Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins by looking back to the girls' pasts where the prison nation withheld resources from them, making their lives increasingly challenging. It describes the criminal identities reinforced in juvenile incarceration education through rhetoric and practices that focused on the control of bodies and minds. The book highlights futures in prison nation which were deeply uncertain and yet unflinchingly hopeful. It offers some ways to dismantle the school-prison nexus through the potential of DisCrit. The book explores the critique of the work being "too intersectional" and push back on the ideas that intersectionality is about slicing identity into smaller and smaller fragments. It is organized along the girls' trajectories, as their lives are likely to be unfamiliar to the reader.