Abstract
This research explores autobiographies of young women in detention, rehabilitation, and education as counter‐stories to the official, institutional stories of their lives. The context of the study is a private detention facility in the United States; the participants are young women aged 15–19 years in a detention classroom; and data for the study comprises their autobiographies, official documents of their life stories, and the researcher's field notes. Through various lenses the analysis supports how students' counter‐stories disrupt the combined institutional discourses of the juvenile justice and the school systems. Students' counter‐stories provide evidence of institutional discourses that racialize and gender certain groups of young women to shape, define, and at times, predicate their detention further compounded by the normalization process of education for rehabilitation. The overrepresentation of minority groups in the juvenile detention system combined with school discourse of sorting, labeling and tracking students based on officially sanctioned norms privileges certain groups of students while fast‐tracking others into the school‐to‐prison pipeline. The article concludes by calling upon educators, curriculum developers, activists, reformers, and administrators to end the pathologizing of minority groups of students through socially unjust practices and policies.
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