Research on the nexus between schools and prisons, which overwhelmingly impacts students of color, has predominately focused on punitive school discipline, such as suspension, expulsion and arrest—or zero tolerance policies. This focus, while important, has generated a narrow conceptualization of the racialized relationship between schooling and incarceration, whereby the multiple and interconnected exclusionary policies fueling this relationship are not adequately explored. In this paper, I suggest that referrals to alternative education (AE) are one mechanism of racialized exclusion whose contributions to the nexus remained under-examined in literature on the school-to-prison pipeline. To fill this gap, and to expand our understanding of the continuum of exclusionary practices fueling the nexus, I use Critical Race Theory to propose the theoretical semblance between zero tolerance policies and AE referrals. I then explore this link empirically, by relying on statewide school district data from a variety of sources to examine: the school district characteristics associated with racially disproportionate enrollment in California’s continuation schools; and the extent to which racially disproportionate AE referrals and racialized zero tolerance discipline occur under contexts with similar characteristics. I find that racially disparate AE referrals and zero tolerance policies share multiple contextual characteristics, and that key divergences in these similarities indicate their potential operation as complementary mechanisms of exclusion. I conclude with implications for future investigations of the school-prison nexus.

This dissertation examines the relationships between schooling and carceral systems, and the ways system-impacted youth build abolitionist alternatives to punitive education, and criminalization more broadly. I conduct a two and a half-year ethnography of Fighting for the Revolution that will Educate and Empower Los Angeles (FREE LA) High School. FREE LA is a police-free, punishment-free alternative school in South LA, created for and by Black and Brown young people who were excluded from, or chose to leave, traditional schooling. FREE LA is rooted in abolition and transformative justice, each of which encompass a broad framework and set of everyday praxes for transforming the conditions, ideologies, and power relationships that make State and interpersonal violence continuous and inevitable. I also taught, substituted, and tutored at FREE LA for the past four years. Through a critical geographic frame, I use FREE LA’s model and students’ insights as a lens to explore the deeper entanglements between schooling and carceral regimes, beyond the focus on harsh “zero tolerance” discipline (e.g., suspension and expulsion) used in much current literature on schools and prisons. Likewise, by examining the numerous processes, praxes, and relationships through which FREE LA participants build an educational space where punishment is nowhere on the spectrum, I explore the possibilities for abolitionist alternatives beyond the “alternatives to discipline” (e.g., behavioral interventions and restorative practices) frequently proposed as solutions to the school-prison link. By viewing schools and prisons not as static ‘things’ linked through isolated policies, but dynamic sets of relationships, I analyze how carceral ideologies, modes of relationality, and forms of social organization flow into, out of, and across “school” in ways that entrench and normalize carceral regimes. I demonstrate how schooling and carceral systems are constitutively produced across numerous scales, to create a complex carceral-education landscape in which young people are repeatedly partitioned into gendered-racial hierarchies of humanness, worth, and belonging. However, through ethnographic observations of FREE LA’s departures from this landscape, I consider the possibilities for forms of education and socio-spatial transformation that contend with the numerous entangled roots of the school-prison link. For example, FREE LA’s refusal to allow police in the space; their abolitionist legal clinic, which provides court support for students who get arrested; and their maintenance of safety and accountability through TJ, all radically disrupt the mundane terms and conditions of both schooling and carceral regimes. Rooted in the experiential insights of FREE LA students, I contribute to critical criminological and abolitionist studies by theorizing models of education and forms of social organization that render criminalization obsolete; and by extending methodological critiques of carceral systems to argue that abolitionist transformation must be epistemological and ontological in scale and scope.