“Ain’t Nobody About to Trap me”: The Violence of Multi-System Collusion and Entrapment for Incarcerated Disabled Girls of Color

ABSTRACT

Incarcerated disabled Girls of Color reside and exist within a nexus of systems that continually entrap them through the ongoing use of carceral logics. Utilizing interviews from a larger qualitative study, this article centers the lived experiences of disabled Girls of Color by interrogating the collusive partnerships between schools, child “welfare,” and other related systems in entrapping and criminalizing them. The narratives shared by the incarcerated disabled Girls of Color highlight the role of schools in perpetuating state induced entrapment, how multi-system collusion makes carceral and state-sanctioned protection systems indistinguishable, and showcase the creative ways that Girls of Color resist and subvert confinement and entrapment within carceral apparatuses. Ultimately, this article recognizes how multiple systems are set up to trap incarcerated disabled Girls of Color through collusive relations. However, through forged connections, economies, and the girls’ savvy and ingenuity, their experiences remind us that ‘nobody about to trap’ them fully.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• child welfare
• carceral studies
• youth prison
• disability critical race theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Though time out rooms may sound fairly innocuous, scholars and reporters have written about the misuse and harm of social isolation. See Kaplan (2010) and Propublica, The Quiet Rooms (2021) for examples.

2. The current data on the foster system indicates that it comprises 51% of youth that identify as male and 49% that identify as female (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2020). Though information on the singular descriptors of race and gender of the foster system is accessible, there is minimal to no information that disaggregates the data on the basis of race, gender, and disability status. This lack of information mirrors the youth carceral system and others and reflects how little we actually know about the youth in foster care.

3. We chose not to share specific instances of trauma, and instead decided only to refer to prior trauma. We make this conscious decision for two reasons. First, we seek to limit the ways we engage in trauma porn, that is, when we horrify to increase the readers’ capacity for care. This refusal of trauma porn is also a refusal to engage in a binary between guilt and innocence. That is, if we tell stories focused on trauma, then we are implying that those who experience horrifying trauma are innocent, and those that have experienced daily indignities – that are also traumatizing – may not deserve compassionate non-carceral approaches of care (Gilmore, 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brianna Harvey

Brianna Harvey, is an assistant professor of Sociology at California State University, Fullerton. Her research interrogates the impact of race, carceral logics, and multi-systems involvement on the lived experiences of Black youth and their families.

Brian Cabral

Brian Cabral, is a sociologist and PhD candidate in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. His research attends to issues related to race, place, language, and carcerality, primarily focused on broader societal dynamics of confinement and punishment within youth reentry.

Subini Ancy Annamma

Subini Ancy Annamma, is an associate professor at Stanford University whose research critically examines the mutually constitutive nature of racism and ableism, how they interlock with other marginalizing oppressions, and how multiply marginalized youth experience and resist intersectional injustice in urban schools and youth prisons.

Jamelia Morgan

Jamelia Morgan, is a professor of law at the Pritzker School of Law and director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern University. She focuses on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment.