Host Rafa Kidvai is joined by Ashley Sawyer, an advocate and attorney focusing on the criminalization of young people in schools. They discuss the pervasive nature of the school-to-prison pipeline, how trauma intersects with the experiences of marginalized students, and the importance of dismantling oppressive structures in education.
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Rafa Kidvai: This is No Body Criminalized, how the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. On our podcast, we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. The founding mothers of reproductive justice in the United States define the term as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
You will hear us restate the shared commitment throughout our interviews because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create. Our guest today is Ashley Sawyer. Ashley is an advocate and attorney whose work focuses on the criminalization of young people in schools. We began our conversation with Ashley recounting her experience representing a young Black gender-nonconforming student in New York who faced severe police brutality for a minor infraction.
Ashley Sawyer: When I was an attorney in New York City, I was working at a very small nonprofit that focused on addressing young people's civil legal needs that came as a result of being criminalized in New York. This was prior to Raise the Age. This is when 16 and 17-year-olds would be locked up on Rikers for any type of offense. And I was representing a young person in the school suspension hearing, and this young person was Black, gender-nonconforming, and it's important to note that they were also a dark-skinned Black [inaudible 00:01:49] young person. And I'll never forget, I think watching their surveillance video of NYPD officers known as school safety agents, literally dragging this young person. Just imagine an old historic school building, dragging them down the cement stairs in handcuffs, and doing this in front of all of the other students who were out in the front of the building in the courtyard come to find out that this student was being assaulted like that because they allegedly were playing basketball at a neighboring school and they weren't supposed to be there. They were considered trespassing.
And then when they were stopped for trespassing, as any teenager might do, they ran and the police were called. Instead of caring, loving adults who can just redirect, the response was policing and criminalization. And when they stopped this young person, they found a little bit of marijuana. This was before marijuana was legalized for recreational use in New York. So this young person experienced the layers of criminalization and systemic injustice. And I wholeheartedly believe that incident was shaped by a lot of factors, but one of them was blackness, right? The other students that were playing basketball were white-presenting Latinx students. And this was a dark-skinned Black person who the state perceived as a girl presenting in a masculine way. And the state has a deep, I think, hatred almost for the way that Black, queer, and trans people move through the world, but particularly young people.
And that situation just escalated until this young person became my client and we worked together for a while to try to mitigate the harm and to try to get their school to be a place that was supportive and affirming. And unfortunately, the administrators at their school really doubled down and they just didn't have, in my view, a lot of grace or compassion for this young person. They treated this young person with a great deal of contempt. And I use that anecdote to point out a myriad of systemic failures that shape the American public education system. And to the extent that I have any skills or useful knowledge, I would like to use that to dismantle these systems and make space to facilitate for young people to create the liberatory education that they're dreaming of or that they maybe could dream of. And to just create space to rebuke the control and the oppression of particularly Black bodies, queer and trans bodies, and to just reject and rebuke the idea that marginalized people or people who have been marginalized should be controlled.
Rafa Kidvai: I appreciated so many pieces of that. The story that you shared just illustrate the violence that young people face in terms of being criminalized. For those who might not be familiar, can you talk a little bit about what the school-to-prison pipeline is and who it impacts in particular?
Ashley Sawyer: The school-to-prison pipeline is a phrase that kind of came about in the late 90s and early 2000s that is used to describe the policies and practices that push young people out of education settings and into juvenile or adult criminal legal systems. So that is manifested through school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests. And also, I think from a gender perspective, Dr. Monique Coulson uses the term pushout instead of the phrase school-to-prison pipeline because she says that the framing of pushout is much broader and it allows us who want to change this to capture and understand the various ways that schools push young people out or systems push young people out of and away from education, including for some young people having adult caregiving responsibilities, having to care for younger siblings, having to help out with income or making meals or doing laundry.
And for a lot of young people, particularly those gendered as girls, they get pushed out of schools because their schools don't make space for the responsibilities that they have and punish them for being late to school and say that they're truant or punish them for being tired when they arrive at school and say that they're disruptive. So that's a manifestation of school pushout or what's more commonly known as the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to the suspensions and arrests that people are more familiar with, the school-to-prison pipeline is also manifested through policies that make young people just hate school and make school not feel safe or welcoming to them. It just pushes young people away from a place that in theory should be safe and affirming and helpful for their future growth and into systems that are designed to harm them, like the juvenile legal system or the prison industrial complex, et cetera, et cetera.
Rafa Kidvai: I like that you named some of the specific ways that Black girls are most affected, and also just this idea of punishment as a response to marginalization as an exercise that this country engages in constantly as opposed to responding to the trauma that is causing whatever behavior that is then pathologized and criminalized. How does trauma intersect with the experiences of students who are pushed into this pipeline?
Ashley Sawyer: Trauma is a term that I think we use broadly. When I talk about trauma, I'm thinking specifically about specific events, but I recognize that just being a marginalized person in the US empire is a form of trauma in and of itself, particularly for young people who've experienced extreme poverty or sexual abuse. All of those experiences create constant stress. Trauma could be just not having enough money to put quarters in the machine at the laundromat and having to go to school with dirty clothes or any myriad of things. The young people who experience the most trauma are the young people who are most likely to be criminalized, arrested, suspended, and pushed out of school. It's really counterintuitive when we think about it from a humanistic or caring and compassionate lens. If I was thinking from a caring and compassionate, perhaps optimistic lens, I would believe that the young people who experience the most harm and need the most help would be the young people who are greeted with love and care when they walk through the building and warm welcomed.
But instead, in this country, in the United States, young people who experience the most trauma are the ones who are more likely to be arrested and suspended. And if they show up in school in a way where they're like, "Hey, I've had a rough night and I just need to lay my head on this desk." As we think about the case of Shakara in South Carolina in the assault at Spring Valley incident in 2015, that young person, instead of being met with love and care and compassion, was met with being slammed to the ground in front of her peers by a school cop. So the young people who get arrested or pushed out are often the young people who need more care and support and have experienced incidents or live in an ecosystem that causes trauma to them. And I think that part really gets overlooked because unfortunately in the US, we live in a very good-bad dichotomy where we're taught there are good people and there are bad people, and we apply that even to young people and children, which to me is absurd.
But the idea that like, "Oh, this child is disrupting class, or this child is disrespectful, or this child is violent so we have to get rid of them." And that's how the system, I think, works, is the young person who maybe is being disruptive on occasion, that young person maybe just recognizes that the way that the classroom is structured is not conducive for their learning or they just have some trauma that needs to be addressed and they need space and care for those things. And instead, the way they manifest or the way they act as a result of that trauma is actually what gets them labeled as bad, or even going back in the day to terms super predator, which unfortunately are having a-
Rafa Kidvai: Resurgence.
Ashley Sawyer: ... resurgence in this... Yeah, for sure. And that's who gets punished and that's who gets pushed out of school.
Rafa Kidvai: Yeah, absolutely. Have you found that there are certain support systems that are effective in addressing that trauma?
Ashley Sawyer: If I had to think of what works, a lot of times it's having caring adults who come from young people's communities be able to be present and show up in the lives of young people. So it's the dope, amazing, radical organizations that young people get to spend time with outside of school hours. And I just have to shout out Freedom Inc. in Madison, Wisconsin, and Southern Movement Committee in Nashville, Tennessee, and Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn that I love so dearly. Groups like that, I think, honestly introduce in some situations young people to an analysis around the structures that they're experiencing, so help them have language and vocabulary to describe like, "If you are getting suspended or punished because you have a hair bonnet on or you're wearing a scarf to school or because you are gender-nonconforming or queer, that is not because you're bad." And those youth organization spaces I think allow young people to be like, "Oh, okay, I'm connected to this broader structure and I'm connected to these other young people, and we can build power and we can challenge the systems that are causing us harm."
And to be really honest, that is what I have seen be the most effective at interrupting the cycles of harming young people's lives. At my current role at Advancement Project, AP has been doing, and I really have to shout out the National Campaign for Police Free Schools, they've been doing this work for a really long time, since that 2015 assault at Spring Valley that I mentioned, the Alliance for Education Justice and Advancement Project, folks there and the youth organizations that are connected to that campaign have been making demands about what they need for schools to be liberatory. And the core demand is to remove cops from schools. Whatever we as a society and in local government spend on policing infrastructure in schools, that's money that's not going to meet the needs of young people who have experienced trauma. That's money that's not going towards, in some instances, a licensed clinical social worker or a therapist can be helpful.
So removing police can make schools better and can be a part of dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. And then also, the adults have to be encouraged, pushed, or prodded to let go of their concept around control. And coming back to the theme of what you all have created in this amazing podcast, a lot of the adults who I have talked to in my real life or in my life as an attorney who have punished young people or suspended young people, it's coming from a belief that they know what's best for young people and that by controlling them, they will help them. I particularly see that around dress code stuff. When people decide and accept the idea that our job is not to control young people but to make space for them, that's the investment. To your question, what has worked? Adults letting go of our control mindsets, adults making space for young people's freedom and autonomy, investments in the community organizations where young people are supported and cared for, removing police from schools, and abolishing dress code policies.
Rafa Kidvai: I really appreciated that answer. And something that you talked about in your answer was about dress code violations. I know that you were part of the push to end school suspensions in Philadelphia for dress code violations. Can you talk about that campaign and the impact that it had on students?
Ashley Sawyer: I was doing my postgraduate fellowship right after law school, and Philadelphia at the time was still suspending young people, particularly Black and Latinx girls for dress code violations. And they were still being told to leave school because some adult thought that their skirt was too short or their blouse was too see-through or whatever. So there were other organizers, particularly the Philadelphia Student Union, PSU, the local ACLU, all got together and applied pressure to, at the time, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission to change the policy. And honestly, at that moment, it was a really good perfect storm ecosystem because I think there were more conversations coming from scholars and experts about the ways that girls, in particular, were being criminalized in school and the ways that the school-to-prison pipeline framework and narrative had excluded girls from the conversation. And it had focused, I think, so specifically on the ways that Black and Latin A boys were impacted by school criminalization, and they very much are, but completely neglecting the gendered aspect of school criminalization.
With all of those scholars talking more about that issue, it really allowed us to apply pressure to people who have power to say, "Why on earth are you suspending young people for something about the clothing that they're wearing? Why would you tell a young person that they need to leave this academic, or in theory, learning environment because you as an adult don't like what they're wearing?" And a lot of that, I have to say, comes from rape culture. I know that's a hard word to hear, but I really am grateful for the analysis that I was able to build while I was at Girls for Gender Equity. I have to shout out Brittany Brathwaite, one of my colleagues there, because she was really drawing the connections between, for me at least, drawing the connections between the sexualization of Black girls, in particular, and the way that the American psyche has this belief that Black girls are either Jezebels or mammies and applying that belief to very, very young people.
And when a person shows up at school and their body is maybe curvier, they're perceived as, quote-unquote, seductive. It still blows my mind that adults think that a young person, or in some cases, a Black girl, could be distracting to the learning environment because she has on a spaghetti strap top or because she has on leggings. And what we were finding and what, honestly, still continues to this day is a belief that if Black girls or girls of color or queer and trans young people are told to cover up and to conform to white supremacist adult ideas about what appropriate school attire is, if they cover up, then sexual harassment won't happen. But that is a part of rape culture, the belief that if someone experiences sexual violence, it's a result of what they were wearing or how they were presenting themselves or them being perceived as seductive.
So dress codes, in particular, just grind my gears because it really is a manifestation of wanting to control young people. It's a manifestation of deep-rooted respectability politics that are harmful and that are unfortunately reinforced, sometimes by Black educators and Latin A educators who believe that they're doing the right thing and teaching young people professionalism. But what they are often doing is reinforcing the idea that your body and how you show up in your body as a young person is a problem and it needs to be fixed or controlled. And I really am excited in my current work to make connections between that framework and dismantling school pushout and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Rafa Kidvai: Ashley, you said so many brilliant things. What made you want to work in this space and how does the work you do continue to sustain you?
Ashley Sawyer: I believe that human beings are divine and created in the image of God. So it just doesn't make sense to me that people should be criminalized. At the end of the day, I am sustained in this because I know that there have been people for many, many years before me who have been working to help people understand what systems are working in their lives and how to fight against those systems and how to build power. I'm looking right now at a beautiful collage that Alexis Pauline Gumbs made. It's a collage of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, and it's right above my desk, and it's absolutely beautiful.
I think about the conditions that they lived under, Fannie Lou Hamer in particular, having experienced state violence, physical beating by police, but also forced sterilization. And Ella Baker really encouraging young people to take an active role in Black liberation movements. That's what sustains me, knowing that as much as the current political landscape is frightening and scary and really heartbreaking with the increase in anti-trans legislation, the increase in anti-intellectualism, all of those things scare me to be quite frank.
Rafa Kidvai: Absolutely.
Ashley Sawyer: I see a rollback, MDC in particular. They're bringing back the tough-on-crime policies, charging children as adults. All of those policies that we now know based on research and science are harmful, are coming back in some cities. So that scares me. And what sustains me despite my fear and anxiety is my true genuine faith and belief that if people are able to build power, particularly if young people are able to build power, we can fight these systems on an individual level and on a systemic level. And I think about that incident of that client that I represented and my experience with that young person just reminded me that I am moving in a space of privilege as someone who has been able to crack the education code. And I have an obligation, I think, to just use whatever I have to try to make more space for other people to build power and to feel free and liberated. That's all I got. I know it's a lot.
Rafa Kidvai: I'm just so grateful for everything you had to say. And I feel if I came in a fan, I'm going to leave a bigger one. I'm sad to end this, but I have one last question for you, which is that our podcast is called No Body Criminalized, and I'm wondering what this phrase means to you.
Ashley Sawyer: No Body Criminalized. I think that it means everyone, no matter who they are, where they live, or what they have done, what harm they may have caused, everyone having access to dignity, and dignity in the form of their material needs being met, having safe, clean housing, safe, clean, welcoming, affirming, inclusive schools that don't look anything like the current American public education system. Schools that are places where actual learning happens and not necessarily being taught rote memorization, but where young people are able to creatively access their own wisdom and share wisdom with the others, whether it's through art or nature or dance or music or skateboarding or whatever, where young people have that.
I believe that is a building block to a world where people are not criminalized. And No Body Criminalized means just that no one has to suffer under prison or juvenile incarceration or any kind of lockup or surveillance through probation, any of those systems, and that people have their material needs met, that they are able to experience actual joy and safety and freedom. And I know that seems very utopian and abstract, but I believe on a small and fundamental level, it means learning how to share resources and creating a more worker-driven society. That's what No Body Criminalized means to me. And really just investing time, energy, love, care, and actual money into the structures that allow people to build power for themselves and for their communities so that they can build power against state violence.
Rafa Kidvai: I especially love what you said at the end because, of course, at the Repro Legal Defense Fund, we love to put love, money, and care into supporting communities. And I'm just really grateful for your wisdom. It's been a joy to hear from you and your expertise. Thank you for joining us.
Ashley Sawyer: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this.
Rafa Kidvai: Here are some takeaways from our conversation. Ashley emphasized that real change requires dismantling current education systems and empowering communities to take control of their own education free from oppressive structures and policies. She discussed the pervasive nature of the school-to-prison pipeline, pushing marginalized youth out of educational environments and into the legal system, and how the practice criminalizes normal adolescent behavior, particularly for Black, queer, and trans youth. She also addressed the need to remove police from schools and invest in resources that truly support students like mental health services and community building programs.
Ashley Sawyer is an advocate and attorney whose work focuses on the criminalization of young people in schools. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for people being punished for abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and other pregnancy outcomes. Learn more at reprolegaldefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call 844-868-2812. No Body Criminalized is produced by Phantom Center Media and Entertainment for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and mixed this episode. And remember, keep your community safe, and don't talk to cops.