{"id":23108,"date":"2012-08-24T16:32:50","date_gmt":"2012-08-24T16:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/underpaidgenius-kathleen-nolans-book-police-in\/"},"modified":"2012-08-24T16:32:50","modified_gmt":"2012-08-24T16:32:50","slug":"underpaidgenius-kathleen-nolans-book-police-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/underpaidgenius-kathleen-nolans-book-police-in\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

underpaidgenius<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cKathleen Nolan\u2019s book Police in the Hallways is a damning portrait of what happens when this more powerful authority becomes dominant. By exhaustively profiling an unnamed Bronx high school \u2014 shadowing and interviewing students, teachers, administrators, security guards, and police officers over the course of an academic year \u2014 Nolan reveals the worrying ways educative aims have been eroded by a culture of control, the ways learning is superseded by law enforcement. \u201cAn institution that in its early days had purported to serve in loco parentis, taking on some of the functions and responsibilities of parents, appeared instead to have taken on the responsibilities of the criminal-justice system,\u201d she writes. More specifically, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani\u2019s controversial \u201cquality of life\u201d campaign of aggressively prosecuting squeegee men and turnstile jumpers and the like under the assumption that the punishment of minor infractions will reduce crime overall had been extended into New York City\u2019s struggling public high schools. The \u201czero tolerance\u201d order-maintenance model has been enthusiastically embraced by Mayor Bloomberg, but what kind of crime are we talking about when we talk about policing minor infractions in schools? While there are some gang fights and drug dealing, Nolan shows these aren\u2019t the issues that command the most police attention. Instead the sorts of petty incidents that, in the past, would have been mediated by concerned teachers and hall monitors \u2014 things like hat wearing, class cutting, talking back or talking too loudly, and not showing ID when asked for it \u2014 now fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. That is to say, behavioral issues have been reframed as criminal ones. After carefully examining the school occurrence reports for the year, Nolan found that the majority of arrests and summons were, ultimately, the result of \u201cinsubordination\u201d or \u201cdisrespect\u201d; in other words, students ignored or resisted officers who told them to take off their hat, hurry up, or show their ID, and the situation escalated from there. These confrontations, which often stem from legitimate frustration at capricious and unaccountable authorities, routinely lead to arrest. (As Nolan shows, some officers appear to publicly humiliate and antagonize students for sport, yet students are expected to react like saints to provocation from their superiors. Taking umbrage is a punishable offense). The \u201ccrime\u201d of breaking a school rule \u2014 not the law \u2014 lands students in court, which, in turn, further derails their academic progress, since they must miss school to appear before a judge. With zero-tolerance enforcement demanding obedience for its own sake, students become accustomed to being threatened with arrest for minor transgressions; many, eventually, are arrested; they get dragged to the police station and miss class; they accumulate summons and have to spend a day at court; some go to juvenile detention or jail. \u201cThe school, where they are by law required to spend most of their day, becomes an auxiliary to the criminal justice system,\u201d writes Nolan. Slippage in the language used to describe school routines, she notes, show how blurry the line has become: Students get \u201cpicked up\u201d and \u201cdo time\u201d; school personnel \u201ccooperate\u201d with the police, who do \u201csweeps\u201d of the building. At one point, an officer confidently assures Nolan that the administrators are at the bottom of the school hierarchy, under the private security guards who search bags in the morning. The police, he said, were at the top. Given all this, it\u2019s hardly surprising that throughout the book, school staff conflates the educational and penal systems. \u201cI think walking through that metal detector every morning completely brings hostility into the building before [the students] even start the day,\u201d laments one veteran teacher, alluding to the school\u2019s intensive security apparatus of surveillance cameras, metal detectors, scanners, guards, and cops. \u201cIt makes people feel like they\u2019re walking into a prison.\u201d The faculty too are prisoners in a sense, in some ways as powerless as the young people they are meant to instruct and guide. A teacher impotently confesses to a student cuffed for disorderly conduct, \u201cYou\u2019ve been arrested. I can\u2019t get involved. You know those teachers who got arrested. This is the same kind of situation.\u201d\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 <\/p>\n

The Prison-Educational Complex \u2013 The New Inquiry<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

underpaidgenius: \u201cKathleen Nolan\u2019s book Police in the Hallways is a damning portrait of what happens when this more powerful authority becomes dominant. By exhaustively profiling an unnamed Bronx high school \u2014 shadowing and interviewing students, teachers, administrators, security guards, and police officers over the course of an academic year \u2014 Nolan reveals the worrying ways […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-60I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}