Giving Compass' Take:

• Jyoti Nanda explores how Latinx and Black students with disabilities experience criminalization in schools through punishment and segregation. 

• How can funders help schools better serve students with disabilities? 

• Read about four ways states can help students with disabilities graduate ready for employment


This Article explores how race functions to ascribe and criminalize disability. It posits that for White students in wealthy schools, disabilities or perceived disabilities are often viewed as medical conditions and treated with care and resources. For students of color, however, the construction of disability (if it exists) may be a criminalized condition that is treated as warranting punishment and segregated classrooms, possibly leading to juvenile justice system involvement. Providing a review of the K-12 disability legal regimes, this Article maps how the process of identifying a student with a disability happens in a hypercriminalized school setting. The Article argues that the school itself contributes to the construction and criminalization of disability and that the attribution of disability is a product of the subjectivity built into the law, heavily surveilled school environments, and biases held by teachers and administrators. For students of color, instead of a designation that attracts more resources, disability is one of the mechanisms through which they are criminalized. This Article culminates with a call for scholars and practitioners to understand the web that exists in the construction and criminalization of disabilities for Black and Latinx children and the role that schools and school actors play in this process.

The discrepancy between well-funded and grossly underfunded schools raises larger policy questions that are outside the scope of this Article but are worth raising; the main red flag this Article raises is the way disabilities are subjectively determined in grossly unequal schools and its impact on Black and Latinx communities. We must fully understand this web that exists in the construction and criminalization of disabilities for Black and Latinx children and the role that schools play in this process in order to effectively address (via laws, policies, and practices) and ultimately end the disproportionate number of children with disabilities who are incarcerated. In doing so, we would move closer to a human-rights-based model of justice where the child’s individual needs are front and center.