"This is an American story, unsettled by contradictions, constituted by unresolvable loss and open-ended hope, produced through brutal exclusivities and persistent insurgencies. This is the story of Lincoln prison." In her Introduction, Sabina E. Vaught passionately details why the subject of prisons and prison schooling is so important. An unprecedented institutional ethnography of race and gender power in one state's juvenile prison school system, Compulsory will have major implications for public education everywhere.

Vaught argues that through its educational apparatus, the state disproportionately removes young Black men from their homes and subjects them to the abuses of captivity. She explores the various legal and ideological forces shaping juvenile prison and prison schooling, and examines how these forces are mechanized across multiple state apparatuses, not least school. Drawing richly on ethnographic data, she tells stories that map the repression of rightless, incarcerated youth, whose state captivity is the contemporary expression of age-old practices of child removal and counterinsurgency.

Through a theoretically rigorous analysis of the daily experiences of prisoners, teachers, state officials, mothers, and more, Compulsory provides vital insight into the broad compulsory systems of schooling-both Inside prison and in the world Outside-asking readers to reconsider conventional understandings of the role, purpose, and value of state schooling today.

About the Author

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

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 communities-including young men who are locked up and their loved ones-negotiate, 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. Vaught's 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

Book Information
ISBN 9780816696215
Author Sabina E. Vaught
Format Paperback
Page Count 392
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 51mm