The Coalescence of Education and Criminal Justice in the United States: The School-Prison Nexus and the Prison-Industrial Complex in a Capitalist Society

The education and criminal justice systems have developed in relation to one another, intersected through specific events, policies, practices, and discourses that have ultimately shaped the experiences and lives of children of color. Racism, white supremacy, and oppression are foundational to the United States and evident in all systems, structures, and institutions. Exploring the various contexts in which the education and criminal justice systems have developed illuminates their coalescence in contemporary United States society and more specifically, in public schools. Public schools now operate under discipline regimes that criminalize the behavior of Black and Brown children through exclusionary practices and zero-tolerance policies, surveillance and security measures, and school police. Children of color must navigate complex and interlocking systems of power in schools and the broader society that serve to criminalize, control, and incapacitate youth, effectively cementing a relationship between schools and prisons. Describing these complex and interlocking systems of power that exclude children from schools and force them into the criminal justice system as the “school-to-prison pipeline” is increasingly insufficient. The “school-prison nexus” more accurately and completely embodies the relationship between education, incarceration, and the political economy. In the United States, where capitalism reigns, the school-prison nexus serves as an economic imperative to further fuel the political economy, neoliberal globalization, and the prison-industrial complex. In both the education and criminal justice systems, Black and Brown children are commodified and exploited through the school-prison nexus as a mechanism to expand free-market capitalism.