is also the emergence of a carceral state that operates a governing-through-crime youth complex and a school-to-prison pipeline that essentially functions as a new extension of Jim Crow.71
The strengthening of the school-to-prison pipeline—seen in the increased acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public schools—is a grotesque symptom of the way in which violence has saturated everyday life. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators are now dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system. Under such circumstances, not only do schools resemble the culture of prisons, but young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial. How else to explain the case of a diabetic student who, because she fell asleep in study hall, was arrested and beaten by the police or the arrest of a seven-year-old boy who, because of a fight he got into with another boy in the schoolyard, was put in handcuffs and held in custody for ten hours in a Bronx police station?72 In Texas, students who miss school are not sent to the principal’s office or assigned detention. Instead, they are fined and in too many cases actually jailed.73 It is hard to imagine, but in a Maryland school, a thirteen-year-old girl was arrested for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance.74 In these examples, we see more at work than stupidity and a flight from responsibility on the part of educators, parents, and politicians who maintain these laws. We see actions motivated by an underlying belief and growing sentiment that young people constitute a threat to adults and that the only way to deal with them is to subject them to mind-crushing punishment.
The consequences have been disastrous for many young people. Even more disturbing is how the legacy of slavery informs these practices, given that “arrests and police interactions . . . disproportionately affect low-income schools with large African-American and Latino populations.”75 Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, low-income white youth and children of color are being funneled directly from schools into prisons. Feeding the expanding prison-industrial complex, justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that “since 1970, the number of people behind bars . . . has increased 600 percent.”76 It is estimated that in some cities, such as Washington D.C., 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison. Michelle Alexander has pointed out that “one in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).”77
Young people of color in America have an ascribed identity that is a direct legacy of the society created by generations of white enslavers. Black men are particularly considered threatening, expendable, and part of a culture of criminality. They are deemed guilty of criminal behavior not because of the alleged crimes they might commit, but because a collective imagination paralyzed by the racism of a white supremacist culture that can only view them as a disturbing threat. Clearly, the real threat resides in a social order that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual ideologies, practices, and policies that support toxic forms of racism and destroy any viable notions of justice and democracy. As the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis cases made clear, when young black men are not being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are being targeted by vigilantes and private security forces and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous—or in Davis’s case because he was playing loud rap music.78 This medieval type of punishment inflicts pain on both the psyches and bodies of young people as part of a public spectacle of domination and subordination.
Anyone belonging to a population identified and treated as disposable faces an existence in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty, and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of “privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization,” fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering, and authoritarianism.79 Students being miseducated, criminalized, and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provide a grim reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune in the past from this type of state violence. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform—it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing most of its population.
Widespread violence now functions as part of an antiimmune system that turns the economy of sadistic pleasure into the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral vitality. Democracy in the United States is increasingly battered by a collusion between financial elites and a surveillance state that de-prioritizes their “complex” crimes of economic mass destruction.80 An American disimagination machine producing civic death and historical amnesia penetrates into all aspects of national life, suggesting that all who are marginalized by class, race, and ethnicity have been permanently abandoned. But historical and public memory are not merely on the side of those enforcing domination.
Anthropologist David Price asserts that historical memory can be a source of renewal within the “desert of organized forgetting” and suggests a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth, and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a “reawakening America’s battered public memories.”81Against the tyranny of forgetting, educators, young people, social activists, public intellectuals, workers and others can make visible and oppose the long legacy and current reality of state violence and the rise of the punishing state. Such a struggle suggests not only reclaiming, for instance, education as a public good but also reforming the criminal justice system and removing police from schools. In addition, there is a need to employ public memory, critical theory, and other intellectual archives and resources to expose the crimes of those market-driven criminogenic regimes of power that now run the commanding institutions of society and that have transformed the welfare state into a warfare state.
The consolidation of capitalism, counterintelligence, and the carceral state with their vast apparatuses of real and symbolic violence must also be situated and understood as part of a broader historical and political attack on public values, civic literacy, activism, and social justice. Crucial here is the need to engage how such an attack is aided and abetted by the emergence of a poisonous neoliberal public pedagogy that depoliticizes as much as it entertains and corrupts. State violence cannot be defined as simply a political issue. Also operating in tandem with politics are pedagogical forces that wage violence against the minds, desires, bodies, and identities of young people as part of the reconfiguration of the social state into the punishing state. At the heart of this transformation is the emergence of a new form of corporate sovereignty, a more intense form of state violence, a ruthless survival-of-the-fittest ethic used to legitimate the concentrated power of the rich, and a concerted effort to punish young people who are out of step with official lists, ideology, values, and modes of social control.
Making young people bear the burden of a severe educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are viewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.82 In any totalitarian society, dissent is a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engaged citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of genuine education with job training. Edward Snowden, for one, was denounced as being part of a generation that combined being educated with a distrust of authority. It is important to note that Snowden was labeled as a spy, not a whistle-blower—even though he exposed the reach of the spy services into the lives of most Americans. Of course, these antidemocratic tendencies represent more than a threat to young people: they also put in peril all of those communities, individuals, groups, public spheres,
