Toward an Anticarceral Art Pedagogy: Youth Poetic Media Making for Transformative Justice

Abstract

This article unpacks existing laws and disciplinary policies like “zero tolerance” and “disturbing schools” that criminalize youth behaviors in public schools and explores their roots in U.S. racialized histories using a critical carceral studies framework. Carceral studies scholars critique the punitive capitalist apparatus that defines crime based on individual culpability and responsibility while masking and erasing systemic racial and gender oppressions, poverty, mental illness, and other pervasive social conditions and inequities in young people’s lives. Drawing on my long-standing work with adjudicated youth in a restorative community-based juvenile arbitration program in the American Southeast—a precarceral space for minor, nonviolent crime offenders, most of whom were charged in schools—I conceptualize an anticarceral art pedagogy and share an example of a youth collaborative poetry-based video-making project for transformative justice. This project resists individualization, creates solidarity and belonging, promotes collective healing, and humanizes the youth participants’ precarious positions as criminal offenders.