talkin to my girl in Creole, you know what I’m sayin, I’m gonna talk in Creole.
Pepi: But, now that your English is strong, if you were in school, and the teacher was giving you a hard time for something, would you speak Creole—kind of a way to give shit back?
Olavo: No, I wouldn’t, and I don’t think that other Creole speakers do.
Carlos: I juss see it as, if teachers go out their way to make an ass out of you (Dion chimes in with Carlos and together they say), you go out of your way to make an ass outta dem.
Pepi: Do most teachers go out of their way to make an ass out of you?
Stevie: They do, they kinda makin fun of you.
Pepi: You get in fights when you were in school?
Stevie: I got in a lotta fights.
Dion: Everybody into fights in school yo—Juss for a little walkin down the hallway and a little bump like dat.
Carlos: Either that or you’re wearin somethin that looks funny to them and they start cappin on you and you don’t like that—you just gotta slammmm!
Pepi: Looking back on all this, if school were different, if it were to change so that you had a place where you could come in and express yourself and talk more about what’s really happening in this community and in your lives—at least start there and then connect that to what’s in the books and all the rest, would your response to education have been different? (There is a group response of, “Yeah.”)
Dion: Way different! It would be different cause you don’t be hearin about reality. You don’t even be hearin Afro-Americans in the history. You also don’t be hearin about the Spanish…. They don’t talk about what’s goin on out there. They talkin the past. Alright, that’s pass, you know what I’m sayin. Talk about now, we’re in the future. Why don’t you bring up the people that doin good for us now!! Those other people are dead, let dem rest in peace.
Olavo: You gotta talk about what’s going on right now.
Paul: If you don’t learn from history you’re doomed to repeat it.
Stevie: I like history, I like history man.
Dion: I like history too, but they don’t teach nothin. They don’t teach you the real truth. Alright look, Thomas Edison, he invented the light, but who made it better? Who made the light better? A black man did yo! Did you hear about it? I read the black almanac yo, when I was in jail and there’s a lotta thangs in there like who came up with all kinds of medicine. A black man came up with a lotta that shit yo! They don’t teach you stuff like dat in school.
Roland: They tell you about the people who led the country, but they don’t tell you about the people that built the country.
Stevie: But you know what though, to sum it all up (laughs), no one here is an American except for the American Indians—they’re the only true Americans.
Dion: This is their land yo!
Stevie: They had it took from em.
Dion: Our so-called Americans took it from dem and now look at em— they ain’t got nowhere to live.
Roland: They come over here for religion and freedom to do this and that right, but the people outside of them wanna do somethin different and they kill them or they just shut em off.
Roland: They just took it from em, took everythin and killed em off. It’s a “I want what you got!” mentality. Kids on the streets do that nowadays and they are locked up and not celebrated—not that they should be. This whole country is a contradiction of itself.
Pepi: Most all of you have kids now, what are you going to tell your kids? What’s your advice to any kid?
Stevie: I wanna tell em to stay in school man, no matter how bad it is, juss do it, juss stay in school!
Dion: Get through yo!
As vividly depicted throughout this dialogue, culture is not simply about food and fun, but rather, its production, distribution, and consumption is implicated in unequal and abusive relations of power that have produced and reproduced (via social policies, institutional practices and structures, and media efforts to manipulate the public) epidemic levels of unemployment and poverty, crime, police brutality, home and community disintegration, illiteracy, drug addiction, and public callousness. As Chomsky points out, the obvious effects of such sociohistorical conditions are “you get violence against children and violence by children.”15 And yet, despite all the national attention on violence and youth, and a growing body of literature in the social sciences documenting the unmet needs of so many young people in the United States, it is amazing how few links are made in the mainstream national and local debates in this country, between government, socially sanctioned, and educational policies and practices that have historically hurt children and their families, and the increasing violence involving kids.
Instead of blaming youth for the world that they are caught up in, but that they did not create, educators and other cultural workers desperately need to forge critical partnerships with them in order to analyze and confront the oppressive conditions and social formations that have inevitably manufactured and imposed a history of despair. Not only do students, like those in Changeton, readily express an interest in their own lives and what they are deeply connected to, but they also generate a great interest in education and the state of society if allowed to connect in substantive and politically influential ways to the very world around them.16 When given the opportunity to speak, the youth in Changeton were more than willing and able to analyze whiteness, discrimination, institutional violence, and the commodification of culture and identity. They were also able to come up with solutions to problems in schools and the larger society.
The implication is not that what kids have to say should be taken at face value, but that educators romanticize their contributions and immediately implement their suggestions. Within a truly participatory democracy, a committed sign of respect and inclusion is that all voices be recognized, heard, and critically engaged for their theoretical insights and weaknesses, rather than simply affirmed. As Paulo Freire insists, “As active participants and real subjects, we can make history only when we are continually critical of our very lives.”17 This type of critical pedagogy demands a great deal of self-reflection about the ways in which subjectivities, desires, and actions are mobilized through social interaction and established systems of meaning and value.
What is being suggested here should not be misconstrued as an attempt to act as an apologist for the often-violent crimes that young people of all backgrounds do commit. Even the youth from Changeton held themselves (among others) accountable for their mistakes. Ways to appropriately deal with the immediacy of an actual crime—a thirteen-year-old that shoots someone—is to say the least an important topic for discussion; however, the point being emphasized here is that there is a serious need to look at and preemptively eliminate the ever-increasing macro conditions within which dehumanization and its consequential micro-violence are so prevalent. Addressing the commodification of identities within the logic of capital and popular culture, Chomsky, talking about an eleven-year-old who kills another child for a pair of sneakers (to the disbelief of the general population), states:
Why not? We’re telling this eleven-year-old through television, “You’re not a real man unless you wear the sneakers that some basketball hero wears.” And you also look around and see who gets ahead—the guys who play by the rules of “get for yourself as much as you can”—so, here’s the easy way to do it. Kids notice everybody else is robbing too, including the guys in the rich penthouses, so why shouldn’t they.18
The society as a whole needs to call into question the larger social formations and policies, which includes public schools, that have produced a culture of survival, materialism, and deviance—that “environment” that Stevie in the above dialogue talks about that needs to be changed.
Educators also need to develop the ability to differentiate pathology from acts of resistance, which are responses (though not always conscious) to domination— such as throwing chairs, evading the police, and developing reputations in order to survive by fear. Resistance is used to help individuals or groups deal with oppressive social conditions and injustice and needs to be rerouted so that it is connected to positive political projects of change.
In addition, from a more sociohistorical approach to understanding identity and human suffering, teachers can rupture and move beyond the inherently racist models that equate crime with the culture of particular racial groups—collective experiences abstracted from a history of antagonistic intergroup relations and abuses of power. They can also move beyond, without completely dismissing, psychological models that simply individualize and pathologize human behavior. Educators should be encouraged to work to understand and engage how the cognitive and psychological makeup of each person is a product of history and politics, and thus intimately affected by such oppressive ideologies as capitalism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. As Bonny Norton Pierce argues, “We need a theory of social identity that integrates the learner and the learning context, and how relations of power in the social world affect social interaction between learners and teachers and among peers.”19
It is only from a more inclusive, historically situated, and critical public debate that educators can better understand the complex roots of inequality and violence in this country, and thus better inform themselves of the current sociocultural context in which students live, as well as the tools they will need to become aware, active, and responsible citizens, and critical agents of change.
Perpetuating the myth of meritocracy, and promising to level the academic and employment playing fields with educational standards, conservatives have yet to clarify how their militaristic approach to public education, and privatization of public space, will address the material and symbolic violence and social turmoil revealed in this chapter. In fact, with the horrific outcomes of the Changeton State Comprehensive Assessment System (used in public schools)—in which, across the state, racially subordinated, linguistic-minority, and poor children overwhelmingly failed—the future of public education in the city is bleak. High school students who do not pass will not be allowed to graduate—they will instead be awarded a “certificate of attendance.” In its first year of implementation, 42 percent of the grade ten students in Changeton failed the English language arts section, 76 percent failed the math, and 58 percent failed in science and technology. With utter callousness, blaming the victims for their own victimization, one local teacher responded to these results by insisting that “The local gene pool in Changeton should be condemned!”
If educators truly wish to counter such an oppressive stance and become self-reflective agents of change, history must be embraced and engaged as a dialogue among multiple and contradicting voices, as they struggle within asymmetrical relations of power. Educators should work to not only include students in the developmental process of curricula in schools, but to help mobilize them into an organized political body (critical communities of struggle) so that they are able to voice their concerns and realize their own goals. This liberatory possibility is a far cry from the racist, classist, and hegemonic logic of those draconian policy-makers and practitioners that engineer public schools into holding tanks that abuse and force young people into a life of survival in the streets, where they are quickly gobbled up by the insatiable and burgeoning prison industrial complex.
1 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: Rethinking Race and Imprisonment in Twenty-first-century America,” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum 27, 2 (April–May, 2002): 23.
2 See Margaret A. Bortner and Linda M. Williams, Youth in Prison: We the People of Unit Four (New York: Routledge, 1997); David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: New Press, 2000); Angela Davis, The Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2000); Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001); Joy James, ed., States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
3 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis,” 23.
4 It’s important to note that as of 1998, 1.2 million prisoners were convicted of nonviolent crimes. In addition with the spreading of the three strikes law, people are going to jail for life for stealing golf clubs, food, etc. Mandatory minimums are also feeding this rapidly expanding industry. It is also crucial to acknowledge that in this rush to lock people up, about one-quarter of those people in prison in the United States are confined in local jails and state and federal prisons on drug charges. In federal prisons, drug offenders now comprise 59 percent of all inmates. In nine states, over 10 percent of the inmates were indicted on marijuana offenses, and over 50 percent of those convicted were on charges of possession. Very few of these prisoners are high-level drug traffickers. In 2000, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, “about two-thirds of the federal drug budget is allocated to interdiction, law enforcement and supply reduction efforts. One-third is allocated to prevention, treatment and demand reduction” (for all of the above statistics, see www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00-03.htm (accessed April 20, 2010)).
5 Also see www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/majority.htm (accessed April 20, 2010).
6 Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martins Press, 2001), 85.
7 Neil G. Bennett and Hsien-Hen Lu, “Child Poverty in the States: Levels and Trends from 1979 to 1998” (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2000). Available at: http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_385.html (accessed April 30, 2010).
8 Chuck Collins, Chris Hartman, and Holly Sklar, “Divided Decade: Economic Disparity at the Century’s Turn” (United for a Fair Economy, December 15, 1999), available at http://www.faireconomy.org/files/pdf/DivDec.pdf (accessed April 30, 2010).
9 Kenneth Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 86.
10 See Michael Apple, Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge, 2001); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001).
11 Noam Chomsky, Pepi Leistyna, and Stephen A. Sherblom, “Demystifying Democracy: A Dialogue with Noam Chomsky,” in Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception, edited by Pepi Leistyna (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 117.
12 The dialogue is a shorter version of the original.
13 All teacher interviews were part of the larger eight-year study that I conducted in Changeton. For detail on this study, see P. Leistyna, Defining and Designing Multiculturalism: One School System’s Efforts (New York: SUNY Press, 2000).
14 Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 20.
15 Chomsky, Leistyna, and Sherblom, “Demystifying Democracy,” 110.
16 Louise Cooper, “Youth Activists fight Prop 21,” Against the Current 86, 2 (May–June, 2000); Elizabeth Martinez, “The New Youth Movement in California,” Z Magazine (May, 2000); and Jay MacLeod, “Bridging School and Street,” Journal of Negro Education (1991).
17 Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1985), 199.
18 Chomsky, Leistyna, and Sherblom, “Demystifying Democracy,” 112.
19 Bonny Norton-Pierce, “Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning,” TESOL Quarterly 29, 1 (Spring 1993): 7.