“This Ain’t My School!” Criminality, Control, and Contradictions in Institutional Responses to School Truancy

Abstract

While previous research has explored the causes and consequences of school truancy, few studies have considered the meanings of institutional responses. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of a pilot program promoted as a “progressive” form of truancy intervention. Midvale Truancy Center claimed to focus on education, rather than punishment. In practice, however, the crime control tactics used to capture, isolate, and discipline truants often overshadowed the Center’s educational objectives, locating the Center in a liminal space between school and detention facility. The Center’s competing goals—revenue creation, truancy deterrence, and organizational survival—resulted in rehabilitation being pushed aside in favor of normalization and behavioral control. These findings illustrate a recent larger cultural turn toward control and punishment (Garland 2001), and the encroachment of crime control tactics into the civil sphere.