Funding from HMUI will support archival research for my dissertation, "Where the Pipeline Begins: Crime Control, Child Protection, and the Development of Schooling in Chicago's Black Belt, 1900 - 1965." This dissertation studies the historical processes that have led to the contemporary “school-to-prison pipeline” by analyzing how tensions between crime control and social welfare shaped the form and function of schools for Chicago’s Black children between 1900 and 1965. To understand the relationship between schools and the carceral state more precisely, I conceptualize and analyze the criminalization of Black schooling along three dimensions: surveillance of truant children; policing of racial tensions; and the confinement of Black children into overcrowded, under-resourced schools. In doing so, my project demonstrates how urban schooling in the first half of the 20th century was shaped by tensions between social welfare, crime control, and antiblack racism. By positioning urban, Black schooling as part of the broader carceral landscape, this project adds to our understanding of how schooling has been shaped from the outset by both welfare and carceral logics, and how antiblack racism has stunted the welfare function of schools in favor of its crime control function.
Researcher: Rebecca Horwitz-Willis
‘Educating a Class of Unfortunates:’ Crime Control, Child Protection, and Chicago’s Compulsory School Movement, 1888 - 1903
In the late 19th century, anxieties about the evils of child labor in newly industrialized urban centers renewed civic and political leaders’ interest compulsory schooling. In Chicago, concerns about protecting children from the dangers of labor quickly slid into concerns about protecting children, and society, from crime. Chicago during this time was an industrial powerhouse. The city’s population had been rapidly growing, and in 1890 Chicago became the third city in the US to reach 1 million inhabitants, many of whom were poor, ethnic Europeans. While others have documented how schooling during this time was used to assimilate ethnic Europeans into dominant, middle-class white culture, this project studies how schooling became a site of punitive regulation of poor people. In doing so, I surface key dynamics through which schools became linked with the broader carceral landscape during the compulsory school movement in Chicago between 1888 and 1903.
“Whereas, the appalling increase of crime among youth, the large number of vagrant children, and the employment of child labor in the city of Chicago is fraught with danger to the commonwealth:
Therefore, We, the Chicago Woman’s Club, respectfully ask your honorable body … to secure the enforcement of the Illinois statute of 1883, providing for compulsory education.” Proceedings of the Board of Education, 1888 - 1889.
In the fall of 1888, the Chicago Woman’s Club, an elite group of politically powerful middle-class white women, argued that enforcement of the 1883 compulsory education law would reduce crime and vagrancy among children and prevent the employment of child labor. The narrative of schools as potential institutions of crime control quickly took hold and shaped the development of a new compulsory school law in 1889, followed by years of debates on how best to enforce the law. This project uses archival data to study the rhetoric of civic elites, social reformers, and state officials to interrogate how the narrative positioning of schools as institutions of crime control led Chicago’s schools to become sites of carceral power over poor families. I uncover three distinct strategies of disciplining the poor: 1) a rigid focus on punitive enforcement of compulsory school laws, rather than the conditions of poverty; 2) the reliance on systems of surveillance, led by police, to identify non-compliant families; and 3) the separation and confinement of poor, habitually truant, or incorrigible children into residential educational institutions. Throughout my project, I argue that the refusal of the state to adapt schooling and welfare supports to the needs of poor families resulted in investment in carceral systems of surveillance and punitive enforcement that operated through the institution of schooling.
“Give them clothes to wear. Could you send these into the cold with no shoes? …. Bring all the law you want and bring food and clothes with it.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 1889
Narratives positioning schools as institutions of crime control naturally led the new law to focus on enforcement, including harsh penalties for parents who refused to comply with the law. However, punitive coercion ignored the material conditions of poverty that prevented many poor families from sending their children to school. These conditions varied from lack of material goods, such as shoes or clothes, to the desperate need for children’s wages. The refusal of poor parents to send their children without material support, coupled with the state’s refusal to provide poverty relief, created deep tensions between the needs of poor families and the will of the state as it pertained to the compulsory school project.
“We should have the power to arrest all these little beggars, loafers, and vagabonds that infest our city, take them from the streets and place them in schools where they are compelled to receive education and learn moral principles.” 44th Annual Report of the Board of Education, 1897 - 1898.
These tensions led to an expansion of the state’s police power via schools, specifically through systems of surveillance led by police and truant officers. More specifically, the newly-formed Compulsory School Department created a tri-part system of surveillance to identify truant children. Principals and teachers tracked attendance of individual students, factory inspectors surveilled places of employment, and police patrolled the streets looking for vagrant or disorderly school-age children. This system was so unsuccessful that twice during this period the Compulsory School Department recommended its own dissolution. This recommendation was not taken up, however, and the compulsory school movement continued to focus on enforcement mechanisms rather than root causes of truancy.
The “class of unfortunates, who, either from improper of unwholesome surroundings at home, or from an unnatural perversity of disposition evade their school duties, and who, when brought to school by the attendance agent, cause sufficient disturbance to have their absence heartily desired by the teacher and principal should be placed in a separate room or building and under a different system of discipline” Compulsory School Department, 1890, quoted in Truancy and Non-attendance
Although the school board and school officials supported these systems of surveillance and the principle of compulsory schooling more broadly, they did not want the most challenging students brought into schools. Instead, for the decade between 1889 and 1899, the school board vehemently advocated for the creation of a residential school for incorrigible, dependent, and habitually truant children. In doing so, school officials evidenced their belief that there existed a subclass of children who were outside the responsibility of the schools, and therefore outside of the parameters of school rights. This belief was legitimized in 1899 when the state included a provision for the creation of the Chicago Parental School in the Juvenile Court Act.
The 15 year compulsory school movement in Chicago was successful in legitimizing the principle of compulsory school attendance and the state’s ability to enforce attendance requirements. Yet, while the principle of compulsory education took root in Chicago, support for full funding of schools did not. Indeed, the focus on crime control and punitive enforcement had the unintended effect of drawing money away from education and towards mechanisms of punitive enforcement of the law.
By 1903, a movement that began as an effort to protect children from the evils of the sweatshop and street life had morphed into one that relied on mechanisms of surveillance, punitive enforcement, and confinement to manage poor children in the interest of protecting society. Popular narratives of schooling as instrumental for crime control, coupled with the state’s unwillingness to mitigate the conditions of poverty that led to truancy, led to the use of carceral techniques to educate and manage poor children.
Schools are the United State’s biggest social welfare investment. Yet, this project shows how this welfare investment was shaped from the start by punitive, carceral logics. The lessons from the compulsory school movement highlight the need to think about how schooling as an institution was fundamentally shaped by inequitable ideologies regarding how to educate poor children, and how those ideologies continue to constrain access to educational justice today.
Keywords: Crime Control, Child Protection, and the Development of Urban Schooling