When School Feels Like Jail
Isolation rooms and paddling: What some schools in the South are doing to keep students in line.
A student inside the Yazoo City Alternative Learning Center, an alternative school in the Mississippi Delta.RORY DOYLE FOR MEDIUM/BRIGHT
Rockmon Montrell “Rock” Allen, an 18-year-old from Jackson, Mississippi, has never gone to jail. But school, he says, was close enough. At Ridgeland High School, a large public school in an increasingly black suburb of Jackson, he was punished repeatedly for what seemed like minor reasons.In the ninth grade, when he wore the wrong-color uniform or didn’t tuck in his shirt, Rock got “whooped,” as he puts it. That meant bending over, putting his hands on a desk, and getting hit three to five times on the backside with a flat wooden paddle. Mississippi is one of only four states—the others are Alabama, Georgia, and Texas—where school districts frequently use corporal punishment on students (although 19 states allow the practice by law). Teachers and administrators openly use paddles—and, in rarer cases, belts, rulers, and key chains—to whip kids into order.
In the 10th and 11th grades, according to Rock’s official disciplinary record, he was sent to in-school detention whenever he spoke out of turn, questioned a teacher, was tardy, or refused to take off his hat. In-school detention, which in some schools is referred to as in-school suspension, takes place during school hours. Instead of being in class, Rock would sit in an empty room, doing nothing, for up to three days at a time. “I wouldn’t say I was a smart aleck,” he says, “but I was known for speaking up.” He recalls asking “why” a lot, like why the pilot of the Enola Gay wasn’t considered “the worst murderer of all time,” and praising Karl Marx during history class. By Rock’s own description, he is curious by nature; he’s always thinking, always speaking up. “Teachers either loved me or hated me,” he says.Then, in 2014, a few weeks into the 12th grade, Rock did the same thing a 16-year-old black girl in Columbia, South Carolina, did this October: He pulled When School Feels Like Jail | The Marshall Project: