ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the girls' trajectories from public schools where the criminalization began into the juvenile incarceration settings. The girls' criminal identities, which were constructed in public schools, were (re)constructed in juvenile incarceration. This process occurred through employing the discourse and practices of criminal thinking, producing criminal literacies in juvenile incarceration classrooms, and using vulnerable identities to further criminalize the girls. The chapter exposes how prison nation education within juvenile incarceration worked to (re)criminalize instead of rehabilitate. It establishes that classrooms in juvenile incarceration produced criminal literacies, treating multiply-marginalized dis/abled girls of color as neither students nor literate human beings. A prison nation education only supported literacy when used within rigid structures and rules, creating criminal literacies. The combination of reductive curriculum, hostile instruction, withholding education, and the resulting missed opportunities created criminal literacies.
