Educate, don’t incarcerate. Schools, not prisons.
The call to invest in institutions of care, not prisons and carceral surveillance has grown in popularity in legal and policy circles in recent years. But how should we spend our money to build a world that is safe and equitable for all? A popular response centers on schools. In her forthcoming article,The Miseducation of Carceral Reform, Fanna Gamal critiques this popular response. She contends that there is nothing inherently benevolent about investment in schools over prison. Yet if we take seriously the idea of reinvestment beyond that conceptual confine, we might begin to imagine a transformative pathway forward. Because her work challenges readers to confront the shortcomings in an underlying assumption central to criminal legal reform efforts in recent years, this article is a must-read for anyone curious about the connection between criminal legal reform and education in the era of mass incarceration.
As Gamal asserts, “public education looms large in criminal legal reform.” Whether policy advocates juxtapose spending on prison and spending on education or lawmakers urge getting “smart” on crime by shifting spending from correctional costs toward schools, Gamal helpfully traces a consistent thread in the legal discourse around mass incarceration – if we are to spend less on punishment, perhaps we should spend more on schools. This shift in money is typically considered a positive development.
And it might be, suggests Gamal, but it is an incomplete solution. This is most evident in specific kinds of criminal law reform bills: those that fund schools through the anticipated cost savings of sentencing reductions. Gamal characterizes legislation like California’s Proposition 47, which reclassifies certain felonies as misdemeanors, as both a sentencing bill and an anti-spending bill. Such legislation, she contends, seeks to reduce overall government spending by directing some funding that would otherwise go toward prisons to schools. Critics usually attend to the effects of such laws on the criminal legal system. In contrast, Gamal interrogates the implications of such laws for schools. To grasp the broader implications of these policies for schools, one must understand the school as a site of institutional care not unlike the prison. Today, prisons function not just as sites of punishment, but also welfare institutions for marginalized populations increasingly subject to the carceral legal apparatus. But prisons are only half the story. As Gamal convincingly describes, schools are the other robust welfare institution in an otherwise “anemic welfare state.”
This insight reframes and deepens existing critiques of criminal justice reform and education policies. First, it underscores how reforms that explicitly connect schools and de-carceration can achieve largely symbolic victories without transforming deeper social ills. For example, in both California and Connecticut, legislation that reduced sentencing and allocated some anticipated money toward schools also earmarked the way schools could use such money for punitive purposes. In essence, criminal law’s “long-arm” shapes schools through sentencing reform. Second, Gamal underscores that the efficiency discourse within which this kind of reform tends to arise can obscure important normative questions about how to go about the administration of schools. The assumption that efficient equates improvement can silence other values, like economic and social redistribution. Thus, a common efficiency critique applicable in the criminal law context also applies in the school context. Finally, the conceptual connection between de-carceration and schools threatens to reinforce uncritical engagement with a problematic narrative about schools in society—that this institution performs an unmitigated good. To the contrary, Gamal emphasizes the contested nature of schools as a site of constant substantive battle for political and ideological inculcation.
As solution, Gamal centers the “problem” with this trend in criminal law policy and discourse in the term “reinvestment.” Gamal argues that we can productively build upon reinvestment by seeing schools as an important part of the welfare state that depends upon and requires other critical welfare institutions, by distributing power over funding decisions when funds move to education from prisons, and by addressing the narratives of race and gender that substantiate our current, problematic configurations of social power.
It is the resistance to an implicit conceptual binary in reform circles that makes her project alluring. Surely, we should not continue to incarcerate in a business-as-usual approach to criminal law and policy. And surely schools are better than prisons in many respects. Said differently, if we must live with an anemic welfare state, a point that Gamal does not engage, we very well may prefer one where schools, not prisons, loom as the larger of the two institutions. By shifting the problem from the policies to the discourse, Gamal challenges the conceptual foundation on which these two singular pillars of care exist. Through this approach, she urges readers to imagine how the law of reinvestment may truly be a “first step” toward deep transformation in society rather than an “only step” to reconfiguring the status quo through criminal law.
