Funneled Into Prison: Race And Behavior Modification At A Mississippi Alternative School

African American youth are 3.5 times more likely than their white counterparts to be expelled from traditional public schools and sent to an alternative school—an exclusionary disciplinary setting focused on behavior modification. Yet how administrators and faculty supervise students’ behavioral achievement in these settings is seldom examined. This research investigates how faculty and administrators define and implement a behavior modification program at Richmond Learning Center, an alternative education setting in Mississippi, and places African American boys as young as 12 years old on a path to prison. To understand how faculty and administrators perceive and practice this program, I performed 9 semi-structured interviews with administrators and faculty and approximately 100 hours of participant observations at the school. I find that administrators and faculty implement a structurally undefined behavior modification program that 1) takes a hands-off approach to the educational and behavioral development of its students; and 2) relies on both the insidious and spectacular surveillance of its African American students. Notably, while faculty and administrators acknowledge the shortcomings of the alternative system, they ultimately blame students who get in trouble under the watchful eyes of the school. These findings have important implications for understanding how some alternative centers criminalize African American boys and places them in the school-to-prison pipeline.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A. in Sociology

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology and Anthropology

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Griffin, Daniela Alexandria

Contributors dc:contributor

• Amy McDowell
• James M. Thomas
• Kirk Johnson

• African American Boys
• Alternative Education
• Behavior Modification Program
• School Discipline
• School-To-Prison Pipeline
• Sociology

Repository record dc:identifier

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/845

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:egrove.olemiss.edu:etd-1844