Segregation, Securitization, and Bullying: Investigating the Connections Between Policing, Surveillance, Punishment, and Violence

Over the past twenty years, scholarly research on the disproportionate control, surveillance, and punishment of racial/ethnic minority students within U.S. public schools have indicated that these youth are subject to greater levels of violence and bullying. Many scholars have conceptualized the term “youth control complex.” This term references the hyper-criminalization of racial and ethnic minority youth across the U.S., which leads to greater levels of over-policing, surveillance, and punishment in U.S. public schools with large populations of racial and ethnic minority students. Using the 2015–2016 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) data, this study addresses two major research questions. First, do racially/ethnically segregated schools have higher rates of policing, surveillance, and punishment? Second, do policing, surveillance, and punishment within segregated schools moderate the rate of bullying? Our findings indicate that majority-Black and majority-Latina/o/x schools do in fact experience hyper-criminalization in U.S. public schools in comparison to majority-White schools. Yet, these increased crime control and punishment efforts in majority-Black and majority-Latina/o/x schools do not have a significant impact on the rate of bullying. Moreover, our findings highlight the educational inequities between majority-Black, majority-Latina/o/x, and majority-White schools.