Solidarity Incarcerated: Building Authentic Relationships with Girls of Color in Youth Prisons

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.