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Youth, Education, and Rural Vitality

School-Based Corporal Punishment: A Driver of Race- and Place-related Educational Inequality Meaghan Mingo*, Meaghan Mingo,

Each year, thousands of students in the United States are physically punished in schools, often for minor infractions. Positioned as a consequence or tool of school discipline alongside detention, suspension, or expulsion, this framing understates the reality that corporal punishment is a form of state violence against children. Drawing on over a year of fieldwork at a predominantly Black public middle school in rural Louisiana, I argue that corporal punishment is a distinct and particularly harmful form of state violence in U.S. schools, one that does little to correct or guide students and instead punishes and humiliates them while reinforcing adult power. I find that corporal punishment is often carried out as what I term a ‘ritual of humiliation,’ wherein students are subject to both embodied and verbal forms of domination by adults. I describe how school-based corporal punishment is a component of what I term the institution-family punishment nexus, wherein state institutions and families interact in service of controlling and punishing children, and show that this often results in ‘double jeopardy’ for children – physical punishment for an offense both at school and at home. I show how children view and resist this form of state violence, including differentiating between state- and family- administered physical punishment, while also illustrating the social, emotional, and physical consequences to students. I conclude by discussing how this form of state violence – one that students who attend rural schools, schools in the South, and schools with higher proportions of Black students are disproportionately subjected to – should be understood as a driver of racialized and place-related educational inequality, while also further socializing children to accept adult and state violence and control.