Growing Up Together: Brooklyn’s Truant School and the Carceral and Educational State, 1857-1924

Abstract

This article uses the history of Brooklyn’s Truant School from its inception in 1857 to its demise in 1924 to highlight the interconnected rationales for public education and juvenile incarceration in nineteenth and early twentieth century urban America. Drawing on newspaper accounts and Board of Education records, I seek to historicize current understandings of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline by examining how the nation’s modern penal and school systems were developed together during the antebellum and Progressive eras, not in tension, but as two sides of the same coin.