Brown v. Board of Education and the rise of mass incarceration

This thesis explores how the Supreme Court's school desegregation jurisprudence, rendered between 1954-2007 has been limited in achieving the goal of school desegregation by the constraints imposed upon the Judiciary both from within and outside of government. I argue that these constrained decisions have in turn laid the groundwork for a system of public education which remains separate and unequal for Black students some sixty-two years after the Supreme Court outlawed racially segregated public schools in its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board o f Education. This racially segregated education, which often fails to prepare its recipients for their roles in the American economy, exposes its students to a greater risk of involvement in the criminal justice system and the American system of mass-incarceration.1 When I refer to massincarceration throughout this thesis, I mean the overrepresentation of Blacks and Latinos in the U.S. prison system. Put simply, I contend that a segregated education in the innercity can expose its recipients to greater risk of incarceration because this education often does not prepare its recipients for what Chief Justice Warren in Brown called "professional training" [347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954)].2