Carceral Pedagogies — Education, Punishment, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
A Columbia panel examining how disciplinary structures in American schools mirror and feed the carceral system, and what abolitionist pedagogy looks like in practice.
Why we picked this
The connection between school discipline and mass incarceration is well-documented but rarely examined by the educators who could act on it — this panel brings that conversation to a room full of people who have standing to change something.
Schools have long been described as pipelines — pathways that for some students lead toward college and career, and for others toward suspension, policing, and incarceration. The scholarship on carceral pedagogies examines why those diverging tracks so consistently follow race and class, and what educational systems borrow structurally from punitive institutions.
This panel at Columbia brings together scholars and educators working on abolitionist approaches to school discipline: what it looks like to remove punitive logic from the classroom without abandoning accountability, and how institutions that have been shaped by carceral thinking reform themselves from within. The discussion takes on additional urgency given ongoing debates over zero-tolerance policies, school resource officers, and the long-term effects of exclusionary discipline on student outcomes.
Free and open to the public, the event draws an audience that typically includes educators, researchers, and policy advocates — the kind of room where theoretical frameworks get stress-tested against lived institutional realities.