From Police Power to Policed Schools: Racial Ideologies, Urban Schooling, and the Carceral Landscape of Chicago, 1888 - 1920

Abstract

In contemporary discourse about the relationship between schools and the criminal legal system (generally referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline), a bright line is often drawn between the nurturing, supportive school and the penal institutions of the carceral state. In this study, I complicate this framing by analyzing key historical processes that developed urban schools as sites of carceral power that rely on confinement, surveillance, and policing as strategies to manage “problem children” and maintain racial difference. Through analysis of three historical conjunctures during Progressive Era Chicago, I show that urban schooling was shaped by an iterative interplay of racial ideologies and carceral logics that unfolded against the broader political economy of social control and social welfare. First, I study the compulsory school movement between 1888 and 1903, and I show how revisions to the Illinois School Law in the late 19th century linked public education with the carceral state through the criminalization of truancy and the segregation of truant, incorrigible, and/or dependent children in residential parental schools. Second, I analyze how ideas about danger, interracial schools, and the value of whiteness were shaped in the public sphere through a series of school strikes between 1902 and 1908. I find that these public ideas coalesced into a racial ideology that positioned Black students as dangerous and problematic, while simultaneously strengthening a property interest in maintaining the value of White schools among White families. Finally, I interrogate how the politics of vice reform shaped schools in Chicago’s growing Black Belt between 1910 and 1920. I find that as the city council passed new vice regulations and laws aimed at eradicating vice, the moral geographies created by vice regulation upheld and legitimized racial differentiation and led to the confinement of Black children in devalued and overpoliced schools. As a whole, this project focuses attention on the broader purpose and function of carceral power in schools: carceral power obscures the structural permanence of a group of “others” in schools by legitimizing and reconciling the permanence of inferiority with liberalism’s guarantees of individual freedom, liberty, and meritocracy. I show how the perceived threat of danger – from poor, immigrant children, from interracial schools, and from Black neighborhoods – was used to make racial inferiority legible in urban schools, and how carceral logics and techniques were used to manage allegedly dangerous, inferior children through schools. This work highlights that disentangling carceral power from urban schools requires tackling the root causes of carceral power in schools: the need to justify, normalize, and reproduce racial differentiation in service of the racialized political economy.