Compulsory: Education and the Dispossession of Youth in a Prison School

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An institutional ethnography of race and gender power in one juvenile prison school system, Compulsory has major implications for public education. Through an analysis of the experiences of prisoners, teachers, state officials, mothers, and more, it provides insight into the broad compulsory systems of schooling, asking readers to reconsider understandings of the role, purpose, and value of state schooling today.

Reviews

"Fiercely rendered, Compulsory is the book for our moment. This book requires readers to remap the circuits that bind schools to prisons and the state and centers how communitiesincluding young men who are locked up and their loved onesnegotiate, and often shatteringly resist, these powerlines. Situating the prison classroom within a carceral landscape punctuated by deeply racialized and heteropatriachal practices of removal and premature death, Sabina E. Vaughts necessary and poetic writing moves activist scholarship into needed and new terrains and pushes readers to mourn, to analyze, and to build struggles for radical freedom that leave no one behind."Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

"Compulsory is a critical ethnography that examines the institution of public education through the lens of the Lincoln prison school at Lincoln Treatment Center, a high-security detention center for males. Observations and interviews with prisoners, their families, teachers, the security staff, and the prison administration offer a vivid look into the specific lives of those at Lincoln and the institutional setting. "American Journal of Sociology

"A highly original, masterful look at the inner workings and logic of the American juvenile justice system. This is the single best book to date on juvenile justice in the age of mass incarceration. Compulsory is an instant classic."CHOICE

Author Bio

Sabina E. Vaught is associate professor of education and director of the Educational Studies Program and the Program in Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. She is author of Racism, Public Schooling, and the Entrenchment of White Supremacy.