Technologies of evidence: An institutional ethnography from the standpoints of ‘youth-at-risk’

Abstract

In this article, I investigate the social relations of evidence that transverse and connect schools, homes, the streets, and the courts. This institutional ethnography begins in the standpoints of racialised and ‘at-risk youth’ to investigate how institutional practices – embedded in and constitutive of the new relations of capital and exchange referred to as the knowledge economy – (re)produce intersecting social relations of objectification and exclusion. Beginning with young people’s experiences of silencing and misrepresentation in public sector institutions, the article examines how different forms of evidence are produced and used across the various institutional settings where young people are active. The study demonstrates how seemingly objective institutional processes actually produce the experiences of diminishment and exclusion that young people described.

Keywords

accountability data evidence institutions institutional ethnography risk youth

Across the public sector, people selectively gather information, generate accounts of their work, and convey particular outcomes of their interactions with others to enable the collection and monitoring of big data, demonstrations of compliance with legislation, and ongoing external assessments of their work (Griffith and Smith, 2014). Institutional data collection, analysis, and reporting practices require considerable interpretive work on the part of practitioners who must fit what actually happened into predetermined categories that enable demonstrations of risk mediation and institutional accountability. As skilled participants of textually mediated professional discourses – i.e. the communicative and interpretive practices through which the professions are constituted and operate – people who work in public sector institutions know how to produce descriptive accounts of their work that map onto the categories through which their work becomes professionally visible and accountable (Smith, 1990). These are the institutional and social practices referred to in this article as ‘technologies of evidence’. The term points to the socially organised practices of public sector professionals who record and account for their work as part of institutionally sanctioned courses of action.

This article is an investigation of the institutional processes through which evidence is constructed and used to make decisions about, or justify interventions for, young people. It seeks to understand how young people in low-income and racialised neighbourhoods come to understand that their own knowledge of their lives and experiences will be dismissed or deemed institutionally immaterial when held up against the evidence that public sector professionals, themselves, generate to account for their work. My aim is not to assess the ultimate truthfulness of either version of what happens in schools and neighbourhoods, but to understand how it does happen that institutional uses of evidence result in racialised young people feeling silenced and unfairly represented across public sector institutions. The article is motivated by Keddell’s (2015) observation that political frames, institutional practices, and ethics are inextricably linked.

To produce my analysis, I draw on qualitative data from an institutional ethnography of school and community safety: Schools, Safety and the Urban Neighbourhood (SSHRC 435-2013-1518). The research begins in the standpoints of young people who have been designated institutionally as at-risk (e.g. at-risk of school failure or criminal [re]offending) and who live in municipally designated vulnerable neighbourhoods or ‘Neighbourhood Improvement Areas’ (NIAs¹) in Toronto, Canada. The ethnographic focus of the research is the political-institutional terrain where designations of safety and risk are made and become powerful coordinators of the institutional and social relations impacting young people’s lives.

Sociological approach

Institutional ethnographers study the interlocking institutional relations that connect people to one another and give shape to their lives (Smith, 1990, 1999, 2005, 2006). Other institutional ethnographies of public sector organisations reveal how the governance and economic concerns of the state are legitimised and operationalised in people’s participation in professional discourse (e.g. child development or healthcare compliance) as well as their work to establish and monitor performance indicators, meet achievement targets, develop and implement growth plans, and compare data across sites (Griffith, 1992; Griffith and Smith, 2005, 2014; McCoy, 2005; Mykhalovskiy and McCoy, 2002, 2004; Nichols, 2014; Nichols and Griffith, 2009; Rankin and Campbell, 2006; Welsh, 2015; Welsh and Rajah, 2014). By coupling descriptive ethnographic accounts of people’s everyday lives with a critical analysis of the social and institutional relations that give shape to personal embodied experiences, an institutional ethnographer looks out from ‘the everyday to discover how it came to happen as it does’ (Smith, 2006: 3). Research begins ‘where actual people are in their own lives, activities and experiences to open up relations and organisation that are, in a sense, actually present in them but are not observable’ (Smith, 2006: 4).

There are important similarities between critical legal scholarship and institutional ethnography. Critical legal scholars have demonstrated that ‘social interests, and the weight they are accorded, do not exist in advance of or outside the law’; rather, legal institutions and legal knowledge – an exemplary text-mediated political-institutional complex – constitute the very social relations that they appear to objectively mediate. The links between critical legal scholarship and institutional ethnography can be seen in their shared materialist orientation to discovering the textually mediated mechanisms through which ‘legal institutions and ideology obscure and thus legitimatize their productive, constitutive social role’ (Crenshaw et al., 1995: xxiv). The critical race legal scholars and critical race feminists extend this analysis to discover how the materiality of race- and gender-subordination have been produced and sustained by law, policy and political-organisational courses of action, including the media (Alexander, 2012; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Lawrence and Williams, 2006; Murdocca, 2013; Razack et al., 2010).

An important distinction between institutional ethnography and critical legal, critical race, and critical race feminist scholarship is the starting place of inquiry. By looking out from people’s embodied knowledge and experience, one seeks to discover how institutional relations are organised by and (re)produce the theoretical knowledge through which legal and other explicit systems of organisation or governance operate. Rather than taking theoretical concepts like risk, deviance, race, gender or class for granted, for example, institutional ethnography seeks to discover and bring into view the social processes through which abstractions are produced by people, using text-based calculative technologies, measures, indices, scales, theories, systems of classification, law, discourse, and so forth. Once the social processes of production have been brought into view, one seeks to explicate how objectified forms of knowledge (e.g. theory, discourse, classifications) are incorporated into other textually mediated social processes that allow others to encounter and use the terms disconnected from the historically situated contexts of their production. Embedded in law, policy, organisational procedure, and institutional discourse, theoretical concepts acquire an objectified quality which conceals the social relations of the term’s production and the social organisation of the phenomenon the term is meant to reference. The result is that the legal and discursive grounds constituted by our use of such abstractions can be presented as neutral, universal or objective. In an institutional ethnography, one’s descriptive work orients to re-constituting – ethnographically – the social relations through which theoretical abstractions are produced and used.

The research: Schools, Safety and the Urban Neighbourhood

Research for Schools, Safety and the Urban Neighbourhood began with the experiences of young people who have been institutionally categorised as ‘unsafe’ through the disciplinary policies and procedures that link the Youth Justice and Education systems. The research occurred in collaboration with a community organisation in a designated vulnerable neighbourhood or NIA. Youth researchers, as well as most interview participants, live or hang out in the neighbourhood. Over two years of field research, we interviewed fewer than five individuals who described themselves as White. The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) school census indicates that the highest numbers of Black students live in the NIA where the research takes place, as well as those nearby (Yau et al., 2013). Many participants lived in social housing, and most youth suggested that ‘a little money in their pockets’ would make life easier.

The field-research team was comprised of between two and five graduate students, two youth researchers from the neighbourhood, and the author of this article. In 2014 and 2015, we worked with our community partner organisation to hire five secondary school-aged youth to participate in an intensive seven-week youth research employment opportunity, funded by a Canada Summer Jobs grant. The research protocol was approved by two university research ethics review boards, three secondary school research ethics review boards, Toronto Police Services, and the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services research ethics review board. All names of schools, organisations, young people and adults have been changed to protect the identities of people who participated in the research.

Data generation

Fieldwork involved extensive participant observation, as youth researchers volunteered as mentor-tutors in a Safe Schools program, co-facilitated workshops on research and critical issues with the adult researchers on the project, and participated in community events (e.g. community dialogues regarding police practices in the neighbourhood). Fieldwork also involved institutional outreach, in-depth interviewing, and focus group facilitation. Since 2014, we have interviewed 63 youth. For this study, we define young people as anyone between the ages of 15 and 29 years of age (Gaetz, 2014; Nichols et al., 2013). Of the 63 interviews conducted with young people, 48 were with young people who live, work, and/or attend school in the NIA where our community-partner organisation is located. We also interviewed young men (n = 15) detained or serving sentences at a youth justice facility outside of Toronto. Beyond this, we interviewed and/or engaged in focus groups with 48 professionals who work with youth. While interviews and focus groups began with people’s descriptions of their everyday work (in school, at home, in their places of employment), conversations ultimately sought to bring into view the co-ordered work activities through which particular organisational courses of action are accomplished as relations among people (DeVault and McCoy, 2006).

Other than the interviews conducted in the youth justice facility, all other interviews and focus group discussions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Due to institutional restrictions, we were unable to audio-record the interviews with young people in jail. These interviews were live-transcribed by two observing researchers, while a third researcher conducted the interview. Single versions of each interview were produced immediately after leaving the field each day by comparing and combining the transcripts. Each transcript was also reviewed for accuracy by the interviewer. It would have been ideal to have each interviewee review his transcript after we had had a chance to consolidate them. Unfortunately, we were not able to communicate directly with young people in the jail, and sending the transcripts to them through the facilities staff would have undermined our commitment to confidentiality. The institutional parameters shaping the interviews in the youth justice facility represent a study limitation. A youth researcher conducted most of these interviews, while a graduate student and I transcribed them; even then, the experience of being interviewed in jail, with two observer-transcribers frantically recording the content of the conversation seemed to limit the degree to which some participants were comfortable sharing their experiences. In general, these interviews were shorter than the ones conducted in non-carceral settings.

In addition to interview and focus group data, this article draws on relevant textual data the research team collected and analysed. Text data include policy, legislative and institutional texts in the fields of education, housing, and policing. In an institutional ethnography, texts (i.e. a reproducible and dispersible communicative media, such as a paper or digital document) are key to understanding how people’s thoughts and actions are coordinated across time and space. Institutional ethnographers see texts as essential coordinators of ongoing courses of action, which allow researchers to trace from the local sites of listening, reading, writing (or typing), and watching to translocally organised systems of thought and classification through which subjectivities are coordinated (Smith, 2005, 2006).

Data analysis

The goal in analysing interview data for an institutional ethnography is to ‘make visible the ways the institutional order creates the conditions of individual experience’ (McCoy, 2006: 109). All interview and focus group data were analysed using a categorical analysis, coding according to themes derived from our initial research questions and arising from the data themselves. Analytically, the thematic coding directs the researcher’s attention to particular aspects of an account that suggest the institutional organisation within people’s stories (McCoy, 2006). To achieve this analytic aim, the research team developed a range of ‘generous’ thematic codes that sought to bring the work organisation of a setting into view (e.g. emotion-work; moving through space; making money; monitoring and measuring) as well as to draw our attention to key institutional sites, processes, knowledge, and policy (e.g. housing, treatment, probation). To achieve coding consistency and accuracy, the author and two graduate students test-coded three transcripts to develop an annotated code-book, which was organised into code-groups (e.g. Education) and individual codes within each group (e.g. alternative and safe schools; attendance; codes of conduct). The code-book was then piloted and revised twice by the research team. In addition to interview analysis, we also engaged in considerable textual analysis. Textual analysis is used to reveal extended social relations that are not initially visible in people’s experiential knowledge of their lives, but nevertheless shape their personal experiences in ways I want to bring into view (Turner, 2006).

Findings

Across the interviews conducted for this project, young people describe being falsely accused, misunderstood, and misrepresented. A young man named Chris I interviewed in a youth justice facility responded to my question about how he ended up in a jail with an explanation that is typical of the young people we interviewed: ‘a year ago I got arrested for robbery and assault causing bodily harm. But I didn’t really do the robbery, but I kinda – my friend was basically getting hurt so I was helping him defend himself. The person was older and he basically charged us.’ This quotation is an exemplary representation of our data. Chris acknowledged that he did something wrong, but wanted the interviewing team to know that the official legal charge for ‘robbery and assault causing bodily harm,’ does not aptly convey what happened.

The production and use of institutional knowledge

It would be easy to dismiss young people’s stories as the desperate tales of people who do not want to take responsibility for their actions. But, in most cases, they do not actually deny breaking the law; rather, they reject the official versions of their actions that the criminal legal system produces in the process of laying a charge. For example, Brad, another young man who was interviewed in the justice facility, explained that he ended up in jail due to a ‘misunderstanding’:

Me and my co-accused were in a vehicle. I pull up in this driveway. The cops pull behind us. They stop the car. They told us to get out the car. Once we got out of the car they [the police] searched the car and found a firearm. It’s not mine. It’s his [my co-accused’s]. He got bailed. I went straight to jail … [My co-accused] framed me … That was his first charge. He never got arrested before in his life. [But] I have previous charges. Well, I got break and enter, breach, theft. I have maybe 10–15 youth charges. Failure to comply, theft, and robbery … I just gotta wait and see what’s gonna happen. It’s not fair.

Like Chris, Brad’s version of the story differs from the official legal accounts of what happened. Brad told interviewers that he had been framed; sociologically speaking this is true. Prior charges, captured in his youth criminal justice record, suggest a pattern of criminality that can be used to establish grounds for an additional charge. Brad’s ‘co-accused’, on the other hand, had no prior charges or convictions, making it difficult to establish a history of criminality. When young people break the law for the first time, police must consider whether an extrajudicial sanction or measure is more appropriate than pursuing a charge (Youth Criminal Justice Act, S.C. 2002, c. 1., s. 6.1). The legislative obligation to consider diversion for first-time ‘offenders’ shapes different criminal-legal outcomes among young people in conflict with the law. Criminal-legal outcomes do not reflect an objective reality; rather, they reveal the complex bureaucratic and legal processes through they are produced.

Later in the interview, Brad elaborates that while the gun was not his, he ‘had to take the charge’. It is common for young people to ‘eat’, ‘swallow’, or ‘take’ a charge, particularly where their co-accused has no prior charges or convictions. If a young person is less than 18 years of age (i.e. still involved in the Youth Criminal Justice system), it is safer to swallow the criminal charge for someone else than to face being labelled a snitch on the streets. Brad’s knowledge of the work organisation of the streets shapes how he responds to the charge, despite his belief that it is unjust. In multiple ways the work organisation of the streets is co-ordered with the work organisation of policing. The experiences of young people involved in illegal street-work are influenced by these two connected and oppositional organisational contexts. Having been brought in for police questioning, young people report that police tell them their co-accused has ‘sung’ or turned on them. For example, Chris explains:

When you get arrested [the police] come to you, and if you have co-accused they’ll say you have friends that snitched on you. When they come to me, I don’t say anything. I try not to listen to them … They want you to talk about the situation. [They ask questions like:] ‘So who was with you?’ … They just wanna get you to start talkin’.

Other young people report that police share ‘intelligence’ they have gathered themselves through their investigative work, but present the information as though it was actually provided by their co-accused. This interview technique reflects professional policing knowledge about how street-level economies are organised. In turn, young people’s refusal to give the police the knowledge they seek reflects their own understanding of how policing is organised to unearth information that will further investigative efforts. Nevertheless, young people detained and questioned by the police find themselves in a precarious position of knowing they and/or their families will be punished (by their bosses and co-accused peers) if they comply with the police requests for information and face harsher sentencing by the courts if they do not.

Using evidence to make things happen

The criminal legal system operates through the collection and use of evidences that fit with and enable particular institutional courses of action that have material effects in the neighbourhoods where young people live and work – e.g. issuing a warrant; approving a police raid; or laying a charge. On the streets and in institutions there is no organised course of action through which young people’s versions of what happened can effectively counter the official versions that are produced through their interactions with the criminal-legal system. Without institutionalised processes that fit with and enable the transformation of young people’s experiential knowledge into legitimate courses of institutional action, young people’s use of knowledge does not produce the extensive material effects enabled by the use of knowledge within the criminal-legal system. While young people can tell their version of what happened to an interviewer or to friends, there is no corresponding sequence of action that enables this version to effectively counter institutional knowledge-producing and use processes.

Particularly, once young people have been designated institutionally as ‘unsafe’ or ‘at risk’, it becomes easier to frame all the things they do and say in the context of these designations – that is, as unsafe or untrustworthy. Unfortunately for some youth, the unsafe designation is attached to the places where they live and go to school. It is increasingly common to use measures to determine relative degrees of vulnerability across a particular institutional-geographic context (e.g. the designation of Neighbourhood Improvement Areas and Vulnerable Schools by the municipality and the school board, respectively). Officially, the scales are used to ensure equitable distribution of limited resources, but they also result in particular spaces being coded institutionally (through crime or school achievement data, for example) as vulnerable or unsafe. These designations justify the use of place-based public sector interventions that are not always experienced as resources or supports by people who become their focus.

Data-led policing in neighbourhood improvement areas

In 2014, I was asked to sit on an advisory committee for a community-based research project. The Community Assessment of Police Practices (or CAPP) project assessed people’s experiences with, and perceptions of, the police in the Division of the Toronto Police Services where Schools, Safety and the Urban Neighbourhood was situated. Specifically, the project sought the community’s perspective on a new police protocol for the production and use of ‘Community Inquiry Cards’. Given my research interests in community safety and young people’s reported experiences of ‘unsafety’ at the hands of the police, our research team attended and recorded our observations of the public release of this report.

The production of Inquiry Cards by police officers is colloquially described as street checking or carding. It is a data collection process, which occurs through police-initiated, non-crime-related interactions with the public and it is an exemplary ‘technology of evidence’ as I use the term in this article. As a result of a 2013 Police and Community Engagement Review (the PACER report; Toronto Police Services, 2013)), the ‘Community Inquiry Cards’ were replaced by ‘Community Safety Notes,’ and the police were required to issue a receipt whenever they stopped people as part of a non-crime related data collection procedure.

The CAPP research team surveyed over 400 people in the neighbourhood served by the Division and found that despite frequent non-crime-related interactions with the police, 86% of respondents were not receiving receipts. Seventy per cent of respondents also reported reduced access to fair movement during these non-crime-related encounters in their neighbourhoods – that is, they didn’t feel that they could simply walk away from these interactions unhindered by police retribution, which is their legal right. My analytic interest in the production and use of institutional evidence was piqued during the public delivery of the CAPP report at Police Headquarters. Much like how institutional accounts of young people’s actions overshadow young people’s own knowledge of what happened, the police used administrative policing data to discredit the CAPP report findings.

The field notes that follow (produced by myself and graduate student research assistants) invite the reader into the everyday world where the extended social organisation this research seeks to discover come into view:

Field note #1, Naomi: we made our way up the big winding marble staircase, following the signs until we arrived in the auditorium. There was a large rectangular table that was occupied by members of the Toronto Police Services board with microphones at each spot and a place at the head of the table for the CAPP research lead, to make his presentation to the Board. The Chief of Police kept his back to for the entire presentation, leaning back in his chair thumbing through the report and scowling, shaking his head, and rolling his eyes … After gave his report, the members of the board were invited to respond … Red in the face, and with a raised voice, the Chief dismissed the report as anecdotal and non-factual.

Field note #2, Jessica: The community’s perspective on police interactions shows that people have limited knowledge of the new policy and that in practice few police follow these new procedure [of providing badge numbers and issuing receipts to people they stop and speak to] … While reviewed the key findings of the Report, I saw the construction of these community ‘perspectives’ as false, biased, and incorrect … those whose work is implicated in these findings turned their backs and rolled their eyes at the table.

Field note #3, Stephanie: On the Thursday I saw Kennard [one of our youth researchers] who actually brought up the release of the carding report. Kennard told me he hoped it would make change and that ‘stuff like this’ (i.e. research) was important … but that the ‘jakes will keep doing it [interacting with young people in unlawful ways] because they are powerful.’

The jakes² are powerful indeed. The police were able to discredit the CAPP report because Toronto Police Services had officially stopped carding people in the aftermath of the PACER report. The police response to the report was to question how people in the community could say they’d been carded, when the computerised devices they use to submit electronic field notes, log calls for service, and so forth no longer enabled the production of contact cards (field note, key informant, 2015). Even though relations between the police and people who live in the neighbourhood had not changed – that is, officers continued to come up and ask people for ID, tell them to take off their shoes, empty their pockets, open up their backpacks, and so forth – the institutional data collection and reporting practices to account for these interactions had been altered. The police were able to argue that the institutional relation that people in the community called carding was no longer occurring – thus undermining the findings produced by the community-based organisation leading the CAPP project. Discursive and procedural shifts in the evidence-gathering procedure the community knew as carding enabled the police to effectively destabilise community activism against this practice. Key to this offensive move – initiated long before the report release – was a shift in data gathering practices, including how the data are talked about and recorded by police.

When we spoke with the police during a focus group the same summer the CAPP research was conducted, they described their interactions with young people and adults as institutionally sanctioned processes for assessing and promoting community safety (focus group conversation, Toronto Police Services, 2014). Contemporary policing depends on practices of data-collection and outreach, responding to non-crime-related calls for service, and simply being present in a neighbourhood (what the police call ‘waving the flag’) as an attempt to deter crime, traffic violations, and unrest (field note, key informant, 2015). The majority of police work involves the very non-crime-related interactions with ‘civilians’, which people in this neighbourhood experience as harassment, racial profiling, and surveillance. Indeed, although Black people represent 8.4% of the total population in Toronto, police administrative data confirm that Black people represent 22.6% of all stop-and-search data, and Black people in patrol zone 113 (a neighbourhood that is affluent and predominately White) are 13.4 times more likely to be stopped and searched than White people in this same neighbourhood (Bailey & Rankin, 2010; Winsa, 2014).

While these data go some way towards substantiating young people’s experiences, I want to make it clear that they are no more indicative of an objective reality than the evidence contained in the CAPP report or the stories shared by the youth I have interviewed.

These data are generated in the field by police officers, who determine how they will racially code the people they stop, and whether they will even record the stop at all. Increasingly, police are not including a racial-ethnic background description in the field-based data they collect. Activists interpret this practice as a deliberate move to undermine efforts to collect and monitor race-based data. It is beyond the scope of this article to investigate this particular proposition. But it is the case that administrative data are produced by the very people about whom the data will be used to make institutional determinations of professional competency and accountability. These are the technologies of evidence that background young people’s experiences with the police and other public sector authorities.

Young people in the community described being more scared of the police than anyone else who they encounter in their ostensibly unsafe neighbourhood:

I feel more scared with the cops then with other people. It’s just the way they are. The way they act. One time [recently] I was riding my bike. A cop passed us by. There was 3 of us. And I knew. I just knew I was gonna get stopped. So I was laughing actually. So he rode and cut us off. He flashed his lights. I knew what was gonna happen. He stopped us. Told us to ride to the side. Started talking to us … I guess we were in the wrong because we didn’t have lights on our bikes and a helmet … He started talking ‘bout if we had weed, he wouldn’t arrest us … We have nothin’ on us, so ‘can we go?’ … they used the bike thing, but they didn’t really care about they bike. But they used that as an excuse to talk … At the end they didn’t give us a ticket or a warning. They didn’t say, ‘next time wear this, wear that’. They just left. (Darren)

Darren’s description of his interactions with the police in his neighbourhood is typical of the accounts we heard from youth. Police establish a pretext to stop young people (in this case, a violation of traffic laws) in order to substantiate an interaction with them. Depending on how the encounter unfolds, other institutionally sanctioned courses of action become possible but the original pretext is a necessary first step. Once grounds for an interaction have been established (e.g. the young person ‘fits the description of a person of interest;’ or is not wearing a bicycle helmet), the officers will often electronically ‘search up’ young people’s names to see what information already exists about them in the police databases. This information shapes how the officer will proceed with the interaction (e.g. whether he or she will request a bag search; pat-down; or in some cases, a body-cavity search). In many instances, no tickets are administered and no institutional follow-up process is visible to young people.

For non-crime-related interactions – particularly where the receipting protocol is not followed – young people are not privy to the officer’s accounts of the interaction nor any ‘intelligence’ produced from it. The collection and submission of data from non-crime-related stops falls under the institutional umbrella of intelligence-led policing. It’s described as preventative (e.g. the use of bikes by officers involved in Toronto’s Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS)) and even as community outreach. These data are used to produce crime analytics that reflect and guide ongoing field-based data collection and reporting processes used by the police. The police explain:

The officer in charge of stations sees … the big picture. So he gets an idea of what areas are busier, which areas aren’t busy, and then over a period of time … if it’s moved from one neighbourhood to another, what types of crime take place and where … the crime analyst helps oversee [the data analysis process to determine] for the whole week or the whole month that it’s these trends happening … So that helps decide where resources are going to need to go. (Focus Group, Toronto Police Services)

Crime analytics are used to make decisions about how and where to deploy additional officers through the Divisional Policing Support Unit. The Divisional Policing Support unit allows additional police officers to be deployed in areas where crime analytics suggest a need for increased police activity (field note, key informant, 2015).

The use of data to make decisions in public sector organisations is framed as a way to improve objective decision-making and reduce the incidence of bias and discrimination regarding the distribution of public resources. But crime analytics – statistical patterns, reflecting calls for police service, arrests, accidents, ticketing, reported incidence of crime – depend on and then obscure the everyday subjective decision-making processes employed by police officers and others acting in a professional capacity as well as everyday people, who make discretionary decisions about what to report, measure and track. Interactions between individual officers and young people on the streets are connected to complex text-based practices through which some young people are constructed as unsafe and policing is constructed as a mechanism for producing safety. While police accounts of the interactions enter into and become actionable within a complex criminal legal system, which connects frontline policing to the court, incarceration and community supervision processes, there is no similar organisational course of action enabling young people to report or act on an alternative version of the interaction³.

Using evidence to initiate an organisational course of action

Like the police activate concepts like ‘suspicious activity’ in order to justify a particular course of action on the streets; school principals rely on ‘code of conduct violations’ to justify particular institutionally mandated sequences of action there. Statistically speaking, most school suspensions (28.2% in Toronto) are acts ‘considered by the school principal to be a breach of the Board’s or a school’s code of conduct’, which specifies acceptable norms for speech, dress, and activity (TDSB, 2014). The ambiguity of the ‘code of conduct violation’ category used by school administrators to initiate school disciplinary processes is similar to the ‘fits the description’ or ‘suspicious activity’ categories used by the police. In either case, the categories are sufficiently open that they can be filled with bits of information that enable their use to accomplish the what happens next in a particular institutional sequence of action (Griffith and Smith, 2014). Use of these categories requires and institutionalises an interpretive process on the part of the principal or the officer who will use prior evidence (e.g. a history of documented infractions) and other socially constructed knowledge to activate the category as part of what will become a textually regulated sequence of institutional actions (Griffith and Smith, 2014).

For example, when I ask Tonette to tell me how she ended up in one of Toronto’s ‘Safe Schools’ programs for suspended and expelled youth, she says,

I got expelled. I used to go to a school in Scarborough, X Secondary School, and I got expelled from that school … Because if I wasn’t wearing my uniform and stuff, I would get suspensions. All those little things. The suspensions add up, right? And I was going there since Grade 9. So since Grade 9 to Grade 11, whatever suspensions or whatever it was – like, I never got in a physical fight or anything. It’s just the suspensions … And then they said I had my last string or whatever … My last strike, yeah. And basically I blew that last strike … I was expelled for walking on another school property … I went to, whatever, Y Secondary School, and I got expelled for being on the property.

School disciplinary processes are regulated by the Education Act. In 2000, Bill 81 (Colloquially described as the Safe Schools Act) amended the Education Act, regulating and providing new policy guidance around school discipline. It has since been amended twice more – in 2007 by Bill 212 (the Progressive Discipline and School Safety Act) and in 2012 by Bill 13 (the Safe and Accepting Schools Act). The policy and practice changes associated with the Progressive Discipline and School Safety Act are visible in Tonette’s story above.

Progressive discipline policies are a provincially mandated response to criticism of ‘zero tolerance’ policies, which have been found to disproportionately impact Black students and other racialised student groups in North American schools (Bhattacharjee, 2003; Galabuzi, 2014; Gregory et al., 2010; Morris and Perry, 2016; Ofer, 2011/12; Rios, 2011; Ruck and Wortley, 2002; Skiba et al., 2009/10; Skiba et al., 2014). The most recent TDSB Student and Parent Census found that White secondary school students represent 2.9% of school suspensions, but 29% of the student population, while Black students represent 8.6% of school suspensions, and 12% of the student population (TDSB, 2013). But these quantitative data tell us nothing about the processes through which they are generated, and whether they have been influenced by more recent policy shifts associated with Progressive Discipline.

The TDSB Progressive Discipline and Promoting Positive Student Behaviour policy outlines a process for ensuring that the disciplinary response ‘will be in proportion to the severity of the behaviour leading to the discipline and the previous disciplinary history of the student’ (TDSB, 2013: 1). Provincially mandated progressive discipline polices outline a scaled disciplinary response to address ‘inappropriate’ student behaviour (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2009). These policy shifts result in interrelated shifts in practice.

A principal’s recommendation to expel a student is mediated by the Education Act, a school board’s Progressive Discipline Framework, and a school’s Code of Conduct – as these three documents work together. An administrator can establish grounds for expulsion based on a review of a student’s disciplinary records and careful documentation of code of conduct violations. An administrator’s work to establish grounds for expulsion requires extensive documentation of Code of Conduct violations and the appropriate use of progressive discipline techniques. This work organisation lies beneath Tonette’s sense that her suspensions ‘add up’, and the experiences of surveillance described by young people moved into a new school through a Safe Schools Transfer or after a period in a youth justice facility.

Young people we interviewed explain that administrators seem to be waiting for them to make a mistake so that there is a reason to move them on again: ‘I kind a felt like he [my principal] was always trying to see if I was doing anything bad. Trying to get me for the smallest things. Like there was no fights or nothing. I think he was just out for me, still’ (Darnell). The shared sense that school principals pay more attention to some young people’s actions than others is shaped by progressive discipline policies. The polices were introduced as a way to diminish the use of expulsions for minor or first-time code of conduct violations and ensure educators pay attention to ‘mitigating factors’ (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2009) when making disciplinary decisions. But as these polices and practices get hooked into the work organisation of schooling they facilitate the emergence of new relations of surveillance through which administrators are able to produce the evidence they need to justify a particular disciplinary action. The observational evidence produced by school administrators ultimately becomes part of the historical justification for removing young people from mainstream schools.

Where student actions require a non-discretionary suspension according to the Education Act (R.S.O. 1990, C. E.2), principals have five days to conduct an investigation of the student action and determine whether evidence justifies a recommendation to expel. According to Todd, a principal we interviewed:

The kids get what’s called a 20-day pending. It’s short for the Safe in Schools 20-day pending, which means they’re immediately suspended for 20 days … pending an investigation … The investigation must be finished within five [days]. It’s like a police investigation. We find witnesses and take statements. We take statements from the perpetrators. Everything’s written down.

School principals we interviewed described reviewing school video camera footage and working with the police to conduct these investigations. Where a decision to expel is made, it is in the context of considerable institutional evidence collected by school administrators (e.g. camera footage, interviews, school records) that young people would have great difficulty challenging, even through the institutional processes, which exist to ensure they have access to justice (e.g. an expulsion hearing). In the context of the policy complex through which school safety is constructed and pursued, the onus to produce sufficient evidence to justify a suspension or expulsion results in increased administrator monitoring and documentation of student behaviour, which shapes conditions of heightened surveillance in schools. Furthermore, the escalation of disciplinary actions (calls home to parents, mandated counselling appointments) heightens young people’s beliefs that they are being unfairly targeted and monitored by school staff.

Discussion and conclusion

The objective of an institutional ethnography is to ‘find and describe social processes that have generalizing effects’ (DeVault and McCoy, 2006: 18). Beginning with young people’s experiences of silencing and misrepresentation in public sector institutions, this article demonstrates how different forms of evidence become institutionally actionable – or not – across the various settings where young people are active. Findings bring into view the social processes through which institutional determinations of safety or risk are constructed textually, through ordinary data collection and reporting practices used to monitor and account for people’s work in institutionally settings. Once a person, place, or event has been categorised institutionally (as unsafe, at-risk, vulnerable, etc.), complementary legislation, organisational policies, processes, and procedures sanction a variety of associated institutional courses of action. These objectifying institutional practices – ordinary work in institutional settings – require the selective extraction of particular details to construct an objective account of a person or event as ‘unsafe’ in the context of a corresponding institutional course of action. Particular social details will be transformed into the categories necessary to contextualise the resulting institutional interventions, while other social details – unknown to the person creating the account or deemed institutionally extraneous – will be left out of the official version of what occurred. The production of an official institutional account requires (and then conceals) the ordinary discretionary work of professionals charged with transforming their professional interactions with young people into the categories through which this work will be accounted for, institutionally, and through which young people’s own versions of what happened will be able to be dismissed as anecdotal or non-factual. The research shows how seemingly objective institutional processes actually produce the experiences of diminishment and exclusion that racialised young people living in a low-income neighbourhood described during interviews. This article has not attempted to prove the truthfulness of young people’s versions of what happened during their encounters with police or school principals, but to understand how it does happen that institutional relations purportedly organised to ensure transparency, objectivity, and accountability produce young peopel’s experiences of silencing and unfairness across public sector institutions.

The policy implications of these findings are stark. Developmentally speaking, experiences of reduced fairness correlate with social isolation, deprivation of dignity, reduced faith in public institutions, and an increased propensity towards activities and behaviours deemed risky or socially non-normative (Noguera, 1995, 2003; Rios, 2011; Sullivan, 2007; Wortley 2008). Wortley (2008) suggests that a ‘lack of youth voice’ is one of many things that shape processes of exclusion that lead to youth violence. This article shows how the use – and framing – of administrative data by mainstream institutions sidelines the experiences and concerns of young people who already experience the marginalising effects of racism and poverty. The effects of these exclusions are evident in young people’s disaffection from/within our public spaces and their disengagement with – and even hostility towards – society more generally.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Insight Grant #: 435-2013-1518.

Notes

Author biography

Naomi Nichols is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. She is the Principal Investigator for a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) project titled: Schools, Safety, and the Urban Neighbourhood. Prior to joining the Faculty of Education at McGill, she completed a post-doctoral Fellowship with the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness at York University. Her work spans the areas of youth homelessness; youth justice; alternative education and safe schools; inter-organisational relations in the youth sector; youth at risk; and community–academic research collaborations. In 2014, the University of Toronto Press published her first book, Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homelessness. In 2016, she co-edited the book Exploring Effective Systems Responses to Homelessness, published by the Homeless Hub: .

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