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Immigration disparities are associated with strict school climates and juvenile justice. Place also matters concerning school strictness and disproportionate minority contact for minority youth. What remains unknown is the relationship between school strictness, immigration, and punishment along the Texas-Mexico border. Drawing from the Texas Education Agency's (TEA) Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), we address two questions regarding the relationship between school strictness and juvenile justice referrals in border and non-border schools. First, do the relationships between school strictness and juvenile referrals differ between border and non-border schools? Second, does school strictness moderate the children of immigrants' juvenile justice referrals at border and non-border schools? Findings indicate border and non-border distinctions regarding both strict and lenient school disciplinary practices and the relationships with juvenile justice referrals. This study contributes to juvenile justice research by investigating potential links between school strictness, immigration, juvenile justice referrals, and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is research exploring how school punishment practices are influencing academic and juvenile justice outcomes, how strict or lenient school punishment practices are related to aspects of education such as grade retention and dropping out, as well as juvenile justice contact, remains unknown. This study draws from the Texas Education Agency’s Public Education Information Management System to investigate the relationship between strict and lenient school punishment practices, academic progress or failure, and juvenile justice contact. Results indicate that schools with more strict punishment practices can contribute to higher grade retention and juvenile justice referral rates; however, it also appears that lenient punishment practices also exacerbate these same outcomes as well as higher referral rates. The importance of fair, just, and balanced school punishment practices is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars demonstrate the confluence of racism, punishment, and spatial constraint on urban communities from the effects of mass imprisonment, we have overlooked the effects that prison facilities have in disadvantaged rural communities of color. Scholars have not given proper attention to the prison town as an artifact of the prison boom. The prison town is also an important site from which to explore the confluence of criminal justice expansion, racialized social systems, and neighborhood change on the political economy of rural communities. We know very little about the role of racial stigma within a prison town. I examine how the messiness of ethnographic encounters produces data in the prison town and demonstrate how prison towns are defined by stigma and racial/spatial stratification. These messy encounters also illuminate how the ethnographic process is both a means and an end to producing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]