On November 13th, the CSUB Ethnic Studies Department will host a Symposium on Mass Incarceration that focuses on the School to Prison Pipeline in Kern County. Students within the department will demonstrate their artwork and research that highlights these ongoing issues. The symposium will begin at 12 p.m. and end at 2 p.m. Translation will be available in Spanish, and lunch will be provided.
Dr. Nora Cisneros, Associate Professor of Latinx Studies with the Ethnic Studies Department at CSUB, a key organizer of the event, stated that both community members and students are welcome. Cisneros emphasized the importance of embarking on a conversation regarding incarceration in the county.
“We see it as one of many needed conversations and points of engagement for folks to begin to understand the impact of incarceration in Kern County. We want folks to learn about the economic underpinnings of who benefits from incarceration,” explained Cisneros.
Students with the Ethnic Studies Department have read a recent study conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) and utilized this report to conduct their own research on the school-to-prison pipeline in Kern. The PPI study recently found that over the past 25 years, youth confinement has dropped to 70 percent; however, they noted that youth of color are overrepresented.
The study also found that both Black and Indigenous youth often receive harsher treatment compared to their white peers.
Researchers of the study also concluded that the reason black and brown youth are overrepresented is because “they are targeted for surveillance, arrest, and punishment in ways that white kids are not.”
Cisneros states that the symposium builds empathy about the lived experience of incarcerated individuals.
“Folks can expect to begin to think about it, it’s a very complex system and issue. Tomorrow, they will begin to understand that by getting a better sense of the school-to-prison pipeline in Kern County. That’s just one aspect of mass incarceration, so you can expect to come and start to plant the seeds of knowledge about mass incarceration,” said Cisneros.
Attendees will gather a multitude of insights on incarceration through different faculty speakers providing brief lectures on these subjects. Community leaders and local organizations will also be participating in the panel discussion, providing their perspectives. Cisneros hopes that through these discussions and artwork displayed by the CSUB students, individuals will become more empathetic to these systemic issues.
According to Cisneros, CSUB Ethnic Studies students looked at the impact of mass incarceration in Kern County and what community members need to feel safe, which does not involve mass policing or mass incarceration. She explained that students ran a qualitative study where they found that in Kern County, there is a high percentage of expulsions, disabled, and homeless students.
“They looked for data available by talking to community members and then coming up with artwork that speaks to that or that shows some of the research, and also for a lot of them have been in some way impacted by incarceration, especially immigrant detention centers,” concluded Cisneros.
