Damien M. Sojoyner’s First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles reveals that Black children are being imprisoned by a thousand lessons, indignities, and disappointments. Sojoyner reorients readers away from the school to prison pipeline (STPP) framework, which focuses almost exclusively on excessive involvement by law enforcement in education. The STPP analysis charts the “funneling” of children from schools into detention centers, jails, and prisons. While this perception of the relationship between schools and prisons has gained dominance within educational and advocacy circles, First Strike demands a different understanding, arguing that the contemporary educational system is not a pipeline but an enclosure or a process by which race, gender, class, and sexuality are produced to destabilize communities through the removal or denial of services. At once material, ideological, and cultural, educational enclosures make clear that schools do not lead to incarceration, but rather that education has developed into a fundamentally...
University of California Press