Police officers and metal detectors have become fixtures in American public schools. In this tough-on-crime, security-oriented era, the new gold standard for school discipline has become the criminal justice system. While harsh school punishment has reshaped schools and communities across the socioeconomic divide, nowhere is the overlap between classroom and prison more striking than at the Orleans Parish Prison, the site of a New Orleans public school enrolling primarily poor African American boys expelled under zero-tolerance policies for minor infractions such as tardiness, but not actual criminal behavior. The Prison School examines how and why public schools take a punitive approach to education and analyzes how this criminalizing mode influences a student's approach toward correctional custody. How did schools and prisons--two very different kinds of public institutions--become so intertwined, and what does this combination mean for students, communities, and, ultimately, a democratic society? How do we begin to unravel the ties that bind the racialized realities of mass school failure and mass incarceration? And what does this mean to segments of the population--in particular, African American males--who have been systematically removed from their schools and their society?--Provided by publisher.