Context: Prison education has often been ignored in discussions of public education. When it has been included, Girls of Color are often eclipsed by larger populations of Boys of Color. Yet the routes disabled Girls of Color take to prisons are different from those of their male peers; Girls of Color become incarcerated for low-level offenses and often end up back in prison due to probation violations, meaning they have been punished more severely for original crimes. Although prison education has offered educational opportunities, such as the chance to get a diploma or GED, most of it has been found to be remedial and irrelevant to the lives of incarcerated disabled Girls of Color. Focus of Study: In this article, we unraveled the complexities and nuances of solidarity within prison education classrooms with disabled Girls of Color. Using a disability critical race theory (DisCrit) Solidarity lens while analyzing a sociocritical literacy course, the empirical research question was: What are the affordances and constraints of DisCrit Solidarity with disabled Girls of Color in a youth prison? Research Design: Our qualitative study took place in a maximum-security youth prison in the Midwestern part of the United States. This study was part of a larger one-year project that included 16 incarcerated disabled girls, mostly Girls of Color, who enrolled in a credit-bearing sociocritical literacy course designed and taught by the principal investigator and teaching team. Our full corpus of data included interviews with the girls (23) and adults in the youth prison (6), classroom observations (25), education journey maps (10), focus groups (4), fieldnotes (20), and classroom artifacts (21). Data for this study focused on the interviews with the girls, observations, fieldnotes, and class materials. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analysis illustrated the affordances and constraints of solidarity in prison classrooms with incarcerated disabled Girls of Color. The affordances included tangible moves that the girls identified as solidarity, the need for solidarity to make critical pedagogy and curriculum impactful, and the effect of those affordances that the girls described. In youth prisons where tools of learning, such as pencils, were considered weapons, we found two constraints that limited DisCrit Solidarity efforts: the conflation of support with solidarity and the violent context of youth prisons. We conclude with the implication that our solidarity efforts were incarcerated. To move beyond narrowly focused solidarity efforts, we suggest growing out abolitionist geography to consider the multiscalar processes that lead to sustained solidarities with incarcerated disabled Girls of Color. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Marilyn Ortega and William Proffitt for their roles in both the pedagogical team and data collection on this project. We also appreciate the editors of this special issue, David Connor and Beth Ferri, for their vision and inclusion of our work and the reviewers whose feedback strengthened our work substantially. Finally, the principal investigator would like to thank the Ford Foundation and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which made this research possible through the Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The United States’ family regulation system often begins with well-intentioned professionals making child protection hotline calls, jeopardizing their own ability to work with families and subjecting the families to surveillance. By the system’s own standards, most of this surveillance leads to no meaningful action. Nowhere is this reality more present than in schools. Educational personnel serve as the leading driver of child maltreatment allegations, yet decades worth of data reveal educator reports of maltreatment are the least likely to be screenedin and the least likely to be substantiated or confirmed. In other words, education personnel— whether motivated by genuine concern, which may nevertheless be informed by implicit biases towards low-income families and families of color; fear of liability; or the desire to access services they believe families cannot acquire elsewhere— overwhelm our child welfare system with unnecessary allegations of maltreatment. This reality has fundamentally transformed the relationship between families and schools. Carrying the heavy burden of mandated reporting laws, public schools disproportionately refer Black and low-income families to the family regulation system, abdicating schools’ opportunity to serve these same families in the communities in which they reside. Rather than serving as the great equalizer, public schools increasingly contribute to the carceral state’s regulation of families. This Article argues that schools must shift their role away from the reporting and surveillance of these families, and instead directly provide and arrange for services for families. This change begins with sharply limiting or repealing mandatory reporting obligations (permitting voluntary reports in severe cases)—but that is only the start. Schools are well-positioned to create new pathways to the supports and services from which most families reported to the family regulation system might actually benefit. Schools are already a primary source of food for impoverished children, and can help ensure low-income families access all the public benefits to which they are entitled. Schools can largely refer children and families to the same services that the family regulation system can—such as mental health services and substance abuse treatment—but without that system’s coercive authority and its associated problems. Where some services are tied to the family regulation system’s involvement, then law should permit schools to refer families directly. Schools know which families need legal services to defend their housing, access benefits, obtain orders of protection—or any of the myriad of other supports that poverty lawyers can provide. This shift would tie schools to the families and communities that they serve and benefit those families and communities far more than the surveillance and policing they experience under the current family regulation system.

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