Punishing Promise: School Discipline and Carceral Expansion during the Era of Desegregation

Matthew Kautz

In 1985, reformers declared the nation's major cities were confronting a "dropout crisis." They expressed concern that this crisis drove the nation's rising incarceration rates. "In some states," wrote one reporter, "fully 70 percent of the prison inmate population consists of former dropouts." The reporter's twinning of dropout and incarceration rates turned on the common but unfounded presumption that students dropped out of school due to their own academic failings and a related predisposition to crime. This manipulation of correlation into causation became a political hammer that policymakers used to affix criminal identities to young people, in particular low income and youth of color, through school-based criminalization. Their focus on individual failure as an explanation for what was instead the product of political, social, and economic changes over the previous three decades obscured the increasingly intimate connection that bound together schools, police, and prisons. Punishing Promise uses Boston as a case study to examine how white resistance to school desegregation led to the mobilization of schools' carceral capacities in newly intense ways and how those changes shaped and were shaped by similar changes in law enforcement. Using a variety of state archives and activist collections, it contextualizes these policies and practices within the city's transition to a service-based economy to illuminate how schools moved to the forefront in the nation's carceral landscape as powerful institutions of criminalization and punishment that forged the material and ideological conditions out of which mass incarceration grew.

About Matthew Kautz

Matt Kautz is an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University. His research examines the historical tensions between education's liberatory possibilities and the social and political barriers that halt their realization in schools. His current book manuscript Punishing Promise (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press) historicizes the formation of the contemporary school-prison nexus. It demonstrates how white resistance to school desegregation led to the newly intense mobilization of schools' carceral capacities. It analyzes how those policies and practices interacted with concurrent changes in law enforcement amidst dramatic economic changes to produce the conditions for mass incarceration. His work has been published in the Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Urban History, and the History Teacher. He previously co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for Teachers exploring the historical relationship between democracy and education in Detroit through the interweaving threads of law, social movements, and public policy. Dr. Kautz's scholarship has been supported by a number of awards, including the New England Research Fellowship Consortium and a 2020 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Prior to joining the faculty at Eastern Michigan University, he taught in schools in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Dr. Kautz completed his PhD in History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University after earning an M.A. in Educational Studies and B.A. from the University of Michigan.