“The Police State in Franklin K. Lane”: Desegregation, Student Resistance, and the Carceral Turn at a New York City High School

Abstract

This essay seeks to understand the origins, development, and consequences of school policing and student discipline at Franklin K. Lane High School in New York City. During the fevered years of the late 1960s, perhaps no other school in the country saw more tension, violence, repression, and resistance. What took place there represented a kind of denouement in the city’s decades-long battles over race, class, policing, discipline, desegregation, community control, and student rights. In centering the happenings at Lane, this essay demonstrates how the logics and politics of school policing and student discipline were forged not only from the top down, by government officials at the highest levels, but also from the bottom up, in the complex interplay between the parents, student organizers, teachers, and administrators at the school. It also demonstrates how city officials leveraged individual school conflicts into broader carceral expansions that affected the entire public education system.