Lizbet Simmons: The Prison School: Educational Inequality and School Discipline in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Excerpt

In The Prison School, Lizbet Simmons examines the link between school failure and mass imprisonment (in New Orleans particularly) in the aftermath of the War on Crime Era. She studies how and why public schools, especially in Louisiana, take a punitive approach to education and how this criminalizing model influences a student’s approach toward correctional custody. Simmons attempts to explain how schools and prisons, which are two different types of public institutions, became intertwined during the War on Crime, focusing on how this combination effects students, their communities, and our democratic society. Simmons conducts her analysis through a case study of the Prison School—a New Orleans public school run by Sheriff Charles Foti, funded by the school board, and housed on a prison campus. …